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Labour Unions frequently inaugurate General Strikes of the whole branch of industry.
Even more frequently, during a large strike, workers of other industries quit work to support the demands of the strikers.
These are sympathetic strikes (solidary strikes). The employers themselves partly show the way to the workers by their ever more frequently operated general lockouts.
In order to defeat the workers of a branch or a factory, the united employers do not hesitate to lock out innocent working men, in order to force the strikers to go back to work, and in this manner destroy their organisation.
Ever more frequently we see that the employers' organisations support each other in order to resist the working men. If the Labour Unions now reply supporting the strikers through mutual understanding and aid, we then have no more a struggle of a particular working men's Union against a particular number of capitalists, but the struggle of the whole working class against all the capitalists. In this way, forced by the continually growing feeling of solidarity among the working people, we have the largest and strongest type of strike, and that is the strike in which the whole class of workers finally refuse to work for the whole class of capitalists—that is, the Social General Strike.
In this way amongst the Labour Unions was born, from the experience of the strike, the whole theory of the General Strike, this new modern tactic, which is best adapted to do away with the capitalistic system.
The General Strike for social reform—in short, Social General Strike—differs favourably from any strike in two vital points, even if it be a strike of a whole branch, which is after all nothing but a wage strike.
First: While in every wage strike the strikers necessarily need money to hold out, to-day in the Social General Strike no money is necessary, because nothing is produced and all the stores are closed.
Second: While every wage strike, even if it be a General Strike of a whole industrial branch, can only reckon on success during a favourable business conjunction, the Social General Strike has the most favourable prospects during a bad business crisis, which, as is very well known, is only the result of relative over-production—that is, the storing away of products which surpass the buying power of the consumers, the masses. Karl Marx taught that every revolution always followed an economic crisis, which increased the misery of the masses and aroused their revolutionary spirit.
During the Social General Strike the proletarians will very likely understand the economic needs and will know very well what they have to do when one says to them: "Do you know why you hunger more now than usually? Because the grain elevators are more full of corn and wheat than usually. Do you know why you go in rags, and why you and your wife and children are homeless and freezing? Because the warehouses are packed with clothes, because the building speculators build too many houses."
