On Monday morning, I was travelling for work and I didn’t know if and when I’d be able to get home. It eventually took me around 12 hours for a 1-hour journey by train, because Italy was holding a general strike for Gaza. It involved transportation, public workers, schools and research, with a call for broader participation from other potential activists, such as influencers, and eventually escalated in a few cities, such as Turin (where I was) and Milan (where I was trying to get), with people blocking or trying to block the railway station and the few guaranteed trains.
I’m not complaining and, though I rarely condone this kind of “Sunday afternoon anarchism”, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. What I want to tackle is the question: does it make sense to strike in solidarity against war, and what result does it achieve? Shouldn’t strikes be an instrument of protest against your employer regarding working conditions?
From a legal perspective, the right to strike typically covers collective actions related to labour conditions or mutual aid, but solidarity strikes for causes like opposing war may face more complex legal restrictions depending on the country and the specific labour laws. That being said, there are historical and contemporary examples of solidarity strikes where workers stop work to protest broader social or political issues such as war, genocide, or human rights violations. These strikes aim to exert moral and political pressure beyond the workplace, often to support humanitarian causes or demand government action.
The debated effect of these strikes is always on the layfolk: people who need to go places and are negatively affected aren’t likely to develop political solidarity, social responsibility, or a collective conscience, even when the issue at hand is perceived as a grave social injustice or threat to democracy and peace.
That’s why I don’t think striking is wrong, but I do think it isn’t enough. It needs to be accompanied by a conversation on the topic, by a broader education on what’s happening and why we’re against it, on the nuances of being against genocide *and* against terrorism *and* against antisemitism. This responsibility to talk about these topics, today, falls to all of us. Let the strike be another reason we talk to each other.
Peace will prevail in the end.
Let us hope it isn’t because we killed each other in the process.
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