UnCivil Uprising: Can A General Strike Save Democracy

What's the most powerful weapon against fascism we've nearly forgotten?

Jack Hitt and Chenjerai Kumanyika, hosts of the Peabody Award-winning podcast Uncivil, turn their lens on the labor movement — tracing the buried stories of workers who fought back against gilded-age oligarchs, accumulated wealth, and authoritarian drift. 

This is not a history lesson. It's a warning — and a call to action.

Recorded live at New Haven Museum as part of America 250: Democracy at a Crossroads, presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Featuring:
Jack Hitt, journalist and co-host of Uncivil
 Chenjerai Kumanyika, journalist, scholar, and co-host of Uncivil

 Learn more about the festival: https://www.artidea.org
 #America250 #DemocracyAtACrossroads #ArtIdea2026 #UnCivilPodcast

Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe on YouTube!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Welcome to Great Art Big Ideas, presented by the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. I'm Tiffany Hopkins, curator for this year's ideas series for the festival. This program is part of our America 250 Democracy at a Crossroads series, supported by Connecticut Humanities, Connecticut Public, and the New Haven America 250 Commission. It was recorded live at the New Haven Museum as part of our 2026 Ideas event. In this episode, titled Uncivil Uprising, Can a General Strike Save Democracy? The hosts of the Peabody Award-winning podcast Uncivil, Jack Kitt and Chinjurai Kumanika, asked the question nobody in power wants you to consider. Can a general strike save democracy? This is not a history lesson, it's a warning and a call to action. And now here's Uncivil Uprising.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

First of all, thank you so much to everyone with Arts and Ideas for gathering us. Thanks to all of you for coming. I know there's a lot of folks. Apparently, there's a lot of people who think we would all be much happier in screens by ourselves, looking at screens or looking at our phones. And um, I think especially in times like this where there's so much going on, it means a lot to be able to come together and think through think through things. And I get to be with my friend Jack Hitt.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Um, well, yes, thank you for all coming out today. Um, and especially because it's the hundredth anniversary of one of the most famous and legendary general strikes back in May of 1926, and we all know that that was the general strike in. Okay, very good. So now we know what we have to do today. Right. So just the anybody anybody have a lot of things. I like that. What country? Anybody? Nope. Eng England, yes. Um yeah, so and and it just just for a second, because I think uh just talking about any of these uh general strikes uh kind of elucidates what is kind of bizarre, um unique and interesting about the possibility of deploying these. Um there are not that many of them. If you read the books on general strikes, if you just google it on Wikipedia, you'll see that there's maybe a couple of dozen at the most expansive definition of what a general strike is in the last century, right? So England in 26. I mean, you could you can name them and collect them and trade them, which uh we have been doing in preparation for this. But you know, Bahamas 1958, Japan, 1950, um Minnesota 1934, um, and and some very most recently. But one of the so one of the things about general strikes that I think we need to just get out there is that they're kind of not strikes. What are they, Changerai?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Right. Well, you know, um strikes, you know, I I look, I I'm somebody who I should mention I'm in the I'm on the National Council of an organization called the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors. We're fighting for higher education and fighting against what's happening. But I'm around all these people who have all this history and labor, and I don't have that much history and labor. So I wanted to ask, and I was like, who understands what a general strike is? And everybody told me to go to this guy named Bill Fletcher. So I was talking to him, and he said, general strike is a tactic that involves labor, but it's about something much bigger, and it has power that other kinds of protests don't have. And I just want to say, you probably have seen this term be used more and more as people try to imagine what we can do to stop this onslaught of what's happening to our democracy, right? It feels like we're seeing all these things happen. People are coming out into the streets, there's legal strategies going on, but those don't seem to be able to really slow it down. Although I should say, one important strategy of what we're facing is to make us feel like nothing works. And so we have to reject that, even victories that are small and not perfect. But I was like, what, you know, everybody's wondering. And so the general strike is a tactic that can do it. And, you know, one thing we should say is listen, it's a labor tactic, but we know that like, well, maybe one way to think about it is how it's different than protests, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Yeah. I mean, we've seen some incredible protesting uh that's happened, people fighting back. Actually, y'all, can we give a round of applause to the protest people who are standing up and coming out? It's like people get mad at protesters sometimes. You know, even you know, me, even me sometimes I know I'm in traffic, like, oh boy, here we go. Okay. But it's hard and important to protest. But the problem with a lot of protests is many of the really massive protests that we've seen, which I applaud, they happen like on a Saturday. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Yeah, Fletcher says so Bill Fletcher was interviewed by by Chen Jurai on his podcast, Unruly Subjects. Like and subscribe. Go ahead, you can do it right now. Um but one of the things he says, this is so fantastic, is that protests happen on Saturday, and general strikes happen on Friday or Wednesday on a weekday. Because one of the key features of a good general strike is that it involves work, like people not working, right? So a protest on a Saturday, we've all done it. We've all been to the No Kings protest, maybe. Um, and you know, you're just you're taking the day off. I mean, it's or it's a it's almost a carnival atmosphere, right? You're out there um, you know, with your sign, maybe you got your frog suit on or whatever. Um, but and that's good. I mean, no question about it. I mean, the most recent No Kings protest was the largest assemblage of you know Americans in public squares in history, as I understand it, right? Um, but but general strikes are a little different. And like what uh Jindra I was saying is that like they often they often begin in a labor issue of some kind, but expand into something much bigger and more kind of either not scary, but certainly something far more ominous in some ways.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Right, some yeah, it's something something that power can't ignore. You know, I was just uh I was recently at a convening that was actually building in Chicago toward um a general, a possible general strike that's being discussed in 2028, and we can talk more about that later. But the UAW president Sean Fain said, unfortunately, this administration has shown that even with massive people on the street, they can kind of ignore that. But what they can ignore is people withholding labor, right? Because what a general strike does is it's a multi-sector strike. That's like weezy labor language, but it means that like, you know, you might think you can, I mean, first of all, I don't think they could ignore the auto workers if they all really went on strike. They they they had to actually capitulate to the auto workers when they just struck at a few plants here and there and rotated them around. But if you think you can ignore the auto workers, can you ignore the auto workers and the railway workers? Now you got a problem. And don't get it, look, I'm I'm with the AAUP. We're affiliated with the AFT. You damn sure can't ignore the teachers. The teachers will shut down, yeah, give it a hand. The teachers will shut down every city. In Chicago, when the Chicago teachers go on strike, every I have a seven-year-old daughter. Every time I realize I missed a calendar, and you ever had this problem? I was like, oh man, the school is out today. I feel the panic. I'm like, oh my God, okay, what am I gonna do? Meetings. So general strike is multi-sector, all these sectors together. And but also it's important that we're at a time where you know participation or sort of formal uh membership in formal unions is actually at an all-time low, even though labor activity is is there. So the general strike does something different, it invites people in, which is why often they don't call it a general strike.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Right. And that's a that's another thing. Well, let me back up a second. Like look looking at England in 1926. So it was mine workers who went out on strike originally, right? Um, and it was right after World War I. And the government was handing it had control of the mining industry for the duration of the war and was handing it back to private enterprise. Private enterprise, the this the presidents of the companies at that time said, Well, now that we're taking it back for profit, um, we think you should work longer hours at lower pay. Right. And so the mine workers decided to go out on strike. And so many other workers thought this was so unfair that it was such a fundamental betrayal of a wartime, you know, sacrifice that they also, so transportation people, dock workers, everybody stepped out, including then the public overwhelmingly supported the mine workers. And suddenly the government of England was looking at something they'd kind of never seen before, which was a general strike. Everybody was walking out. Um, now I will say England, uh, England's government at the time reacted the way some American governments do. They sent in uh armed soldiers with bayonets, there were battles, uh, there were there were deaths. Um, the strike failed ultimately. Um, the Union freaked out at at the violence, and also they just didn't, they hadn't really pre-organized to to to handle something like a general strike. Um, so they caved. But here's what's interesting people are still writing books about 1926, and they're still writing about that general strike, even though there were all these other strikes before and after that one. But that one altered sort of like the fundamental notion of what negotiating power looked like in the country. And that's yeah, isn't that a comment? I mean, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Yeah, that's very much a common thing. And you know, it's really important to note that particularly in America, strikes have been responded to with violence because the people that govern this country in terms of capital understand that the power of workers. Now, look, we all have feelings about some of the unions, and of course, unions are not free from corruption and all kinds of bad faith action. But at the fundamental, basic sort of you know, core of it is that you got to respect people's work. And a lot of people's profit is contingent on ignoring people's work, all kinds of people's work, invisibilizing people's work, devaluing people's work. So, speaking of mine workers, you know, it's interesting, like in the violence, you know, in the late night in the late 19th century, the United Mine Workers was doing very powerful work in the fields of Pennsylvania. They were some of it was multiracial work, right? I actually talked to a black mine worker who they brought up from Tennessee to Pennsylvania, and they were striking, they were unionizing all of these plants one by one. And inevitably, the folks who own those plants, you know, would just like, you know, they would just bring people out with guns. They had at one point more artillery collectively than the US Army, and they would shoot them down. And then, and it was it would be like a big press scandal, right? It was like just they massacred workers who were fighting for basic conditions. This black worker told me he he witnessed some of this with his own eyes when he came up. And then the people who own some of these uh plants eventually said, you know what? I wonder if we could figure out a way to offload the expense of all this putting down these protests onto taxpayers. So they invented an institution which did not exist between 1906, which was the Pennsylvania State Police. And uh they then took over the work. Um and so this same black mine worker tells us in 1924 he saw that the mine workers surrounded the factory, the pay, the PA state police on their horses came out and trampled people. But the point of saying this, which is I know it's depressing, but the point about of saying it is that it's it's people they they recognize the threat that workers pose, and that this can become something big if workers really do realize that we have power. And so that is, I think, you know, and you see this in the general strike, you see this like sort of raised to a whole nother level, especially as you're saying, when other people get involved. One reason why they don't often call a general strike a general strike, and Bill Fletcher explained this to me, is he said, first of all, general strike has all kinds of legal implications. So some of the major unions have to avoid it. But the other thing is you want everybody involved. So in South Africa, they use the term stay away, right? This gives the unions power up the ability without declaring a legal strike, to everybody kind of gets sick, maybe. We don't come, you know, we don't, you know, we don't come in. And then the public can get involved. And that's kind of the power that you started to see in places like Minneapolis recently, right? I mean, the formal unions did kind of declare a strike, but they made it into something that everybody could participate in.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Right. And in Minneapolis, they called it an ice out. So they they just gut away from the whole term of strike. I think, you know, even though it they always begin in a labor issue of some kind, they often broad out and broaden out into these much larger coalitions that are way and and the issue is way beyond just a labor dispute. Um, and in fact, it may often it's not even about a labor dispute. But uh it's amazing how many of them have uh resort to sort of like other language in order to sort of broaden that coalition. I'm gonna talk a little bit about a um uh uh a strike that happened in Iceland in 1975 uh in a minute. And um and in and in that case, they they called it a a day off. And uh I just I I I think I can be fact-checked today because the uh the director of the documentary about the uh the day Iceland stood still is in the audience somewhere. Yes. Pamela Hoogan. Yes. Shout out to Wow. So yeah, so change I have my my riff later is going to be fact-checked by the director. He doesn't care that worry. Okay, I don't know if anyone's but um but but I was amazed at like how often that was the case. Even like one of the earliest, like uh general strike theorists, this guy named uh well, I'm gonna forget his name right now, but begins with a B. Um, but in 1832, he wrote this pamphlet and he he wanted to call it a national grand holiday. But everybody sort of gets away from the labor thing in part because the coalition builds into this much larger thing than labor. And it often involves just, you know, regular people, shop owners closing their stores. And in Minneapolis, when they had the ice out, um, I mean, I I you know looked up these stats, but like, you know, hundreds of businesses closed, a hundred thousand people in a town of 400 and something thousand people stepped out in sub-zero uh weather to to protest ice. Um, and that and and that that closure uh or that closing of the day, I mean, basically the whole day was taken off. Um, that form that unity that comes out of that, and this is another key feature of every one of these uh general strikes, that unity has this sort of like um staying power that lasts way past the general strike. And uh just to, I guess going to Minnesota for a second, but like um, you know, the general strike was called after the killing of uh of good, right? And uh but the killing of Pretti was uh to come. But what happened was in after that general strike, what everyone saw was that essentially all of Minnesota was against this. And and they were kind of unified. I mean, even the cops gave a press conference after one of their cops had been had had been harassed by an ICE agent, and he said that he would arrest any federal officer who, you know, harassed or detained uh one of his officers. Then you had Governor Waltz called out the National Guard, but they were handing out donuts to the protesters, uh, their backs to the ICE facilities. Um the the unity was kind of terrifyingly broad if you were an ICE agent. And then what came out of that, too, was that the the all these actions um after the general strike, for instance, like any time an ICE agent approached anyone, if anyone saw it, everyone carried whistles. Do you all know this? They blow these whistles, everybody would come out, huge numbers of people would assemble around the action, everyone with their cameras on. The reason we have nine different angles of Pretti's killing is because everybody was there with their cameras running. That happened every time ICE made any move, right? And that is what that that's one of the after after effects of a general strike is this um, and at least in Minnesota, this sense that like um the whole town suddenly saw itself as itself. And I I called some friends in Minnesota and they all described this. Like all of a sudden we realize, you know, we're all in this together. So every time like a whistle blew or if someone called for a uh a gathering, every park in Minneapolis would fill. Right. And so there was just this constant display of the power of the of the public and the shopkeepers. Uh people, uh, people with uh Anglo last names would drive Latino kids to school because they were running plates. And if you had a Hispanic last name, you got pulled. So anybody who had a non-Hispanic last name was suddenly carpooling all the kids to school. Or um the uh uh some some people, you know, living paycheck to paycheck, uh, couldn't go to work, so they couldn't pay their rent. People pooled money and were paying people's rents in the interim. So that's and that's that's kind of one of the effects.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

And that and that, yeah, and I mean, one word for it is solidarity, right? And like, you know, I talked to hospital workers and a principal. I interviewed them on my show and I was asking them, you know, what what was this, what was it like? And it was, you know, they will this was like a there was both like an African-American um uh sort of person who works in education, a principal of a school, and uh and a healthcare worker. And first of all, they were explaining how they were losing like both hospital workers would not work in the hospital because they were scared of confronting ICE. And they were describing mothers calling into the hospital, like, I got two sick kids, you know, do I have to bring both, you know, and maybe making choices not to bring sick kids in. But one of the things about this kind of scale of solidarity is that it can overcome all these differences that people are using to exploit us. So the, you know, the guy, the the um, the black doctor I talk spoke to, he said, to be honest, he said, there were businesses that I kind of looked at it like these are people in a white part of town, they don't they don't really care too much about black folks. But in the context of the strike, he said, I had to, he said, man, I we those things were overcome because I saw them. They were out there, they were shut down, and it and he was like, yo, I in in the moment, in that cauldron of struggle, we work through these differences. You see what I'm saying? It's not like some abstract thing. It's like we're here, you see it, and you work through it. And I that that is so important, and that's also why it's so threatening.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

So uh by the way, just another uh uh in the collect 'em and trade them uh general strike file, uh, New Orleans, 1898, um, the the um the dock workers uh went on strike, and there were, of course, two segregated unions, black and white. Um, and the the the level of unfairness in the working conditions at the time drove both of these uh these unions to strike, and then many people to join them and and other uh unions. Um and you know the city did exact exactly what you think they would do is that they tried, they played the race card every day, trying to m keep these unions apart. And one of the things the general strike did was it it the surfaced this sort of temporary unity, let's be clear. After they kind of won the general strike, or at least the issues that they needed, certainly things settled back into the the old regime that we all know. But for that moment, you know, there was that kind of unity. But so let's so let's just let's hold up, bro.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Hold on. I gotta I gotta interrupt my man Jack because this is my friend. We made a podcast called Uncivil Together. I don't know if any of y'all heard that. You know, when we made Uncivil, when Jack Jack invited me to make Uncivil, I wanted I want to set the records. We're gonna do some history making right here. And we were working with a company that was new in the podcast space called Gimlet. And when I told everybody, we got our podcast Greenlight, we're gonna make a podcast, everybody was real excited. And then they were like, What's it about? And I was like, It's about the Civil War. And they were like, ah, okay. Yeah, you had me a Gimlet, lost me a Civil War. And like, but I talked to Jack and I said, now I wasn't the right person to solve this problem, okay? I was a I'm a I was a professor at that time. I was teaching at Clemson University. So I was like, I was literally my university was a plantation, but I was like, um, you know, professors, look, I'm gonna speak for myself, I'm not gonna speak for any professors, but sometimes we're not known for being the most riveting storytellers. You make very important scholarly interventions. In our journals, you know what I mean? But so I was like, Jack, how are we gonna do this? And what we were able to do, and what Jack and other folks who kind of took me in showed me is that people think that history is not exciting, it's not riveting. People think also that people can't take the harsh histories. And what Jack showed me, I think before we made the first episode of Uncivil, we would talk on the phone for like hours with Jack just regaling me with the most weirdest, wildest stories about this country and how we got here. And um, I don't know. I just wanted to express some love and say that to me, this is what's exciting about learning this stuff and going into it because we get told that this stuff is kind of like in black and white and old and dusty, and it's not, and it's also what we need to sort of understand how we got here. So I just wanted to say that, man. You know what I mean? But um, but yeah, but um, but yeah, you want to go let's go to some recent history. Uh South Korea. South Korea two years ago. So when I talked to Bill Fletcher, Bill Fletcher said the problem with general strikes now and deploying them, he said, is that there's not really anybody alive in America who has actually lived through one and planned one. He said, so in a way, we have all these ideas, but it's like we're kind of talking about something we haven't done. So that got me thinking. I said, yo, who has done it? So I started asking around. And um what they what essentially what people explained was that in South Korea on 2024, you may remember that the president, Yoon Sukyul, declared martial law. So I said, here's a strange idea. What if I could get one of the leaders of that labor union to talk to me on my strange little podcast?

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Unruly subjects. Like and subscribe.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

By the way, you're talking about the humblest email I ever sent. I was like, hi, I'm a podcaster. And uh, I have a podcast that doesn't have that merry many listeners, and I was wondering, can you talk to me anyway? But um, so uh I did. I I said yes. She said yes. I spoke with uh the head of the KCTU, the South Korean Confederation of Trade Union, an umbrella organization over many different trade unions, and she came on and told me the story. And the first thing she, you know, she told me is that uh it all started basically on um the night of December 3rd, 2024. She was watching TV, and all of a sudden the TV waves went crazy. The president interrupts, he's on the TV, and he starts talking about stuff that the state has taken, unilateral action, and he has to fight back, and he declares martial law. Now, you know, when she said this, right, I was thinking like, there's a lot of people who are looking at stuff that that's going on with our democracy right now. You know, the wind seems everything seems to be pointing in a certain direction. You look at how they're messing with elections, you've you've created the largest law enforcement. I'm not even gonna call it law enforcement. I mean, we call it that at this point. You've recalled it the largest police agency in the country, right? You're you're all doing all these things. So it's like I was like, I felt like she was talking about, I was like, I hope it she might be talking about our future. So she said, you know, she's like, yeah, he declares martial law and it's like, she's like, it felt so strange. She was like, we didn't know what to do. So immediately she hops on Telegram and she talks to the other people in her union, and they're kind of trying to figure it out. So what they know they have to do, they know they want to, they we all have to go outside and go downtown together and protest. So she said she got on there. But the first problem was they can't bring their president down because he's been a target of this president there of the KCT KCTU. So she was like, we'll send our vice president down. So they send them down. They she said when they got downtown, it was like really scary. There were police. She said there were helicopters in the sky with military repelling down from the helicopters all around, trying to prevent entrance to the National Assembly. And they knew that the only way they could get this martial law rescinded was they had to get the National Assembly into parliament so that they could deliberate and then say this is illegal. But the police are there blocking it.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

Physically into the building.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Physically into the building.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:15

And so eventually uh they came up with a plan to do that. And we'll hear a little bit from the thing here.

SPEAKER_04 26:20

And then some people start to have the National Assembly members to get in uh the National Assembly hall uh through the wall. So it they climbed the walls. Yeah, they climbed the wall and we helped. And the colleague who was uh taking the seat in strike has a Letty uh microphone and amplifier and speaker. So uh the sound system. So we broke this and uh someone started to make a speech uh there to warn uh the military uh armies and to encourage people to uh protest in order.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Wow. Wow, that is that is amazing. So it's incredible. So they're down there, they're lifting what she said, they're lifting the assembly members to climb over the walls of the assembly. They've got microphones out there, they're telling the military and the police, you better stay away or the people are gonna fight back. It's like this whole big thing. They lift the assembly members inside of the assembly, they're heaving them over the walls, heaving them over the walls. And she said, like they didn't really have a real plan at this point, other than that they knew they they figured that out while they were down there, right? In the heat of the moment. And the assembly, by the way, we're now talking about, so they get them inside. It's this start this started at 10 p.m. this uh December 3rd, 2024. It's now like 2 a.m., right? The assembly members get in there, they deliberate. I think by like 4 a.m. they have rescinded martial law. So I you know, I'm talking to Mick Young Roo, and I said, Wow, this was major. This was like a celebration, right? You all did it. And she was like, No, we weren't done. She said, We felt that any president who did this has to go. You know, he has to uh, you know, um, you know, he can't remain. He has to be impeached and removed. And so she assembles all the members of the KCTU. Now you're talking about all, you're talking about Hyundai, you're talking about Samsung, you're talking about the, you know, the railway workers, you know what I'm saying? And she said that they uh this is what they basically did. Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_04 28:34

So in that meeting, the the KCTU central leadership and the president of each uh affiliated union decide uh to stage uh our uh struggle for the impeachment or uh a voluntary resignation of the president. Uh and to do this, uh we uh launch general strike. Yeah. And uh it uh was the Metal Rockers Union, uh, which is very disciplined. Uh so they go for the four hours for each shift uh went on a strike. So the workers in Hyundai, Motors, and Kia, and GM, yeah, go on a strike.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

I know they didn't want that, Mikyon.

SPEAKER_04 29:28

And in addition to this, uh some uh workers, for example, the railway workers and the non-regular workers in the education sector, actually they plan uh to go on a strike, and they call for the resignation and impeachment of the president.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

If you want more air horn in your podcasts, Unruly Subjects, like and subscribe.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Can you imagine? Like, this is the this is like the most, she's very kind, she's the most serious person in the world. She was reacting so strange as I'm like hitting buttons, ow, sound effects. It was so I I felt so silly, but I wanted to celebrate. So anyway, what happens is, and now it's a it's a this plays out between December and April. But basically what happens is that they're able to, the general strike really, it's called so fast that it really kicks off a larger mass mobilization. And they're able to, it's so the strike itself is powerful, but it's a spark. They call two million people into the streets of downtown uh South, you know, Seoul to South Korea. And they stay there. They're able to keep that momentum up all the way pretty much until April. She talks to me about the different strategies they use. A couple of things to highlight. One really important moment she said was that, you know, typically in labor protests, they had their traditional labor songs, labor leaders, known political activists would take the stage and lead things. But she said, we realize if we want everybody to be involved, we got to create an opening, a way for everybody. So she said, all these young people who were dreaming of a different world started coming to the protests. And we said, yo, we have to break our no our normal plan and let them on stage. And they had like these light sticks, and she said they had these light sticks, and it wasn't even like a fully coherent politics, but it was like, we want to light the way for a better world. And she said, we'd let them be on the stage. See, I'm getting emotional. Thinking about it. But she said then they would sing, and um, it was really powerful to her. She said that for her was the most meaningful thing. And um, you know, they did other things because they had been able to amass this many people, right before they sort of got the parliament to you know, say they were going to impeach, but it looked like they were taking too long, so they threatened another general strike. And then on April 4th, they impeached uh the president and arrested him and took him out of there. You know what I mean? And so it just was like a really powerful, amazing story of someone who actually did it, you know, who actually did what had to be done. And uh yeah, I mean, there's much more to say about it.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Um, yeah, you know, the the the the that story is incredible because the the impact of the general strike was almost immediate and and unbelievably effective. Um, but in most of these general strikes, the the buildup and the payoff is a little bit different. Um so the this the Iceland uh uh story of of 1975. If I had that right, Pamela says never 75, yeah. Um so one of the things that you and you must go see this documentary because um, first of all, it has it strangely had very little coverage uh in the last 50 years until uh Pamela took control of the camera. I had never heard of it. Right. I mean, it's just it's uh well, I mean, a lot of these general strikes are largely unknown unless you're like a labor historian or something. But this one, because of its impact and because of its effectiveness, it's it's it's amazing that we aren't all taught this. But um the one of the key aspects of of this strike and and of of many of them is just how kind of ready uh everybody is for this kind of strike. It's almost like dry tinder is waiting for a match. That's something, there's some discontent or some um injustice that has to be surfaced and visibly seen in order to be acted on. And that might be the destruction of democracy, or it might be sort of a baked-in sexism in a culture that's, I believe, you know, uh has like the oldest written or oldest constitution in in the West, right? Um but thousands of years of baked-in sexism. And it what what initiates this is the um the the UN had declared the year of the woman. And um and then uh then these women started to but actually let let me just put play this piece of tape because I I love the way they just describe sort of how ready the the country was for something.

SPEAKER_07 34:11

We could feel it, you know, there were waves in the air.

SPEAKER_08 34:22

The earth was already everything was prepared for doing something. It only needed this to start.

SPEAKER_05 34:34

On the first of May, the radical people have an array for workers' rights. I went down to speak on radio, and I just said women in red stockings, let's meet at the square in the morning. They were all ready. They said, Yes.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

So I hope you all can uh could hear that, but like the this basically a woman went on went on the radio and said, I think all the all women should come to the public square wearing red stockings. Now that that image, uh the metaphor of the red stocking, was freshly minted just a few years before in New York City by, you know, Glory Steinem and Letty Cotton Pogerbend and the founders of his magazine, which was just a couple of years old, I believe, at the time. The red stocking movement was a kind of, you know, kind of a poke in the eye of the blue stocking district of the of the east side of Manhattan, right? And that phrase had taken off in a couple of places elsewhere. And so um uh you know, a number of women did show up in the public square, and that's with wearing the red stockings, and the red stocking movement sort of picks up in in Iceland. Um and then they do they they there's there's a number of different, I guess you would call them stunts, uh, but there's just things that they do that are kind of and this is the other aspect of of a general strike that I find so charming is that there almost these joyful sort of uh performances that they that do to to to a arouse support, but also to sort of like reveal sort of the injustice that they're talking about. So one of the things that they did was um uh they brought a cow to a beauty pageant and just sat out front with it, you know, and and apparently um you know the police came, um, but I guess there's no law against having a cow at a police pageant. At a at a beauty pageant. So um it's good to know. Yeah, good to know. Yeah, that that hadn't been made illegal yet. Um, but the thing was that people didn't want to go inside because all of a sudden, of course, you know, the the metaphor that they were working with was suddenly bright and clear, right? This that women are you know treated as livestock in here. And by the way, that uh uh in in Pamela's documentary, you you learn that like no one like uh the beauty pageant business had kind of faded from view for like a decade before they managed to sort of resurface. Um but then there, you know, there were others um that just showed you how kind of, like I said, baked in a lot of the the sort of like uh traditional cultural sexism was. Um many women record you know recollect that Christmas was this incredibly stressful and just oppressive time for mothers because they were sort of expected to do pretty much everything. There's a very important holiday in Iceland, of course. You know, it's when the light is beginning to reappear. And so that there was it's an incredibly important cultural uh celebration besides a religious one. And uh, but they were, you know, required to bake, you know, uh every kind of cookie and cake and you know, and sort of things to eat. Every child in the house hadn't had to have a new set of clothes made for the you know the Christmas thing. So typically, you know, women in like December were just in this sort of like uh sprint, exhausted sprint, uh uh up until the holiday. So the uh the red stocking uh ladies decided to uh just something so simple. They just took uh made a doll, a life-size doll, of a housewife, and uh and then they did this.

SPEAKER_09 38:22

And she had you know rolls in the hair or something like that because he wanted to be beautiful. The doll was a very, very tired housewife.

SPEAKER_07 38:32

She was exhausted and we brought her down to the main street crucifying the housewife on a Christmas tree.

SPEAKER_08 38:43

It was hilarious, and that is what made me see the things clearer.

SPEAKER_06 38:50

And this was so provocative for for some people. Well, it didn't come to blows, but we got very harsh words, mostly from men.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Nice at it, Pamela. Um so this movement kept taking off. People started thinking about um the issues at hand, and then there was this sort of Congress of uh women um to discuss, I guess, the you know, the movement, and it came up that they should have a general strike, right? That people should just walk off women's work for a day, just to s or or no, just to walk off women's work. And and immediately they realized, as so many of these general strikers do, that these issues now are much broader even than women's work. It's about it's about you know showing the injustice kind of physically, right? Um, and also to broaden this coalition. And one of the things they realized is that a lot of conservative women didn't want to join something called a general strike. Um, it just sounds so labory and you know yucky, right? So they called it a national day off, and suddenly that opened the doors to all kinds of people coming into the movement. Um, and in the in the course of the the months after uh that follow this, um, and in the documentary, you you you you come to hear just sort of like how uh amazingly oppressive life was for just almost any worker. Like, you know, the women who work in banks were pretty much uh confined to you know, sort of the accounting jobs, and but they would train these young men who would come in and then of course be promoted right beyond them into the higher paying jobs. And when you know asked about that, they would hear things like, Well, you know, of course your pay is so low because you know, you you only really need money for makeup and uh clothes because you're going to marry a man uh eventually who will make the real money. Uh and that's just the way things are. And and and that, you know, people, men would say that without any sense of shame whatsoever. But that just shows you how, like I said, just how settled in a lot of this was. Or so many of these professionals were in various jobs where they would just stagnate at sort of like secretarial or typist uh positions and then watch everybody else get promoted beyond that. Um, or some of them, some of the differences were just so plain, it was just appalling. Like the women who and men who filleted fish at the, you know, seafood, of course, being a big industry in Iceland, um, they were just paid, you know, completely different wages based entirely on sex. So the the idea of like women would walk off these jobs for one day. Uh and then that idea grew into all kinds of women's work. So even just housewives would just not show up for house today. No children would be taken care of, no meals would be made, they would just disappear. It would be like the rapture. All the women would just be summoned away from and and then this this so as in when when the day came, this actually happened. 90% of women stepped out of their, you know, whether it was a house or a job or, you know, wherever, and including and and we really got to listen to the the documentary for this because I and I couldn't pull tape because there's um a lot of it is in Icelandic, but you can hear this incredible description of these three women who work on a um on a boat, and they're sailing 22 men on the crew, three women sailing into Russian waters, you know. They they basically bully the uh the the communications officer into telegraphing back to you know the land, uh to the organizers of the march that um that they're gonna participate. And so the the the way they're gonna do is that they're gonna lock themselves in their room for the day and and they'll not you know do anything. So um, and you you you you gotta hear this on this documentary because the their men are pounding on the door, insisting that these women come out. I mean, the captain is present at some point. I mean, the the word mutiny is thrown around, you know. Um, and these women like they hold to they hold to their moment, uh, they do not leave the room. Um, and then you find out what was it that they did that was so crucial on this boat? They polished the men's shoes and they made the beds and they swept. I mean, that this this was what they did. Um, and the men are out there screaming how helpless they are. Uh without they have to come out because what are they supposed to do? You know, it just you know, you you may recognize this, some men may recognize this in the way we sort of like allege that we don't know how the washing. Machine works, you know, and that that's why we haven't done the laundry that week. You know, it's a kind of a there's a sort of that level to it. But they they hung in there. And um and like I said, 90% of women uh stepped out of their work that day. By the the effect was um not immediate, but it was amazing. You know, the uh first of all, the press coverage of this was global. Everybody, I mean, you uh, you know, some someone someone called it the, I believe the the the New Aristophanes, if you know your Lys Estrata. This is the labor version of that. Um, but uh, but you know, in the course of the years that followed, the the general strike changed pretty much everything in Iceland. Um, and you know, that it's not like they were calling for that change. They just wanted people to see here we are. This is who, you know, this is who we are, this is what we do. And they, you know, that did call for equal pay and you know, fair opportunities. Um, but you know, it it took time, but not that much time. Um, today, I guess I think uh 48% of Iceland's parliament is female. Six years later, the the country elected a female president and she served for decades. Um, you know, the law schools, et cetera, filled up with women and and the general strike, I mean, if you want to measure success, was incredibly successful. Um it had completely upended this ancient sort of like baked-in sexism in the culture and set a whole new kind of culture in motion.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

Right. No, absolutely. And it's set, it's it's it seems like it's set, you know, also the terms of negotiation are different. Because one thing the general strike does is the nature of the way our society is is organized is that once people realize that things are going to be shut down, they're gonna lose money, if that's possible, they have to calculate for that. So just imagine, you know, the next year and these these these women continue continue to come together apparently in ice iceland year after year and do different things to commemorate, but also to think about how we can move the struggle forward. But when they said we're getting ready to do this, you have to pay attention now because of that show of force. Similarly, can you imagine in South Korea, and if the umbrella you know union says to the president, we need to talk. It's like they're definitely gonna listen. See, over here, our leaders have gotten a little too comfortable not listening to us. One one other thing I want to say before we leave Iceland, though, is like, you know, um, Jack, this this story really reminds me of the work of a scholar uh named Sylvia Federici who talks about housework and and women's labor and something called the wages for housework movement in the 70s. And she has this really powerful essay that's trying to describe the fact that, of course, we love our families, of course we take care of our children, but that for women, like she has this essay called They Call It Love. And she's talking about the way that women's work is sort of hidden in the idea of love. You're supposed to do this if you love. And it's just really, really profound. And she talks about the fact that even in this country, there have been, you know, struggles that have said the state, you have to find ways to compensate this work. So that that seems like it took it to a whole nother scale. And um, yeah, but I mean, the general strike, you hear people talking about it. And I think the fact that both of these things happened in this in these initial phases are also points that one of the lessons that I think the takeaways that's important is that people tend to look at massive protests and everything as sometimes like failures. Like I heard people, there's people who are really critical of the No Kings protests, you know. But what labor organizers understand, and labor I can labor organizers don't, we don't have all the answers, but one thing they understand is you have to test, you got to work out the muscle. So when you saw those first protesting people come out in the streets, you know, they came out, it might have been on a Saturday, but it was, you know, I don't know, maybe 30,000, 40,000. The last No Kings protests I went to in New York, it was 60,000 people on the streets. All kinds, by the way, people I'm not used to seeing on the streets either. You know what I mean? If you listen to my work, you know I'm not a very patriotic person. There's lots of American flags. I was like, oh, hi, hi there. They were like, hey, hello to you. You know, I had a kafia on. Like, we're all out here. I guess we do have something in common, huh? You know what I mean? But the point is, is that you don't, in other words, what they say in what we say in the labor movement is this you're not gonna get somebody to uh sort of like wear a t-shirt if you can't get them to fill out a petition. If they can't fill out a petition and wear a t-shirt, you're not gonna get them to come to a rally. They're not gonna come to a rally, there's no way you're gonna get them to strike. So if we really want to move people to sort of say no to the stuff that's coming down on this country right now, you got to work out those muscles. I know some people have a fantasy that one day, like you're gonna hear a news report and then everybody's gonna get so mad and go into the street and shit. It doesn't happen that way. We have to be working out our muscles.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

It already, I mean, that's already true. So, you know, uh, if you uh in the wake of Minneapolis on May Day, May 1st, right, there was this call. If you went online, you saw that there was a big call for a national uh general strike. And that that kind of didn't work. It receded to the No Kings march, right? But it was the biggest march in American history, right? The most populated protest march in American history. So one of the things Chen said to me earlier uh today was, you know, often these kinds of these kinds of actions are like um stress tests, right? So it's not that May Day, May 1st was a failure of a general strike. It was a stress, a stress test of a of a protest to see if that can if the trajectory can get us to a general strike. And I guess really, I mean, we only have a few minutes uh a few minutes left, so I want to open it up the the the floor to questions and stuff. But um, but you know, I'm I this talk was described as a question can a general strike save uh American democracy? And uh I I'm here to say that we're not going to answer that today, but you are. Um, because do we do we have uh a feeling of injustice in this country profound enough, kind of smoldering enough to push a protest beyond that into a kind of general strike? Do we have uh you know the the organizing capacity to pull it off between now and the midterms or now and twenty twenty-eight? Um if you go online, there is talk. I mean, there's already uh this the the uh auto companies, auto unions are already planning a general strike to coincide with the ending of their contracts in 2028, right? So there there is a long-term uh attempt at this. But you can also find, you know, uh efforts um, you know, in between now and the midterm.

SPEAKER_01 51:04

In the examples, one thing I would say is labor can't do it alone, right? We saw in these examples that you have to have on rabs for everybody. But the thing that labor has is like you have to have leverage. And this is why it's been a shame. This is why the the sort of strategy of labor has been like we haven't learned about it. It's been taken out of our history books because you have to, you know, for example, I mean, look at who went on strike in South Korea: railway workers, the people who are making the cars, the teachers. Like you have to have that to really kick it off. That's in Minnesota, that was the thing that they, it wasn't just like, you know, because Jack said this easy. So sometimes people pull a call for a general strike online, like they'll announce it, and then it's like the bagel shop across the street is on strike. It's like that's good. We, you know, solidarity, but so that's so I think that labor has to kick it off with a certain scale and the ability to really kind of shut stuff down. But then we as labor organizers and the whole the public has to, we have to figure out a way for everybody to join and to not control it too much and to really think about everybody's stakes.

SPEAKER_03 52:11

So um, so I think my question follows up on that point a little bit. Um, two questions from I said, or two aspects I love for you to touch on. The first one being the United States just being a huge country, um, and it's more difficult to get people together, to get people into a central space, right? It's so much easier in a metropolis like Seoul to do that and to get the numbers out there. And I think we're seeing it in Boston, we're seeing it in New York City, but there's also like every single Saturday I drive through a middle town, there's always between 15 and 50 people there at the intersection every single week. But you don't hear about those because the numbers just aren't there. And the second thing, and this comes maybe from my personal backgrounds. I'm half German, half American, had spent years and years in both countries. And my German friends always say, Well, why aren't you doing more? Why aren't more people at the protests? Why aren't there more strikes? And I keep trying to explain to them, well, people are afraid of losing their jobs. Not everybody has the union protections. And I hear what you're saying about, you know, the big labor unions have to go first. Um, but what about all those people's people that don't have that protection? They're gonna live in fear of losing their job. They lose their job, that's tied to losing their health insurance. These are fears that many other countries in the world can't even comprehend. And it's eye-opening to my German friends when I share that thought with them. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on what how do you see that, those two aspects playing into um both general strike and so your answer to the question, can a general strike save American democracy is no. Absolutely. That's absolutely not my answer. No. Um, how do you get over those over those fears and how do you get two people um to the extent where they're willing to throw that into the wind?

SPEAKER_00 54:03

I I think there are those roadblocks, what you're saying, absolutely correct. I'd I'd another one is if you study your 20 or so general strikes around the world, American general strikes, when they have happened, are incredibly violent. Um, and it's not, I mean, Iceland was like a a a walk in the park. You know, the all the 90% of women showed up in the town square and sang, you know, and gave speeches. Um, it was the most civil thing you can you can see. Um, and you know, their their maneuvers now in in these cities are are much more restricted than they were before this general strike. And let me just say when the No Kings March happened, the the so-called failed general strike of May 1st, um eight million people or so turned out in all these town squares all around America. And, you know, that that it was an incredible show of force. It was covered everywhere except in conservative media, which didn't say a word about it. And the only thing Trump did was issue one of those um insane AI slop memes of him and a fighter jet dropping human feces on top of the protesters. Yeah. That was his attack. That but that's all he had to say. But what that says to me is that that they're afraid of that. Yeah. The fact that they wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't report it, and that Trump is going to throw out one of these dumb memes, that's that says that this the No Kings march may in fact be a pretty decent stress test for something bigger.

SPEAKER_01 56:17

I mean, I would I would say to you, these are really important considerations. Um, and you know, one thing I'll say is that when people get fed up enough, sometimes you see a scale of protest. I mean, if you think about Occupy, you think about Black Lives Matter, you think about George Freud, which is not even separate, you think about uh how people responded to what was going on in Palestine. I mean, you know, some people came out in massive numbers. Um, but the other thing is even in South Korea, you notice she said the metal workers changed their shifts. They reduced their shifts to four hours. So there's a planning. And even in even in Minneapolis, it wasn't that everybody, the most vulnerable people were asked to go out. You coordinate it so that maybe some people are coming out in the evening, maybe other people are out. But now the major people, you know. So I think any good organizing strategy has to think about also how to protect people, right? So you're really good considerations. Yeah. I just want to say, uh, I hope that uh, you know, look, I can't bake pie for all of y'all, but I hope that I now have a room full of people who were in community. Please feel free to reach out different ways, you know, willing to share my email and let's keep this conversation going. And um, thank you so much for your attention and presence to gurn.

SPEAKER_02 57:34

Thank you for listening to this episode of Great Art, Big Ideas, presented by the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. If you like this series, make sure you subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And you can show your support by making a donation at artidea.org slash donate. The International Festival of Arts and Ideas thanks the hundreds of individuals whose support is foundational to our work, as well as our marquee sponsors. Yale University, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the City of New Haven, the State of Connecticut, and the Seedlings Foundation. We are also grateful for the leadership support of the Sassafras Foundation, Roslyn Milsteinmeyer and Jerome Meyer, and Alexander Clark. Credit goes to audio editor Nike Connors, our stage manager, Genevieve Peters, and our production manager, Kelsey Carboni. Other members of the media team include Quinn Bassett, Cliff Baird, and Dante Houghton. Thank you for listening.