As workers around the world undertake massive work refusals—from 2020’s general strike of 250 million workers in India to an ongoing general strike across France—labor organizers and political theorists have argued that the general strike is a distinctive form of democratic action. Organizer and writer Jane McAlevey argues that the general strike is the most powerful tool for “defending what’s left of our modicum of democracy.” Political theorists find that strikes are distinctive expressions of democratic agency that resist oppression in the workplace and in the labor market. Looking beyond national borders, theorists have also argued that mass strikes may form part of a repertoire of an anti-colonial, revolutionary ethics and politics of non-violence.

I was moved to write this dissertation by W.E.B. Du Bois’s pathbreaking Black Reconstruction, which famously “fabulated” an emancipatory general strike of enslaved workers whose transformation of the U.S. was overthrown by white capital and was nearly erased by white supremacist historians of Reconstruction. Du Bois inspired me to find other works in a kind of counter-tradition of the general strike. This counter-tradition is alive to the politics of racism and is interested in how to actualize a lasting equality that might take institutional form. My project thus looks to thinkers—Du Bois, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière—who see the general strike as part of a broader politics that meets violence with non-violence and uses moments of solidaristic refusal to create something new and lasting.

My book project makes two contributions. First, I show how an unconventional tradition of political thinkers reinvented the general strike after early 20^th-century strike movements faced profound state repression. Confronting the strategic and theoretical limitations of the general strike tactic, these thinkers implicitly or explicitly developed what I call a “general strike perspective” on popular power to critique modern democracy and offer radically democratic alternatives. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois recovers a general strike of enslaved workers that historiographers of the Civil War sought to erase. With the help of Du Bois’s Black feminist critics, I argue that his literary representation of the strike foregrounds the need to constantly reclaim and reinvent democratic agency. (An article version of this chapter, “Between General Strike and Dissensus: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction,” was recently published in Political Theory.)

Second, I demonstrate that reading modern political theorists from a general strike perspective can answer enduring puzzles in their work. For example, Hannah Arendt (in)famously constructs her phenomenology of labor, work, and action on a distinction between public and private spheres. On this basis, her political theory is commonly interpreted as neglectful of, or even antagonistic to, justice for workers. Yet, the labor movement provides the only modern example of political action in The Human Condition. And her proposal for a republic of councils was inspired by workers’ councils founded during general strikes. These choices seem puzzling if we see Arendt as anti-labor. This puzzle dissolves when we take a general strike perspective on her work, showing her separation of action from labor and work can be understood as a general-strike-inspired claim about the political power of work refusal. The idea that suspending work makes a genuine politics possible is a general strike claim.