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A general strike is a strike action by an entire 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 are effective because of the wide-reaching disruption they cause. Few official services continue to run in a general strike because other workers will often be pressured by strikers and labour organisations to join the strike.
A large-scale strike, like a general strike, requires a high level of labour organisation. Often a galvanising motive like widespread economic hardship or social unrest is necessary to provoke one.
Many leftist and 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-syndicalist labor organization Industrial Workers of the World, especially in the early twentieth century. General strikes were frequent in Spain during the early twentieth century, where revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism was most popular.
1 Notable General Strikes
2 See also
- direct actionDirect action is a method and a theory of stopping objectionable practices or creating more favorable conditions using immediately available means, such as strikes, boycotts, workplace occupations, sit-ins, or sabotage, and less oppositional methods such
- list of strikesThe following is a list of deliberate absence from work related to specific working conditions ( strikes) or due to general unhappiness with the political order ( general strikes). Chronological list of strikes Homestead Strike (1892) Pullman Strike (1894
3 External links
- chronology of general strikes
- The Mass Strike by Rosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg ( March 5, 1870 or 1871 January 15, 1919) was a Polish and German Jewish Marxist politician, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a social democratic theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and later the Independent (1906)
Labor
