The recent, and still ongoing, general strike in Russia is in its scope and duration the most powerful example of this form of struggle that has ever been seen. There is really not a single industrial city in that gigantic empire in which the working class as a whole or at least those in several of the most important branches of industry have not stopped work, and in many regions, for example in Łódź and in the Dąbrowa mining region in Poland, the strike has lasted for several weeks. The strike has spread from industry to sectors of commerce and trade and to the banks. Every day there comes news, particularly from Poland, about new sectors of economic life that have been seized with the strike fever. Even insurance offices, drugstores, and photography studios have gone on strike. And in many cities, Moscow, Petersburg, and Warsaw, the police themselves are threatening to strike. Simultaneously, this giant movement is played out with every nuance from purely political and revolutionary demonstrations to purely economic wage struggles, and yet the basic tone is being set by the political demand for freedom and the demand for the eight-hour day, that is to say, the most important socioeconomic demand.
In its huge dimensions and in the multiplicity of accompanying features, the present movement in Russia offers a veritable mine of data [Fundgrube] for the study of the nature and political significance of the general strike.
In the most thoroughgoing way, the experiences of recent times have made a clean sweep of the pedantic-mechanistic conception, according to which the general strike is treated exactly like getting ready for a journey back in the days of our great grandmothers when the route was planned out years in advance and talked over thoroughly in the family circle months before it was time to bring down the trunks and load them for the journey. A real general strike, which shakes up an entire country or an entire region, cannot be organized and led that way—with “the idea of a general strike” being posed on an abstract basis as some sort of panacea, although a discussion on this basis has been going on for so long at party gatherings and in articles, just like the discussion about the “idea” of a consumers’ union, until the working class has become convinced of the excellence of this “idea” and at a certain moment decided to actually begin a general strike.†
A mass uprising as a large-scale political and social class movement lends itself to being “made by command” as little as does a revolution. A political general strike, which can be unfolded in an orderly way, the way a screen can be unfolded in a living room and then later folded up and put away in a corner, the kind of general strike that took place at one time in Sweden, is only a demonstration, which undoubtedly has great importance as a review of the organized and disciplined forces of the proletariat, but does not represent a direct method of struggle. On the contrary, in a revolution, the general strike is only one phase, one stage in the direct struggle, and the transition from general strike to street fighting cannot be avoided any more than an exact borderline can be drawn between the one and the other.
Here again, the general strike does not flow from a preconceived plan worked up by Social Democracy, and it does not occur because it has been chosen as the “best” method after a long discussion. It should be noted that there is no country in which so little has been written up to now about the question of the general strike and so little discussed as in Russia and Russian-dominated Poland. It arose —as it must arise everywhere where there is a genuine revolutionary movement—of its own accord out of the economic conditions of the working class. The mass of the proletariat, in ordinary times, is welded to the chain of capital. It is tied down in factories, workplaces, and mines, and at the same time it is isolated and fragmented. If the working class wishes to undertake any kind of direct political mass action, it must before all else lay down tools and leave the factories, workplaces, and mines. Thus, the general strike is the first step and the natural initial form of every open mass action, or at any rate of every modern revolution in the streets.
On the other hand, however, the economic and social pressure of capital remains the great underlying foundation and basic fact of modern public life, and therefore, in every direct revolutionary action of the mass of the workers nowadays, there must be a powerful interplay between revolutionary action and the economic struggle, which by nature finds expression in a tremendous strike movement.
In this sense, the present revolution in the tsarist empire is a new phenomenon, which is likely to be far more typical for future revolutionary struggles of the European proletariat than the earlier bourgeois revolutions in France and Germany. A mass uprising of this kind never played a major role in those earlier revolutions. Certainly, in those cases the revolution expressed itself in the form of an economic slowdown, which was always a natural consequence of the political and social upheaval. However, up until now, that slowdown was only the negative expression of the disruption of the ordinary course of daily life; it made its appearance as a passive result of revolutionary times, but it was not by itself an active means of struggle for the revolution. This is connected with two aspects of the historical circumstances. First, neither during the time of the March Revolution [in 1848] or at the time of the great French revolution [1789–1793] was large-scale industry so highly developed and so decisive for the economic life of society as it is in present-day Russia. Second, and this is closely linked with the first factor, no modern revolution up until now has been so explicitly and exclusively proletarian as is the current one in the tsarist empire. In earlier revolutions the decisive factor, not only politically but also economically, was the petty bourgeoisie, and it goes without saying that direct action by this latter class could not take the form of a general strike. Today’s revolution in Russia is not only a purely political struggle against the autocracy but also at the same time—as every workers’ movement at present must be—a more-or-less class-conscious struggle against the rule of capital, and the combination of these two aspects finds its adequate expression in the enormous and powerful general strike crisis which today is shaking the gigantic Russian empire.
Therefore, this crisis is also a brilliant refutation of the pedantic conception which holds that all prospects for a revolutionary general strike can be dismissed out of hand with the dry formula that if we were to develop so “broadly” as to be able to call forth a real general strike in the whole country, it would no longer be at all necessary to do that, since we would already be strong enough to take political power and simply do away with the existing dominant social order. In Russia the totality of the conditions, which according to this conception are indispensable for a general strike to come into existence—building up trade union organizations and extending them to nearly all of the working class; a completely unrestricted right of association (i.e., the right to form or join a union); the absence of a strong modern form of militarism; well-filled trade union coffers, thoroughly well-tested union discipline; and so on and so forth—the totality of those conditions was lacking. In Russia, there was and still is, at any rate from the standpoint of the broad masses, what amounts to an absence of any trade unions at all; there are no union treasuries; no right of association; no training and experience on the basis of large-scale political or even economic struggles. But there is militarism in very brutal forms. On the other hand, despite all these circumstances, the general strike has been as absolute and as exemplary as has ever been seen in any European country; and yet, at the present moment, the people [in Russia] are not in a position to take political power and carry out a socialist transformation. Even to accomplish a political revolution, powerful and sustained struggles will still be necessary in Russia, and the general strike merely constitutes an introduction to those struggles.
At any rate, one thing is clear. This kind of powerful mass strike movement, in the political sense as a disruption of the entire social life of a country, is only conceivable as a historical moment in a revolution and therefore as a phenomenon in which Social Democracy can have exactly as much or as little room for active planning or for conscious leadership as in a street revolution, a phenomenon which itself can arise only on the foundation of a great social crisis, which affects the deepest vital interests of the broad mass of the people, but not on the basis of partial and secondary issues, such as, for example, the right to vote in elections for the Prussian Landtag.* To the ruminating academic this matter might seem to be an uncommonly important question, but the masses could never be stirred from the bottom of their hearts by that.
It is not by systematic propaganda for a general strike for its own sake, as a miracle-working form of the proletarian class struggle, and also, on the other hand, it is not by merely engaging in the beehive-type of activity of endlessly building new trade union cells, but it is by educating and awakening the masses along the lines of developing their revolutionary understanding—the understanding that in all the most vital political and social questions and decisions they can only rely on themselves, on their own direct action—it is only in this way that we ourselves lay the groundwork for that moment when the workers as a class will be ready, for the sake of their true vital interests, not only to “stop every wheel from turning” but also if necessary to shed their blood fighting in the streets. To sense the onset of such a historical moment, to take a bold initiative giving expression to that, and to lead the working class energetically and decisively through a general strike with all the consequences of that struggle, and not to stop halfway with some tricky talk about “strategic withdrawal”—that is the actual great task of conscious action to be carried out by Social Democracy.