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 appeal to other 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. The biggest general strike in recent european history - in fact the first general wild strike ever - was May 68 in France.

Notable General Strikes

• Winnipeg General Strike of 1919
• Seattle General Strike of 1919
• British General Strike of 1926
• 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

• direct action
• list of strikes

External links

• chronology of general strikes http://www.sonic.net/~figgins/generalstrike/
• The Mass Strike http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/index.htm by Rosa Luxemburg (1906)