Mass Strike

1905 and Luxemburg's formulation

The Russian revolution of 1905 showed strikes spreading and taking on a political character. Strikes that began over wages ran across whole cities and turned into political demands, and in the course of it a new organization, the soviet, was formed. Luxemburg analysed this experience in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906).

Her argument was that the mass strike is not a tactical instrument a leadership proclaims. It is not a single action but a process in which strikes in many sectors follow and overlap one another, a movement in which economic and political demands convert into each other. The conclusion followed that the role of a leadership lies in giving political direction rather than in commanding the process.

The dispute in German Social Democracy

The formulation set off the mass strike debate inside the German Social Democratic Party. The trade union leadership objected that a general strike threatened the finances and existence of their organizations and put action beyond members' control, while the party leadership sought to define the mass strike as a reserve instrument confined to particular aims such as extending the franchise.

Luxemburg and the radical left rejected that definition and argued that the mass strike was not an auxiliary means subordinate to parliamentary work but the political learning process of the working class itself. The argument recurred at the Mannheim congress of 1906 and at later ones, and remained as the problem of the tension between preserving organization and mass action.

Influence

The concept was inherited in two directions. Revolutionary syndicalism developed a strategy making the general strike the central means of overthrowing capitalism, while the communist movement treated it as the joining of mass mobilization to the creation of political crisis.

Mass strikes recurred through the twentieth century in many settings. The British general strike of 1926, the French May of 1968, the Gdansk shipyard strike in Poland in 1980, and the Great Workers' Struggle in South Korea in 1987 showed similar patterns of spread under different conditions. These cases repeatedly display the features Luxemburg identified: economic demands converting into political ones, and spread that escapes the control of existing organizations.