Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike Alex Gourevitch The right to strike is everywhere recognized but appears unjustifiable. Strikers refuse to work but they claim a right to the job. This sounds like illiberal privilege, or at least it cannot be a coercively enforceable claim. I argue, however, that the right to strike is justified as a way of resisting intertwined forms of structural and personal domination associated with the modern labor market. Workers are structurally dominated insofar as being forced to make a contract with some employer or another leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. They are personally dominated insofar as they are required to submit to the arbitrary authority of managers in the workplace, which deepens their potential exploitation. Strikes contest this domination by reversing the relationship of power. Workers can formally quit the job but they can’t quit work, so strikers quit working but don’t quit the job. D uring the plebeian secessions in Rome, the plebs retreated from the city but they did not leave it. According to Livy’s account of the first secession, they gathered at the Sacred Mount (Mons Sacer), created a new religion of the plebs, and swore an oath not to fight the patricians’ war until their demands were met. 1 After Menenius Agrippa’s failed arbitration, which included his famous appeal to the organic integrity of the body politic, the plebs won a newfound presence in the political community: the tribunes. They stood not just as parts but as members, as the members they already claimed themselves to be. They had become citizens and had inscribed their status on the public consciousness of Rome through the office of the tribunes. Many of the most characteristic institutions of the Roman republic followed the same course. Plebeian secessions gave birth to the Twelve Tables, the formal legislative supremacy of the plebs, and the abolition of the debt-bondage. 2 Livy called the post-secession dictatorial decree that abolished debt- bondage the Lex Poetelia (326 BC), “the dawn, as it were, of a new era of liberty for the plebs.” 3 This is one of those instances in which the distance between the ancients and the moderns is not so wide as we might think. The classical past was prologue. Con- sider the basic elements of the plebeian secessions: withdrawal from the city while insisting on continued membership; collective demands and a culture, even cult, of solidarity; class conflict and social crisis; economic and political demands folding into each other like a Mobius strip; the birth of a new liberty. These are the elements of a strike narrative. Think, for instance, of the 1812 “blackface” strikers who, rioting against low wages and high wheat prices, painted their faces black, took sacred oaths of secrecy “under the canopy Alex Gourevitch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University (alexgourevitch@gmail.com). He is author of From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and writes on public affairs for magazines like Jacobin and Dissent and co-authors a contemporary politics blog The Current Moment. This article benefited from far more assistance than a single essay deserves. He would like to thank the following individuals for reading and commenting on various drafts: Libby Anker, Sam Arnold, David Borman, Sandipto Dasgupta, Cindy Estlund, David Estlund, Jason Frank, Nicholas Frayn, Pablo Gilabert, Michael Gorup, Bonnie Honig, Onur Ulas Ince, Carlo Invernizzi, Melissa Lane, Ben Laurence, Daniel Layman, Adam Lebovitz, Patchen Markell, Mara Marin, Ben McKean, Russ Muirhead, Alan Patten, David Plunkett, James Gray Pope, Aziz Rana, Will Roberts, Corey Robin, Lucas Stanczyk, Annie Stilz, Lucas Swaine, Jeppe von Platz, Laura Weinrib, Ahmed White, Nicholas Vrousalis, and Bernardo Zacka. He also would like to thank participants in the Brown Political Philosophy Workshop, Columbia University Political Theory Workshop, CUNY Graduate Student Political Theory Workshop, Cornell Political Theory Workshop, Public Law and Legal Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago School of Law, Dartmouth Political Economy Project, the Ethics and Economics Network, and the Harvard Political Philosophy Workshop. He is also grateful to five anonymous reviewers and to Jeffrey Isaac, James Moskowitz, Rafael Khachaturian and the entire Perspectives on Politics editorial team. doi:10.1017/S1537592716000049 © American Political Science Association 2016 June 2016 | Vol. 14/No. 2 307 Articles