General Strike Research Articles

“Art Is the Armchair in Which the State Sits for Its Own Pleasure”

Abstract In mid-January 1925, André Breton published an editorial, “La dernière grève” (The Last Strike) in the opening pages of the second issue of the new Parisian journal he helped produce, La Révolution surréaliste (Surrealist revolution). Breton’s essay discusses the tentative economic value of cultural and intellectual production in the capitalist economy and calls for artists, philosophers, and scholars to undertake a general strike for a period lasting between several nights to one year. Breton’s “Last Strike” essay influenced another and much more well-known call for an art strike by a French writer who was closely aligned with surrealism, Alain Jouffroy. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Breton’s 1925 “Last Strike” essay in relation to Jouffroy’s late 1960s statements on the art strike and the revolutionary abolition of art, in order to determine the differences and similarities between their approaches, and to demonstrate how surrealism is essential to Jouffroy’s theories about the abolition of art as a key aspect of anticapitalist culture.

“If your ox does not pull, what are you going to do?”: Persistent Violence in South Africa’s Deep-Level Gold Mines and Its Contribution to the 1922 Rand Rebellion

Abstract The 1922 Rand Rebellion was the only instance of worker protest in the twentieth century in which a modern state used tanks and military airplanes, as well as mounted infantry, to suppress striking workers. These circumstances were unprecedented in their own time and for most of the century. The compressed and intensely violent rebellion of twenty thousand white mineworkers in South Africa’s gold mines had several overlapping features. Within a matter of days—from 6 to 12 March—it went from a general strike to a racial pogrom and insurrection against the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Throughout all these twists and turns, the battle standard remained, “Workers of the world unite and fight for a White South Africa!” Race and violence were integral features of South Africa’s industrial history, but they do not explain the moments when discrete groups of people chose to use them as weapons or bargaining tools. At the close of the First World War, for instance, South Africa’s white mine workers demanded a more comprehensive distribution of the privileges of white supremacy, but in a manner that was both violent and contentious. Consequently, South Africa’s immediate postwar period became one of the most violent moments in its history.

The Poverty of Bureaucracy: New Left Theory and Practice in the Canadian Labour Movement during the 1960s and 1970s

This essay examines the New Left’s impact on the Canadian labour movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, it argues that in large industrial unions such as the UAW, New Left ideas that were popular amongst the rank and file were stifled by the more conservative labour bureaucrats. However, in public sector unions and unions unaffiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress, New Left ideas were often able to flourish, and these more radical unions were sometimes able to obtain substantial gains for their members throughout the 1970s while also fostering a broader sense of class consciousness in Canadian society — culminating most notably in the Common Front’s general strikes in Quebec. Furthermore, this essay suggests that New Left ideas were more popular in public sector and independent unions because these unions had a larger proportion of women in comparison to other unions, and women at this time had a greater incentive to embrace transformative ideologies than men.

People Don’t Give Up!

In 2017 images of demonstrations, riot police, and tanks filled social media worldwide. Most of the videos and media coverage reported on the first wave of #BlackLivesMatter uprisings were catalyzed by police brutality in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. In June of that year, similar footage came from Buenaventura, on the Pacific coast of Colombia. This predominantly Afro-descendantpo rt city is responsible for the transit of about 60 percent of the country’s commerce, while unemployment and inequality are rampant, and the infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. The affected local communities responded to these conditions of structural racism with a direct action named Paro Civico: a general strike planned for years by a coalition of grass-rootsAfro-Colombi an organizations demanding clean drinking water, health care, education, and policies to combat drug trafficking-related violence. Resisting police attacks while negotiating with a high-ranked delegation from the Colombian government, the months-long general strike achieved the majority of its goals and, most importantly, galvanized the momentum into the election of one of the movement’s leaders as mayor of Buenaventura. However, the leaders of the Paro Cívico’s Executive Committee have been emphatic in naming this a multiethnic movement and rejecting any specific racial discourses as organizing guiding principles for the direct action. In addition to contextualizing Paro Cívico, this article uses Tianna Paschel’s concept of “organizing while black,” to explain this omission in a racial context determined by the politics of mestizaje in Colombia. It also explains how Paro Cívico strategically exhibited the political power of the communities of the African diaspora without verbalizing it, becoming one of multiple factors that ushered in a new chapter of racial politics in the nation.

‘Solidarity Across Borders’: online gender activism and the construction of a Middle East and North African regional public space

ABSTRACT Academic discourse frequently speaks of a gender violence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), suggesting a distinctive gender violence that is tied to a geographic location. Within the framework of a digital ethnography, this research examines whether gender activists operating in digital spaces themselves conceptualise and mobilise around their struggle using a regional lens, combining observations, a multimodal analyses of social media content, and interviews with 20 digital activists to do so. Challenging orientalist narratives, I centre the ontological agency of these (predominantly) young, (predominantly) women digital activists from and within the region in defining, contesting, and (re)producing the MENA within their resistance to gender violence. This timely intervention comes after a string of feminicides in June/July 2022 led to calls for a regional Women’s General Strike going viral across social media platforms. Following the strike’s slogan, تضامن عابر للحدود (Solidarity Across Borders), this research explores the potentialities and limitations of regional solidarities as a vehicle for building feminist public spaces. Contributing to debates within transnational feminist research regarding activism’s multiple spatialities, I examine how strike participants, through their framings of regional gender-based violence and the networks and identities built around said framings, navigate sameness and difference in dynamic and sometimes divisive ways. Within the strike context, we see a fragile regional public being formed that simultaneously challenges and reproduces narratives of gender violence in the MENA in ways that demonstrate both the salience of regionality and the importance of including activist voices in our regional constructions.

Geological mapping and mineral exploration in Francistown region, north east Botswana from integration of ASTER TIR and aeromagnetic data

To map the region's geology and mineral exploration, this study looked at how remote sensing satellite imaging from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Thermal Infrared (TIR) sensor and aircraft geophysics may be used. The Francistown region forms part of the Zimbabwe craton, northeast of Botswana. It comprises felsic rock types, including granite and dry river sand, mafic-ultramafic rocks, and gneiss country rock. Based on their spectral emissivity responses, mafic-ultramafic units and quartz-rich units were discovered. These units are important targets for the discovery of mineral resources. The research region can be described as convoluted, fractured, intruded, metamorphosed, and ultimately worn from a geological and geophysical standpoint. Several remote sensing and aeromagnetic approaches were employed. The false color composite (FCC) and mineral indices using ASTER TIR data provided helpful information for delineating the area's geology and concentration of major-rock-forming minerals. The aeromagnetic data extracted lineaments well, and the Center for Exploration Target (CET) grid analysis system was very helpful. The CET Porphyry Analysis technique was applied in mapping near-circular porphyry features, which are good indicators of possible sites with high mineralization potential. The analysis of the lineament map shows that mineral deposits are mostly along the NE-SW direction. The results from the ASTER TIR and aeromagnetic enhancements indicate the occurrence of mafic-ultramafic rocks and felsic-rich units, which have been documented to host mineralization in the region. Porphyry structures are also mapped successfully along the general strike of the geological structure in the study area. The combination of these methods proved their success, and they can be used further in other regions of high mineral potential and lithological mapping for their cost efficiency and reliability.

The General Strike and the Specter of Anarchism in the German “Mass Strike Debate”

The General Strike and the Specter of Anarchism in the German “Mass Strike Debate”

Tectonic pozition and metamorphism of rocks in the Chara-Tokko iron ore region

The article provides the material on the geological structure, structures, tectonic position and metamorphism of rocks developed within the Chara-Tokko iron ore region, identified in the western part of the Aldan-Stanovoy shield. Most researchers agree that the Chara-Tokko iron ore region is confined to a trough that formed on the site of one of the long-lived deep fault zones of meridional strike. This zone received various names (Derbegelakhskaya, Charo-Imalykskaya, Tarynakhskaya, etc.). Currently, the fault zone and the trough trough are called Chara-Tokko after the name of the iron ore region. It is assumed that to the south, the iron ore deposits of the Chara group (Sulumatskoye, Nizhne-Sakukanskoye) are confined to the continuation of this trough trough. The nature and conditions of metamorphism can be judged by the mineral associations of some rocks of the sedimentary productive complex, such as metapelites or ferruginous quartzites. It is noted that metapelites, now represented by gneisses and mica schists with high-alumina minerals, are especially important for this. Based on their characteristic mineral associations, three temperature facies were identified in the Chara-Tokko iron ore region: staurolite, biotite-muscovite gneiss and orthoclase-biotite-sillimanite. The internal structure of the Chara-Tokko iron ore field were not sufficiently studied and is extremely controversial. The boundaries of metamorphic zones are mainly parallel to the general strike of the structures and only in rare cases intersect the stripes of productive sedimentary units. After the temperature maximum of progressive metamorphism and past granitization, a significant period of cooling began, which was heated and in some places impregnated with layer-by-layer injections of migmatites and bodies of granites of the Borsala sequence. Gradual cooling was accompanied by regressive metamorphism with the formation of low-temperature minerals at the expense of higher-temperature ones. It is believed that ferruginous quartzites of the western part of the Aldan-Stanovoi shield are part of sedimentary-volcanogenic rock complexes that fill suture troughs or troughs confined to long-lived deep fault zones. The processes of regressive metamorphism manifested themselves most intensively in tectonic zones. The nature of the processes depends on the composition of the host rocks. The regressive phenomena of continuous chloritization and epidotization are associated with the local movement of components, mainly calcium.

Black Education as the General Strike: The Radical Origins of African American Teaching and Learning

Black Education as the General Strike: The Radical Origins of African American Teaching and Learning

‘Sunderland Has Lost a Figure That Will Go Down in History’: Marion Phillips in the North East of England, 1923–1932

Selected as the Labour Party’s chief woman officer in 1918, Dr Marion Phillips played a prominent role in the British labour women’s movement before, during and after the Great War. However, her brief stint as Labour MP for Sunderland between 1929 and 1931 has not attracted the same level of academic attention as the parliamentary careers of other early women MPs. Phillips’s connection to the North East of England throughout the 1920s illuminates her work as chief woman officer, as well as the prominence of the labour women’s movement in the region. This article focuses on Phillips’s relationship with the labour movement in County Durham to understand how she was selected as a parliamentary candidate for Sunderland. The annual women’s gala, first held in June 1923, and the Women’s Committee for the Relief of Miners’ Wives and Children formed in response to the 1926 General Strike, are crucial to understanding her early connections to the region. Phillips’s sudden death in early 1932 led to a wave of local and national commemorations demonstrating the legacy of her political work.

The 2023 Mobilisation against Pension Reform in France: Some Elements of Analysis

Abstract This article analyses the exceptional social movement that took place in France between January and June 2023 against the increase in the retirement age imposed by the government. The mobilisation took place within a unified framework that brought together all the trade unions and encouraged massive participation by workers. On several occasions, the demonstrations brought together more than three million people. However, although there were strong individual strikes, these did not develop into a general strike. This article explores these contradictions by looking at the various industrial relations reforms that have weakened union action in the workplace and now make it difficult to build strike action.

How The "Great Resignation" and COVID Unemployment Have Eroded the Employer Sponsored Insurance Model and Access to Healthcare.

Pre-pandemic, employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) covered 175 million workers and their dependents, the equivalent of 49% of the country's total population. ESI, a valuable tax preference to employer and employee alike, spurred worker job dependence on employers resulting in access to healthcare dependent upon continued employment. With the advent of the pandemic and the dramatic increase in unemployment, the number of uninsured increased by more than 2.7 million people. Then, unemployment proliferated further by an unprecedented exit from the workforce dubbed the "Great Resignation." Over 47 million Americans voluntarilyquit their jobs in a movement characterized as a general labor strike. The pandemic opened the floodgates to workers' concerns about COVID safety in the workplace, wage stagnationdespite increases in the cost of living, enduring job dissatisfaction, and increased demand for a remote-working environment. Data shows that the unemployed shifted to the Affordable Care Act marketplace or to the public payer option, Medicaid, for coverage. This shift signals a change, post-pandemic, away from the destabilizing system of access to care based on employment and unwanted job dependence and provides a policy argument favoring the more stabilizing influence of public insurance options in the health insurance market.

The dialectical debt-image

This essay asks what is “the image of unpayable debt”? I approach Ferreira da Silva’s assemblage from the angle delineated by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “image,” a multi-layered composite of time-spaces. I include Benjamin’s weak Messianism, via the democratic debt jubilee, and the general strike reconfigured for the present as the feminist strike against debt. The “image” formed in this process is multiple and sedimented with layers of time-space, containing a caesura. This “break” is comprised of weak Messianism and blackness. The essay concludes by asking how the debt-image can be projected into the world as the general strike.

It started on the railroads: the journey of an anarcho-syndicalist in the Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT This paper aims to trace the journey of Manuel António Bôto, a Portuguese anarcho-syndicalist militant during the Spanish Civil War, who lived and worked in the region of Setúbal, near Lisbon. Bôto, along with many other militants, was forced to flee to Spain as a result of the repression and violence that followed the general strike and bomb attacks of the 31 January 1934 movement. This was one of the biggest attacks against the Estado Novo, organised by multiple factions of anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and communists. In Spain, Bôto took part in the Spanish Civil War, voluntarily enlisting himself in the Quinto Regimiento de Milícias Populares (5º RMP) in Madrid, and, later, was given missions by the SIM (Servicio de Información Militar). Given Salazar’s support to Franco’s forces, men like Bôto saw this participation as a way to oppose the Estado Novo and the fascist wave that crossed Europe. We will focus on the social aspects of Bôto’s experience in these years, mainly with his integration in groups of support and communication with Portugal, through organisations like the Federación Anarchista Ibérica (FAI) and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), or the Núcleo Cultural Português de Madrid.

How the influenza pandemic 1918/19 affected teacher education and schools in several ways − a case study from Switzerland

ABSTRACT Outbreaks of respiratory infections have impact on schools. The present article draws upon sources from the school archives of the former teachers’ seminary Muristalden in the city of Bern in Switzerland. The aim is to ascertain how the various pandemic waves 1918/1919 affected school operations and the people living at Muristalden. During the summer wave 1918 (Phase A), the summer vacations were extended until end of August 1918 to limit infection spread. During the strong second wave in the autumn/winter 1918 (Phase B), the entire autumn quarter was cancelled. However, as this wave coincided with the General Strike in November 1918, during which Muristalden was occupied by the military, many families living at the seminary became ill due to the high prevalence of flu among soldiers. A kind of distance learning was instituted by requiring students to complete homework. At the beginning of 1919 (Phase C), when most of the official measures had been lifted again, considerable gaps in students’ knowledge became evident. Those seminarians who had not yet suffered from the flu became ill within a very short time. This rapid spread resulted in many and long absences, hindering regular teaching and learning. The epidemic resulted in very few fatalities at Muristalden but many seminarians had to struggle with longer-termed after-effects. While the Muristalden case study is just one piece of a jigsaw that many have forgotten, together with other case studies it will contribute to a better understanding of past pandemics and their impacts on education.

Revolt with a Revolutionary Perspective

At the zenith of the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) protests in October to December 2022, the call for (general) strikes became a rallying point for activists who were seeking to increase the protests’ social reach and political strength in the face of increasing state repression. Therefore labor provides an advantageous analytical lens for exploring some of the constraints and potentials of the social dynamics of the WLF protests.

QUANTITATIVE LAWS OF A MORPOLOGICAL PATTERN FOR ABRASION SLOPES WITN A LANDSLIDE PROCESS WITHIN THE CRYOLITHOZONE (THE COASTS OF THE KANIN AND YAMAL PENINSULAS AS EXAMPLES)<a href="#FN1"><sup>1</sup></a>

Coast landslide processes take a special place in the study and monitoring of processes in permafrost under the climate change, however, not much attention has been paid to the morphology and quantitative characteristics of the landslides. The aim of the work is to reveal quantitative relationships between the abrasion slopes and a landslide process for coasts within the cryolithozone, mainly in contact with the adjacent interfluves. The research is based on the interpretation of high-resolution space imagery at five costal sites of the Kanin and Yamal peninsulas. The study was focused on the morphological features of the upper part of the landslides at the border with the adjacent interfluve. This border is a combination of arc elements. Besides, there are arcuate residual sections of the interfluve surface, corresponding to different stages of landslide process, in some places on the slope. Analysis of the coastline from images gave us such characteristics of landslides as the length of the arcs forming the boundary, the length of the chords of the arcs, the arrows of the arcs, the average radii of curvature, the central angles of the arc, the angles of orientation of the chords with respect to the vector of the general strike of the corresponding section of the coastline. Some of these characteristics were obtained by direct measurement from satellite images, the others by calculation. The analysis included 30 samples with a volume of 103–183 elements. Statistical processing using Pearson’s goodness-of-fit test showed that in the vast majority of the sites, the distributions of the landslide upper boundary arc sizes, chords, arc arrows, and curvature radii, as well as central angles, correspond to a lognormal one. The chord orientations with respect to the strike of the site are normally distributed. The values of the distribution parameters of the studied quantitative characteristics of the landslide morphological features differ and depend on the physical-geographical and engineering-geocryological conditions of specific areas.

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

The middle class and the modalities of political protest: evidence from the Arab world

AbstractObjectiveThe middle class has historically played a decisive role in mass movements and rebellions against the status quo, including in both peaceful and violent protests that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa following the events of the Arab Spring. Yet, we know little about why the middle class tends to be over‐represented in protest movements, or why that protest takes nonviolent versus violent forms.MethodsWe develop a model in which protest constitutes a “costly” signal of discontent, where violent actions are more costly than peaceful demonstrations and where the cost of action increases with individual income. Under such assumptions, the upper‐middle class will engage in nonviolent protest, the lower middle class will support violence against the government, while the poorest and richest will abstain from opposition activities.ResultsSurvey data from the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll across 20 Arab countries supports these hypotheses. Using both parametric and semi‐parametric analyses, we find that participation in nonviolent protests and general strikes rises from the first (lowest) and peaks at the fourth income quintile, then declines thereafter. Meanwhile, support for political violence rises sharply between the first and second quintiles, falling for individuals in the upper quintiles. Our findings are robust to broader measures of wealth and status, as well as to corrections for regime type, levels of regime support, and joint determination of anti‐regime behaviors.ConclusionsThese findings shed light on why certain socioeconomic groups engage in anti‐governmental behaviors, while others do not, and suggest that income subgroups within the middle class may choose different modalities of protest.

Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East

Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East