University of Colorado at Boulder, Ph.D., 1981. 546 p.
DAI, VOL. 42-08A, Page 3707

The work is divided into three sections reflecting the theoretical development of the general strike and the problems of its implementation.

The first part is an overview of the origins of the general strike in the early radical movement. Particular attention is given to the role of the general strike in the English Reform movement of 1832, the First International, and nineteenth century anarchism. Despite sporadic mention of the concept of the general strike during the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth century, however, there were few detailed elaborations on the general strike at that time. The importance of the general strike for the radicals was that it represented a vision of how people could emancipate themselves from oppression by a mass refusal to work.

The second section focuses on syndicalism and the general strike. Those labor movements are discussed in which the workers believed that the new society could be brought forth from the old by means of the proletariat’s economic power as embodied in the general strike. Despite their commitment to the general strike, the syndicalists failed to develop a successful method of staging the general strike. Consequently, a syndicalist praxis of the general strike did not develop, and the general strike never served as an effective, dynamic working class weapon for the syndicalists.

The third part deals with social democracy and the mass strike. The social democrats called their concept of the general work stoppage the mass strike which they saw as a tactical tool to be employed in the appropriate circumstances.… The work finishes with an epilogue treating the general strike from World War I to the present".