Mutual aid gives a general strike its teeth

Whatever you want to call yesterday, it was impressive, it was different, and it represented many Americans reacquainting themselves with one of the most powerful tools that people have against an oppressive government—the general strike. OK so it wasn't a general strike, strictly speaking, but that's fine. We might think of it like a flirtation with one, which helps us understand the organizing, logistics, and community care that a lasting strike would demand of us.

Following huge protests, school walkouts, and business closures in Minneapolis a week ago, yesterday's mandate was no work, no school, no shopping, paired with mass demonstrations. Student groups including Somali Student Association, Black Student Union, and the Graduate Labor Union at the University of Minnesota led the walkouts and called on others to follow, with cities nationwide following suit. Hundreds of businesses closed for the day, and schools in multiple cities shut down. Tucson held a few different actions yesterday, which all converged downtown in a crowd of around 6,000, which is big for a city this size. Lots of local small businesses and schools closed.

Some people called it a shut down or a blackout or a national day of action, but many used the term general strike or national strike, a concept has been surfacing a lot in various contexts during the past few years. Some people are probably bristling or at least conflicted at the application of the term here, but I'd say it's an overall good thing, because it demonstrates a recognition that other forms of political action are no longer working and we're in need of new tools. And also I don't think it does anyone any good to go on the internet and scold people over terminology because, honestly, that is why everyone hates the left including the left we are the absolute worst.

But it's also important that we think about what a general strike actually is, how yesterday's action was different from that, and what it would take to turn a one-day demonstration into something that has real teeth. And one thing we would definitely need is a strong network of mutual aid, in order to alleviate pain during economic paralysis, and demonstrate that people in power cannot control us because we do not need them to survive.

What is a general strike?

I am sorry, I'm not trying to take you to baby school, I am right here with you professor baby trying to give these terms some precision as they apply to this moment. So a strike is a withholding of labor by an organized workforce from a company or a sector, in pursuit of certain demands. Organized meaning a union, which ensures participation, protects the workers involved, and acts a bargaining entity. The strike goes on until the demands are met or a compromise is negotiated.

A general strike reaches beyond one company or industry to achieve larger goals, often at the government level. And they have worked, even in very recent history. General strikes have won sweeping labor protections, stopped coups, even toppled regimes. They happened many times in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th century—including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Seattle General Strike of 1919—and won many of the labor laws we sort of enjoy today. One of the biggest modern general strikes was the May '68 uprising in France, which began as a student protest that joined with the labor movement for one of the largest stoppages we've seen in an industrialized nation—10 million French workers halted labor across factories, schools, transportation, freezing the entire nation's economy for weeks.

So was yesterday a general strike? Not really, because it was lacking key components. First, it was openly time-limited. When a strike is planned to end in a day, the leverage of ongoing economic pain doesn't exist. The other big thing it was missing was, well, labor. Much of the workforce did not and could not participate because they don't have union or other forms of protection due to diminished organized labor in the United States. As a result, the pain of losing even a day's work, or risk of losing their jobs or even being deported, made a strike impossible for the most vulnerable workers. Many of the participants were business owners, which is kind of the opposite of the way a strike usually works, but does speak to the breadth of discontent. And to be fair, teachers played an important role, prompting the shut down of schools in many places for the day.

So if it wasn't a strike, what was it? We might think of yesterday's action as a mass economic protest leveraging the idea of a strike. The difference being that a protest, rather than inflicting ongoing pain, acts as a threat of potential power. When masses march in a country that has an elected government, it is often to send a message that leaders may be removed from power if they don't change their ways. It's a flex, like faking to punch someone and then stopping right before you hit their face, or spitting a loogie and then sucking it back up so gross terrible analogy. That's what yesterday was, only instead of the threat of electoral power, it used the threat of economic power, because the former doesn't really work when the will of the people is not reflected in government. Yesterday sent a warning shot that enough people are so enraged that we might actually be able to bring the country to a halt to get what we want.

That's what makes yesterday's action exciting, in fact, because it suggests that while it didn't have all of the preconditions of an actual strike, it did have some of them. Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!, recently pointed out the reasons a general strike is freshly on the table: the wide range of people harmed by MAGA, the lack of available political alternatives to stop that harm, and the failure of the Democratic Party to act as any kind of check against abuses. Grandmothers who have been voting blue since JFK are in the streets screaming abolish ICE, but Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is meeting with Trump and appreciating his "collaborative tone," and saying he's going to "take them for their word right now." This week, Democratic leadership cut a deal to extend Department of Homeland Security funding for two weeks to avoid a government shutdown, with the intention of "negotiating guardrails" for immigration agents such as forbidding them from wearing masks and requiring body cameras whoopdeedoo.

The reality is, while 63% of the public disapprove of ICE, Democrats in power have always supported and funded both ICE and immigration enforcement, more broadly. Trump's surge builds on decades of bipartisan funding and expansion of detention infrastructure and Border Patrol has gone from 1,500 agents in the 1970s to 20,000 today. Elected officials in both parties show no signs of backing down from that support.

People see state murder in the street, an occupying paramilitary force, mass detention camps, families torn apart, communities torn apart, detention of Indigenous people and citizens, and the exposure of immigration enforcement as a unapologetic effort to purge the country of non-white people. That is paired with growing economic pain for the majority of us as wealth accumulates at the top. And the public is realizing that calling your representatives, or voting, or even marching is not a way out of the bog that we are drowning in. We need something more.

Giving a strike teeth

So that's what has brought us back to the idea of a general strike. But if yesterday was a threat of what economic power we could wield, what would it take for us to actually use that weapon? Probably a lot of stuff, including even broader buy-in and more organized labor presence. But one critical element that makes general strikes successful is care. Strikes are a last resort for a good reason—they are difficult and they are painful, by design.

Union organizer and strategist Elana Levin told Kim Kelly for Teen Vogue, RIP Teen Vogue, back in 2019: “If you are asking someone to strike, you have to be able to help them answer the question of how will you help them survive if they do. It’s a question that has been asked and answered before, but it is a serious thing. In reality, general strikes are generally led by the most marginalized groups, because it is a way to wield power.”

Even in this limited one-day action, we saw the tensions around asking people to strike. As many business owners shut down for the day, including retail and bars and restaurants, honestly in some cases to avoid blowback, the sacrifice falls on baristas, cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders, cashiers. Tips from a Friday shift at some of these places can pay a worker's whole utility bill. And many, like domestic workers, simply could not take the day off. Because the nature of a general strike means that any one union can't shield participants from the pain of a work stoppage, we need deep and wide networks of collective care.

Fortunately, the creation of these networks has been freshly underway since the pandemic hit. A mid-sized city like Tucson has by my count something like 8 to 10 mutual aid collectives currently operating across town. We've come a long way, and we do our best, but I think we all know deep down that it's not nearly enough. At Community Care Tucson, we often talk about how our goal is not sharing resources in one park downtown, or even two or three parks, but the creation of a community-driven, people-powered social safety net that exists everywhere: a CCT or a COW or an ALMA in every park and neighborhood in the city. As systems fail us—but also as we intentionally withdraw from them—that's what is necessary.

The idea of a general strike becoming a reality lifts up this underlying principle of mutual aid, which most participants are well aware of but that often gets overlooked in the process of meeting immediate needs. That is, mutual aid in and of itself is a deep well of power.

Much of our current vocabulary around mutual aid is in the context of emergencies, such as natural disasters or COVID. That continues to be the case as institutions collapse and we enter a climate change-fueled era of repeat crisis. But sometimes that gets twisted to suggest that mutual aid is an emergency stopgap or a band-aid for government services, a lesser-than offering until we can restore or create proper institutional aid.

I would say that is actually the opposite of mutual aid's purpose and power. First, anyone who goes out there will tell you that ordinary people often do a better job of providing services than government agencies, working with far less. Beyond efficacy, this idea we often repeat that "we take care of us" means that there is inherent value in community care, because it frees us from systems of control.

There is no better demonstration of how this works than when envisioning a general strike. So much of what prevents us from standing up to those in power is that they've created a world in which we believe we need them to survive. The goal of a general strike is to prove to them that they need us. But we can only make that clear if we are able to take care of each other, both because it alleviates the pain that withdrawal from the dominant economic system inevitably causes, and it lets systems of power know that we will be alright without them.

We can apply that deep well of power, not just to a general strike, but to many struggles for justice—resisting harmful responses to poverty and homelessness, police and prison abolition, the fight against economic inequality, resistance to mass deportation, climate justice, all the way up to the dismantling of an oppressive state or economic system. It means we don't have to call them and beg them for help. Or settle for a lesser evil at the polls. It means that we call the shots, because they don't take care of us. We do.

When we talk about how mutual aid is a radical act of defiance and power-building, that's what we're talking about. It provides the teeth for something like a general strike: the capacity to not back down because we have astonishing strength as a collective, more than even the most powerful government, and we have each other's backs.

Links

• Academics modeled how a Civil War could start in the United States and it looks a lot like what is happening in Minnesota. This article also summed up the atrocities of just one week of ICE takeover:

"In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. They blinded two protesters by shooting them in the face with so-called “less deadly” weapons. They fired teargas bombs around the car of a family carrying six children, sending one child to the emergency room with breathing problems. They violently dragged a woman out of her car and on to the ground screaming. They have shot protesters in the legs. They have forcibly taken thousands of individuals to detention facilities, separating families and casting people into legal limbo – often without regard to their legal status."

• Trump has made ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the country, but "the administration’s actions build on a long history of anti-Black racism, criminalization, and U.S. militarism that have fueled the detention and deportation machine’s growth over time."
• Outstanding guidance from Dean Spade on how to apply abolitionist values to navigate conflict in movement spaces. A must read.
• Bari Weiss's gross road to power in her current role turning CBS News into a MAGA apologist. All because some people said mean things to her on Twitter what an absolute loser.
• Contrary to pundit discourse, "Abolish ICE" is not a strategic messaging failure for liberal electeds, it is a moral imperative. Thrilled to see popular resurgence of Abolish, and mealy mouthed Democrats defending ICE can go take a hike.
• A doctor reflects on what The Pitt has taught him about practicing medicine.
• Microsoft projects that data center water use will double over 10 years.
• Norman Rockwell was ANTIFA.
• Merpeople.

Music

I guess since we talked about May '68 and I also just watched Breathless I am feeling a little Francophilic or Francophilish so here is a song I really like from a movie Lovers on the Bridge by French director Leo Carax.

I hope you are doing alright. RIP Catherine O'Hara. Bad things happening quickly. I'm thinking of getting into bonsai.

The Tucson protest was nice yesterday. Sometimes I am like oh god another march what is the point, but when you get there you remember that a big part of it is just being around friends and cool people and feeling something together. Find your people, do what you can to protect your community, hold on tight. Listen to music on vinyl. Watch some French new wave.

Tate