General strike

Origins and early debates

The idea goes back to Chartism: William Benbow's "grand national holiday" of 1839 proposed a nationwide stoppage to win the franchise. In the later nineteenth century the Bakuninist current and French syndicalism built the prospect of bringing down the state by a single general strike, which Sorel formalized as a mobilizing myth. Engels, in "The Bakuninists at Work" (1873) on the Spanish rising, attacked the notion of the unprepared general strike as a cure-all. The Second International repeated the same argument over the general strike as a means of stopping war.

General strikes in history

The October 1905 general strike in Russia spread from the railways until it halted the empire; the Petersburg Soviet was born inside it, and it forced the October Manifesto from the tsar. The Seattle general strike of 1919, the British General Strike of 1926, the French strike wave of 1936 under the Popular Front, and the September 1946 general strike in southern Korea under the US military government each marked a watershed of twentieth-century class struggle, with outcomes ranging from concessions to crushed organizations.

Distinct from the mass strike

In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), Rosa Luxemburg distinguished the one-off demonstration strike proclaimed from above for a set date from the spontaneous process in which economic and political struggles feed each other and spread. The latter is the mass strike. Seen through that distinction, a general strike can be a moment or a peak within a mass-strike process, but not a weapon that can be conjured by decree. The two concepts overlap but are not the same, and this glossary keeps them as separate entries.