I appreciate Hedges’s response, especially this part:
Nonviolence is key. . . . The state speaks the language of violence, and it does so in ways we [as citizens] never can. . . . [The U.S. government] has 60,000 in the special forces. These are death squads. We can’t compete on that level. But if you look closely at Crane Brinton’s book, The Anatomy of a Revolution, you’ll see he makes the point that most revolutions succeed not through violence . . . but through national strikes – the ability to essentially shut the country down.
. . . Nonviolence is a fundamental key component of any revolutionary movement, and having been around a lot of violence and covered [as a journalist] various revolutions, [I’ve come to see that] nonviolent revolution is more effective in most cases. I also think that nonviolent revolutions permit an easier transition to a better society.
In another recent video, Hedges talks further about the strategy of the general strike. Following (with added images and links) is part of what he says.
[Through measures like the Powell Memo*, civil society] is very weakened at a time of rising authoritarianism and corporate and oligarchic control over the two major parties. . . . So, yes, it’s a very perilous moment. But that is why I took the time to go to Italy [with] a film crew, because the Italians have shown us that the only mechanism we have left to protect our rapidly eroding civil liberties and halt the genocide in Gaza [which is a template for what’s coming with the upheaval caused by climate breakdown] is to develop a kind of militacy and mass organization [in and through strike actions].
All the tools of control on the outer reaches of [the American] empire – including wholesale surveillance and militarized police – are now being used against us. . . . [T]he different technologies that have been “battle-tested” against the Palestinians are now being used against migrants and, increasingly, against dissidents. So you had Sikh farmers, for instance, protesting in India when suddenly overhead are these Israeli drones dropping tear gas.
Effective resistance and mass mobilization requrires months and months of preparation. You can create flash mobs but the state doesn’t care about flash mobs. It cares about the kind of resistance that took place in Italy when you have dockworkers refusing to load weapons onto ships bound for Israel. This all requires a level of education. It requires a kind of continuity so that it’s not just one action but about mobilizing to essentially disrupt the machinary, in this case, of genocide, but ultimately the machinary of state and the machinary of commerce.
A good example of this is Just Stop Oil, which shut down the M25 motorway [in the U.K.] and received very harsh reactions on the part of the U.K. government. Also, the criminalization of Palestine Action which has disrupted weapons manufacturers in the U.K. that produce weapons for Israel. So when there is effective resistance, the state responds very, very harshly. And that’s how you know it’s effective. But we have to begin to build those kind of movements [as] the only power we have is the power of the strike, the ability to strike. That’s why the oligarchs and the corporations have worked to hard to break organized labor. . . . So we have to step outside the system. The Democratic Party, as I’ve said repeatedly, year after year, is not going to save us.
In a way we’re beginning from zero, which is very frightening given the rapid consolidation of control by the authoritarian state, whether that’s through the massive funding of ICE, the building of these “detention centers,” stripping green card holders or people on student visas of the right to be here, or declaring ANTIFA a “terrorist organization,” which is ridiculous. . . . These are the first steps [of authoritarianism] – the characterizing and criminalizing of any kind of politcal resistance.
It’s key to remember that for the founders of the IWW, sabotage did not mean destruction of machinery or equipment. Here’s what it does mean according to the IWW:
Sabotage did not originate from workers throwing their wooden sabots (shoes) into machines to stop them. In fact, the word has a much less romantic origin. The wooden sabots sometimes worn by the working class in the early industrial age made their walking inefficient. Early attempts at workers’ resistance to automation by their employers did on occasion involve property destruction, but such attempts took place much earlier than the formation of the IWW.
Sabotage is the collective withdrawal of efficiency by the workers at the point of production. While the IWW as an organization never officially endorsed sabotage, various IWW members (including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Walker C. Smith) advocated it individually. Various IWW publications also suggested it, if not openly advocating it as a tactic. Further, IWW artists and cartoonists frequently utilized the Black Cat (sometimes known as “Sab-cat” or “Sabo-tabby” (the latter being a play on words, no doubt) and the Wooden Shoe to symbolize direct action, including (but not always) sabotage. The reasoning behind the use of the wooden shoe, despite the often inaccurately quoted origins of its usage, is obvious.
The black cat symbol itself has a colorful history. Originally the cat wasn’t necessarily black, but (in the United States of America and England in particular) black cats tend to have sinister connotations. IWW’s, speaking in code so as to not tip off the employers and their enablers would sometimes rework the old saying “letting the cat out of the bag” to mean taking collective action. IWW members of a specific industrial union, such as the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union 110, would sometimes be referred to as “110 cats.” Elected IWW officials and union hall staff (back when the IWW had paid union hall staff, as they sometimes did in large industrial organizing campaigns) were sometimes known as “hall cats.” The late Franklin Rosemont of Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company and author of the book, Joe Hill, the IWW, and the Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture (Kerr: 2003), has even suggested that the adoption of the term “cat” by beat poets and jazz musicians may directly derive from the IWW’s use of the term!
It must be emphasized, however, that never did this mean the destruction of property or machinery, especially the machinery of production.
* Writes Jeet Heer:
[The] new documentary podcast series Master Plan (created by the journalist David Sirota and his team at The Lever) . . . thoroughly debunks the bland image of [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis F. Powell as a moderate and instead shows that he was one of the founding fathers of modern American plutocracy. Powell earns particular pride of place in the show because of his authorship of a notorious 1971 memo (prepared for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) that laid out a strategy for a corporate counterrevolution against the emerging social movements of the 1960s and early ’70s (notably the Black Power movement, environmentalism, and consumer protection). The memo was a call to arms for corporate America to use its economic power to push back against the left, with particular emphasis on the importance of gaining sway over the courts, the academy, and the media.
The Powell Memo was the Project 2025 of the Nixon era—a detailed program for establishing and entrenching right-wing power over the commanding heights of American government and society.
Related Off-site Links:
The Pathology of Power: How America Learned to Love State Violence – Tim Hjersted (Films for Action, January 9, 2026).
Can the Left Resist in the Face of Increasing Repression? – Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report, January 8, 2026).
The Playbook of Every Successful Nonviolent Struggle – Jamila Raqib (Waging Nonviolence, November 21, 2025).
Dockworker Strikes in Solidarity with Gaza Have a Long Legacy – Peter Cole (Waging Nonviolence, October 31, 2025).
What Would a General Strike in the U.S. Actually Look Like? – Jeremy Brecher (Waging Nonviolence, April 8, 2025).
The Powell Memo Helped Create Project 2025 – Jeet Heer (The Nation, September 6, 2024).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Chris Hedges on the End of the American Empire
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in 2024
• Building Solidarity on the Left
• General Strike for Peace (2007)
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