Seven days after ICE agents gunned down two of our comrades in cold blood in the streets of Minneapolis, calls rang out for a general strike across the city. A week later, the call for a  general strike had spread across the whole nation, echoing earlier exhortations, including UAW president Shawn Fain’s announcement (the first text in this reader) of a May Day 2028 general strike. As twenty-first century fascism has moved  from a creep to a full-on sprint, as bombs drop over Iran, as genocide consumes Palestine, as our neighbors are deported, as billionaires enrich themselves while our cost of living goes through the roof, the stakes of inaction could not be more clear.  It is in this context that calls for a general strike demand our serious strategic attention. But as Fain notes, there is nothing new about calling for a general strike, and most calls in recent memory have amounted to little more than social media posts accompanied by ephemeral street demonstrations.  This isn’t how it has to be. But what would it take to see the call for a general strike turn into a real contestation for power by working people? 

This reader is an attempt by members of the Santa Cruz Democratic Socialists of America to reflect on what a call for a general strike means and how we, organizers and workers in a small city on the west coast of California, should engage it. If we are to get out of the trap of merely responding to every crisis with short-term mobilizations, the questions raised in these readings must guide our thinking. The readings collected here are aimed at prompting our comrades to think about general strike calls from a number of different angles: the roles of spontaneity and planning in a general strike, the relation between workplace economic demands and broader political demands, and the distinction between a demonstration of our discontent and using a strike as a weapon.  All of these topics find expression in the final text excerpted in this reader, Rosa Luxemburg’s “The Mass Strike.” It is our hope that after reading and discussing the other texts gathered here, Luxemburg’s important essay will be made more accessible to comrades thinking through contemporary calls for a mass strike. 

Every serious strike in history has had to grapple with the relation between spontaneity and planning.  From the outside, general strikes often appear to come from nowhere. They burst onto the scene, usually in the wake of some offense or tragedy. They sweep people up in energies that seem to have no antecedents. Many organizers, however, will be quick to tell you that spontaneity is always an illusion–that every spontaneous eruption was in fact the result of years of careful work behind the scenes to prepare the ground for the strike.  But spontaneity cannot be dismissed so easily.  We know from experience that all the careful planning and one-on-one organizing in the world will not produce the rupture on its own.  Different historical moments can be more or less conducive to the spread a mass strike. Beyond simply developing plans, we must attune ourselves to the moment we are in, experimenting, prodding at the present, analyzing our results and adapting our plans so we are ready to seize the moment. This is the first question we want to draw out of these readings: what is needed for the “Call” for a strike to land? What features of a moment in history are conducive to general action? When do we make the leap from spadework to the barricades? 

The second set of questions we want comrades to consider in relation to the general strike call has to do with the relation between “economic” demands and “political” demands. “Economic” demands originate among workers in their day-to-day struggles—demands like better wages, working conditions etc.“Political” demands bring in issues that are not typically identified with the workplace –demands to end wars, to abolish ICE, to institute healthcare for all, etc. In the U.S., this distinction feels more rigid and real than in most parts of the world. Here, unions exist to bargain for working conditions, while electoral parties exist to take on political questions. But this distinction is not a natural one. It is the result of decades of historic defeats of the working class by the forces of capital. It is a distinction that is enshrined in laws like the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which bans ‘political’ strikes. It is enshrined equally in the structure of our political parties, which treat the working class as one “interest group” among others, whose political power is measured not by its ability to disrupt the reproduction of capital but by its ability to contribute to the campaigns of pro-labor politicians. It is time to challenge this distinction. Several of the readings below show how economic and political struggles are often difficult to disentangle from one another. The final reading gathered here, Rosa Luxemburg’s “The Mass Strike” is perhaps the most direct: for her, the political demands of the working class are always built off of the day-to-day struggles of the workers for better living conditions. From that starting point, workers begin to make broader and more ambitious demands on the State. But a mark of the success of the mass strike is that as expectations are raised around political demands, new economic fights become conceivable and winnable. The economic struggle bleeds into the political struggle, which then throws gasoline back on the economic. For Luxemburg, this interplay has a name: the revolution. 

Finally, it is our hope that readers will come away from this collection with a keener sense of how to think strategically about strikes. A strike is different from a protest or a demonstration. And a general strike wields our power differently than the biggest “No Kings” march. A general strike is not a performance of our outrage or our unity but a weapon aimed at the production, circulation, and reproduction of capital. This distinction is something we have to feel in our bones; it is something that has to guide every strategic decision we make if we are to make the leap from protesting fascist power to contesting it. 

We are two years out from May Day 2028. We don’t yet know what kind of world we will be confronting at that time, and we don’t know what shape our own movement will take.  What we do know is that if we are going to stand a chance at confronting fascism, we must develop our capacity as the working class to resist, to organize, and to think strategically about power. The three sets of questions we raise here: the relation of spontaneity and planning, of economics and politics, and of demonstrations and disruptions are just a beginning to the strategic inquiry we want to deepen in the coming period. While May Day 2028 will surely be an important moment, the real fight for a better world requires that we prepare ourselves for the long haul.