Publisher’s Note:
The following was written by a contact out of Southern Illinois named Elisha Moon Williams, however, we feel that the content rings just as true here as there. The original can be accessed here.
Over the past 5 years, it seems that there has been a noticeable uptick in “general strikes” declared in the United States. Despite the decades-long demobilization of the working class through de-industrialization, the gig economy and so on, “general strikes” are more numerous than ever! Of course, these strikes are not actually being mobilized by the masses of workers but instead declared ahead of time by liberal activist groups on social media and through press releases. The most recent of these farces is the “May Day Strong” coalition.
On its website, “May Day Strong” defines itself as:
“… a network of hundreds of organizations and hundreds of thousands of working people coming together with a common purpose: standing together against the billionaires waging a war on working people.”
When looking at the organizations that make up the coalition, it is composed of a multitude of classes working together towards a common goal. From trade unions like the Chicago Teachers’ Union and SEIU, to liberal activist organizations like 50501 and Indivisible. What is that common goal?
As the Communist Party of the Unites States’ Labor Commission put it in their publication “People’s World:”
“… taxing the billionaires so working families, not big business, come first; no ICE; no war; no private army serving authoritarian power; expand democracy; hands off our vote.”
The CPUSA aren’t the only alleged socialists involved with this project, however. Overt sections of this coalition also include the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), and (allegedly) the Industrial Workers of the World.
Within my region of the country, the St. Louis DSA has openly declared its support for such a “strike” on May Day in a post:
“It’s up to us to organize and act together. The change we need has never come from voting harder or making one more phone call alone — every time abuse of power has been stopped, it’s been because labor and community moved in collective action.”
The PSL especially has been honing on the cross-class nature of this “strike” within their very own posts on social media. The St. Louis Section of the PSL has openly declared that they are using “outreach sessions” to “talk to our neighbors and small businesses about the May 1st General strike.” In another post, they endorsed a joint press conference they held in which member of the city’s Board of Aldermen, Daniela Velasquez endorsed the strike alongside Ward 3 Committee-person for the Democratic Party Maxi Glamour and a representative of the local 50501 chapter. How can you say that you have a general strike with any power when one of the members of the state, the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie” is endorsing it and allegedly urging their fellow members of the state into “participating?” How can you claim a “general strike” on the part of the workers when it’s being organized by coalition members like Maxi Glamour, member of a party of the owning classes, openly running a merchandise and entertainment business fueled by their brand?
As of writing this article, 4 more members of the Board of Aldermen have endorsed this “general strike:” Alisha Sonnier, Laura Keys, Rasheen Aldridge, and President of the Board of Aldermen Megan Green. Many of these representatives have been presiding over the city government for several years, administering the region’s managed decay across multiple mayors. The local police in 2017 brutalized working class people when they took to the streets to protest its murder of yet another civilian. The city government paid over 4 million dollars in settlements towards the victims of such police violence to shut them up. That cover-up of the police’s brutal violence towards workers in the courts was funded by the same alder-people that are now calling on you to join them in a “general strike” against Trump and the Republican Party’s takeover of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police. They continually increased the funding of a police force that, at any moment, could start a formal agreement with ICE to try and snatch immigrant workers off the streets and go beyond the individual reporting that seems to be happening already. These are people that represent another section of the owning class, simply another side of the same capitalist coin. They want to use the St. Louis working class and whatever activity it can muster to fight its own battle for control of the state and national government while supporting the very same systems that caused actors like Trump to rise in the first place.
In Chicago, the PSL has openly advised the workers on how they can “legally” call off work (calling off sick, using personal days, or asking off in advance) for May 1st. A strike with the owning class’s permission and made on an individual basis strips the very nature of why a strike is so powerful and how it has been used towards revolutionary ends. The strike is so transgressive and so feared as a method of struggle precisely because it disrupts the social relations that keep capitalism going. It is disrupting the self-alienation of the workers through the act of working for a boss in order to maintain themselves through wages, and also disrupting the profits of the bourgeoisie. With this action, the power of the worker is firmly, if temporarily, established so that the workers are able to extract concessions from the ruling classes. This can and has been used to spark a more fundamental change in society, even when that was not the intention of the workers themselves from the outset.
How can you justify working with a class of people whose interests fundamentally oppose that of the working class (careerists and small business owners)? How can you do so especially on a day that was made to commemorate the history of the working class’s immense power through their ability to stop working and collective organization? Was it the small business owners and artisans that slowed St. Louis to a halt in the first ever general strike in American history in solidarity with their black class-comrades in 1877? Was it the small business owners and artisans that were prosecuted and later executed by the American government during the Haymarket Affair, the whole cause of why May Day was created? Was it the small business owners and artisans that brought countries like Germany and Russia to their knees, overthrowing the Kaiser, Tsar and the Provisional government respectively in revolutionary uproar and collective strike tactics? The answer is clear!
As Marx clearly put it in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844:
“From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.”
Marx and Engels understood very clearly the unique position the working class was in to move towards international socialism, and why they supported such a class so completely with the task of overthrowing the ruling classes. It’s not an arbitrary observation, but something they understood because of the very social relations that make someone working class and others not that give them the key to fighting for that better world.
Upon further investigation, the PSL within St. Louis are handing out pamphlets across the city within the weeks leading up to this “general strike.” It mostly takes aim at the Trump administration on the grounds that he is bad for “the people” (whoever they’re supposed to be) and that the war in Iran is illegal (as if a “legal” war would be better). Here are some choice excerpts regarding this “general strike:”
“It is clearer than ever that the majority of people in this country are opposed to Trump’s agenda of racism, war and attacks on working families. His approval rating is sinking, and today’s protests are taking place in every corner of the country from small towns to big cities. What’s the next logical step? To make the people’s opposition impossible to ignore with a general strike that shuts down work, school and shopping!
…
A general strike is when people from all walks of life stay home from work and school and boycott shopping. It shuts down profit making for the billionaire class who runs the government, and demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that working people are the ones who make this country run.
On May 1st, unions, community groups and progressive organizations of all kinds are gearing up for another powerful day of protest. We need to do everything we can to get ready to make this day an expression of people’s power that can stop Trump in his tracks – a general strike!”
This understanding of a general strike is incredibly misguided for many reasons. First and foremost, one cannot simply will a general strike into existence at a set date or time as if it were simply another protest or rally. You can no more declare a general strike into existence than you can declare a hurricane into motion! General strikes that have any real power are often spontaneously created due to a mixture of the working class’s own activity and the crises that animate the context of their actions. Like hurricanes, general strikes often occur as a culmination of ever-escalating forces that later dispense themselves in devastating fashion. Instead of the circling of cold and hot air at different pressures, the general strike is fueled by the conditions that make the maintenance of capitalism’s social relations unbearable and the self-activity of the working class in response to such crises that challenge these social relations.
The St. Louis General Strike of 1877 is a great example of this concept, as it even took the socialist party that would later be given control of it by complete surprise when it occurred. A general strike wasn’t declared until the conditions for it coming into being were already occurring within the bodies of railroad workers of East St. Louis.1 Also like hurricanes, you cannot declare that a general strike is occurring until one is already well underway. Not even the more self-aware sections of the working class (those self-declared as communists and organize themselves as such) can dictate such action over the whole working class and expect it to succeed with the same effect as the activity that belongs to the whole working class itself.
Even when such strikes are put under the helm of unions and parties, like in the case of 1877, the British General strike in 1926 and the French General Strike of 1968, even the unions and “socialist” parties that claim to represent them openly sabotaged the workers. They joined with the owning classes to maintain “order,” or worse, actively sabotaged the workers by refusing to help in their armament in order to defend themselves against the coming repression to end the strike with a genuine belief that they wish to enact this form of struggle in a “peaceful” manner.
We cannot know for certain what the outcome of this event will be. There have been plenty of genuine working class innovations even in the midst of movements that were, at their inception, led by the bourgeoisie. A big example of this innovation that the working class took very clearly to heart was the Petrograd Soviet during the 1905 Russian Revolution. In the midst of a struggle between the bourgeoisie, peasants, proletariat and the aristocracy came forth the Worker’s Council (or Soviet) in the Russian Empire’s largest city. A whole host of socialists participated in the event, ultimately being led by Leon Trotsky, who would later be a key part of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War (for better and worse).
If there is to be an outburst of independent revolutionary energy by the working class either in St. Louis or elsewhere that threatens the control of the petty bourgeois activists and small business owners, then it will be in spite of the efforts made by all these groups and not because of them. In fact, much like the old Workingman’s Party, the British Trade Unions, and French Communist Party, they will likely be the first in line to put the workers back in their “rightful” place or maintain “order” when the fires of revolt become too hot for their liking. Others within this group may simply stand back and watch as their class partners within the bourgeoisie suppress the workers that they championed prior due to them moving in directions clearly counter to their own saintly ideas. They will, when the fires are extinguished and the books are written, then claim that the only problem with such a movement in retrospect was a “lack of revolutionary leadership.”
If such independent class action does occur in response to the conditions that are clearly escalating in this country, communists worthy of the name should welcome such action. If it is nearby, we should not seek to control and command such movements as the petty bourgeois activists and unions are clearly attempting. We should join alongside them as fellow members of the working class and bring whatever unfolds to its logical conclusion through ardent advocacy towards expanding the revolt at hand and refusing compromise with the bourgeoisie. As an unknown speaker during the St. Louis General Strike once declared, the masses of workers responding with prolonged cheers:
“Why this state of things? Because it’s so, according to the law. Well, if that’s the law, then damn the law. If that is the rule that governs society, then the sooner it is broken the better.”2
- Kruger, Mark. The St. Louis Commune: Communism in the Heartland. Bison Books, 2021, pp. 198-199. ↩︎
- Kruger, Mark. The St. Louis Commune: Communism in the Heartland. Bison Books, 2021, pp. 204. ↩︎
