General strike
They are organised by large coalitions of political, social, and labour organizations and may also include rallies, marches, boycotts, civil disobedience, non-payment of taxes, and other forms of direct or indirect action.
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.
[2] Early conceptions of the general strike were proposed during the Renaissance by Étienne de La Boétie,[2] and during the Age of Enlightenment by Jean Meslier and Honoré Gabriel Riqueti.
[3] 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.
[4] 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".
[2] 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.
[11] 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.
[12] 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.
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".
[18] 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 a capitalist country.
[22] 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.
[24] 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.
[25][26] However, this conception were rebuffed by African-American economist Abram Lincoln Harris, who dismissed Du Bois' claims of a general strike as fantastical.
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.
[30] 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.
[32] 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.
[50] 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.
[58] The CGT's example accelerated the spread of revolutionary syndicalism throughout the world,[59] bringing with it a wave of general strikes at the turn of the 20th century, to mixed results.
[60] 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.
[60] The Swedish general strike of 1909 was broken up without achieving its demands,[62] accelerating the split of syndicalists from the social-democratic unions and the formation of the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden (SAC).
At the Paris Congress of 1900, the French socialist politician Aristide Briand adopted the idea of the revolutionary general strike in order to boost his popularity with the syndicalists.
At the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, the anarchist calls for a general strike to prevent war were taken up by Gustave Hervé, but these were ardently opposed by the German delegates, who feared repression by the authorities.
[73] Finally, at the Copenhagen Congress of 1910, a proposal for a general strike to prevent war was put forward by the French socialist Édouard Vaillant and the Scottish labour leader Keir Hardie, but this too was voted down by the other delegates.
[74] While it was consistently defeated by the social democrats, the anarchist proposal for a general strike was taken up by members of the far-left, such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who saw it as an instrument for obtaining political concessions.
[75] The Congress played host to a fierce debate between Errico Malatesta, a proponent of classical anarcho-communism, and Pierre Monatte, a disciple of the new current of anarcho-syndicalism.
[78] Malatesta was particularly critical of the general strike, which he dismissed as a "magic weapon" that was incapable of fighting a violent conflict with state militaries,[79] which had the ability to starve out workers in the event of such an industrial dispute.
[88] As part of the fight for the Indian independence movement, leader Mahatma Gandhi promoted the use of what is called Hartal, a mass protest and a form of civil disobedience that often involved a total shutdown of workplaces, offices, shops, and courts of law.
[95][96] In a 1911 speech in New York City, IWW organiser Bill Haywood explained his view of the economic situation, and why he believed a general strike was justified, The capitalists have wealth; they have money.
[105] The prolonged strike involved eleven million workers for two weeks in a row,[105] and its impact was such that it almost caused the collapse of the de Gaulle government.
