You can tell how serious people are about organizing — general strikes or anything else — by how interested they are in specifics: the nuts and bolts of organizing strategy, hard data about the historical record, and an unflinching analysis of a tactic’s usefulness. The saying goes: “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” If someone just waxes poetic about the revolutionary importance of a particular form of action, or about the urgency of the current moment, or romanticizes the past in a way that doesn’t do much beyond conjuring sepia-toned images of worker militancy — then they are not serious.
This article takes a look at the use of general strikes in Europe, tracing how they came to prominence in the last few decades, and assessing how successful they have been. It turns out that not only would it be difficult to import these kinds of general strikes to the North American context, but there’s reason to be skeptical whether we would even want to. They are not the display of power we take them to be.