My first book, Strike!, told the story of “repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America.”[1] It focused on the action of rank-and-file workers “thinking, planning, drawing lessons from their own experience, organizing themselves, and taking action in common,” sometimes using “unions and other established organizations” as their means to do so but in other cases having to “organize themselves and act outside institutional channels.”[2] It used Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of “mass strike” to analyze such peak periods of class conflict in terms of a “mass strike process” marked by three characteristics: “an expanding challenge to established authority in workplaces and beyond; a tendency for workers to take control of their own activity; and a widening solidarity and mutual support among different groups of working people.”[3] This process often emerged in “informal workgroups” that provided the “cell unit” of mass strikes. The book argued that ordinary people can have power because “it is their activity that makes up society.” If they refuse to work, withdraw their cooperation, or take control of their own activity “they have the power to reshape society.” Such power is not “the power of some people to tell others what to do” but the power of “people directing their own activity cooperatively toward common purposes.”[4]
Strike! has been repeatedly updated. The 50th anniversary edition published in 2020 included a chapter covering the “mini-revolts of the twenty-first century,” including Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for Fifteen; over a hundred pages of new materials and examined a wide range of current struggles, ranging from #BlackLivesMatter, to the great wave of teachers’ strikes “for the soul of public education,” to the global “Student Strike for Climate” that may be harbingers of mass strikes to come.
In 2012 I wrote a critique of Strike! which found the book marred at points by reductionism but still providing a useful perspective whose flaws were corrected in my later work.[5]
The original, 1972 edition of Strike! has been posted on-line at libcom.org.
[1] Strike! 2014 edition, 1.
[2] Strike!, 2014 edition, 2-3
[3] Strike!, 2014 edition, 2.
[4] Strike!, 2014 edition, 4.
[5] Save the Humans?, chapters 36-37.