The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

eligious faith in the success of the revolution. From the outset, the debate on the general strike was a struggle
between two opposing conceptions: anarchism or revolutionary syndicalism, and Marxism. At stake was the
proletariat’s organised political activity to prepare the subjective conditions for revolution. Only after a wave of
generalised and mass strikes starting at the beginning of the century could the debate on the ‘general strike’
cease to be a theoretical combat between Marxism and anarchism, to become the crucial debate on the
movement of the revolution within the Marxist camp, the dividing line between Marxists and revisionists or
reformists.
From the very beginning of the workers’ movement, the general strike as a political means of struggle against
the capitalist system had been at the heart of its concrete concerns. It was used for the first time in 1842 by the
Chartist movement in Britain. At the end of a long economic depression which had lowered workers’ wages, and
in the context of a Chartist petition for universal suffrage, a movement of spontaneous strikes, spreading from
England to Scotland and Wales, had generalised for three weeks, affecting 3 million workers. Without
organisation, without leadership, but also without clear political perspectives, the strike failed. Characteristically,
this ‘general’ strike, which was more a generalised strike, was both political and economic. It was spontaneous,
massive, and without any previous organisation.
At the time of the First International, the idea of the general strike was taken up again in 1868, as a political
means of preventing future wars, at the International Congress in Brussels. But this decision by the Congress
remained without any practical effect.
In the 2 nd International, the question of the ‘general strike’ was posed in two ways: as a demonstration for the
proletariat’s political and economic rights, and as a means of anti-militarist struggle against the danger of war. In
1892, the general strike was used for the first time as a political means to the conquest of universal suffrage; a
second general strike called by the Belgian Workers’ Party (POB) won the plural vote for male electors. From
then on, the problem of the general strike was posed practically at every Congress of the 2 nd International.
The Congresses of Brussels (1891), Zürich (1893), and London (1896) marked a definitive divide with
anarchism. The latter, which advocated the ‘universal general strike’ as a panacea against war or for revolution,
was expelled, and its theses on the general strike rejected. The International’s position was first to encourage
partial strikes, as a means for carrying out the proletariat’s economic and political tasks, and to accelerate the
proletariat’s organisation as a preliminary to an international movement. In a period marked by the struggle for
reforms, and for the proletariat’s organisation as a conscious class, the conditions were not present for
international revolutionary mass action. This remained the position of the Marxist Left until the moment when
the first symptoms of a new historic period appeared in the full light of day. The conditions of the period prior to
1905, when the division between revolutionaries and reformists was still unclear, allowed the revisionists to
avoid a debate in depth on the proletariat’s methods of action: partial strikes, the general strike, the mass strike.
At the Paris Congress in 1900, the revisionist leader of the German unions, Karl Legien, could declare without
being contradicted: “as long as there are no strong organisations, there can be no question for us of any
discussion on the general strike”. 203
From 1901 onwards, the problem posed in the real class struggle, on both the economic and the political terrain,
was no longer the abstract one of an international general strike, but the concrete problem of workers’ mass
strikes. In 1901, a rail strike broke out in Barcelona; unlike other trade conflicts, led by the unions, this strike
spread to the engineering workers. 1902 saw strikes used as demonstrations for equal universal suffrage in
Sweden and Belgium. In 1903, mass strikes spread throughout Russia, shortly after the generalised strikes on the
Dutch railways. But it was above all the Italian mass strikes of 1904 that put the discussion on the general strike
and the mass strike back on the agenda. In the autumn of 1904, a series of workers’ risings spread throughout the
Mezzogiorno. The terrible repression that followed led the Milan trades council to call a general strike. This
spread to the whole of Italy, and for four days workers occupied the factories. For the first time in the history of
203 Quoted by A. Grünenberg in: Die Massenstreikdebatte. Beiträge von Parvus, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky und Anton
Pannekoek, op. cit.
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