May Day 2014: Reviving The General Strike

By Staughton Lynd
This article originally appeared in the May 2014 Industrial Worker

On May 1, 1886, the first general strike in U.S. history brought workers into the streets on behalf of one simple demand: an eight-hour working day. Their anthem was:
“We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure (that) God has willed it
And we mean to have eight hours.

We’re summoning our forces from
Shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.”

As is the case in the movement of low-wage workers today, the movement for eight hours was characterized by skilled and less-skilled workers, and workers in different trades, making common cause.

On May 3, 1886, union members at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago, who had been locked out, confronted strikebreakers as they left the plant. A firefight broke out involving the police, and strikers were killed. In response a protest rally was called at a downtown open area called The Haymarket. The rally was peaceful, but as the meeting was coming to an end someone threw a bomb and seven policemen died. After a dramatic trial and unsuccessful appeals, four so-called “anarchists” were hanged.

This story became familiar to working-class movements all over the world. May 1 became international May Day. In Mexico City, it has been a tradition that every May Day translated excerpts from the last words of two of the executed men, Albert Parsons and August Spies, are read aloud to huge crowds in the central public square, or zocalo.

An excellent recent book by James Green, entitled “Death in the Haymarket,” tells the story in more detail. Perhaps you, like myself, will be most moved by the fact that Parsons escaped the police dragnet, made his way to Wisconsin, changed his appearance, and then…came back to Chicago, walking into the courtroom so as to share the fate of his comrades.

Another General Strike? There is a live possibility that within the year 2014 there will be another general strike in the United States.

It would not be a strike of the entire working-class. But it would be a strike, in many parts of the country, by prisoners, among them prisoners in “supermax” (highest security) prisons serving indefinite sentences in solitary confinement.

A statement circulated last fall by prisoners at the Pelican Bay supermax in California declared that they were “members of the working-class poor, warehoused in prisons.” A dramatic example of the spreading insurgency is the hunger strike and court victory of Hispanic workers detained for deportation at the federal facility in Tacoma, Wash.

This movement is taking shape spontaneously, from below. Some general features can be discerned:

1) When will it occur? It seems clear that activity will occur in the period between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. Sept. 9 is the 43rd anniversary of the Attica uprising. Oct. 27 is the anniversary of the date on which the lockdown at Marion penitentiary in Illinois was made permanent. A major support network has called for action throughout the month of October concerning “mass incarceration.” Within this general framework, it doesn’t really matter if different groups do different things on different days.

2) What are the general demands? Will there also be local demands? Will everyone be expected to hunger strike? “Stop Mass Incarceration” will surely be one general demand. “No Solitary Confinement Longer Than 15 Days” is likely to be another. In addition, every group will presumably have demands specific to its situation. Thus at Menard, Ill., prisoners want to know why they are being placed in administrative detention and how long it will last.

Critically, whatever prisoners initiate will not be limited to the liberal strategy of prohibiting solitary confinement for juveniles, pregnant women, and prisoners who are mentally challenged. It will insist that all human beings, no matter how resilient, are damaged when they are cut off from other persons. It will seek to end solitary confinement for everyone.

A hunger strike has been the strategy of choice for many insurgent prisoners in recent years (see below). But one assumes that groups and individuals may choose any nonviolent approach.

3) What about divisions among prisoners of different ethnic and racial groups? A great achievement of the initial struggles in Ohio, California, and Illinois during the past few years is that prisoners have set all such differences aside in the interest of solidarity. A small but successful hunger strike by three members of the Lucasville Five in Ohio involved a Sunni Muslim imam, a longtime leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, and an unaffiliated African American. In 2013, representatives on the Pelican Bay Short Corridor of African Americans, Caucasian, Southern Californian and Northern Californian Hispanics declared a truce and invited groups on the street to join them in doing so.

4) What about nonviolence? Without any exception known to me, all the prisoner movements of recent years, whatever the issue or location within the United States, have insisted on nonviolence.

This is a strategy dictated by circumstances. Before Nelson Mandela was imprisoned he was in charge of preparations by the African National Congress for guerrilla warfare against the apartheid government of South Africa. On Robben Island there was no opportunity to organize armed insurrection and Mandela became a legendary advocate of mass nonviolent resistance. Similarly, as David Shulman writes in The New York Review of Books for Apr. 24, 2014, in Palestine “anyone who knows the Palestinian grassroots activists…knows that the dream of mass Gandhian-style action is their great hope.”

From the Bottom Up
The key thing to remember, and hold on to, is that general strikes are not “organized.” The people themselves, in their infinite variety, make them happen.

In the Russian Revolution of 1905, as described by Rosa Luxemburg in her book “The Mass Strike,” workers themselves in city after city across the vastness of Russia, with quite different issues serving as sparks of rebellion in different places, turned Russian society upside down.

It can happen in the United States as well. When campesinos in the fields of California in 1970 decided to throw their support to the United Farm Workers of America (rather than the Teamsters), Marshall Ganz says it was “one of those moments”:

“Really, it was a general strike, from north of Watsonville all the way south to below King City, a coastal area of about 120 miles. Companies were going on strike that we didn’t know existed. People would come and say, ‘We’re the brussel sprouts workers. Help us strike.’ ‘We’re the radish workers.’ It was led by committees of workers, and we were trying to coordinate it as best we could.”

How ironic it would be if the men and women scorned by society as “the worst of the worst,” and even by some radicals as a “Lumpenproletariat,” were to lead the way toward rediscovery of the only force that can truly transform this brutal capitalist world: the spirit of solidarity.