General strike
A
general strike is a
strike action by an entire
labour force in a city, region or country. In the late
19th century, the growing international labour movements advocated general strikes for industrial or political purposes.
General strikes were frequent in
Spain during the early twentieth century, where revolutionary
anarcho-syndicalism was most popular. The biggest general strike in recent European history – and the largest general
wildcat strike ever – was
May 1968 in France.
Many
leftist and
socialist movements have hoped to mount a "peaceful
revolution" in a country by organizing enough strikers to completely paralyze it. With the state and corporate apparatus thus crippled, the workers would be able to re-organize society along radically different lines. This philosophy was favored by the radical labor organization
Industrial Workers of the World, especially in the early twentieth century, when many members hoped to organize "One Big Union" of all workers who would launch the general strike that would end
capitalism forever.
The term "general strike" is sometimes also applied to large-scale strikes of all of the workers in a particular industry, such as the
Textile workers strike (1934). Those "general" strikes, however massive they might be, only involve workers who are pursuing their own immediate demands. The classic general strike, by contrast, also involves workers who have no direct stake in the outcome of the strike; as an example, in the
San Francisco General Strike of 1934, both organized and non-union workers struck for four days in protest of the police and employers' tactics that had killed two picketers and in support of the longshoremen's and seamen's demands.
The distinction is not always that clearcut. In the
Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, as an example, many building trades unions and organizations of unemployed workers in federal work projects struck in sympathy with striking truckdrivers and in protest against the police violence directed against picketers; thousands of others participated in demonstrations in support of the strikers. Those sympathy strikes, while sizeable, never acquired the duration or scope necessary to amount to a "general strike", however, and the organizers of the Teamsters' strike did not describe it as such.
*
1820 Rising in Scotland
*
Russian Revolution of 1905*
1912 Brisbane General Strike*
Winnipeg General Strike of 1919*
Seattle General Strike of 1919 *
British General Strike of 1926*
San Francisco general strike of 1934*
Toledo General Strike of 1934*
Great Arab Revolt of 1936*
French general strike of May 1968 *
Uruguay general strike of 1973*
Northern Ireland general strike of May 1974*
Spanish general strike of 1988 *
Italian general strike of 2002 *
Venezuelan general strike of 2002-2003*
Ukraine's
Orange Revolution of
2004*
direct action *
list of strikes*
Industrial Workers of the World*
Georges Sorel's "myth of the general strike"
*
chronology of general strikes*
The Mass Strike by
Rosa Luxemburg (1906)
