It remains to be seen whether educators in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma and beyond can channel the energy of the 2018 strikes into sustained organizational and political power over the coming years.
But there are good reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for continued education militancy and labor revitalization in the United States. Just as defeats in struggle lead to demoralization and resignation, victories tend to beget more victories. The spring 2018 movements radically shifted the national narrative about who is responsible for the education crisis. A sustained surge of successful school strikes in the coming period could turn back the neoliberal tide in public education, boost the trade union movement, and potentially spark workers’ militancy across the public and private sectors. The powers that be understand this—which is why they are likely to do everything possible to prevent such a possibility from becoming a reality.
Across the country, co-optation and repression should be expected on scales as yet unseen. Within West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, the forces of reaction have already clearly demonstrated their increased political resolve. Dead set on defending their wealth and demoralizing working people, they’re fighting harder than ever to defeat educator battles around the strikes’ outstanding demands. The corporate-bought removal of the Invest in Ed initiative from the ballot by the Arizona Supreme Court in August 2018 was only one—egregiously anti-democratic—expression of this well-financed commitment to win “round two.”
Given the power of the ruling rich and the contingencies of mass struggle, trying to guess if and where strikes will continue to spread is no simple task. And in crucial ways, to do so would misidentify the strategic question at stake. The basic problem with such predictions is that what happens in the coming period depends in large part upon what we choose to do. In a post-Oklahoma discussion about the prospects for the strike wave’s continuation, Jane McAlevey made an important point:
I don’t like the term “wave.” Everybody uses it, but to me as an organizer I see that workers build worker agency through struggle. A wave sounds like a mysterious phenomenon that we don’t have any control over. It implies that the wave can suddenly go back out to sea, regardless of what we do. I don’t believe that. I believe that it’s up to us to figure out how to continue building powerful movements right now.1
That’s why learning about the 2018 red state rebellions is so politically important: to fight effectively for a better future requires an accurate understanding of the past. Illegal mass strikes did more to revive the trade union movement, and to force concessions from employers, than decades of electing and lobbying liberal Democrats. Though these politicians and their allied labor leaders may tack to the left under pressure from below, neither are interested in articulating—or consistently implementing—the main strategic lessons of the recent upsurge.
Fortunately, many strike participants have drawn their own conclusions. West Virginia teacher Carrena Rouse put it well: “I’d like to give God credit for moving the politicians’ hearts, but unless they raise the tax on natural gas to fix PEIA, I think we might have to go back on strike.”
The red state revolt was a historic step forward for working people. But ultimately it was just one early battle in what will certainly be a much-longer war to save our schools and transform the United States into a country where government policy is determined by human needs, not corporate profits.
It’s impossible to know how this conflict will play out. Influential business interests and their political proxies remain committed to dismantling our unions and privatizing public services. As the social safety net and living standards decline, Trumpism and racist scapegoating can appear to many as the only alternative to the status quo.
But if working people cohere themselves politically and reverse this reactionary drive, there’s little reason to assume that they’ll stop there. Depending on the course of struggle in the coming years, all sorts of transformative demands and projects that today seem far-fetched could become realizable.
Successful strikes have an extraordinary power to raise working-class expectations. From winning comprehensive labor law reform, to building an independent workers’ party, to decommodifying health care, transportation, and energy production—nothing is off the table. The Koch brothers are right to be worried.