General strike
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A '''general strike''' is a strike action by an entire labour (economics)|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 Anarchism in Spain|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 left-wing|leftist and socialism|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 anarcho-syndicalism|anarcho-syndicalist 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 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike|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.
Notable General Strikes
1820 Rising in Scotland
Russian Revolution of 1905
1912 Brisbane General Strike
Winnipeg General Strike of 1919
Seattle General Strike of 1919
UK General Strike 1926|British General Strike of 1926
San Francisco general strike of 1934
Toledo General Strike of 1934
Great Uprising|Great Arab Revolt of 1936
May 1968|French general strike of May 1968
Uruguay general strike of 1973
Sunningdale Agreement#The Ulster Workers' Council Strike|Northern Ireland general strike of May 1974
Spanish general strike of 1988
Italian general strike of 2002
Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004
See also
direct action
list of strikes
External links
http://www.sonic.net/~figgins/generalstrike/http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/index.htmby Rosa Luxemburg (1906)
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