“People shouldn’t just call for a general strike as if they know what it is” is a very popular social media opinion, at the very least in what I see. Most of my engagement on political issues is on social media. It’s not ideal but it’s how it is. Obviously, there is a possibility that the idea of a general strike is more popular outside of social media. I do know that the UAW has planned a general strike for 2028 but I, as an engaged but uninvolved observer, do have some issues with that idea. Maybe I’ll get to them later. My point is that among those who talk a lot and think they know, the general strike is seen as a pie-in-the-sky idea, like fully-automatic luxury gay space communism.
I’m a guy who talks a lot and thinks he knows, but I don’t agree that the general strike is a pie-in-the-sky idea. I don’t agree that we should stop talking about it. But I think there is something we should try to clarify here if we are going to talk about it: what is a general strike?
See, that prevailing attitude accuses everyone else of not knowing what a general strike is, but I suspect that a lot of people who say that also don’t know what a general strike is. What I’m going to do here is tell you what it is, or at the very least explore the question and give my opinion. Usually, what I would do first is give you my theory and then lay out the evidence for it. This time, I’m going to go through the historical examples first, then make my conclusion about them.
These historical examples are all of actions which have been called general strikes (at least by Wikipedia, which we must protect) and which achieved at least some of their aims. I chose to focus on this rather than including strikes which failed because I think the successes more clearly show necessary elements that make a general strike successful, whereas the failures may have been pushed in disadvantageous times. Without fully giving away my point, there is more to a successful general strike than just a political decision.
I’ll discuss these events in chronological order. First will be the Russian Revolution of 1905, and then the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia. After this I’ll talk about the Minneapolis truckers’ strike of 1934, then the 1936 French strikes which led to the Matignon Agreements, and finally the Iranian Revolution of 1978.
The 1905 Russian Revolution
There were actually two major strike waves in the Russian Empire during 1905 which could be called general strikes. The first began in January, when workers at the Putilov plant in St. Petersburg went on strike against an arbitrarily dismissal of four workers. This led to a petition being drafted to the tsar asking for labor reforms, a petition that would be delivered in a mass march. As the procession reached the palace on January 9th (Gregorian), the palace guards fired upon the procession and killed dozens, an event known as Bloody Sunday. This led to more widespread strikes and protests in universities, not only within the nation of Russia but also in Poland and the Baltics. By February, the tsar had agreed to some sort of representative body but the details were not confirmed.
Political discord continued throughout the spring and summer of 1905, and as did labor unrest. In early October, the All-Russian Union of Railroad Employees and Workers called a “general strike of all the railways”1 which quickly spread through Moscow and then to other cities. The strike was widely supported not only by workers but also by the middle classes, including some industrialists. In St. Petersburg, they established the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies to coordinate their strike efforts, and this eventually became “the headquarters of the general strike”2. The government wished to crack down on the unrest but found this untenable. In response, the tsar reformed the government by appointing a new prime minister, granting civil liberties, and creating a formal legislature: the State Duma.
I have boiled quite a lot out of both of these events in these summaries, I acknowledge that. What I want to do with these summaries, and the later ones, is to demonstrate what I think of as the general strike portion of a larger movement, from the initial strike action to the strike becoming “general” to the end of the strike.
In my opinion, the strike of January-February created the conditions for the strike of October; while the earlier events appear segmented-but-allied, the events of October have a far more unified aspect. Rather than inchoate socio-economic demands, there was a clear political demand. That unified front contributed to the swiftness of the October crisis being resolved, as Ascher points out3. It would not have existed, however, if the end of the messier January crisis had not been left unresolved through the summer, largely due to the tsar’s stubbornness. That created the determination that everyone needed to apply pressure in order that some sort of political resolution be reached.
What about the earlier strike, then? The conditions for the January crisis came from existing tensions in the Russian Empire at that time. The empire was in an economic hole at the time, considered both at home and abroad to be backward in many ways. It attempted to modernize without granting civil liberties or changing aristocratic domination and this led to widespread discontent with the regime. Perhaps as important as the general atmosphere of Russian politics was the specific case of the empire’s poor performance and eventual defeat in the Russo-Japanese War which ended in 1905. Not only did this serve as a proof of Russia’s backwardness and weakness, the military could not provide as effective a counter to the protests as they usually might since most of their mobile forces were deployed at the front, which helped the pro-reform supporters to some success.
This was not the end of the struggle, however. The tsar dissolved the Duma for the first time in 1906 and would frequently do so going forward. As much as possible, the tsar resisted the reforms which he had just agreed to. While the general strike (and military mutinies) did bring pressure, it did not remove the tsar’s authority or result in lasting change. This meant that the underlying issues remained and intensified, leading to the next political revolution in Russia.
The 1917 Russian Revolution
Though the 1917 revolution, like the 1905 revolution, is often split into early (January/February) and late (October/November) phases, I would not say that both of the 1917 phases involved general strikes. Without taking a stance on the definition of revolution, I will say that the February phase has much more in common with the 1905 actions than the October phase does.
The 1917 Revolution began on March 3rd of 1917 (Gregorian); in the Julian calendar, this was February 18th, hence the name “February Revolution”. On that day, the workers at the Putilov factory in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) went on strike against the tsar. This strike continued for many days and was eventually joined by people protesting and even rioting against food rationing. The city was virtually shut down soon after. A military company fired upon police in defense of the protesters, leading to further military uprisings. Workers and soldiers would then occupy the Duma and establish a provisional government, soon also taking control of the telegraph and the rail. Though the tsar wished to remain in power, he was advised that the situation would not recover if he didn’t abdicate, so he did. Though he wished to pass power to another, the potential heir refused it, and so the only power left in Russia was the provisional government of the Duma.
Political turmoil did not end with the abdication of the tsar, especially as Russia was still embroiled in World War I (begun in 1914). As the revolutionaries in Petrograd had forced a change in the Duma, they had also established the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and these two bodies began to be in conflict. Peasant uprisings continued, as did general agitation against the government. As this happened, the Bolshevik Party gained ground in the soviet councils, including gaining a majority in the Petrograd Soviet. Shortly after this happened, the Bolshevik-led soviet system led an uprising which seized formal state power from the provisional government; this happened on October 24 in the Julian system (6 November in Gregorian), so this phase is called the October Revolution.
From these summaries, the October Revolution is clearly more of a single political decision made by the Bolshevik Party to seize control of the government. It’s the February Revolution which involves a more-or-less spontaneous general strike of the kind that emerged 12 years earlier. The background of the February Revolution is much like those of 1905: political unrest, anger at autocracy, weak economy. They even had a war in which they were performing poorly: here, it was the First World War. Like 1905, they set up their own parallel institutions from which they could make their voices heard, and so were ready to take on a governing role if needed.
The 1934 Minneapolis truckers’ strike
In May 1934, Local 574 of the General Drivers and Helpers Union – a truckers’ union in Minneapolis affiliated with the Teamsters – called for a general strike against all Minneapolis trucking. This pit them against the Citizens’ Alliance, an employers’ group which was dedicated to keeping unions out of the city, allowing them to further exploit their workers. Other groups went on strike as well, in support of the truckers, and even national labor organizations became involved. The strike continued for several months, severely disrupting commerce in the city and leading to several deaths and dozens injured. The city would eventually be placed under martial law and an arbitration was forced which stated that unionization and collective bargaining must be accepted by employers.
In many ways, this strike was much less dramatic than the strikes which led to the Russian Revolutions. However, this strike does share many aspects with them. It began with one group protesting their conditions and grew primarily based on sympathy of other groups, not direct pre-organization. The strike was able to severely cripple commerce in general, largely due to the nature of the main striking group (as trucking is essential to commerce in American cities). These effects were enough to force the government to intervene, primarily in the interest of ensuring peace. While I am not sure how widespread the appeal of this strike was, it’s noted on Wikipedia that the national Teamsters organization was against general strikes; possibly this strike could have achieved more had it been supported by the national group.
The 1936 French general strike
On May Day in 1936, a whopping 120 thousand engineering workers stopped work in honor of the occasion; the Renault factory was shut down due to this. Two days later, the left-wing Popular Front was elected to the government. More strikes soon followed, from airline workers to building, printing, transport, and others. Eventually, in early June, the new government not only ensured certain reforms (such as the 40 hour work week), they met with leaders of the striking unions and signed the Matignon agreement which made more formal concessions.
The major difference between this general strike and the others we’ve discussed so far is that this was not really anti-government, more running in parallel to it. The new Popular Front government was far more likely to grant the concessions sought than any previous French government would have been. It doesn’t seem as though the Popular Front directly advocated for many of these labor policies in its platform; Yonatan Reshef suggests that compromises made the Front’s platform less socialist than it might have otherwise been4. We can therefore perhaps see these strikes as necessary catalysts which forced the government to take actions which it was already inclined to take. This likely contributed to the relative quickness of the resolution.
Regardless of the left-leaning government in France, the progress of the general strike itself matched the progress of previously discussed general strikes. Though the occasion of May Day was the cause of the first demonstration, the larger movement can be tied in part to protests to reinstate workers who had been fired as a result of those protests5. That is to say, there is a case to be made that the main spark was arbitrary abuse of authority, similar to the other examples. There were also clearly existing labor tensions which contributed to desire for the strike. Further, the trade unions in France, along with the Communist Party and the French Section of the Socialist International, were highly capable and effective at this time.
The 1978 Iranian Revolution
In early September of 1978, workers in the Tehran oil refinery went on strike in response to the Black Friday massacre of anti-Shah protesters by the Iranian military. These strikes quickly spread throughout the oil sector and others, through to most of the country. According to Kurzman, the country was practically at a standstill by early November6. The shah cracked down on the strikes and other protests against his regime, but this did not end the protests. Eventually, in January 1979, the shah and his family left Iran on what they may have intended to be a temporary trip. The premier of Iran in his absence welcomed back Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah’s greatest critic, and by February the Ayatollah had been installed as the supreme leader of Iran.
Unlike in the other cases, the causes of the general strike in Iran can’t be said to be economic in any de-politicized sense. The anti-shah movement was already very developed and the strike came as a further expression of that rather than a direct outcome of business or labor issues. With that being said, the general strike at least followed exactly the same pattern as the other examples. Organizations did exist which helped to mobilize the people for the strike, but there was no one overall organization or even much agreement beforehand. Each organization moved on its own in solidarity with those already in motion.
Conclusion
I’m not going to be so naïve as to think that these five examples prove that the general strike is a foolproof strategy. I’ve obviously picked these out to show successes, as I said at the beginning. That said, it is clearly a workable strategy that can produce results in a variety of different situations. Of course, I am in part arguing against a strawman; that’s part of building these positions out. Let’s say this strawman is saying something like “A general strike needs to be well-organized and centrally directed in order to work.” That statement is what I disagree with.
From what I can see, and what these examples certainly support, three things are needed to launch a general strike: (1) an understood working order between society and labor; (2) a general atmosphere of discontent with the current order; and (3) a compelling particular issue. It should also be understood that the spread and power of general strikes is primarily sympathy strikes, not through pre-organized action. While this is not to say that strikes cannot be organized in a direct way, the initial organized strike is not the same thing as the general strike which evolves from it. As far as I can find, the majority part of these protest movements come from supporters, not the “core” strikers.
It may seem obvious that the main point of the strike is to affect the economy of the society, in a de-politicized sense; to hurt commerce and business. I disagree in part. Strikes are most often seen as a weapon of labor and, as such, are primarily thought of in terms of labor relations. In that case, what the business being striked against wants is for their business to do well, so it makes sense to try and harm that success. In a broad sense, though, I believe that the main goal of strikes is to demonstrate that the power that the ruling-group has is either not absolute or non-existent. We can see this in the Iranian and Russian Revolutions whose goals were primarily political rather than commercial-economic.
I’ve argued before that power is about subsuming things in the middle. When a CEO says that they personally delivered a product, that’s an expression of power. Protest is those “things in the middle” stand up and make themselves unignorable. It’s about breaking apart power. State-society needs power, it needs its power to be unbroken or it cannot function. That’s why government gives way whenever it does, why militaries that could violently put down strikes sometimes refuse to do so. The protest isn’t simply a group of people in a place at a time; it is a symbol that the normal pathways of power, the normal processes of getting things done, will not work as they did before. In order to get them to work, it is not always enough to crack heads because that doesn’t always subdue the population. The only sure way to end a protest is to concede to it, and some governors will pursue that in order to get an end to the conflict.
The mirror of discontent is militancy. This is, in a strategic sense, why I disagree with the idea that people should resist calling for a general strike. Discontent makes people more likely to engage in a general strike, but militancy makes people more ready for a strike of any kind when it happens. They are likely to increase alongside one another but not at the same speed. That is to say, we can become highly discontent without being highly militant. If that happens, any potential general strike – which will, as I’ve tried to show, be largely spontaneous – will be much more likely to fail.
To be sure, this is not suggesting general strikes as the total solution to any crisis, economic or political. Like I said, I’ve left out many outright failures of general strikes, some of them which were comparable in size to those I’ve discussed. I have also, to a large degree, left out the serious hardships imposed by strikes which leave communities without essential goods and services like food and electricity. I’m assuming that my readers are largely familiar with these things. The point is not that the general strike is perfect. It is, however, a potent weapon which can, at the very least, set the terms upon which later political struggles are fought.
I don’t think it is helpful for “random people” to try and set dates for a general strike. But there is no harm, and there’s probably even good, in people simply stating that we should hope for one.
Because it’s true. We live in a broken society. A general strike would, in full sincerity, be better than doing nothing.
Sources
Ascher, Abraham. The Revolution of 1905: A Short History. Stanford: Stanford. 2004.
Blantz, Thomas E. “Father Haas and the Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934.” Minnesota History, vol. 42, no. 1 (Spring 1970). Accessed via JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20178070
Kurzman, Charles. The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. Harvard: Cambridge, Mass. 2004.
Lenin, V.I. “On Strikes.” Uploaded 2003. Accessed 1 Mar 2025. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dec/strikes.htm
Quam, Lois & Peter J. Rachleff. “Keeping Minneapolis an Open-Shop Town: The Citizens’ Alliance in the 1930s.” Minnesota History vol. 50, no. 3 (Fall 1986). Accessed via JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20178998
Refesh, Yonatan. “The Matignon Agreement.” Accessed 1 Mar 2025. https://sites.ualberta.ca/~yreshef/orga417/PrintPages/countries/matignon.htm
Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. Marxists Internet Archive. 2000.
and, of course, Wikipedia (which we must protect)