29.01.2026

Classical Marxism and general strikes

Can the working class liberate itself through staging one big strike? That was the idea of Chartist leaders and is still the idea of left groups today. Marking the centenary of the 1926 General Strike, Jack Conrad looks at the Marx-Engels team and the international debates

Throughout their political lives Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - the founders of scientific communism - intransigently argued against the proposition that the working class could liberate itself by the simple device of staging one big general strike. Given the division of labour that existed between them, it was usually the latter who took the lead in the associated polemics.

On a number of occasions, Engels, understandably, referred back to his brilliant book - published in 1845, when he was only in his mid-20s - The condition of the working class in England.¹ We will do the same. In it, after all, Engels touched upon how the world’s first mass proletarian party, the British Chartists, attempted to stage what they called the ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ month.

This month had nothing to do with celebrating “god’s mighty works”.² No, the goals were explicitly political. It was a proposed month-long holyday, or the general strike, which, alongside a consumer boycott and widespread civil disobedience, would - or so it was thought - be more than enough to bring the capitalist system to its knees and raise the working classes into power. The holy month was to be prepared by local and regional committees, mass meetings and a prolonged education programme in both means and ends. Strikers would have to save up enough money, food and other provisions to last out the month.

The phrase, ‘holy month’, seems to have been coined by William Benbow: a shoemaker, a non-conformist preacher, a coffee house manager, a journalist, a pornographer and a reform agitator. He suffered prison at least three or four times for his efforts. In 1831 Benbow joined the National Union of the Working Classes and in the following year published his little pamphlet: the Grand national holiday and congress of the productive classes.³ Showing that revolution was in the air, the Chartist convention, meeting in the summer of 1839, adopted Benbow’s plan and determined to put it into almost immediate effect. It was to begin on August 12. So no prolonged period of preparation.

The weekly Chartist paper, The Northern Star, for August 17 and 24 reports local rallies, often with very large turnouts “comprising a majority of the working population of particular areas, which then proceeded to march to surrounding locations to pull others out in support of the sacred month”.⁴ Nonetheless, the general strike failed. Dorothy Thompson argues that the authorities feared that “the limited actions” of the holy month would “soon have developed into an armed confrontation with troops and police”.⁵ Note, many workers equipped themselves with muskets, rifles, bludgeons, pikes and knives. Even before it started, meetings were forbidden, rallies attacked and top leaders, such as Feargus O’Connor, Bronterre O’Brien and Henry Vincent, were rounded up. They were charged with seditious libel, conspiracy, etc (Benbow served nine months). The Northern Star writes about a “reign of terror”.⁶ On the back foot, the Chartists called off the holy month after a mere three days.

Second test

Ironically, as explained in Engels’ book, it was the bourgeoisie of industrial northern England who were consciously responsible for putting the holy month to its second test, this time in July 1842. It was not, Engels said, that workers wished to quit work, but the manufacturers “who wished to close their mills and send the operatives into the country parishes upon the property of the aristocracy”.

Putting aside their social contract with the aristocracy and their law-abiding creed of moral persuasion, the industrial bourgeoisie seem to have provoked, or taken advantage of, a general strike in order to use the working class as pawns. Letting loose proletarian anger was meant, in Richard Cobden’s, words to “frighten the aristocracy”, so much so that it would bow before demands for the repeal of the Corn Laws.⁷ This would bring the industrial bourgeoisie one step nearer to the day when it could finally crown itself the governing class.⁸

Predictably, because the industrial bourgeoisie and their Anti-Corn Law League led from behind; because for those below there was no clear goal in mind; because workers were driven into revolt by a plan hatched from above; because none wished to die for the sake of ending the corn laws; the whole thing did not take long to fizzle out.

For our purposes, however, what is particularly germane is not only the fact that at its height the general strike “involved up to half a million workers and covered an area which stretched from Dundee and the Scottish coalfields to South Wales and Cornwall”.⁹ An independent working class politics was being forged - politics which went much further than those resulting from the simple antagonism that permanently exists between employer and employee.

Instead of striking against the corn laws, they acted in their own general - class - interests. They demanded the 10-hour day, the restoration of wages to 1840 levels and the full implementation of the People’s Charter. Led by Thomas Cooper, a minority argued that there ought to be a physical-force insurrection to carry through the entire programme. The majority around Feargus O’Connor agreed, but considered any such a move premature.¹⁰

Incidentally, as an aside, O’Connor was a dynamic, but mercurial, character. The majority of the industrial working class saw him as their natural leader - that despite the fact that he was what AL Morton calls a “strong opponent of socialism”.¹¹ Marx and Engels, it should be added, admired O’Connor, not least when it came to uniting British and Irish workers. However, O’Connor’s solution to the social question lay very much in the past, not the future. In 1845 he founded the National Land Company which was designed to facilitate workers purchasing little parcels of agricultural land. This would supposedly allow them to become independent of capitalism (needless to say, his ‘land plan’ failed). Of course, Marx-Engels had nothing but contempt for his ‘smallholder socialism’.

Anyway, let us conclude our account of the 1842 general strike. For the industrial bourgeoisie it marked an historic turning point. The proletariat could not be as easily manipulated as was once believed. Having been unleashed as a weapon to frighten the landed aristocracy, workers showed themselves to be self-willed and uncontrollable. Horrified by their own creation, the industrial bourgeoisie abandoned its last Jacobin vestiges and adopted a thoroughly respectable constitutional stance.

Trusted retainers were armed and sworn in as special constables. In Preston, when they failed to disperse the crowds, the 72nd Highlanders were given the command to open fire. Four died and many more suffered injury in the hail of shot. The unintentional general strike therefore stood opposed not only by the government, but all propertied classes: the propertyless were threatening “the destruction of those who had property” (Lord Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Denman).¹²

Arising from the events of July 1842, many Chartist leaders were arrested, convicted and sentenced. There was, however, a positive side. Crucially, the industrial bourgeoisie and the working class “decisively” separated.¹³ Chartism freed itself from bourgeois hangers-on and became a purely proletarian movement. The British industrial bourgeoisie had burnt its fingers trying to manipulate working class militancy. Chastised, it refused any longer to listen to physical-force talk. Fear of the working class now weighed more heavily than dissatisfaction with the governing landed aristocracy.

Anarchist polemic

Despite the negative experience of the Chartists’ general strike, the idea was taken up by socialists in France and Belgium after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Hence at the 1868 Brussels Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association - the First International - the Belgian delegate, César De Paepe, proposed that a general strike should be used to prevent the outbreak of war. He considered war to be the principle means by which the ruling classes befuddle the masses. De Paepe also thought that trade unions themselves should constitute the constitutional foundations of the socialist order.¹⁴

Much to the astonishment of Marx, hearing about the proceedings back in London, De Paepe’s resolution passed without division: “Since no society can exist when production is stopped for any length of time … it is therefore sufficient to cease work for a war to be made impossible.” His resolution, therefore, called on workers “to cease work in the event of war breaking out in their country”.¹⁵

Marx, writing in September 1868 to Engels, bluntly dismissed De Paepe’s idea as “Belgian nonsense”.¹⁶ De Paepe’s ideas undoubtedly went on to exert a strong influence on revolutionary syndicalism. That said, it was the anarchists, under the leadership of Mikhail Bakunin, who, in the First International, made the general strike their own.¹⁷

Bakunin rejected the Marxist strategy of winning universal suffrage and using elections - even with the most restricted suffrage - to politically educate the working class and patiently build a mass party based on a minimum-maximum programme.¹⁸ He reasoned differently. The time for book-worming theorising, partial reform demands and stoically waiting for objective conditions to mature had gone. He called for ‘propaganda by the deed’ (later, after his death, to degenerate into desperate, despairing acts of individual terrorism). Exhausted workers, indebted peasants, ruined artisans, society’s dregs and outcasts could not be convinced by fancy words. No, the best way to overthrow the capitalist system was via what appeared to be the shortest route of direct action. Attack the property, profits and privileges of the ruling classes through riot, boycott, sabotage and strike.

The “economic struggle” unleashes revolutionary instincts by jolting people out of their humdrum existence.¹⁹ With hidden leadership provided by Bakunin’s secret organisation, events finally climax in the general strike. A minoritarian putsch follows, the state is ostentatiously abolished, but, according to Bakunin’s private schema, power is actually exercised by the “collective dictatorship” of his secret organisation, headed - quelle surprise - by “Citizen B” himself²⁰).

If such a society had ever been realised by some horrible fluke, it would have been what Marx-Engels called a ‘barrack room communism’ of the kind that the Jesuits established in Paraguay during the 17th century: Bakunin admired this ‘theological socialism’. Work was compulsory for the indigenous Indian population: they were housed in dormitories and ruled over by a self-appointed religious elite. There was, needless to say, no self-organisation. A more recent example of such a hell hole would be Kampuchea under Pol Pot (‘Comrade No1’).

Note, Marx took the lead in the expulsion of Bakunin and his followers at the September 1872 Hague congress. Marx attended in person - a first. Behind the ‘mask’ of anti-authoritarianism, liberty and federalism, Bakunin was accused of running a secret, disruptive, conspiracy. This was, though, not drawing a line of demarcation against anarchism as such. Sincere anarchists were urged to stay and argue their corner. However, that did not mean some liberal ‘live and let live’.

Engels mercilessly tore into the anarchist principles of federalism, opposition of political action and general strikism. “One fine morning,” he mocked, the anarchists imagine “all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the ruling classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use the opportunity to pull down the entire old society.”²¹

Events in Spain in 1873 gave an “unsurpassed example of how a revolution should not be made”. Here was a country where the anarchists enjoyed considerable influence. Confronted by a serious revolutionary situation, however, the anarchists were compelled to ditch virtually their entire programme. Instead of abstaining from political and electoral activity and abolishing the state, they constituted themselves as an impotent rump within an archipelago of patently bourgeois ‘cantonal’ governments. Finding themselves drawn into useless, senseless and uncoordinated uprisings, their only remaining principle of federation and local autonomy gave counterrevolution the initiative and allowed it to concentrate its forces and crush one town at a time, before turning to the next.

Obviously anarchist politics stood in flat contradistinction to the living economic and political struggle. In spite of that, even as the Spanish fiasco unfolded, there were still those anarchists who refused to let go of the general strike as their social panacea. Hence, at the September 1-6 1873 Geneva congress of the anarchist Alliance of Social Democracy, it was agreed that “the partial strike” should be renounced “as much as possible”. Yet, while there were different opinions and no firm final decision, there was a distinct current - crucially the Swiss centre - favouring the general strike.²² However, it was in effect admitted that to carry out this strategy there had to be an almost perfectly functioning global organisation presiding over almost unlimited funds.

Engels had no problem in pointing out that here was the “rub”. On the one hand - especially if the anarchists has persuaded people against political participation - no government would sit idly by while workers painstakingly accumulated their pennies for their project. On the other hand, almost by definition, the real class struggle would bring about the liberation of the working class long before any almost perfectly functioning organisation with almost unlimited funds had been built. Furthermore, if by some miracle such a global power had been built, then surely there would be no need for the “roundabout way of the general strike” in order to obtain the objectives of the working class.²³

Here was the reasoning that constituted the Marxist approach to the general strike strategy and which went on to inform the approach of the Second International.

Second International

Founded in 1889, the Second, Socialist, International expanded at a fantastic pace. By the early years of the 20th century it included within its ranks every mass working class party in the world (often newly formed). Unlike the First International, which was a smaller but very broad affair - embracing not only Marxists, but Proudhonists, Blanquists, Owenites, British trade unionists, as well as Bakunin’s anarchists - the Second International accepted Marxism as its natural world outlook.²⁴ Engels was elected honorary president.

The Second International grew in an extended period of social peace - fertile conditions for many leaders to be seduced by the specialised business of parliamentary procedure, trade union bargaining, party management ... and the lures of bourgeois respectability. Hence there was a considerable stratum of influential social democratic office-holders who wanted to forget (even censor) the countless and very inconvenient revolutionary statements contained in the writings of Marx and Engels. How, for example, they had called for internationalism, arming of the people, smashing the capitalist state and proletarian dictatorship. Instead, all that was remembered was their stress on using elections and criticism of the anarchists - who were now almost totally irrelevant. Notwithstanding that, the general strike as a social panacea refused to die.

The first, 1889, Paris congress had before it an amendment, from a French delegate, to the successful resolution calling for the international celebration of May Day: he wanted it to be a day of general strike “to mark the beginning of the social revolution”.²⁵ Due to time constraints, discussion proved impossible. According to the records, only Wilhelm Liebknecht referred to it, dismissing the amendment because it “was an impossibility”, since a general strike required a degree of working class organisation “unattainable in bourgeois society”. The proposal was withdrawn.²⁶

The 1891 Brussels congress saw the Netherlands delegation, headed by Domela Nieuwenhuis, table a proposal urging workers to stop war with a general, mass, strike: “a threatened declaration of war should be answered by an appeal to the people for a general cessation from work”.²⁷ Delegations rejected the motion by 13 to three: the Netherlands and a majority of the British and French voting in favour.

The 1893 Zurich congress likewise had a motion calling for an international general strike against the threat of war. It too fell because of time. However, after preliminary discussion on the International Socialist Bureau, it was agreed that Karl Kautsky would draft a motion.

Ideas of a “world strike” were rejected as impractical due to the uneven development of the workers’ movement. That notwithstanding, a general stoppage called in particular industries “could in certain conditions be a most effective weapon of political as well as economic struggle”.²⁸

The 1896 London congress saw an overdue line of demarcation drawn. The anarchists were excluded because of their rejection of political action (eg, standing in elections). Nationwide strikes and boycotts were, though, it was agreed, perfectly legitimate tactics to advance the interests of the working class. Once again, however, the idea of an international general strike against the war threat got nowhere.

At the 1900 congress in Paris there was a similar outcome. The reporters were Karl Legien (Germany) for the majority and Aristide Briand (France) for the minority. The congress adopted this resolution by a sound margin of 27 to seven:

The congress - taking into account the resolutions adopted by the international congresses of Paris and Zurich, and recalling the resolution adopted in London in 1896 that dealt with the general strike - considers that strikes and boycotts are necessary weapons to attain the goals of the working class, but it does not see how an international general strike is, under existing circumstances, possible.

What is immediately necessary is the organisation of trade unions by the masses of workers, since it is only the extension of organisation that makes possible strikes in entire industries or entire countries.²⁹

But then there was life itself. In 1891 - and then, crucially, in 1893 - Belgian workers staged general strikes to compel the government into conceding universal male suffrage. Called by the Belgian Workers Party - one of whose founding members was a certain César De Paepe - the 1893 general strike lasted from April 12 to 18, and was met by military force: a dozen or two strikers were killed.

The rapid spread of the strike apparently caught the BWP leadership, under Emile Vandervelde³⁰, by surprise. Approximately 200,000 took part. Wanting to avoid revolution, the Catholic-dominated government agreed to expand the franchise tenfold. Tax thresholds were abolished and all men over 25 gained the vote.

The first elections under the expanded franchise took place in October 1894. However, the BWP did not fare as well as might perhaps have been expected. Social Catholicism, launched with the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum novarum, considerably boosted the electoral fortunes of the Catholic Party. Despite that, over 300,000 voted BWP and 27 BWP MPs were returned (the third largest parliamentary fraction). Note, it was not until 1948 that universal suffrage was finally achieved in Belgium.

The Belgian general strikes had a definite impact on the Second International. After all, the BWP had shown that “Belgian nonsense” worked - well, in the limited terms of expanding the franchise. Nor was a nationwide general strike an “impossibility”, as Liebknecht seems to have maintained (he might, after all, have been rejecting a “world strike”). Anyway, Belgium’s workers had staged a mass strike that succeeded in smashing open the hitherto closed doors of parliament.

There was also the 1905 Russian revolution - the great dress rehearsal - with a massive strike wave, which culminated in two general strikes in October 1905 - the subject of our next article.

In closing, it is more than worth noting that, despite Ignaz Auer’s famous adage, “Generalstreik ist Generalunsinn” (general strike is general lunacy), he and other leaders of Germany’s Social Democratic Party closely paid close attention to the Belgian and Russian events. Moreover, they began active preparations for an anti-constitutional political general strike in the first half of 1914 (an inconvenient fact which totally blows apart the bog-standard academic and leftist narrative of a reformist, non-revolutionary SDP, mired in bureaucratic inertia³¹).

The objective was to force an extension of the franchise in Prussia (the pre-eminent and by far the largest political unit in the German empire). Its ‘three-class’ system favoured Junkers and big capitalists and ensured that their interests easily dominated Prussia’s indirectly elected Abgeordnetenhaus (lower house). The Herrenhaus (the upper house) was largely appointed by the kaiser.

Even the likes of Friedrich Ebert and Eduard Bernstein were up for the fight. In May-June 1914, the SDP actively geared up by creating its ‘suffrage reform fund’ (originally named ‘mass strike fund’). Prussia’s interior minister, Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell, expressed his grave concern about the looming general strike, and the central government made ready for criminal proceedings against SDP leaders.

The outbreak of World War I in late July 1914 abruptly halted all such plans. Party leaders agreed the Burgfrieden (castle peace) with the government.³² War credits would be supported in the Reichstag and there would be no strikes for the duration. An act of monumental betrayal.

1. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 4, London 1975, pp295-96.↩︎

2. www.marxists.org/history/england/chartists/benbow-congress.htm.↩︎

3. Ibid.↩︎

4. kmflett.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/175-years-since-the-sacred-month-of-august-1839-how-the-chartists-planned-to-bring-down-capitalism.↩︎

5. D Thompson The Chartists: popular politics in the industrial revolution Aldershot 1984, p77.↩︎

6. The Northern Star August 24 1839.↩︎

7. The Corn Laws were first introduced in 1804 by a parliament dominated by landed interests. War with France perpetuated conditions whereby the most parasitic elements could hang on to governing power and push through legislation that ran counter to the ‘national’ interests of the bourgeois nation. Though big landlords maintained their enormous and bloated wealth by levying a protective duty on corn imports, for the mass of the population that meant a high price for bread, and, for the industrial capitalists, an upward pressure on the price of labour-power. A combination of Anti-Corn Law League agitation and the famine in Ireland was eventually responsible for their final repeal in June 1846.↩︎

8. The industrial bourgeoisie secured full voting entry into the parliamentary political system with the Reform Act of 1832. Edward Thompson suggests that this resolved a revolutionary situation in Britain and hence prevented an explosion that would have undoubtedly gone way beyond the Jacobin Year  I of France, maybe even putting political power into the hands of a British version of the enragés (EP Thompson The poverty of theory London 1981, pp257-66). Though real capitalism was now the dominant mode of production, even at this decisive reformist moment the industrial bourgeoisie failed to constitute itself as an independent, let alone dominant, political force in parliament. Except for the handful of Radicals, the industrial bourgeoisie lined up behind the Whig Party (a prefiguration of the reformist entry of working class voters onto the political scene less than half a century later). Capital exercised power not through a bourgeois political class, but socially as a dominant mode of production. The landed aristocracy - which had, through capitalist farming and charging capitalist ground rent on mines, become bourgeoisified - continued to staff the governing caste throughout the 19th century. Between 1818 and 1900 there was no discernible increase in the number of commoners in British cabinets. Indeed, before Edward Heath most Tory leaders boasted a long aristocratic pedigree.↩︎

9. M Jenkins The general strike of 1842 London 1980, p21.↩︎

10. See D Thompson The Chartists Aldershot 1986, pp271-98.↩︎

11. AL Morton A people’s history of England London 1974, p433.↩︎

12. Quoted in M Jenkins The general strike of 1842 London 1980, p15.↩︎

13. F Engels The condition of the working class in England Harmondsworth 1972, p259.↩︎

14. See R Graham, ‘Anarchism and the First International’ in M Adams, S Matthew S and C Levy (eds) The Palgrave handbook of anarchism London 2018, pp325-42.↩︎

15. www.marxists.org/archive/braunthal/history-international/vol1/19gstrike.htm.↩︎

16. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 43, Moscow 1988, p101.↩︎

17. Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) - Russian anarchist and one of its leading ideologists. He took part in the February 1848 revolution in Paris, was imprisoned in Saxony in 1849 and handed over to the tsarist authorities, who sent him into exile in Siberia. He escaped in 1861. As a member of the First International, from 1864 he waged a fierce factional struggle against its general council led by Marx.↩︎

18. The maximum programme is the final aim of communism. The minimum programme includes reform, such as universal suffrage, the eight-hour day, a progressive income tax, universal free education, the nationalisation of the banking system and replacing the standing army with a popular militia.↩︎

19. M Leier Bakunin the creative passion - a biography New York NY 2006, p249.↩︎

20. Bakunin wrote to Albert Richard in April 1870. explaining his organisational schema: “like invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest, we must steer it not by any open power, but by the collective dictatorship of all the allies - a dictatorship without insignia, titles or official rights, and all the stronger for having none of the paraphernalia of power” (M Bakunin Selected writings New York NY 1973, pp178, 180).↩︎

21. F Engels MECW Vol 23, Moscow 1988, p584.↩︎

22. “The congress, considering the actual state of the International, does not regard the question of the general strike as a complete solution for the workers’ movement, but believes it should be presented to the workers as an active part of socialist propaganda” (Quoted in P Goodstein The theory of the general strike from the French revolution to Poland Cambridge 1984, pp44-45). Over the next few years, anarchists mostly moved away from advocating the revolutionary general strike, instead embracing what the Italian anarchists called ‘propaganda of the deed’. The concept was in many ways a continuation of the general strike strategy, in that its goal of fostering workers’ consciousness of their oppression and their power would thereby prepare the way for revolution (See N Pernicone Italian anarchism, 1864-1892 Princeton NJ 1993, pp118-28, 41-45).↩︎

23. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 23, London 1998, p585.↩︎

24. Bakunin and other anarchists were expelled from the First International at its Hague congress in 1872. A similar fate befell the anarchists at the Second International’s 1896 congress in London.↩︎

25. It is worth pointing out that the workers’ movement in France was deeply divided between Marxists on the one side and on the other those organised in the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats Ouvriers. Unions strongly favoured the general strike, but not as a weapon for securing political objectives: they rejected all forms of parliamentarism too. The general strike was their lever of social revolution.↩︎

26. www.marxists.org/archive/braunthal/history-international/vol1/19gstrike.htm.↩︎

27. www.marxists.org/archive/braunthal/history-international/vol1/19gstrike.htm.↩︎

28. Ibid.↩︎

29. www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/second-international-resolutions-book/ch05.htm.↩︎

30. Emile Vandervelde joined the BWP in 1886 and had a long parliamentary career. Widely respected, he served as president of the Socialist (Second) International from 1900-18. However, with the outbreak of inter-imperialist war in August 1914, he urged national defence against the Germans. In 1916 he became a minister of state in the de Broqueville government.↩︎

31. See CE Schorske German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: the development of the great schism Cambridge Mass 1955; JP Nettl Rosa Luxemburg Vols 1 and 2, Oxford 1966; D McLellen Marxism after Marx: an introduction London 1979.↩︎

32. The leadership of the SDP’s Reichstag faction voted by 4:2, the entire Reichstag faction by 78:14. Observing party discipline, the entire Reichstag faction then voted unanimously for the Burgfrieden. Karl Liebnetcht was the first to rebel, but only in December 1914. Others soon followed.↩︎