General strike
A general strike is a strike action in which a substantial proportion of the total labour force in a city, region, or country participates. General strikes are characterised by the participation of workers from a multitude of workplaces across different industries, and tend to involve entire communities. They are often used to strengthen the bargaining position of a trade union or achieve a common social or political goal. General strikes first occurred in the mid-19th century and have characterised many historically important strikes.
History
Precursors
An early predecessor of the general strike were the Jewish traditions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, the latter of which involves widespread debt relief and land redistribution. The secessio plebis, during the times of the Roman Republic, has also been noted as a precursor to the general strike.Early conceptions of the general strike were proposed during the Renaissance by Étienne de La Boétie, and during the Age of Enlightenment by Jean Meslier and Honoré Gabriel Riqueti. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, the idea was taken up by radicals such as Jean-Paul Marat, Sylvain Maréchal and Constantin François de Chassebœuf, who proposed a strike that included merchants and industrialists alongside industrial workers and farmworkers. In his essay Les Ruines, Chassebœuf proposed a general strike by "every profession useful to society" against the "civil, military, or religious agents of government", contrasting "the People" against the "men who do nothing". Chassebœuf's work held a great influence in Great Britain, where it was distributed throughout the country by the London Corresponding Society, while his chapter on the general strike was reprinted for decades after its initial publication. The idea was later taken up by the British economist Thomas Attwood and the French communist Louis Auguste Blanqui.
During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, an ill-defined conception of a general strike was expressed by workers in Nottingham and Manchester, but it lacked a systematic formulation. There were periodic strikes throughout the early 19th century that could loosely be considered as 'general strikes'. In the United States, the 1835 Philadelphia General Strike lasted for three weeks, after which the striking workers won their goal of a ten-hour workday and an increase in wages.
Conception
The idea of the general strike was first formulated by William Benbow, a Quaker and shoemaker who became involved in the British radical movement of the early 19th century. After he was arrested for his political activities, Benbow turned away from reformism and began to publish a number of anti-authoritarian and anti-clerical polemics. At meetings of the National Union of the Working Classes, Benbow expressed impatience with the progress of the Reform Bill and called for armed resistance against the government.In January 1832, Benbow published a pamphlet titled Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, in which he outlined his proposals for a general strike. Benbow called for workers themselves to declare a month-long "holiday", which would be financially supported first by workers' savings and then by exacting "contributions" from the wealthy. He also proposed the formation of workers' councils to keep the peace, distribute food and elect delegates to a congress, which would itself carry out wide-reaching societal reforms. Months after the pamphlet's publication, Benbow was arrested for leading a 100,000-strong demonstration, which he had intended as a "dress rehearsal" for his proposed "national holiday".
The passage of the Reform Act brought with it the collapse of the radical movement, including Benbow's National Union. But six years later, in an atmosphere of rising disillusionment with the progress of political reform, the nascent Chartist movement adopted Benbow's platform for a "national holiday". The Chartists planned to carry out their month-long national holiday in August 1839, but following Benbow's arrest, the campaign was abandoned. Benbow was tried and found guilty of sedition. Although he attempted to continue his Chartist activities from prison, after being excommunicated from the movement by Feargus O'Connor, Benbow ceased his political activities.
Early expressions
In April 1842, after the second Chartist Petition was rejected by the British Parliament, demands for fairer wages and conditions across many different industries finally exploded into the first general strike in the capitalist country. The strike began in the coal mines of Staffordshire and soon spread throughout Britain, affecting factories, mills and mines from Scotland to South Wales. Although the general strike started as an apolitical demand for better working conditions, by August 1842, it became directly associated with the Chartists and took on a revolutionary character. But government forces intervened, cracking down on the protests and arresting its leaders, eventually forcing a return to work.Strike actions by workers in Barcelona played a prominent role in the Spanish Revolution of 1854, which gave way to a progressive period that extended a number of civil liberties to Spanish workers. But labour unrest grew as the new authorities again prohibited freedom of association and work stoppages, leading to the outbreak of the 1855 Catalan general strike, the first in Spanish history. After months of strike action and attempted negotitations, the general strike was suppressed and the draft constitution suspended in a coup by Leopoldo O'Donnell.
During the American Civil War, millions of black slaves escaped southern plantations and fled to Union territory, depriving the Confederacy of its main source of labour in what W. E. B. Du Bois described as a "general strike" in his book Black Reconstruction in America. However, this conception was argued against by African-American economist Abram Lincoln Harris, who dismissed Du Bois' claims of a general strike as fantastical. A. A. Taylor also rejected Du Bois' interpretation, noting that the flight from the plantations did not constitute an organised movement to achieve economic or political concessions. And American historian Arthur Charles Cole criticised what he described as "discrepancies between well established facts and extravagant generalization" in Du Bois' claims of a general strike.
Debate in the First International
In 1864, the International Workingmen's Association was established as a federation of trade unions by delegates from England and France. The French trade union delegates, such as Eugene Varlin, saw the nascent International as a means to coordinate support for strike actions by its members. In the first volume of Das Kapital, published in 1867, Karl Marx conceived of the general strike as a means by which to build class consciousness.At the International's Brussels Congress of 1868, the Belgian delegate César De Paepe proposed that a general strike could be used to prevent the outbreak of war, which he considered to be a means for the ruling class to subordinate working people. He further declared that trade unions themselves constituted the mechanism for replacing capitalism with socialism, the establishment of which would put a final end to all wars. In a letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx himself rejected what he described as "the Belgian nonsense that it was necessary to strike against war". When Mikhail Bakunin joined the International the following year, he declared his own support for these proposals. Bakunin rejected political participation, instead advocating for workers to take strike actions to improve their working conditions. He argued that the International could be the organisation through which trade unions could build such strike actions into a revolutionary general strike, which would abolish capitalism and institute socialism.
The proposals for a revolutionary general strike to overthrow the state were rejected by the Marxist faction, who instead proposed the creation of political parties to take state power. Through the General Council, which had centralised control over the International, Marx moved to expel Bakunin's anti-authoritarian faction at the Hague Congress of 1872. In response, the expelled sections established the Anti-Authoritarian International, which was designed to operate according to a federal structure. The anti-authoritarians upheld the syndicalist view of using the International as a coordinating body to support strike actions and build them towards a revolutionary general strike, which would overthrow the state and establish workers' control over the means of production. This view was particularly supported by the Spanish Regional Federation, which itself organised a general strike in Alcoy, although it was quickly put down by Spanish government forces.
At the Geneva Congress of 1873, Belgian delegates proposed the adoption of the general strike as a tactic for social revolution. This motion was supported by the Jura Federation, which additionally stressed the need for smaller strikes as a means to achieve wage increases. The discussions over strike action at the Geneva Congress lay the foundations for what was to become known as anarcho-syndicalism. But before long, the anti-authoritarians began to move away from the anarcho-syndicalist model. Members of the Belgian section began to advocate for a dictatorship of the proletariat and electoralism, while the French and Italian sections moved towards anarcho-communism and proposed the theory of propaganda of the deed. By 1880, the debates within the International had led to its collapse.
Rise of revolutionary syndicalism
In 1881, a revolutionary socialist faction of the Socialist Labor Party of America split off and established the International Working People's Association, which developed anarchist tendencies and held itself to be a continuation of the defunct IWA. Inspired by the example of the Paris Commune, IWPA members such as the Chicago anarchist Albert Parsons formulated a kind of revolutionary syndicalism that eschewed the general strike in favour of popular insurrection. In response to the repression of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the IWPA armed and drilled its members into workers' militias, seeing violent action as a necessary complement to strike action. On 1 May 1886, the IWPA organised a nationwide general strike for the eight-hour day, which had been a focus of demands for Parsons and the Chicago anarchists. Throughout the United States, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike. The general strike's epicenter was in Chicago, where protests against the police repression of striking workers escalated into a riot. Eight of the protest's organisers, including Parsons, were executed by hanging on charges of conspiracy. In the wake of their execution, the IWPA demand for the eight-hour day spread around the world and 1 May was declared International Workers' Day.Inspired by the IWPA's general strike, European anarchists began to reconsider the general strike as a revolutionary instrument, with the French anarchist Joseph Tortelier taking up the idea of the revolutionary general strike, which then spread to Italian and Spanish anarchists. Albert Parsons' wife Lucy Parsons also adopted the revolutionary general strike in her own platform, which became a founding precept of the Industrial Workers of the World. The first trade union to adopt the revolutionary general strike into its platform was the French General Confederation of Labour. The CGT launched its own campaign for workers themselves to institute the eight-hour day, culminating in a general strike which secured French workers a reduction in working time and workload, an increase in wages and the introduction of the weekend.
The CGT's example accelerated the spread of revolutionary syndicalism throughout the world, bringing with it a wave of general strikes at the turn of the 20th century, to mixed results. Although the Belgian general strike of 1893 was halted in order to prevent damage to the workers' movement, it eventually won its demand of universal manhood suffrage. Following the Cuban War of Independence, in 1902, anarcho-syndicalists organised the country's first general strike against the government of the new Republic of Cuba. In the Netherlands, the railroad strikes of 1903 resulted in harsh repression against the Dutch workers' movement. The Swedish general strike of 1909 was broken up without achieving its demands, accelerating the split of syndicalists from the social-democratic unions and the formation of the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden.
File:Tampereen suurlakko 1905.jpg|The 1905 general strike in Tampere, Grand Duchy of Finland|thumb|right
Some of the general strikes of this period reached revolutionary levels: the Russian Revolution of 1905 demonstrated the efficacy of the general strike as a revolutionary instrument, but was ultimately suppressed; in 1909, the Catalan syndicalist union Solidaridad Obrera called a general strike against conscription for the Spanish invasion of Morocco, briefly bringing Barcelona under workers' control before the revolt's suppression by government forces; and following the Revolution of 1910 in Portugal, a syndicalist-led general strike briefly brought Lisbon under workers' control before being repressed, resulting in the formation of the by Portuguese socialists and anarchists.
In Italy, there was a particularly large wave of general strikes during this period: the general strike of 1904 resulted in no political reforms but strengthened the social movement; in 1908, syndicalists led a two-month general strike in Parma, but were likewise defeated; and in 1911, anarcho-syndicalists mobilised a general strike against the Italian invasion of Libya, blocking troop trains and even assassinating an army officer. This series of syndicalist-led general strikes brought about the establishment of the Italian Syndicalist Union, which itself led a further series of general strikes that culminated in the Red Week of 1914.