General strike: neither ploy nor dream
There had been general strikes before 1905. The so-called Plug Riots of July-August 1842 were in fact a spontaneously-spreading general strike over large parts of England against wage cuts and for the ten-hour working day. The Belgian workers launched three general strikes, in 1891, 1893, and 1902, to widen voting rights. But the mass strike movement which erupted in Russia in 1905 after ten years of strikes and agitation by a fresh and growing industrial working class, and after the defeat of Tsarism in its war with Japan, was something else again. It was a new starting point for all...