Leftists have sometimes romanticised the wildcat as the authentic expr — General strike

"The General Strike has taught the working classes more in four days than years of talking could have done."

"It was military might, not pacifism, that defeated Hitler". Not exactly. Examples abound, both large and small, in Denmark, Holland, Norway, France, and elsewhere, in which nonviolent resistance defied the Nazi onslaught. In those places, Gene Sharp writes in The Politics of Nonviolent Action, “patriots resisted their Nazi overlords and internal puppets by such weapons as underground newspapers, labor slowdowns, general strikes, refusal of collaboration, special boycotts of German troops and quislings, and non-cooperation with fascist controls and efforts to restructure their societies’ institutions.” The defiance tended to be hastily organized and was not widespread. If the opposite were true—if Hitler had been resisted in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, not the early 1940s, and in more places—the war’s death toll might have been much lower."

"It may have been a magnificent demonstration of the solidarity of labour, but it was at the same time a most pathetic evidence of the failure of all of us to live and work together for the good of all. I recognize the courage that it took on the part of the leaders who had taken a false step to recede from that position unconditionally...It took a great deal more courage than it takes their critics now, who are blaming them for not going straight on, whatever happened. But if that strike showed solidarity, sympathy with the miners—whatever you like—it showed something else far greater. It proved the stability of the whole fabric of our own country, and to the amazement of the world not a shot was fired. We were saved by common sense and the good temper of our own people."

"It is Northern Ireland that provides the classic contemporary demonstration of Clausewitzian principles in action. In 1974 the Ulster Protestants rejected powersharing under the 1973 Sunningdale agreement to the point of launching a general strike which the British army warned the British government it could not handle. The government thereupon abandoned the project. But in 1998 the majority of Unionist political parties and at least half the Unionist electorate have come to accept power-sharing under the deal brokered by Mo Mowlam. Wherein lies the essential difference between 1973–74 and 1998? It lies in the profound yearning on the island of Ireland and on the British mainland (including Whitehall and Westminster) for "peace" after the intervening 25 years of unrelenting "war" on the part of the IRA, years of violence of the most extreme kind intended (to quote Clausewitz) "to compel our opponent to fulfil our will". Thus all the talk of compromise and reconciliation in Northern Ireland is just so much small-l liberal blather disguising the Clausewitzian reality that by their "continuation of politics by other means" the IRA have indeed compelled their opponents to fulfil their will."

"In the Bakuninst program a general strike is the lever employed by which the social revolution is started. One fine morning all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at the most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use this opportunity to pull down the entire old society."

"Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it."