Page:The Social General Strike - Arnold Roller (1912).djvu/9

 During the miners' General Strike in the United States, and in October, 1903, in Bilbao in Spain, the working men destroyed the beam supports in the mines, which practically closed them.

The Spanish and American miners accomplished much by the application of fire and dynamite, the latter of which they could easily get, as they used it in their daily work. During the General Strike in Holland it often happened that the strikers sunk a ship crosswise in the river, before a bridge, and stopped all traffic by water.

The strike of the dock workers, who refused to unload the vessels, caused in this way great famines in articles bought in foreign countries. The recent reports from Barcelona show us how the bourgeois increased the number of strikers by closing their stores and laying off their employees, and how the proletarians, forced by hunger, stormed the provision stores, so that the soldiers had to defend them. Universally known is the following amusing detail from Barcelona. As long as the soldiers protected the provision stores the rich bourgeois could still send their servants to the bakeries and butchers' shops to buy provisions. In all the side streets and at the entrance of the houses these girls were stopped and their food stuffs taken away from them, and brought to the hungry families of the strikers.

The idea of providing the strikers with food and clothing during the strike by the organisation of a working men's Production and Communication Brotherhood has been abandoned, because it was evident that in such a struggle the ruling classes would pay no sentimental regard to law, and simply seize the provisions of the proletariat for themselves and their army.

From the above it can readily be seen that the military forces could not very easily rehabilitate order in the beginning of the General Strike, as was done in the street revolts heretofore, as in the year 1848, where the soldiers only needed to be drawn together in the centre of the large cities, and simply shoot into the masses, which were crowded before the muzzles of their guns. No—the General Strike, as it has been pictured here, entirely changes the situation.

As before, it would be the duty of the military forces to-day to protect the Government buildings and the palaces of the wealthy from the hatred of the masses, because all the central stations of government, such as police stations, court houses, prisons, national banks and ministeries of finances might be threatened by the masses. Also single persons, prominently hated by the masses, might run the risk of suffering injury to life or limb. Above all, the army would try to protect them.

But it would also have to try and keep the railroads running, and for that it would be necessary to not only man the railway stations with soldiers, not only to make drivers, firemen, guards, and signalmen of soldiers, but also to protect every train with the proper amount of soldiers; and very likely it would be necessary to station guards all along the line to protect the signals, to keep the track from