The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only a product of popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is, whether the general strike contains everything that the Socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat.
- George Sorel, Reflections on Violence
Since violence is clearly illegible as violent, we may as well admit that the type of violence known as "resistance" and "anti-capitalist" struggle will work with as much insipid, invisible, globe-engulfing force as anything like "capitalism". Keeping in mind that the "capital" of Das Kapital is more an arche-principle of any organon, than the designation of any specific economic system, it might seem as if violence itself were in any case anti-capitalist. The specific illegibility of violence as violent (our inability to identify all possible consumption as violent, for instance) leads us to the same equipollence we find surrounding so many concepts, such as sovereignty, perpetrator, terrorism, and roguishness. So, of course, capitalism is auto-immune, as Marx and so many others have pointed out. But, further, if its violence has failed to live up to the stupidity of our concept of the "event" as irruptive, as violent, then so, by any argument, must its self-violence.
It is for this reason that the violent destruction of aggregate demand in "advanced" economies must be judged along the same lines as the violence of the general strike once was: not does it "work" (as if we could know what this means), but is its futurity proletarian? Does it expect an aneconomy of the other, not knowing what it will be? In this way, and only in this way, is the myth of the general strike growing out of its long, long infancy...
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