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.
Great importance was also attached to the general strike at the Geneva Congress of the Alliance held September 1, 1873, although it was universally admitted that this required a well-formed organization of the working class and plentiful funds. And there's the rub. ... The governments, especially if encouraged by political abstention, will never allow the organization or the funds of the workers to reach such a level.
The poor were wise, who, by the rich oppressed,
Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude.