For all her obsessive work teaching the fundamentals of organizing, Jane McAlevey grumbled that they alone were not enough — the Left and labor had to “learn real strategy.” In the years I worked under her assisting with strategic research, training design, and writing preparation, she’d say it over and over.

She was grateful that so many have put the organizing lessons she popularized into practice, teaching each other the spadework of developing the strike muscle that is the ultimate basis of workers’ power. She wouldn’t have spent so much time figuring out how to get people to internalize the principle that workers needed to discover and systematize their ability to act together to create a crisis for the employer class by durably and collectively withholding labor if she didn’t think so.

But Jane thought the labor movement also had to do much more: learn how to wield that power against the right targets, avoid overshooting or undershooting because of misreading the moment, as we transformed the power needed for individual contract campaigns to the power needed to win class-wide goals. This relentless demand to improve organizers’ ability to strategize was at the center of how Jane worked: given the stakes of the fight facing the working class, people who had committed our lives to the work of struggle had to hold ourselves to the highest standards, and then do one better.