TCS Daily - Paró General! The Return of the General Strike - by Lee Harris

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The Return of the General Strike - by Lee Harris

The photograph showed an elderly Hispanic man holding up a placard with the words Paró General written on it, and it accompanied an internet article about the strike of immigrant workers scheduled for May the First in the US -- a strike that its sponsors pledged would "shut down" cities. As I glanced at the picture, groping through my very limited mental Spanish lexicon, I made the connection: Paró General is the Spanish phrase for general strike. No wonder, I thought to myself, that so many responsible Hispanic leaders have expressed concern about the possible backlash from the projected Paró General.

For most Americans, the phrase "general strike" may not pack as much of a wallop as it does for Europeans. But it was once a revolutionary slogan, and one that was embraced by one of the more fascinating and original French thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, Georges Sorel. In his most famous book, Reflections on Violence, published in 1906, Sorel argued that the general strike was the utlimate weapon in the arsenal of revolution, one that would lead to an apocalyptic transformation from capitalism to socialism. Yet, in the century that followed the publication of Reflections on Violence, Sorel's faith in the revolutionary promise of the general strike inevitably came to seem a bit puzzling. Indeed, not quite four years ago, I wrote that Sorel's myth of the general strike "never quite caught on," and that is why I was somewhat startled to see the placard proclaiming Paró General. For it suddenly made me ask myself, "Did Sorel write his book a century too soon? Is Sorel's general strike ready to have a comeback?"

Sorel believed that it was only by returning to the law of the jungle that power could be put back in the hands of those who deserved it -- the warlike, the heroic, the ones willing to die for their beliefs. For Sorel, the normal political channels through which a liberal democracy selected its managerial class were carefully arranged so that only non-entities would end up with power.