Talk:General strike/Archive 1

General Strike v. Sympathy Strike
At what point does a sympathy strike qualify as a general strike? I understand that general strikes tend to have a more revolutionary, political, and class-based character, and that a "critical mass" is part of the formula, but can someone offer a more precise distinction between the two? The article makes a good distinction between general General Strikes and industry-specific General Strikes, but doesn't make the distinction with sympathy strikes adequately. More specifically, if there's any BC or Canadian labour people out there, I'm wondering why the 1903 CPR strike isn't considered a general strike but the 1918 one day strike is considered the first Canadian general strike. I'm not sure about number of workplaces or industries involved in either, but it seems that the main difference is the revolutionary consciousness in 1918, being the year after the Bolshevik Revolution. Thanks, Bobanny 06:20, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

General strike proposed for the USA on 9-11-2007
Still to early to talk about this in wikipedia?

edit by someone else who actually signs his posts: link: http://strike911.org 24.45.152.94 00:43, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

General Strike, Election Day 2007
A Garret Keizer has also proposed a general strike for Election Day 2007 in the Notebook section of the the October 2007 issue of Harper's. As more information on this idea becomes available, it should probably be added here. &mdash; Aldaron • T/C 20:33, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

General Strike vs. Mass Strike
This article should really make the distinction between the 'general strike' advocated by the syndicalists (like Sorel) and the 'mass strike' advocated by certain elements of the pre-war socialist movement - Luxemburg comes to mind. I'll do this when I have slightly more time in my schedule. Until then, what do you all think? Nautica Shad es  21:56, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

paragraph transferred here
I have removed this text from the article, and pasted it here:


 * Georges Sorel published Reflections on Violence in 1908, in which he promotes an understanding of the myth of the general strike:


 * To estimate, then, the significance of the idea of the general strike, all the methods of discussion which are current among politicians, sociologists, or people with pretensions to political science, must be abandoned. Every-thing which its opponents endeavour to establish may be conceded to them, without reducing in any way the value of the theory which they think they have refuted. The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only a product of popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is, whether the general strike contains everything that the Socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat.


 * Sorelian ideas helped the emergence of national syndicalism, and also of right-wing groups like the Cercle Proudhon.

I think it could be worked back into the article. However, it lacks context; i don't think many readers will comprehend its relevance without some intro. Richard Myers (talk) 22:24, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

1948 German general strike
Any reason why this strike (12 November 1948) is not even in the list? It is clearly described in the corresponding German article. Tdent (talk) 19:36, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Iran
May be able to add Iran to the list of examples. One of the reasons for the fall of the Pahlavi regime in 79 was a general strike, including the oil industry which was responsible for generating most of Iran's revenues. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.79.143.139 (talk) 06:44, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

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Why was there no info in the accompanying red-linked aricle? (Former title here was "Untitled")
Is there some information about the general strike of 1886? This page is linked to from the 1886 page, but when I get here there is no information. Bizarre. — Preceding unsigned comment added 02:05, 18 December 2004 UTC by Special:Contributions/81.132.40.201 (late in 2004, "Anybody's" ("in case anybody cares")
 * As not infrequent on talk pages, our colleague meant, by "here", "on the accompanying WP:Main namespace page". --JerzyA (talk) 04:29, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * It's there now.Bobanny 06:20, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
 * That's what the early phase of WP was about: If ya were interested enuf to follow the red link, you might comment, like our colleague Bb did right there. If not, it kept happening until somebody said HELL, i can at least write the dictdef; even i know that much! Or maybe they wrote a good article (or a bad one, which is incentive for others to improve it), after saying "Hell, even i can do better than that", or "That's gotta be BS", and did enuf research to fix that, and thus could improve the article even if they simply expanded lamelyWP:lame/PC. The history of the intellect really is largely about bringing together enuf thots that we could improve our technologies for bringing them together. (We ain't done yet, either.) --JerzyA (talk) 02:02 & 06:29, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Status of August 5 Hong Kong Strikes
Please discuss whether events in Hong Kong on August 5, 2019 qualify as a general strike. This edit has been proposed and retracted once previously. Strikes in Hong Kong are limited in scale and not widely participated with the exception of airport staff. Instead, protesters had attempted to prevent workers from commuting the workplace. Impact on economy is limited --- the Hang Seng index stayed around approx. 26000 after Aug 5. I propose temporarily cease adding Aug 5 to list of notable strikes until a consensus is reached. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.94.233.235 (talk) 19:28, 18 August 2019 (UTC)


 * More than 350000 people joined the strike, which is a substantial proportion of the total labour force. https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1472997-20190806.htm; Protesters attempting to prevent workers from commuting is a big impact, not "limited", which should not be measured by the economy. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/08/05/hong-kong-protesters-occupy-sha-tins-new-town-plaza-mass-strike-grips-city/ James (talk) 03:22, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Tea Party.

Tea party launched a mass strike (general) strike too, is the rightest populism — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.77.95.187 (talk) 19:08, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Labor Day
The claim that Labor Day is a form of annual general strike seems to be original research. Even the claim that there was a NYC general strike in 1885 is unsupported by the source, which says that the workers took unpaid leave from their work to attend a protest. Taking leave from work is not striking. Mauls (talk) 10:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
 * agree--I have never seen any reliable published source make this claim. That calls for deletion. Rjensen (talk) 11:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Unsourced individual general strikes
These are all tagged as needing sources, so storing them here for future consideration:

czar 20:23, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
 * 2013: 🇸🇮 Slovenian public sector general strike
 * 2012: 🇪🇸 29 March Spanish general strike
 * 2010: 🇪🇸 Spanish general strike
 * 2002: 🇮🇹 Italian general strike
 * 1995: 🇨🇦 Days of Action, Canada
 * 1958: 🇧🇸 Bahamas general strike


 * @Czar The Days of Action were a series of strikes and walkouts in the late 1990s in Ontario. Not all of them were general strikes, but I think it's fair to describe at least some of them that way. I added that one back in with a footnote. -- asilvering (talk) 06:02, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Honestly this entire section is bereft of sources and would be a lot better utilised in the list of strikes article. The section header implies also that this should be a section only about the most notable general strikes, yet this list is exhaustive. -- Grnrchst (talk) 22:14, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's outlandish for this article to have a list of noteworthy general strikes (with their own articles), but true that it isn't always clear (1) if it's a "general" strike, and (2) sourced as such. I wouldn't oppose chopping it down to a list of influential general strikes, especially since the list of general strikes already exists as a separate list. czar  00:34, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

February 2023 edit-a-thon report
Here's a short report about my work on this article for the Organised Labour Online edit-a-thon of February 2023: Using the sources I had available, I managed to expand on the history of the general strike's theoretical development, debates over its use, and strikes that were carried out during the 19th century. Unfortunately I wasn't able to cover much of the 20th and 21st centuries during the allotted time of the edit-a-thon, so the chronology of the edits I made currently stop at 1914. But I'm generally pleased with the work I've done so far and may revisit this article at some point for further improvements. For anybody that wants to help expand the article, the sources listed in the bibliography should be a good place to start. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:35, 28 February 2023 (UTC)