General strike
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
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.
Notable General Strikes
- British General Strike of 1926
- Winnipeg General Strike of 1919
- Seattle General Strike of 1919
- San Francisco general strike of 1934
- Minneapolis General Strike of 1934
- Toledo General Strike of 1934
- French general strike of May 1968
- Italian general strike of 2002
- Spanish general strike of 2002
- Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004.
See also
External links
de:Generalstreik es:Huelga general
