In recent weeks, strikes of varying sizes and aims have made national news. On Jan. 23, tens of thousands of Minnesotans left their jobs to participate in a general strike, with many taking to the streets of Minneapolis to protest the aggressive deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their city. A few weeks later, teachers in San Francisco went on strike from Feb. 9 to 13 to push the San Francisco Unified School District to negotiate a new contract. Thus, with heightened public attention to this longstanding method of protest, professors in Swarthmore’s history department decided to host a lunchtime panel on the history of general strikes.
The Feb. 11 panel was moderated by Associate Professor of History Megan Brown; the panel featured Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations Bob Weinberg, Associate Professor of History Farid Azfar, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies Thamyris Almeida. After each speaker delivered a brief lecture on a specific historical moment related to strikes, the group took turns responding to questions posed by Brown and the audience.
Weinberg’s presentation focused on the October 1905 general strike in Russia, which is often eclipsed by the more well-known events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The strike was an attempt to overthrow the tsarist autocracy of Nicholas II and included participation from “workers, professionals, students, national minorities, peasants, and sailors and soldiers.”
According to Weinberg, although the strikers failed to coordinate their protest activities and goals among their various political groupings, they still managed to shut down the government and “paralyzed life through urban Russia” from January to October of 1905. One notable feature of the movement was that, despite the lack of communication between groups, a strike in one industry often “inspired workers in other branches … to walk off the job,” suggesting that the overall momentum of protest compensated for organizational failings. He concluded by reviewing the general strike as proof that “social and political mobilization, even if not under central direction, can chip away at oppressive political regimes.”
Next to speak was Azfar, who began by describing how he revisited the 1925 essay “Toward the Critique of Violence” by Walter Benjamin in preparation for the panel. Azfar said that, upon his early encounters with the text, he had not fully appreciated “the significance of what [Benjamin is] saying about the general strike,” but now found it to be extremely relevant.
Of particular note to Azfar was Benjamin’s endorsement of what Azfar characterized as “educative power,” which led Azfar to delve into The Phoenix archives for mentions of strikes in Swarthmore’s history. His search revealed documentation of a visit by the president of the Oxford Union, Kenneth Lindsay, in 1926, during which Lindsay discussed the successes and failures of the 1926 U.K. general strike. Strikes remained a popular topic of conversation on campus throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but that discourse largely abated from the 1950s until 1969. The Black Liberation movement of that year, which demanded higher Black enrollment, was the last instance Azfar could find of strikes relating to the Swarthmore community. He ended his lecture by circling back to the concept of educative power and the insight that the Swarthmore community students might gain by reading Benjamin today.
Almeida delivered the third presentation, which discussed the 1978-1980 metalworkers’ strike in Brazil. She first gave a brief overview of the dictatorship in Brazil at the time, which began with a military coup in 1964 and lasted until 1985. A watershed moment that Almeida emphasized was the passage of the Institutional Act Number Five, which “completely [stripped] political rights from Brazilian citizens” and marked the “hard line of the military dictatorship.” The metal workers of the ABC Region, an industrial region in Greater São Paulo, went on strike in an attempt to reclaim “their political and economic voice” in 1978. During this period of autocratic rule, unions were controlled by the state, and strikes were outlawed, but “the metal workers, despite this, decided to strike anyways.”
The two years that followed consisted of several discrete strikes across different industries and with varying degrees of planning, all as part of an effort to improve working conditions and wrestle control of unions away from the state. Although strikers frequently faced state repression, Almeida said their efforts are often seen as contributing to the implementation of democracy, as the striking coalitional force transformed into a party within a democratic state. In sum, the movement of the metal workers and their allies was proof of “how important and effective this coalition building can be” in the struggle to reinstitute democracy, Almeida noted.
Brown then contributed a few takeaways from the lectures and summarized the themes that emerged across all of them. She highlighted organizational logistics, noted the divergent impacts of spontaneity and planning, and emphasized that the expansion of the media landscape has drastically altered the possibilities for strike coordination. Another point of note for Brown was viewing strike “as a response to violence” and “as inviting violence in the sense of state reactivity.” Additionally, she commented on the diverse range of groups that have become strikers throughout history: citizens of democracies (disenfranchised or not), colonial subjects, and national subjects of an empire. “The types of authority they’re striking against,” she said, are equally broad.
Brown framed the history of strikes as “a history of capitalism,” regardless of the purpose of each strike. Some might strike in protest of a failing system of capitalism, while others might do so because they see its successes and “want a share of capitalism to delight in capitalism’s promises.”
Lastly, Brown noted that many of the histories presented by the panel have been overshadowed by later developments, as in the case of the 1905 Russian strike and the subsequent 1917 Revolution. Nevertheless, she argued, these understudied events remain significant for the “lessons” learned by their participants. The general strike, she proposed, might be characterized as a “training ground for future politicians.”
Brown then posed a question to the panelists, asking, “How can historians and non-historians look at the examples that we’ve heard about today … to help make sense of what’s going on in Minneapolis or to help make sense of calls for national shutdown or trying to make that some sort of broader push going on right now in the U.S.?”
Responses mentioned the importance of a centralized organizing body to develop a cohesive aim, the role of education in getting individuals to think about the interconnected nature of various global struggles, and the capacity of groups to envision themselves as people with collective leverage outside the formal structure of a union.
During the Q&A portion of the panel, audience members expanded on these conclusions. Some were interested in how a culture of striking might be constructed, while others returned to the role of globalization in transforming how labor struggles are now less visible in post-industrial American cities.
The final question summarized a throughline of the panel, with an audience member asking how a strike could facilitate a reimagined shape of society. The answers pointed back to the historical examples, revealing that strikers often have a vision of a new political and economic system underlying their efforts of protest. Weinberg left the audience with an anecdote about Rosa Luxemburg, a theorist in the German Social Democratic Party during the late 19th century, who believed that “mass strike could shut down the political and economic system, not in a day, but maybe over a period of time.” It is yet to be seen whether Luxemburg’s idea proves to be true in the contemporary U.S.
