Page:The Social General Strike - Arnold Roller (1912).djvu/23



As in other great ideas, so in the General Strike we find analogies in history, the unconscious forebodings of great poets and thinkers.

Already in old Rome, 494 years before Christ, there took place ("Secessio in montem sacrum") the marching-out of the Plebeians to the holy mountains, when they demanded equalisation from the Patricians. This first General Strike in history, the strike of the Plebeians, was crowned with complete victory. However, let us return to the present. As one of the first, undoubtedly unconscious, apostles of the General Strike, we can consider Mirabeau, when he in 1789, in the National Convention of the Privileged, thundered towards them: "Look out! Do not enrage the common people who produce everything; who only need to fold their arms to terrify you!"

Fifty years later Max Stirner wrote in his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" ("The Ego and His Own") the words: "The working men have the most terrible power in their hands; and if once they would be aware of it and use it, nothing could resist them; all they would need to do would be to quit work and consider what they produced to be their own, and enjoy the benefit of it." This is the sense of the strikes and riots uprising here and there.

The well-known stanza of George Herwegh says:—

Could not this serve as an issue for the General Strike? William Morris, in his beautiful dream of a happy and free society, "News from Nowhere," tells us how the old society broke down through the shocks of several successive revolutionary General Strikes and made room for the new free society.

Already in the congress of the International in Geneva in the year 1866 the thought was expressed that sectional strikes never could produce lasting effects, therefore it would be necessary to organise large international strikes, which would be conducted by the International. Principally, however, this idea was considered as a means to prevent war—to refuse service in case of war also as a military strike, and the discontinuance of production of munitions of war. This idea was proposed by the Frenchman Charles Longuet and the Belgian Caesar de Paepe, and adopted in the following congress of the International in 1868. Later on, this conception of the