Democratic Refusals: The General Strike in the Making
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.
If such work stoppage is temporary, then how have strikers and strike theorists imagined the persistence of their power over time? My book project, Democratic Refusals: The General Strike in the Making, draws on historical events and the resources of conceptual and critical political theory to develop an account of how the general strike has shaped the democratic imaginary. My project looks to thinkers of the strike—Du Bois, Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt—who invite us to see the general strike as part of a broader politics, a “politics from below” whose aim is to strike at violence with non-violence and to use moments of solidaristic refusal to create something new and lasting.
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 20th-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.
Hannah Arendt and Anti-Racist Politics
Together with Jana Schmidt (Bard College) and Miko Zeldes-Roth (University of Toronto), I am co-editing a volume with new and reprinted works investigating Arendt’s relationship to the idea of race and the ways that her work can illuminate the theory and practice of anti-racist politics. (This project partly came out of a conference I organized at Bard College, “The Revolutionary Spirit: Hannah Arendt and Black Political Thought”.) As political theorist Michael Hanchard has explained, Arendt “remains one of the few political theorists of any Western canon to explicate racism as a political phenomen[on]”. In Arendt’s work, we find the idea that race-thinking is born out of an “irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist,” and as such it is a threat to the idea of politics. Despite the unfortunate degree to which Arendt’s own thinking failed to thoroughly confront the problem of race-thinking, there is something in her notion of politics that requires the problematization of racism and race-thinking. The works in this volume read, analyze, make use of, and judge Arendt’s work to find in it something generative for the project of anti-racist political thinking.
‘…if we stood together’: The 1913 South African General Strike and the Making of Collective Power
This work in progress on M.K. Gandhi and his role at the head of a movement against the oppression of Indian migrants in South Africa considers another dimension of an alternative general strike tradition: the complexities of race and nation in a strike against colonial forces whose participants—some native and some immigrants from South Asia—are not seen as members of the nation. It also contributes to the recent discussions of Gandhi’s anti-colonial ethics and politics. I show how understanding Gandhi’s politics requires appreciating how members of the movement he led, against his protestations, undertook a general strike to improve their working and living conditions. Strikers challenged what they saw as Gandhi’s political purism and, at the same time, they refused intra-movement hierarchies across differences of race and gender. I argue that we can learn from those who, inspired by Gandhi’s vision, promoted the general strike as part of a radically egalitarian anti-colonial politics.
J.L. Feldman 