A General Strike
I am home spending time with my mom as she continues her radiation treatment. No one can quite convey the torrent of emotions that comes with seeing your mother battle a life-threatening disease – of wanting to make everything alright, of wishing she could be her vibrant self again. Cancer is a vile disease. But love is a powerful treatment. And I am here, in my little town with its beautiful bayous, to love up on her as much as I can. And even with that on my heart, I cannot help but think about our perilous times.
I keep wondering what we must do to challenge what Donald Trump and his people are doing to the country. There are the court battles, the importance of elections, the immediate protests and the like. But something more dramatic is needed—something that matches in intensity and in its implication what the Trump administration is doing. They show their power with military vehicles, armed national guard, and masked ICE agents alongside police who are now free to act with impunity. We hear their demands. The anger. The screams. We watch the cuffs and then people disappear. It’s happening in the nation’s capital now. They are showing us their power. We have to show them ours.
Right now, Trump and his ilk are banking on the fact that Americans are either too afraid, too selfish, or too greedy to resist. That most are content to live their lives as long as the mayhem does not touch them or the people they love. These Americans might grumble over inflation and jobs numbers. They may even express some concern about Putin and outrage over the Epstein files. But give them the cultural red meat of hatred and grievance, and they will quiet down. They will turn their eyes to watch the spectacle of the whip’s lash and enjoy the flying froth.
Traditional politics will not be enough. Waiting on politicians to do something will not be enough. This moment has been in the making for over fifty years as neoliberalism emptied out our sense of the public good and attempted to make us all into pliant, selfish people with no real connection with others who are in our immediate tribe—people who, in the end, have outsourced their moral will.
But we must resist. I have said it before but, given all that is happening and what awaits us on the horizon of the next three years, I think it is even more necessary now: we need to call a general strike.
W.E.B. DuBois described the actions of the enslaved in the Civil War as a general strike. The description in his 1935 classic, Black Reconstruction, was a stroke of genius. Slaves had been treated in the scholarship as mere pawns in the war, moved about by the forces of white in the epic battle over the union as objects of the virtue of the North or bearers of the consequence of the South’s sins. But DuBois rejected the idea that Black people were mere passive objects. These were America’s revolutionary proletariats, workers who refused to work, and who sabotaged the South and ran away from plantations. They struck the blow for their own freedom and forced Lincoln to see, DuBois argued, that the war was about more than saving the union. It was about ending the scourge of slavery.
These Black people had agency.
We have agency, too. We don’t have to sit back and watch these people institute a white nationalist state, witness Trump upend every value and norm of democratic life, and keep our mouths shut as they hurl more and more people into deeper poverty and into prisons like Alligator Alcatraz.
But their efforts presuppose our reticence, our fear, our indifference. They want you debating about a damn American Eagle ad or whether LeBron is better than Jordan. They want you to drown in the mundane—to let your moral sense harden, like calcified bone. They want you to become monstrous in your indifference to others.
But we can show them our power. I know folks have bills to pay. Responsibilities are what they are. I know people cannot afford to lose their jobs in this employment environment. Uncertainty makes us cling to the security of safe and cautious choices. But, I believe, a general strike is needed. Let’s coordinate our sick days, our vacation time, let’s teach in, let’s figure out together how to shut this country down for a day or two. And for what end? To show them OUR power. To show Trump that we are not passive pawns to be moved about by the whims of mean-spirited people.
We are agents capable of turning the tide of American history.
You are absolutely right on every score. I am upgrading to paid today because finally someone is asking for action. We have spent the last 7 months protesting without any movement from our elected officials because they are not worried because they think we are as selfish and scarred as they are. I have been following so many great thinkers on the platform and what they are saying is so true but the people who should be listening are not listening. We have to take action, and a national strike would be a first step to do something without resorting to violence. We also need to galvanize a multi-million march to the capitol steps to strike some amount of fear into the people who are supposed to represent the country We have let a petty dictator take over and now we have to take real action to reclaim a country.
Just tell me when, and I'm prepared to strike, whether it's a shopping or dining out moratorium or stop paying my federal income taxes.