![]() ![]() They were a distillation of the historical experience so far, from someone who had witnessed at first hand the struggle of the British working class in the 1840s and the revolutionary upheaval of 1848. Then the class enemy would collapse without struggle.Įngels’ arguments were not drawn out of thin air. Instead of talking, about concrete action that was necessary, they simply spread the illusion that all you had to do was wait until the whole working class was persuaded to stop work simultaneously. He insisted that the general strike was a panacea proposed by people who were not prepared to confront the immediate tasks facing the working class. He criticised Jules Guesde, the French Marxist, for adopting the general strike slogan, and he repeated his arguments a couple of years later in a letter to Kautsky, the leader of the German socialist movement. In the early 1890s Engels returned to the theme. He said they were calling upon the workers to sit with folded arms, while the key question was one of direct, insurrectionary activity to establish a radical republic. So Engels, for instance, was absolutely scathing in his criticism of the Bakuninists for raising the slogan of the general strike in Spain in the early 1870s. Until then Marxists had tended to see mass strike activity as little more than a form of training which would teach workers the merits of political action. That is why the first serious Marxist discussion of the mass strike is Rosa Luxemburg’s brilliant pamphlet, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, written in 1906. And that means the general strike comes to the fore with the transition from the period of ‘free competition’ capitalism to that of monopoly capitalism and state capitalism. The class struggle in such a situation can no longer be confined to individual combats with this or that employer, but has to confront the generalised power of the employing class. It comes to the fore when the development of the class struggle has reached the point where action in one industry has an immediate impact upon every other industry and upon the state. The general strike is a form typical of class struggle in large scale modern industry. The contrast between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century is not accidental. The ‘year of revolution’, 1919, saw a rash of general strikes – in Central Germany, Berlin, and Bavaria, in Seattle, Vancouver and Winnipeg, in Barcelona, in Belfast.įurther general strikes followed in Germany in 1920, Berlin in August 1923, Hong Kong and Shanghai in the mid 1920s, Britain in 1926, France in 1936, German-occupied northern Italy in 1944, in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Belgium in 1961, France in 1968. So there were general strikes in St Petersburg in October 1905, in Belfast in 1907, and in Spain in 1917. There was no other experience of a general strike for half a century, until the Belgian general strike for the suffrage in 1894.īut the question of the general strike has come to the fore in virtually every major upsurge of the class struggle in the twentieth century. And the first experience of anything like a real general strike came soon afterwards, with the ‘Plug Riots’ which swept Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1842. ![]() He propagated the call for a ‘national holiday’ – a cessation of work by the whole working class which, he held, would achieve a quick victory for the workers’ movement. It was first elaborated in the 1830s, in Britain, by William Benbow, who was associated with the ‘physical force’ wing of Chartism. THE IDEA of the general strike is nearly as old as the working class movement. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. ? The General Strike (January 1985)įrom Socialist Worker Review, No. 72, January 1985, pp. 8–9. Chris Harman: What do we mean by the General Strike? (January 1985)Ĭhris Harman What do we mean by. ![]()
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