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General strike
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see
General strike
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 radical 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
*
Ulster Workers Council Strike Northern Ireland general strike of May 1974
*
Spanish general strike of 1988
*
Italian general strike of 2002
*
Venezuelan general strike of 2002-2003
*
Ukraine's
Orange Revolution of
2004
See also
*
direct action
*
list of strikes
*
Industrial Workers of the World
*
Georges Sorel's "myth of the general strike"
External links
-
chronology of general strikes
-
The Mass Strike by
Rosa Luxemburg (1906)
Category: Labor Category:Left-wing tactics and strategies
ca:Vaga general
da:Generalstrejke
de:Generalstreik
el:Γενική απεÏ?γία
es:Huelga general
fr:Grève générale
nl:Algemene staking
ja:ゼãƒ?ラル・ストライã‚
sv:Storstrejk
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