The means of pressure and the weapon of warfare peculiar to the proletariat is the organised refusal to work, the strike. The more the capitalist mode of production develops, the more capital concentrates, the more gigantic become the dimensions which the strikes assume. And the more the capitalist mode of production drives out production on a small scale, the more the entire society becomes dependent on the undisturbed progress of capitalist production, so the more every serious disturbance of the latter, such as is caused by a strike on a large scale, becomes a national calamity, a political event. At a certain stage of the economic development it is, therefore, but natural that there should arise the idea of using the strike as a political weapon. This idea has already made its appearance in France and in Belgium, and has here and there been applied with success. In my opinion it will play a great part in the revolutionary struggles of the future.
That has long been my view of the matter. In my articles on the new party programme (Neue Zeit, 1890–91, No. 50, p. 757), I already pointed to the possibility "that, under circumstances, when something very important is at stake and awaits its decision, when the mass of the workers have been stirred to their innermost depths by some great events, strikes on a large scale may have a great political effect."
In saying this I naturally have no wish to advocate a general strike in the Anarchist sense, or the sense of the French trade unionists. In this sense the strike is to take the place of political, viz., Parliamentary, action of the proletariat, and to be the means of overthrowing the existing order of society at one blow.
That is nonsense. A general strike in the sense that all the workers of a country at a given signal lay down their tools, assumes a unanimity and a state of organisation of the workers hardly attainable under the present conditions of society, and if once attained would prove so irresistible, as to make the general strike itself superfluous. Such a strike, however, would at one blow render not merely the existing society, but all existence impossible, and that of the proletariat even sooner than that of capitalists; it would therefore necessarily fail at the very moment when its revolutionary effects would begin to develop.
The strike as a political method of warfare will scarcely ever, certainly not within any time we can foresee, assume the form of a strike of all the workers of a country; nor can it be expected to replace the ordinary weapons of political warfare of the proletariat. It can only complement and strengthen them. We are approaching a time when, confronted by the enormous superiority of the employers' associations, the isolated, non-political strike will have no more prospect of success than the merely parliamentary action of the Labour Parties against the power of the capitalist-ridden State. It will become ever more and more necessary that both should each complete the other and draw new strength from co-operation.
