Tag Archives: general strike

A b/w image of a wine glass on its side with the bowl end shattering into tiny pieces.

The Big Break: General Strikes in the Past and Present

The term “general strike” is re-entering the vocabulary of more and more workers in the US today. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to coordinate their contracts to expire on May 1st, 2028 provided the initial impetus for this. Labor Notes, which hosts the largest union conference in the US and produces the labor movement’s most-read website, has published half a dozen articles over the last year about general strikes. Some union leaders, like Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants, have discussed and called for general strikes publicly in recent years. Trump’s lurch further right in his second term has emboldened many to call for a general strike to fight back. Even relatively mainstream political figures, such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have recently called for a general strike amidst Trump’s violent crackdown on immigrant communities and federal occupations of major cities.

A general strike is a work stoppage in a city or region that halts the majority of its economic activity. Historian Jeremy Brecher notes three essential features of such strikes: “an expanding challenge to established authority in workplaces and beyond; a tendency for workers to take control of their own activity; and a widening solidarity and mutual support among different groups of working people.”

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The cover of the 50th anniversary edition of Jeremy Brecher's book Strike! The title is emblazoned in bold red letters across a black and yellow image of a workers facing off against soldiers in front of big mills.

Mini-Review: Jeremy Brecher’s Strike!

Of all the sweeping US labor histories out there, Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! is the best one I’ve read. It balances dramatic story-telling with political analysis in exactly the right proportion. It carries you through all of the major periods of mass strikes, including the late 19th century insurrectionary strikes, the post-World War I and II labor uprisings, the 1930s general strikes and sit-down strikes, and the wildcats of the 1960s and 70s. In between these eruptions he teases out the longer trends that tie this history together.

Also unique for a labor book of this scope, Brecher tells the story more from the vantage point of the rank-and-file. The decisions and actions of union leaders are noted where they are important, but Brecher avoids the lionization of union officials that pollutes so much otherwise decent labor history. He repeatedly elevates the voices of the rank-and-file struggling without or even against their formal leaders. This is not only a political choice but is also good and accurate historiography, as unions in the US have always been riven with these tensions and divisions which more often than not gets glossed over.

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A wide shot of the Niagara Falls horseshoe waterfall. The sun is shining and the water is as blue as the sky.

Anarchist Unionism: A Forgotten but Glorious History

[For more of my posts on anarchism visit this page. An abbreviated pamphlet version of this post is available for download and printing here. A computer voice reading of the blog post can be listened to in the player below.]

Why should we think about anarchist unionism?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the push towards capitalist reforms in China, self-proclaimed Communist movements the world over have lost their main sponsors and sources of political inspiration and legitimacy. Subsequently, since the early 1990s anarchism has seen a resurgence within social movements in the US. Some movements, like the early anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street, have more foregrounded anarchist ideas, while all social movements have been touched by an increased number of anarchists within them, such as the abolitionist wing of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The labor movement has long been a central part of social movements in the US, sometimes radical and sometimes not, but always touching the lives of millions of people and putting them into varying degrees of action for reform and occasionally towards revolution. While the US labor movement is at a historical nadir in terms of union membership density, the last decade has seen a broad uptick in strike activity and public support.

With this modest resurgence of both anarchism and union organizing, it’s strange that there’s very little overlap between the anarchist movement and the labor movement in the US today. There are very few anarchist-led organizations or prominent anarchists working within the labor movement, and the labor movement has very few prominent leaders or groupings of its own that identify with anarchism. 

From a historical vantage point this is unusual. In the early 20th century anarchism was at times the dominant leftist pole within the international labor movement, with anarchist-led labor federations claiming tens or hundreds of thousands of members and leading large strikes in countries on five continents. However, the repression and precipitous decline of anarchism as an international social movement from the 1930s – 1980s overlapped considerably with the successful assault on the labor movement in the US (and to a lesser degree in other countries) from the late 1940s – 2000s. These movements shriveled up and became increasingly isolated from each other over the second half of the 20th century. 

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