There is a feeling among the American working class that has not been felt in decades. The feeling is so electric that it cuts through despair over the move toward outright fascism by the far right. The feeling is so electric that when Mayor Brandon Johnson called for a general strike in this country at Chicago’s October 2025 No Kings rally, it was imbued with possibility rather than just dismissed as a leftist pipedream. But what is a general strike? What does it take to organize a general strike? And what can we expect to see on May 1, 2028, the date called for by the Chicago Teachers Union, United Auto Workers, and now Mayor Brandon Johnson for attempting a general strike by aligning the expiration of as many union contracts as possible?

The General Strike – Origins and Socialist Adoption

Workers have been withholding their labor collectively to exert political power for as long as there has been civilization. However, with the advent of capitalism and the system of wage labor, withholding labor became both more dangerous for workers and more powerful. It was more dangerous because workers no longer did subsistence farming and often did not have the kind of networks of mutual aid which were once common because they were necessary to survival. Now workers could buy their food and other necessities with wages, liberating them from the work and risk of subsistence farming and social reproduction like making their own clothes, but also putting them at the mercy of the capitalists who paid their wages.

But strikes also became more powerful because capitalists depended on workers even more than workers depended on their wages. Labor is not cheap, even at the poverty wages that many capitalists have paid, but capitalists will always spend some of their capital on it because without labor no value is created, and without the creation of value no profits can be made. Capitalists can only earn a profit by paying wages that are less than the value created by the labor provided to them by workers.

Capitalists act as a class as well as individually. Not necessarily in some kind of smoke-filled backroom conspiracy way, but rather because their class position predisposes them to actions that become more than the sum of the individual actions. 

One example of this concerted action by capitalists as a class was in 1842 in Britain. In the midst of one of the worst depressions the country would ever experience, British capitalists slashed wages, laid people off, and cut corners on making workplaces safe. In response to these abuses, a group called the Chartists, formed by utopian socialists, liberal reformers, and workers, submitted a petition to the House of Commons in Parliament demanding  six significant reforms to introduce universal male suffrage, reduce corruption, and strengthen democratic representation and accountability in Britain. The petition had over three million signatures. The vote was not even close; it failed 287 to 49.

Two months later, a coal miner strike began in Staffordshire. For the most part it was like many strikes before and since. But there was one thing that stood out – the miners stated that they wanted the Chartist petition passed, and they connected their strike to it. Less than a month after that strike began, cotton workers who had their wages cut proposed “A Grand National Turnout” in support of the Chartist petition. Within less than a week, all work had stopped in Stalybridge and Ashton, then in Manchester, and soon throughout the country. Though the strike was eventually violently crushed, the capitalists got the message. They reversed  the previous wage cuts. Parliament got the message as well, passing the Factory Act in 1844. Worker organizers learned an important lesson – when the capitalist class uses their collective power to oppress, it takes the collective action of a whole nation of workers to fight back.

However, when early Marxists analyzed the general strike in Britain, they dismissed it due to its connections with utopian socialists and anarchists. Writing in 1873, Friedrich Engels argued that to use a general strike for revolutionary socialism (rather than the liberal reforms accomplished by the Chartist general strike) would require a level of organization and resources that would essentially beg the question “Why not simply use that organization and resources to take over the state rather than carry out a general strike?” But that changed in 1905, when the first of many revolutions swept the Russian Empire. While Russia was still largely feudal, especially compared to a nation like Britain, revolutionary socialists were nonetheless able to organize hundreds of thousands of workers to go on strike, shutting down electricity and newspaper distribution in St. Petersburg completely. The tsar eventually capitulated, abdicating a totalitarian feudal monarchy and creating a constitutional monarchy with a legislature and civil rights. Though these would later be rolled back, prompting the more famous Russian revolutions that created the Soviet Union, in 1906 the socialists of the world stood in awe of the historical victory of their Russian comrades.

One of the most inspired was a German economist and union organizer who had always believed in the potential of strike actions to bring about revolutionary change – Rosa Luxemburg. Not only did Luxemburg join the struggle in Warsaw, where she was arrested, but she eventually met up with Lenin, Trotsky, and others for an intensive weeks-long discussion in Finland about how the Russian revolutionaries were able to pull it off. She turned her take-aways from this discussion into her most influential political writing, The Mass Strike. In it, Luxemburg pointed out that the political mass strike in St. Petersburg was preceded by several strikes all over Russia in the years proceeding – and we now know in 2025 that there were even more of these smaller economic strikes leading up to it than Luxemburg even knew about.

Luxemburg argued that it was the participation of revolutionary socialists in these seemingly just-economic strikes over the years that was crucial to building toward the eventual general strike in 1905. These strikes were almost always unanticipated and unconnected to the socialists – the socialists did not start the strikes, but rather took the opportunity created by them to agitate for revolution and build working class organization. And they were cumulative – like the adage of Paulo Freire, workers make the road to a general strike by walking it, by carrying out strike actions repeatedly.

While Rosa Luxemburg dismissed the idea of “equal authority,” that trade unions should have as much political authority as a socialist party, she argued “everywhere trade-union work prepares the way for party work.” But Luxemburg was not concerned with winning over the trade union leaders, trying to convince them that their political “neutrality” was misguided – the value of trade union work was in the connection to rank and file members. Worker organizing raised class consciousness just as much, and perhaps more, than socialist party organizing. 

To summarize, the general strike is the mass withholding of labor by organized workers across an entire nation and multiple industries which has a political aim that confronts the capitalist class as a whole rather than a single capitalist employer. The experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905, as distilled by Rosa Luxemburg, presented a socialist political theory: revolutionary change could be accomplished through a general strike, built by organizers participating in smaller strike actions and engaging with the rank-and-file workers carrying them out.

The 21st-Century Push for a General Strike in the U.S.A.

There are considerable differences between the 21st century United States and those of 19th century Britain and early 20th century Russia. Most notably, labor unions and strikes were illegal in both of those historical cases, whereas in the U.S. both are, at least for now, legally protected if carried out in the way prescribed by the law. This has made it safer for workers to go on strike, but has also successfully pushed labor unions into less militant action.

While it appears the U.S. labor movement is rebounding from its historic lows of strike actions, we are still below the number of strike actions happening in the 1990s, let alone at the high points of labor militancy in U.S. history like in the 1970s. So is the general strike still a relevant concept for modern U.S. socialists?

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) decided it was still relevant, and did so before the recent resurgence in interest. On March 26, 2019, Barry Eidlin published an article in Jacobin titled “What is the Rank-and-File Strategy, and Why Does It Matter?” This article was not the origin of the rank-and-file strategy – that traces back to a working paper authored by Kim Moody in 2000 for the organization Solidarity. But with this article, Eidlin applied Moody’s most famous theory to the organizing DSA was doing in some places and seeking to do elsewhere. “Unions give workers a platform to wage class struggle in a coordinated and sustained way,” writes Eidlin, “in the process developing the capacities necessary for future fights.” For this reason, Eidlin argues that DSA projects like YDSA’s campaign to encourage members to become teachers and join or form unions was the crucial way for DSA to engage in labor politics. Eidlin cited the wave of teacher strikes in 2018 as an example of how the rank-and-file strategy had already produced success. 

Like Luxemburg and Moody, Eidlin casts doubt on the revolutionary potential of union staff and leaders, at least as the primary focus of socialist agitation, given their predisposition to conservatism from their material interest in minimizing risk to the financial well-being of the union as their employer. But Eidlin does not argue that these figures cannot play a part in the rank-and-file strategy – the question is whether those union staff and leaders will use their power and roles to empower a militant minority in the union.

Eidlin does not expressly cite the concept of the general strike, but it is easy to see how it fits into his argument when he writes that the rank and file strategy is “a theory of how to build power to change society in the interests of the vast majority…linking workplace struggles to broader community struggles.” But as Rosa Luxemburg notes, the general strike is not simply a campaign that socialists decide to do one day, but rather a culmination of a series of militant labor actions engaged in by socialists.

That is why the DSA Rank-and-File Strategy does not tell our members to “organize for a general strike” but instead to:

1. Educate DSA members about unions and the local labor movement.
2. Launch a jobs program for those interested in taking strategic jobs.
3. Create support structures for our members in these jobs.
4. Support members organizing new unions in their workplaces or choose strategic targets to organize.
5. Join and build union reform caucuses.
6. Support strike and contract campaigns through connections with workplace leaders.
7. Build and use the Labor Notes network.
8. Connect local unions and worker leaders with broader DSA campaigns such as Medicare For All and Green New Deal.
9. Work with unions on electoral campaigns for DSA-endorsed candidates.

We can see this strategy in the work of the Labor Branch of Chicago’s DSA chapter.. Every Labor Branch meeting has a political education section to educate our members about unions and the local labor movement. Our pipeline program connects our members to jobs in unionized workplaces. Our members who get into these jobs form formal or informal networks for discussing our organizing as socialists as well as labor militants. Our CHIWOC (Chicago Workplace Organizing Committee) organizing helps members start new unions in their workplaces. Our members are involved in reform caucuses of unions like Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) in CTU and Teamsters for a Democratic Union in the Teamsters. And our strike support program has brought our members out to talk to UAW workers, Teamsters workers, and Illinois Nurses Association workers on the picket line.

There is always more that we can do, especially as we expand our membership, but this work we are doing is laying the groundwork for a general strike. A lot of it may not fit our romantic ideas of what carrying out a general strike is – the epic rallying cry speeches, the grand stands against authoritarian politicians and bosses. But as Rosa Luxemburg taught us, it is this work that may only be remembered deep in the pages of history books that builds the road to the general strike. And her own tragic death, in which she was murdered by right-wing forces after a failed attempt at revolution that she reluctantly joined, shows the consequences of trying to force a general strike to happen without laying enough of that foundation.

But we may be getting closer to that crescendo. President of the UAW Shawn Fain, whose election was the result in no small part of socialists organizing as members of the UAW in a reform caucus, has called for unions to line up their contracts to expire on May 1, 2028, providing a legal impetus for a coordinated cross-industry and nation-spanning strike. It is an exciting development in labor militancy and collective working class action across unions rather than siloed in individual unions and individual workplaces. But what can we expect?

The future is always unwritten, and those who make unequivocal predictions should be treated with as much skepticism as a strip mall clairvoyant. But we can use our understanding of history and our analysis of the current conditions of the political economy to outline the most likely possibility. As aforementioned, strike actions in the U.S. are still at a relative low in our history, and there has been no indication within any of the major unions that this will be changing in the near future. Nearly every union has contracts with a “no strike” clause that prohibits going on strike until the contract expires. Even under Trump with the courts and National Labor Relations Board being disarmed as weapons of the labor movement, unions are still stuck in these legal-based strategies and unwilling to engage in strikes. Union density continues to decrease (11.1% in 2024) despite being at newfound highs of popular support according to polling. Lastly, the COVID pandemic unfortunately threw a wrench in the momentum that labor had following the strike waves in 2018 and 2019, with 2020 having the least amount of strikes of any period in U.S. history since the information first started being tracked.

All of these factors weigh against May 1, 2028 becoming a real general strike. Despite whatever their public statements may sound like, the labor leaders involved with organizing the effort are well aware of this. The point of the proposed May 1, 2028 action is to show the working class the power of their collective action and union collaboration, so that in the future if those workers face the decision of whether to go on strike, they will understand the potential benefits as well as the risks.  May 1, 2028 may not be the general strike its organizers hope it to be, but it is part of the process of building toward one, and that is why socialists should absolutely engage with the effort and take hope from it. But even this campaign, with the lofty aim of a general strike, still boils down to the basic work Chicago DSA and the organization nationwide is doing through the rank and file strategy – in the simple words of the UAW, “organize, organize, organize.”

If and when a general strike one day brings revolutionary socialist change to this country, it is impossible to say who will be the faces of that moment or the leaders whose names will be captured in the history books. No one can show you the path to capture that glory. But what DSA can do, through our understanding of the history of the general strike and of the current conditions of the U.S. political economy, is give you a strategic framework through which you can organize your workplace and get it ready for the beautiful day when we will cast off our chains and step bravely forward into a socialist future.