A strike builds the organisation that makes every later demand credible

The argument

A second argument for the strike concerns what it leaves behind. Advocates point out that most protest disperses: a march ends and the people who attended return to having no particular relationship with one another. A strike, on their account, cannot work that way, because withholding work together requires people to know who is participating, to agree in advance what would count as a settlement, and to trust that nobody will break first. Proponents argue that the organisation this demands is not overhead but the main product. The reasoning is that leverage has to be credible to function. A demand backed by the possibility of a stoppage is taken seriously only if the other side believes the stoppage could actually be organised, and that belief rests on whether it has been organised before. Supporters hold that this is why a single strike changes the terms of every later negotiation, including negotiations in which no strike occurs, and why the tactic compounds in a way that one-off demonstrations do not. Advocates also describe an internal effect. Acting together at real personal cost is said to alter how participants understand their own position, converting a set of private complaints into a shared account of what is wrong and what would fix it. Proponents argue that this is what makes a movement able to hold a line under pressure, since people abandon demands they hold alone far more readily than demands they hold with others. On this view the strike is best judged over several rounds rather than one. Its advocates accept that a single stoppage may win little, and argue that the method is still the strongest available because it is the only one that accumulates capacity rather than spending it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that failed strikes can destroy the organisation they were meant to build, leaving participants worse placed and more wary than before. They also note that the coordination described is easiest where people already share a workplace and a schedule, which excludes much of the workforce and most protest causes. A further reply is that capacity built around bargaining tends to narrow the aims of a movement to what can be bargained over.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Coordination can be imposed from above rather than built, in which case participants end with no shared capacity of their own. [Rejecting P2] Belief in a threat can be manufactured or inherited from elsewhere, so it need not rest on having organised a stoppage. [Rejecting P3] A defeated stoppage makes the threat less credible in later disputes rather than more. [Rejecting C] Capacity built for bargaining can crowd out broader aims, so what accumulates is not necessarily what the movement wanted.