The General Strike Was An Economic Bust

Found via Pajamas, filmmaker Andrew Marcus has video of yesterday’s pro-illegal immigrant (or at least, hey, that’s what critics are calling it) protest in Los Angeles <that’s well worth your attention.

Jonah Goldberg And Lee Harris look at the Depression-era proto-Marxist tactic of The General Strike. Jonah writes:

I see that Lee Harris has beaten me to the punch in calling attention to the smirking ghost of Georges Sorel in the Day Without Immigrants protests (I just wrote up a somewhat similar piece for elsewhere). He makes many excellent points and I am very reluctant to argue with Lee because if smarts were people, Lee Harris would be China.

Nonetheless, I think he muddies or misses an important distinction in his discussion of Sorel and the General Strike. He seems to be working from the assumption that Sorel believed the General Strike would in fact bring down capitalism and bring about true socialism if it were successful. He writes, for example, that “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.” It’s my understanding