The general strike is the simultaneous withdrawal of labor across an entire economy. It is anarcho-syndicalism’s central concept: the claim that workers do not need to seize the state or the means of production — they need only stop working, and the system that depends on their labor collapses.
The concept was developed theoretically by Georges Sorel in Reflections on Violence (1908) and practically by the anarcho-syndicalist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the CGT in France, the CNT in Spain, and the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in North America. The general strike differs from an ordinary strike in scope and aim: an ordinary strike targets one employer over specific demands; a general strike targets the entire economic order. It is not a negotiating tactic but a revolutionary method — the withdrawal of the obedience that sustains the system as a whole.
The power of the general strike follows from a basic anarchist observation: hierarchy depends on the compliance of those it dominates. The employer needs the worker more than the worker needs the employer — without labor, capital is inert. The state needs the population more than the population needs the state — without obedience, governance has no object. The general strike makes this dependency visible by withdrawing the cooperation that conceals it. This is why states respond to general strikes with exceptional force: not because the strike threatens violence but because it threatens to demonstrate that the existing order requires consent and can be ended by its withdrawal.
The general strike connects to the refusal of work but is not identical to it. The refusal of work, as theorized by autonomism, is a sustained practice of withdrawal from the identification of personhood with productivity. The general strike is a collective event — a coordinated act of self-organization in which workers demonstrate their capacity to shut down the economy and, implicitly, to reorganize it on their own terms. It is both direct action (it achieves its effects without appeal to intermediary authority) and propaganda of the deed (the action itself communicates the analysis).
Related terms
- Obedience — the compliance the general strike withdraws
- Refusal of work — the sustained practice the general strike concentrates into an event
- Self-organization — the capacity the general strike demonstrates
- Direct action — the mode of action the general strike exemplifies
- Coercion — what the state deploys when the general strike threatens to succeed
- Labor — what is withdrawn
- Propaganda of the deed — the communicative function of the strike