[ASA_PEWS] ben manski on the short term and the long run

[christopher.chase-dunn at ucr.edu]

*please forward*

*Facing a Society on Strike.  GTN April 6, 2026*

*Great Transition Network* *<gtnetwork at gtcampaign.org
<gtnetwork at gtcampaign.org>>*

Ben Manski manski at nextsystem.org

“It is difficult to envision concretely what social strikes would mean in
the context of the struggle against Trumpian autocracy,” writes Jeremy
Brecher in his essay, “Society on Strike: A Last Defense Against Tyranny?”

Is it?

It is a truism that mass uprisings and their trajectories are
unpredictable, their outcomes unknowable. But like many supposed truisms,
on examination, this one often proves false. The forms and timing of
uprisings are much more predictable than we sometimes tell ourselves. As I
attempt to show in Methodological Approaches to Movement Waves and the
Making of History
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3MzcxJmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cHMlMjUzQSUyNTJGJTI1MkZ3d3cuYWNhZGVtaWEuZWR1JTI1MkYzNjQ4OTEyNCUyNTJGTWV0aG9kb2xvZ2ljYWxfQXBwcm9hY2hlc190b19Nb3ZlbWVudF9XYXZlc19hbmRfdGhlX01ha2luZ19vZl9IaXN0b3J5Jmhhc2g9ZTg1ZTc1NzMzNzhhODE2ODMyYzIyOTlhYTg1OTg2MTRmMzlhZDQ5MTQzZGUxNzdlNDZmODliMTExYmFiOTY4MQ==>,
with my coauthors Dhruv Deepak, Hillary Lazar, and Suren Moodliar in Coding
the Future: Digital Technologists and the Constitution of the Next System
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3MzcyJmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cHMlMjUzQSUyNTJGJTI1MkZ3d3cuYWNhZGVtaWEuZWR1JTI1MkYxNDMwMjgxOTclMjUyRkNvZGluZ190aGVfZnV0dXJlX2RpZ2l0YWxfdGVjaG5vbG9naXN0c19hbmRfdGhlX2NvbnN0aXR1dGlvbl9vZl90aGVfbmV4dF9zeXN0ZW0maGFzaD1lMTYwZDdkMTVlYTM3MDU1OTNmNTAyZjY5YmU0ZDllNTc3MTljOGM1YWFkNGY0NjIzMTA5YTI5YmYwZWUzMDQ0>
and
in The Millennial Turns and the New Period
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3MzczJmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cHMlMjUzQSUyNTJGJTI1MkZ3d3cuYWNhZGVtaWEuZWR1JTI1MkY0NTA1MjYxOCUyNTJGVGhlX01pbGxlbm5pYWxfVHVybnNfYW5kX3RoZV9OZXdfUGVyaW9kX0FuX0ludHJvZHVjdGlvbiZoYXNoPWI4ZGEwZDNkMGJiNDdjODY0YmVmYWJmODhhNzNhYjM0YWJlNTNkM2JjY2VjMmZjYTIwZDFhMWI2ODBhZGMzYzk=>,
it turns out that there is a great deal that activists know about the
movements they build and the history they make. That activist knowledge has
predictive power.

The social movement of these past six decades has been to the mountaintop.
It has seen something of the promised land. And it has strategies, tactics,
and resources for getting there. The U.S. protest waves of 1999-2001,
2011-2013, and 2020 were not only predictable, they were made by the people
who predicted them. If we pay close enough attention to the origins and
trajectories of the action on the ground, so too may we predict the form
and timing of what comes next.

Let’s begin with U.S. cities. This past October 2nd, Common Dreams
published my short, dense, article, This is Not a Drill: Bravery as
Strategy in the Face of American Tragedy
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3Mzc0JmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cHMlMjUzQSUyNTJGJTI1MkZ3d3cuY29tbW9uZHJlYW1zLm9yZyUyNTJGb3BpbmlvbiUyNTJGdGhpcy1pcy1ub3QtYS1kcmlsbC1icmF2ZXJ5LWFzLXN0cmF0ZWd5LWluLXRoZS1mYWNlLW9mLWFtZXJpY2FuLXRyYWdlZHkmaGFzaD1hMTg3ZjhhNjM4OWU0NGU4OTE3Y2YzYTJiYjIzOGI4ZDI1NTAyYjM0ZGQwNGFlMTdhNzIxNTcwZWJiYzgyZjFm>,
in which I wrote that:

*“Today we face the unthinkable. But the resilience and resistance of
American cities show that another world is possible. At the moment, our
cities are where the current crisis is being determined and where the
possibility of a better world is being built . . . . [They] are the places
both most targeted by Trump and they are where he has met his most
determined resistance.*

I wrote that in the wake of federal invasions of DC and Los Angeles, and at
the launch of ICE’s so-called “Operation Midway Blitz.” In the weeks and
months that followed, ICE attempted to occupy Chicago and Minnesota’s Twin
Cities.

The response from these and other U.S. cities tells us plenty about “what a
social strike would mean” in the current context. Hundreds of thousands of
people in Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Paul organized themselves into
nonviolent neighborhood, workplace, union, faith, and civil resistance
groups. They trained. They organized. And they acted with great discipline
and bravery in confronting Trump’s gestapo-in-training.

*First prediction: Organized cities will lead the coming social strike.*

In the same Bravery as Strategy
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3Mzc0JmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cHMlMjUzQSUyNTJGJTI1MkZ3d3cuY29tbW9uZHJlYW1zLm9yZyUyNTJGb3BpbmlvbiUyNTJGdGhpcy1pcy1ub3QtYS1kcmlsbC1icmF2ZXJ5LWFzLXN0cmF0ZWd5LWluLXRoZS1mYWNlLW9mLWFtZXJpY2FuLXRyYWdlZHkmaGFzaD1hMTg3ZjhhNjM4OWU0NGU4OTE3Y2YzYTJiYjIzOGI4ZDI1NTAyYjM0ZGQwNGFlMTdhNzIxNTcwZWJiYzgyZjFm>
article,
I argued that the scale and regularity of mass protests needed to increase.

Since then, we have seen increasing coordination of the three major
coalitions of the center (No Kings), center-left (Rising Majority), and
left (May Day Strong), and the largest single days of protest in U.S.
history.

Yes, we all still live with the unreality of trying to get through our days
pretending that, as the rising musical artist Carsie Blanton writes,
“Everything
is Great!”
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3Mzc1JmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cHMlMjUzQSUyNTJGJTI1MkZ3d3cueW91dHViZS5jb20lMjUyRndhdGNoJTI1M0Z2JTI1M0RKaFprUFJ0YzRHbyZoYXNoPWY5Yzc3ZjQxMmFmZTY1NTRiZmZiNmU3NTg1MWQ5ZTI5ZTNmM2VlYzNmOTJkYTY0MDljMmE4MzAwOTc4ZWY3OTk=>

Yet it is significant that we also find ourselves in a period of momentum —
from the March 28th No Kings protests, heading toward the May 1st No
Billionaires protests — with further major rounds of protest already
planned for the Summer and Fall.

 *Prediction 2: This broad-spectrum coalition of coalitions will hold and
produce ongoing protests by Americans in the tens of millions.*

This self-described anti-antifascist regime wields the most terrifying
technologies of surveillance and violence ever available. It has used these
to murder Americans off the coasts of Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela, and
it has murdered Americans in the streets of California, Illinois, Maryland,
Texas, and Virginia, and it has purged officers and public servants who
balked at unlawful orders. It has murdered Americans in its concentration
campus at the borders and across the Americas, and it is building more
camps. It has built ICE into a $75 billion ideological police force and
prepared the way for the use of ICE, Secret Service, ATF, and other federal
forces, including our regular armed forces, at transportation hubs,
schools, places of worship, and places of government, and yes, places of
voting. And it has taken the final step in the long march of the executive
into the exclusive war powers domains of Congress and the People; it makes
unsanctioned and unchecked war on Gaza, war on Iran, war on Venezuela, and
more war on Iran.

*Prediction 3: The regime will deploy significant violence in an attempt to
disrupt the midterm election tidal wave that is coming.*

These three predictions do not speak to everything we need to know. Of
course they don’t. But the questions that Brecher raised must be confronted
seriously.

It’s reasonable for those outside of the United States to experience the
U.S. as a totality. That is how most people experience other countries,
particularly countries whose governments brutalize so much of the rest of
the world. But the U.S. is an enormous, plural, and highly contentious
society. It is not a totality.

As Walden Bello points out (in contradiction to a number of other
responses), Trump is opposed by a supermajority. This means that an
informed international solidarity with the struggle within the United
States is both possible and necessary. (And on this note - tongue in cheek
statements about Mark Twain and reviving the American Anti-Imperialist
League — as if thousands of American anti-imperialists had not been
imprisoned, wounded, and killed in struggles against imperialism, fascism,
and white supremacy since the days of Twain and Carl Schurz — are very
disappointing to read).

This bring me to what William Robinson wrote about the repressive apparatus
directed against society:

*“Within the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is
emerging as a fascist paramilitary force: a modern iteration of the
brownshirts that serve as a bridge between the development of the fascist
state and a fascist reorganization of civil society.”*

This is a truth we all must face. Are we facing it? Truly?

Gwendolyn Hallsmith, writes that, “we’re naïve to imagine that effective
resistance won’t be met with increasing violence, increasing incarceration,
and increasing tyranny,” pointing to the (generally unacknowledged) history
of mass strikes and general strikes in the United States, and to the
horrific violence used against labor and popular movements by paramilitary,
police, and military forces.

Given that history, is it so hard to predict what forms the social strike
might take? We may be a long way down history’s trail from the formation of
the world’s first socialist parties in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York,
and Boston, and from the century of struggle and repression that followed
them, but we have more recent history to point to.

As Guy Standing argues, education is an “existential flashpoint.” It is
also a workplace. Alongside the May Day strikes of immigrant workers, the
municipal and statewide teachers and anti-austerity strikes of Wisconsin
(2011), Chicago (2012, 2016, 2019), West Virginia (2018), Oklahoma (2018),
Los Angeles (2019), Seattle (2022), Minneapolis (2022), and Portland
(2023), tell us something about what a coming social strike might look
like. Yes, there is a certain pattern to those cities (and cities like
Boston and Philadelphia where citywide strikes were averted after
management conceded): Educators and service workers have been leading the
municipal resistance against ICE.

Where does this leave us?

1.    Organized cities will lead the coming social strike. Public sector
unions, service workers unions and organizations, and community and
neighborhood organizations will be particularly important to this
leadership.

2.    A broad-spectrum coalition of coalitions will produce ongoing
protests by Americans in the tens of millions and in every corner of the
country.

3.    The regime will deploy significant violence in an attempt to disrupt
the midterm election tidal wave that is coming. Many are in denial about
the severity of this coming violence, and most of us (likely nearly all of
us) are as of yet unprepared for it.

Yes, it is possible that the regime could disintegrate before or as things
get worse. Some Republican officials are behaving as if the midterm
elections will happen and will produce a Democratic wave, and they are
responding by seeking an early exit. Some members of the radical center (as
small as it is, it does exist and in this case it may matter) clearly
understand that this regime is an openly fascist regime, and that as such
it poses not only an existential threat to democracy, but also to
liberalism. But in reviewing the accumulated responses on this question of
the social strike, one thing seems consistent: None of us are so foolish as
to count on the possibility of regime implosion.

Instead, we must ready ourselves for a period of struggle that is likely to
intensify through Election Day in November and for many more months
following. Even if voting takes place and vote counting is allowed to be
completed by the duly constituted election authorities, it is by no means
assured that the newly elected Congress will be able to take office, as I
wrote in Bravery as Strategy
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3Mzc0JmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cHMlMjUzQSUyNTJGJTI1MkZ3d3cuY29tbW9uZHJlYW1zLm9yZyUyNTJGb3BpbmlvbiUyNTJGdGhpcy1pcy1ub3QtYS1kcmlsbC1icmF2ZXJ5LWFzLXN0cmF0ZWd5LWluLXRoZS1mYWNlLW9mLWFtZXJpY2FuLXRyYWdlZHkmaGFzaD1hMTg3ZjhhNjM4OWU0NGU4OTE3Y2YzYTJiYjIzOGI4ZDI1NTAyYjM0ZGQwNGFlMTdhNzIxNTcwZWJiYzgyZjFm>
.

Allow me, therefore, to draw a line under *Prediction 4: Come 2027, we may
very well be faced with competing claimants to federal power, and an
intensifying struggle that operates far beyond the established norms of
U.S. politics.*

This brings me to something else that William Robinson points out:

*Lastly, let us recall that at times of crisis history seems to accelerate,
contradictions ripen, and what seemed most unlikely, even impossible, may
appear on the horizon of the possible. The situation in the United States
and globally is very fluid and could go in many different directions.*

And to something that Biljana Vankovska and others insist:

*Too often, your theories and methods serve to preserve the social and
class status quo, rather than imagining new possibilities that genuinely
serve global society.*

I agree. It would be profoundly unethical of any of us to fail to prepare
for all the possibilities of this moment, both terrifying and liberating.

I believe that the liberating possibilities are already here and already
bound up in the resistance — in the society that is increasingly, already
on strike, already building a better next system.

My day-to-day work as a professor involves research, teaching, and
collaboration with local neighbors, international citizens, students, and
colleagues, about and for an emerging next world system organized through
community power, popular constitutionalism, solidarity economies,
transformative justice, digital commoning, and other approaches to creating
a world that is democratic, sustainable, and just.

Recognizing the relationship between the immediate existential crisis faced
by people within the United States under a fascist regime, and the
near-term existential world crisis generated by climate system collapse,
digitalization, and necropolitics (rendering the vast majority as
disposable), the necessity of world system change, and desirability of
winning a better next system — this is what occupies me. One major part of
this particular work is the Next System Teach-Ins, which I encourage you to
investigate and perhaps co-organize: NextSystem.org
<https://gtcampaign.org/wp-json/wp-mail-smtp/v1/e/ZGF0YSU1QmVtYWlsX2xvZ19pZCU1RD00MDM0NCZkYXRhJTVCZXZlbnRfdHlwZSU1RD1jbGljay1saW5rJmRhdGElNUJvYmplY3RfaWQlNUQ9MjI3Mzc2JmRhdGElNUJ1cmwlNUQ9aHR0cCUyNTNBJTI1MkYlMjUyRm5leHRzeXN0ZW0ub3JnJmhhc2g9NzJkMjAzZTg4YjA0Y2QxYzc1YTVkMTY2Mjk3N2M2Y2I2YTI0ZGIxZjkyOGQ3YmYzM2M5MDljMWM2MDI2Zjc2OQ==>

I firmly believe that each of us has a duty to confront the actuality that
much of the United States is already heading into the depths of what
Brecher has called a social strike. We do in fact know a great deal both
about the conditions of struggle and the conditions of possibility present
in this strike. We cannot yet predict the outcome. We must not look away.

- Ben Manski (PhD, JD) is Assistant Professor of Public Sociology and
Director of Next System Studies at George Mason University in Virginia.