Autonomous Worker Assemblies and General Strike Strategy

Introduction

Autonomous worker assemblies are no longer a romantic relic of revolutionary history. They are becoming a practical necessity.

Across industries and continents, workers face a double bind. Capital and the state coordinate with ruthless speed, imposing austerity, restructuring, automation and repression. At the same time, many traditional union bureaucracies appear cautious, procedural or openly complicit. Contracts are negotiated behind closed doors. Mobilizations are staged as spectacles with pre-approved limits. The ritual of protest continues, yet its disruptive edge has dulled.

When institutions designed to defend workers begin to manage defeat, something shifts in the collective psyche. People stop asking permission. They begin to meet off the clock. They test their own capacity to decide and act together. Factory occupations, wildcat strikes, rank and file caucuses, neighborhood worker councils, digital back channels, and cross workplace assemblies emerge not as ideological experiments but as survival strategies.

Yet autonomy alone is not enough. Without coordination, autonomous initiatives fragment. Without strategy, they burn brightly and fade. Without protection, they are co-opted or crushed. The real challenge is this: how do you build independent, democratic worker assemblies that challenge bureaucratic inertia while cultivating the solidarity and synchronization required for class wide action, including the possibility of a general strike?

The answer lies in treating worker power as a form of applied chemistry. You must combine autonomy, solidarity, timing, and narrative into a reaction that multiplies itself faster than institutions can suppress it. The task is not to abandon unions nor to worship spontaneity. The task is to regenerate sovereignty from below.

Why Autonomous Worker Assemblies Matter Now

The call for autonomous worker assemblies arises from a crisis of efficacy.

The Limits of Bureaucratic Unionism

Most established unions were built for a different era. They excel at contract negotiation, grievance procedures, and electoral lobbying. These tools remain valuable. But in a period defined by global supply chains, financialized capital, and permanent austerity, defensive routines often prove insufficient.

When leadership becomes professionalized and insulated, a gap opens between the rank and file and decision making. Risk tolerance drops. Escalation is tightly managed. Mobilizations are predictable. Once a tactic becomes predictable, it becomes easy to neutralize. Management budgets for a one day strike. Police plan for a permitted march. The spectacle unfolds and the system absorbs it.

This is not an indictment of every union or leader. Many fight courageously. But the structure of bureaucratic mediation tends toward caution. If your theory of change relies exclusively on official channels, you surrender initiative.

Autonomy as Regeneration of Sovereignty

Autonomous assemblies are not anti union by definition. They are pro sovereignty. They create spaces where workers deliberate and decide without requiring authorization from above.

History offers precedents. During the Russian Revolution of 1905 and again in 1917, soviets emerged as worker councils that coordinated strikes and political demands across industries. In Spain in 1936, neighborhood and workplace assemblies took on logistical and defensive functions almost overnight. More recently, factory occupations in Argentina after the 2001 economic collapse demonstrated that workers could run enterprises when owners fled.

Each example differs ideologically and contextually. Yet they share a core insight: when workers gather as decision making bodies rather than as audiences, power shifts. The assembly becomes a site where will is forged collectively.

Autonomous assemblies matter now because they restore the capacity to act without waiting for permission. They are rehearsal spaces for larger confrontations. They are laboratories where new tactics can be tested before being scaled. Most importantly, they are schools of democracy in a time when democracy feels hollow.

But autonomy is fragile. It can splinter into isolated groups or be absorbed into existing hierarchies. To endure, it must be strategically designed.

Designing Assemblies That Resist Fragmentation and Co-optation

Autonomous worker assemblies fail when they either become talk shops or drift into personality cults. Design is not secondary. It is decisive.

Build Small, Durable Cores

Begin with compact groups rooted in specific workplaces or sectors. Ten to twenty people who know each other’s shifts, pressures, and vulnerabilities can act with precision. Large public meetings have their place, but initial trust is built in smaller circles.

Set clear norms:

• Decisions are made through transparent processes, whether consensus or supermajority.
• Roles rotate to prevent concentration of informal authority.
• Minutes are shared internally before any public communication.
• Security practices are agreed collectively.

Rotating facilitation and mandated recall of spokespersons are not bureaucratic formalities. They are counter entryism safeguards. Transparency in process inoculates against charismatic capture.

Separate Public Demands from Internal Metrics

One strategic mistake is to measure success solely by public recognition or concessions. Autonomous assemblies need a dual ledger.

The first ledger is visible: demands, petitions, public statements. This is the terrain where negotiation and messaging occur.

The second ledger is internal: number of workers who participated in a coordinated action, speed of communication across shifts, percentage of departments represented in meetings, willingness to take escalating risks. These metrics track actual power.

Union officials or management can respond to the first ledger. They cannot easily assess the second. Guarding this internal capacity preserves strategic depth.

Use Time as a Weapon

Movements often assume that staying out indefinitely demonstrates strength. Sometimes it does. But repression hardens over time. Legal injunctions, fatigue, and media narratives accumulate.

Consider instead acting in cycles. Short bursts of synchronized action followed by deliberate withdrawal can exploit institutional lag. Bureaucracies respond slowly. A one minute coordinated pause across multiple departments may be too brief for discipline yet long enough to signal capacity. A lunch hour walkout replicated across sites creates ripple effects without triggering immediate mass retaliation.

By rehearsing escalation in pulses, assemblies build muscle memory. Each action becomes data. Who hesitated? How fast did information travel? What rumors reached supervisors? Treat every initiative as an experiment whose results refine the next iteration.

Prevent Isolation Through Constellations

Fragmentation occurs when each workplace struggles alone. The antidote is a federated structure.

Establish periodic gatherings of delegates from each assembly. Delegates carry mandates, not personal opinions. They rotate and report back. This creates horizontal coordination without erecting a new bureaucracy.

Constellations allow diverse workplaces to align around shared timelines. They also enable mutual aid. If one site faces retaliation, others can respond in solidarity.

The goal is not uniformity. It is synchronization.

Building Genuine Solidarity Across Divides

Solidarity is not a slogan. It is a practiced habit of acting for others as if their fate were your own.

Move Beyond Symbolic Support

Posting statements of support on social media does not create solidarity. Coordinated inconvenience does.

The Québec casseroles of 2012 provide a lesson. What began as student protests against tuition hikes evolved into nightly pot and pan marches across neighborhoods. Households joined from balconies and sidewalks. The sound pressure was irresistible. It was not merely symbolic. It disrupted the acoustic normalcy of the city. Participation became contagious because it was easy, visible, and rhythmic.

Autonomous worker assemblies can design similarly accessible solidarity acts. Short synchronized pauses, coordinated sick days, badge wearing, or simultaneous refusal of voluntary overtime can include workers who are not ready for full strikes.

Solidarity deepens when participation is low threshold but collective.

Craft a Shared Narrative of Victory

Many movements collapse because participants cannot imagine winning. Without a believable path to victory, people reconcile themselves to defeat.

Assemblies must articulate how small actions scale toward larger leverage. If the aim is a general strike, explain the ladder clearly. Today’s one minute pause demonstrates communication capacity. Next month’s coordinated departmental walkout tests broader participation. Cross sector alignment follows. Eventually, a citywide shutdown becomes conceivable because it has been rehearsed in increments.

Story is not propaganda. It is orientation. When workers see how each step connects to a larger arc, commitment strengthens.

Fuse Multiple Lenses of Change

Most labor organizing defaults to voluntarism: gather numbers, escalate pressure, win concessions. This is necessary but incomplete.

Structural conditions matter. Monitor economic indicators, supply chain vulnerabilities, and political crises. A general strike launched during relative stability may falter. The same strike during inflation spikes or electoral turmoil can cascade.

Subjective dimensions also matter. Music, art, rituals of remembrance, and shared meals transform assemblies from tactical meetings into communities. Protecting the psyche is strategic. After intense mobilizations, deliberate decompression prevents burnout.

When assemblies combine will, structural awareness, and cultural depth, solidarity becomes resilient.

Preparing for Coordinated Class Wide Action

The general strike occupies a mythical place in labor imagination. It promises total disruption. It also risks total failure if misjudged.

Demystify the General Strike

A general strike is not a single day of outrage. It is the visible crest of long preparation. The global anti Iraq War marches of February 15, 2003 mobilized millions across 600 cities. Yet the invasion proceeded. Size alone does not compel power.

What compels power is structural leverage combined with timing. Ports shut down. Logistics halt. Care workers coordinate. Teachers, transit workers, warehouse staff, and digital platform laborers align their actions.

This level of synchronization cannot be improvised at the last minute. It requires months or years of building cross sector trust.

Rehearse Through Micro Actions

Think of escalation as a series of rehearsals.

• Department wide pauses of increasing duration.
• Cross workplace synchronized lunch break assemblies.
• Coordinated refusal of specific tasks across sectors.
• Citywide days of visible but brief disruption.

Each rehearsal tests communication channels and response time. Each reveals weak links. By the time a formal call for a broader strike is issued, the infrastructure already exists.

Anticipate Repression and Co-optation

Any serious threat to capital will provoke response. Management may offer selective concessions to divide workers. Union leadership may attempt to absorb assemblies into official structures. Legal threats may escalate.

Prepare counter measures in advance. Agree on principles for negotiation. Establish legal support networks. Communicate transparently about risks and outcomes.

Co-optation thrives in ambiguity. If assemblies clearly define their non negotiable principles and democratic procedures, absorption becomes harder.

Measure Sovereignty, Not Headlines

Media coverage can inflate or deflate morale. Resist equating visibility with victory.

Ask instead: do workers have greater control over scheduling? Over safety protocols? Over political demands? Has decision making shifted even slightly from management or bureaucratic offices toward assemblies?

Sovereignty gained is the real metric.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To begin fostering autonomous worker assemblies this week, focus on concrete, low risk actions that build capacity and signal independence.

• Convene a discreet shift council. Gather a small, trusted group off the clock. Map grievances and identify one action that can be executed without formal approval. Establish rotating facilitation from the start.

• Coordinate a brief synchronized pause. At an agreed time, participants set down tools or log out for sixty seconds. No slogans, no confrontation. Resume work smoothly. Debrief privately afterward to assess participation and response.

• Create a dual ledger. Publicly articulate a modest demand while privately tracking participation rates, communication speed, and cross department involvement. Treat these internal metrics as your true power index.

• Establish a delegate network. Invite one trusted representative from each participating area to a periodic coordination meeting. Mandate recall and rotate roles to prevent hierarchy from hardening.

• Narrate the escalation ladder. Share a clear outline of how small actions scale toward larger leverage, including the possibility of coordinated strikes. Help participants see the horizon beyond the immediate act.

These steps are intentionally simple. Their purpose is not spectacle but rehearsal. When workers experience even a brief, successful act of collective autonomy, their sense of possibility expands.

Conclusion

Autonomous worker assemblies are not a rejection of solidarity. They are its renewal. In an era when capital moves at digital speed and bureaucratic mediation often lags, workers must rediscover their capacity to deliberate and act together without waiting for instruction.

The path toward coordinated class wide action, even a general strike, does not begin with a dramatic call from a podium. It begins with small, disciplined experiments in self rule. It grows through federated constellations that synchronize without centralizing. It matures when solidarity becomes habitual and sovereignty measurable.

Do not mistake autonomy for isolation. The objective is not to splinter movements but to infuse them with renewed vitality from below. Bureaucracies can be pressured, reformed, or bypassed. What matters is that workers regain the lived experience of collective power.

Power is a muscle. It strengthens through use. This week, what deliberate act will you undertake that proves to yourselves, before anyone else, that you can move together without permission?