Constituent Rights and the Right to Strike

ABSTRACT This article asks what it would mean for a strike not merely to exercise, demand, or claim rights but to constitute a right through its own existence. Developing the concept of constituent rights in relation to the strike, I describe a mode of existence in which the collective power to act coincides with the right to act. The strike provides an especially useful site for these explorations: The withdrawal of labor complicates any straightforwardly affirmative approach, whereas the constituent relations formed through that withdrawal complicate a straightforwardly negative approach. I approach strikes through the methodological lens of the meanwhile, suspending their outcome as the criterion of their existence in order to attend to how the power to strike is continuously composed and decomposed through affective and transindividual relations. I argue, consequently, that constituent rights themselves may have a transindividual existence. If the right to strike can exist within those relations, however transiently, then the article shifts the question from whether radical politics should remain within or beyond the language of rights to a question of what counts as the existence of rights in the first place.