There's a moment in almost every major labor conflict when someone floats the idea: What if everyone just stopped? Not one factory, not one industry—everyone. The buses don't run. The ports go silent. The lights flicker as power workers join the line. It's the nuclear option of labor action, and it terrifies people in power precisely because it works.

General strikes are rare precisely because they're so potent. They reveal something most of us prefer not to examine too closely: modern society runs on the daily consent of millions of workers who could, theoretically, withdraw that consent at any moment. When they actually do it together, the effect is less like a negotiating tactic and more like an earthquake.

Understanding what triggers these moments—and why they succeed or fail—tells us something fundamental about how power actually operates. Not the power written into laws and contracts, but the power that emerges when ordinary people recognize their collective leverage and decide to use it.

General strikes don't happen because workers are angry. Workers are always angry about something. They happen when separate grievances across different industries suddenly feel like the same grievance—when nurses, dockworkers, and teachers all realize they're fighting the same fight.

This alignment typically requires what historians call a 'precipitating event'—something that crystallizes diffuse frustration into focused rage. It might be a massacre of strikers, a government crackdown, or an economic shock that hits everyone simultaneously. The key isn't the event itself but its ability to make connections visible.

Take the 1919 Seattle General Strike. It wasn't just about shipyard wages. It was about returning soldiers finding no jobs, wartime promises of reform evaporating, and a sense that workers had been essential during the crisis but disposable afterward. The shipyard dispute became a vessel for much larger feelings.

The combustion also requires organizational infrastructure—unions, councils, networks of communication that can coordinate action across industries. Spontaneous general strikes are vanishingly rare. What looks spontaneous usually reflects years of relationship-building that suddenly catches fire when conditions align.

Takeaway

General strikes emerge not from single grievances but from moments when workers across industries recognize their separate struggles as one shared conflict.

The 1919 Seattle General Strike lasted five days. Workers ran the city—they organized garbage collection, maintained essential services, kept the peace. Then it ended, somewhat anticlimactically, without achieving its stated goals. The mayor called it a revolution; the workers called it a demonstration of possibility.

Compare this to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, where general strikes evolved into something far more radical. Workers didn't just stop production—they seized it. Factories continued operating under worker control. The strike became a transformation rather than a pause.

The difference wasn't primarily about worker militancy. It was about context. Seattle's strike occurred in a stable political system where the threat of federal intervention loomed large. Barcelona's happened amid governmental collapse, where power was genuinely up for grabs. The same tactic produced radically different outcomes because the surrounding structures differed.

What both cases share is the revelation effect: for a moment, the curtain pulled back on how society actually functions. In Seattle, middle-class observers were shocked to discover that workers could run essential services without managers. In Barcelona, the revelation went further—that perhaps the managers were never necessary at all.

Takeaway

The same strike tactic produces wildly different results depending on whether the surrounding political system is stable or fracturing. Context shapes what's possible.

If general strikes are so powerful, why don't they happen more often? The answer reveals uncomfortable truths about collective action. The very conditions that make workers desperate enough to strike also make coordination hardest—economic precarity means people can't afford to lose even a day's pay.

There's also the free-rider problem at massive scale. A general strike only works if nearly everyone participates. But each individual worker has an incentive to let others take the risk while they keep earning. Overcoming this requires either extraordinary solidarity or organizational structures that can enforce participation.

Modern labor markets have evolved to make general strikes harder. The decline of industrial unionism, the rise of gig work, the geographical dispersion of supply chains—all of these fragment worker identity and complicate coordination. It's difficult to feel solidarity with someone you've never met who works in a different sector in a different city.

Yet the infrastructure question cuts both ways. Social media and instant communication could theoretically enable coordination at unprecedented scale. The 2019 climate strikes, while not traditional labor actions, demonstrated that millions can synchronize action globally. The technical barriers have fallen even as the social ones have risen.

Takeaway

General strikes require solving a massive coordination problem where individual incentives conflict with collective power. Modern economies have made this harder—but new tools might eventually make it easier.

The general strike persists as labor's ultimate threat because it exposes a truth that comfortable societies prefer to forget: the whole edifice depends on daily cooperation that could be withdrawn. Every commute, every delivery, every surgery performed represents a choice that workers make—usually without thinking about it as a choice.

Understanding general strikes isn't just historical curiosity. It's a lens for seeing how power actually distributes in modern economies, where the weak points are, and what kinds of solidarity might still be possible despite fragmentation.

The next time you read about a strike in one industry, notice whether the coverage treats it as isolated or connected. The difference matters more than you might think.