Abolition, Black Ultraradicalism, and the Generation of the General Strike

Abstract

This essay unearths an alternative genealogy of the general strike by tracing the concept's first articulation back to the struggle against Atlantic racial slavery. The famed originator of the general strike idea, the English radical William Benbow, turns out to have adapted the revolutionary program of his associate Robert Wedderburn, a Jamaican-born Black abolitionist and “ultraradical” communist. Wedderburn's 1817 abolitionist text on the general strike, energized by the Haitian Revolution and calling for global rebellion across both the Caribbean and Europe, reveals the theory and practice of the general strike to have always been a weapon of Black radicalism and one especially shaped by enslaved women. With this framework established through the recovery of Wedderburn's importance, the essay offers theoretical reflections on some of the key issues that the general strike inherently raises around work, temporality, the idea of the proletariat, and communism, while engaging several important thinkers of the general strike (in particular W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Benjamin, and Saidiya Hartman). Ultimately, the essay argues for approaching the general strike in the light of its convergence with abolition.

What if the strike precedes the worker? The strike has long been considered the essential tactic of the working class, an action most radically instantiated in the form of the general strike: a complete withdrawal of labor and productive economic activity across a preponderance of major sectors. Yet outlines of this much-promoted, much-derided, much-discussed conception of proletarian action, one closely associated with currents of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, have been far from actually “general,” traditionally adopting certain delimited conceptions of a laborer (white, male, waged, industrial). Such a picture of the worker—and thus, in this paradigm, the striker—does not encompass most proletarians, certainly not today and not even in the mid-nineteenth century, when the concept of the general strike is usually taken to have originated in the burgeoning European workers' movement. This state of affairs is both a symptom and cause of the overall conflation of worker and proletarian. But the proletariat is not strictly identical with the working class; more originally, it designates those who must sell their labor-power because they do not own property or means of subsistence, and even more originally and radically according to some early formulations of Marx, it designates that which is constitutively excluded and suffers “wrong in general”—that which has nothing and is nothing. The proletariat's universality, or generality, is only its suffering and nothingness; it is negatively formulated as pure collapse and general “dissolution” (Auflösung).¹

This problem of mapping categories to concrete existence and to tactics—of approaching the proletariat's suffering “wrong in general”—is inseparable from the question of generality: what is general or generalizing in the general strike? What force governs or attends the generation of generality? In tracing the first articulation of the general strike back to the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world, it becomes possible to recover another genealogy of this concept and another bearing toward generality itself: a notion of the general strike aimed from the first at regimes of racial capitalist control and accumulation. The general strike first emerges out of Black resistance to slavery and is thus born out of the most general, world-making wrong; but because of this, it gestures toward a generality, a groundless commonness, that moves (along the) outside of the modern world and its fundamental categories. In this account, the general strike names a movement of generalization detached from its exclusive adhesion to a narrow formation of striker-as-worker, and converges with all kinds of strikes and struggles, especially around social reproduction, antiwork and antiproductivism, and the abolition of prisons and police. Thinking the general strike as a generalizing force does not turn analytical or political focus away from the singularity of discrete struggles and historical particularities; instead, it seeks to intensify their powers of rupture and thereby to loosen the enclosures of their discreteness in the name of a universal downfall. Ultimately, this other genealogy of the general strike tends toward a delegitimation and deracination that is nothing short of cosmic—a “dissolution of the existing world order” (Marx)—and forces a confrontation with time itself. Understanding this equiprimordial intimacy of the general strike and abolition, found at the intersection of Black resistance and rebellion in the Caribbean, insurrectionary London ultraradicalism, and the early workers' movement, also reorients the present situation: it allows us to see both contemporary strikes and new abolition movements in the buried light of their once and future unity.

As on a Holiday

Theorizations of the general strike in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are legion, but it is almost unanimously agreed that the idea comes from the nineteenth. In fact, practically every account of the general strike traces it back to a single figure: the English radical William Benbow (1787–1864),² and more specifically to a pamphlet Benbow published in 1832 titled Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes. A beguiling and “shadowy figure” who worked as a prolific publisher of pornography alongside radical literature, Benbow had a revolutionary career spanning five decades, most notably with the Chartists, but today he is best remembered for Grand National Holiday.³ Though Benbow does not use the term “general strike” in this remarkable document, he lays out a program for precisely such a gesture, calling for a complete withdrawal of labor for a full month by “the working classes.”⁴ As a “grand national holiday,” this general strike is intended to turn the world upside down and institute a radically new, egalitarian England:

The emergent class consciousness of this text is acutely felt; Benbow rails against the “monstrous power” of the ruling elite and repeatedly urges workers to have “UNITY OF THOUGHT AND ACTION” to overcome their oppressors (GNH, 3, 6). In addition to the central proposal to “cease from labour during the short space of four weeks,” a few other key aspects of this rousing proclamation stand out (GNH, 8). First, Benbow makes clear that the general strike and its essential “unity” will not happen without organization and “preparation.” This readying assumes a generalizing momentum (“universal preparations”) and is characterized by a necessary sociality (“Every man must . . . assist his neighbor in preparing”) and attentiveness to ecological agricultural rhythms (“neither in seed-time nor in harvest-time”): “The preparations must begin long before the time which shall be hereafter appointed, in order that every one may be ready, and that the festival be not partial but universal” (GNH, 10). The “universal” festival is the general strike.

Preparation involves first of all the gathering and storing of “provisions and funds” (Benbow essentially theorizes what we now call a strike fund) for the period of nonwork, but just as importantly it also involves the building of proletarian social forms and institutions of the common (GNH, 11). These prefigurative social forms generated out of preparation for the strike are arguably more important than the strike itself—they include local workers' councils, militias, provision distribution, and ultimately an alternative “congress” to supersede and unseat Parliament. The full title of the pamphlet refers not just to the strike “holiday” but precisely to this new alternative workers' government or “congress” to replace the ruling elite: Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes. The necessity of alternative institutions is connected to Benbow's firm insistence on refusing to make demands of the ruling class—this aversion to petitioning is, for Benbow as for later theorists, a key aspect of what differentiates the general strike from partial or political strikes that aim for specific demands like better wages or conditions. Benbow identifies a number of past revolutionary precursors and inspirations for the holiday, but his most prominent analogy is to the biblical Jubilee. Like other radicals from the Romantic period, he finds in the Jubilee—called “an unceasing festival,” and a “political one” at that—a model not only of social leveling through the cancellation of debts, redistribution of land, and emancipation but also of the cessation of work for an entire year (GNH, 8).

Such is the outline of what is near-universally agreed to be the first theorization, plan, and call for a general strike. While Grand National Holiday stops short of directly calling for a violent revolution, the possibility of force is heavily implied, particularly in relation to confiscating the property of the wealthy; to be sure, Benbow did call for violence and arming revolutionary workers in other contexts. But this text represents one man's vision—the idea of the Grand National Holiday (also called the “sacred month”) was then debated and modified by Benbow's Chartist comrades, gaining momentum until such a general strike was appointed and organized by the Chartist Congress for August 1839. This action, however, was called off at the last minute when Benbow was arrested eight days before the holiday was to begin.

Benbow's general strike plan of 1832 could not have come at a more critical moment—it was the dawn of the organized workers' movement in Britain (primarily in England, but with significant activity in Scotland [e.g., Glasgow] and Wales [e.g., Merthyr]) and Europe more broadly. The year 1831 saw the creation of the National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC), which Benbow was involved in founding, while Robert Owen's Grand National Consolidated Trades Union began in 1834, among other trade union initiatives (the Chartists also began stirring in the mid-1830s).⁵ Not just working-class self-activity, then, but “worker”/“working class” as a concept, identity, and class for itself were coming into being—and notably, often in a way that explicitly distinguishes the worker from the slave. A proto-general strike in Glasgow in 1820, for example, enjoined every worker to withhold labor and “not to recommence until he is in possession of those Rights which distinguish the Freeman from the Slave,” while another in 1842 lamented “the degraded and insulted white slaves of England.”⁶

This last fact is of central importance, because the familiar, now canonical account that attributes the first articulation of the general strike to Benbow's Grand National Holiday and the early British workers' movement is incorrect: not merely inaccurate but wrong in ways that fundamentally deform the generation, development, history, and capacity of this concept. While he certainly popularized it, Benbow was not the first to articulate the general strike; in fact, he was borrowing and reformulating an idea he took from his associate Robert Wedderburn, who had done so fifteen years earlier. The still-neglected Wedderburn (1762–1835/36), an abolitionist and communist ultraradical born into slavery in Jamaica to an enslaved African mother named Rosanna and a Scottish planter father, first lays out the concept, plan, and call for the general strike in his 1817 periodical The Axe Laid to the Root. Crucially, he does so in the context of Atlantic racial slavery, explicitly framing his text as an address to the enslaved people of Jamaica. Wedderburn was legally manumitted as a small child of two or three years but grew up around the horrors of Jamaican sugar plantation slavery before spending several years in the British Royal Navy and landing in London, where he turned first to radical Methodism and then to Spencean ultraradicalism in the early 1800s.

Thomas Spence was an agrarian communist whose political system was centered on the complete abolition of private property in land, among many other radical proposals. In contrast to the more “respectable” radicalism of figures like Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, Spence's followers are known as “ultraradicals,” both because of the extremity of their program and because they refused any bourgeois notions of social respectability. The Spenceans and their fellow travelers composed, in the words of Iain McCalman, a “radical underworld”: a ragtag group of downtrodden artisans, partisan revolutionaries, petty criminals, sex workers, heretical preachers, proletarian printers and poets, former Caribbean slaves, runaway sailors, dispossessed Irish and East Indian immigrants, and others on the margins—they were described by contemporaries as “next to nobody and nothing.”⁷ These London “ultras” were unquestionably the most radical contingent of the period, and the most radical among them was Robert Wedderburn, who assumed leadership of the Spenceans after Spence's death in 1814. What I'm here calling Black ultraradicalism, then, names Wedderburn's singular merger of Black radical currents from the Caribbean with Spencean communist agitation.

The first issue of Wedderburn's The Axe Laid to the Root (1817) (hereafter referred to as Axe) opens with the plan for a general strike by the enslaved Black people of Jamaica. On the first page of the first volume of Axe, which is cast as an “address” both to the planters and to the enslaved people of Jamaica, Wedderburn demands immediate emancipation and the total abolition of slavery, an event he refers to as “jubilee.” Preceding Benbow's association of the general strike with jubilee by fifteen years, Wedderburn advises the Jamaican slaves, his “afflicted relatives and countrymen yet in bondage,” to obtain their jubilee by way of a coordinated and universal withdrawal of labor on the plantation—a general strike:

Although the work stoppage (non)action starts at only one hour, this hour is meant to have resounding revolutionary consequences, shifting the entire work, time, and disciplinary regimes of the plantation system on their axes. Wedderburn fully intends this one reclaimed hour to become charged with collective force, and to pry open time itself, leading to a revolution that would build on the achievement of the Haitians (whom he cites as both inspiration and commination). In this he anticipates several major theorists who see the general strike as beginning from “small channels” (Rosa Luxemburg), from “trickling streams” (W. E. B. Du Bois), and from “incidents . . . [seemingly] of small importance” (Georges Sorel).⁹

Wedderburn is clear that the key aspect here is the “union” and “universality”—the generality—of the labor stoppage planned and performed by the enslaved population. Although the text does not use the exact phrase “general strike” (as Benbow also does not),¹⁰ it comes extremely close in the last sentences quoted above: “Universality . . . will strike . . . Union among you, will strike tremendous terror to the receivers of stolen persons.” Grammatically, the subjects of these sentences are “universality” and “union,” and the verb for both nouns is “strike”—the “union” is doing the striking, and this striking is defined by its universality, or generality. The union is on strike. Labor unions were illegal at the time as stipulated by the Combination Acts, but Wedderburn's use of “union” here would have had this resonance to his English audience, not least because he and his comrades were associated with a group that evocatively called themselves the “General Union of Non-Represented People.”¹¹ Wedderburn thus embraces the generalization of what cannot be represented in, to, or by the world. Likewise, although the primary sense of “strike” here is to cause terror, the double entendre with strike, a word having only recently acquired the meaning of “labor cessation,” is certainly intentional. The particular labor meaning of strike emerged from the British navy in the late eighteenth century (when a ship would “strike” its sails to block ports), before semantically expanding in the 1790s and early 1800s to mean a labor action in any sector that halted the flow of production or distribution; because Wedderburn actually served in the navy in this same period before settling in London, he would have been not only aware of this new idiom but perhaps even present for some of the first ever genuine “strikes” that bore the name in the context of the unruly and revolutionary maritime Atlantic world.¹²

It would be remarkable enough if Wedderburn adapted the general strike to the context of plantation slavery over a century before W. E. B. Du Bois's equally controversial and influential idea of the general strike of the slaves in Black Reconstruction. But more remarkably still, the strike plan in Axe is not an application or adaptation of a preexisting concept to a new context. It is in fact the generation of a new concept, which only later was adapted, and indeed diminished—de-generalized, as it were—to fit the context of the workers' movement by Benbow in 1832. Several scholars have noted the formal similarity of Wedderburn's bold call for mass slave resistance in Jamaica to what would come to be called a general strike.¹³ Wedderburn's editor McCalman has even directly linked Wedderburn's call for a work stoppage to Benbow's holiday, though he assumes that Wedderburn performed an “adaptation” of Benbow's concept.¹⁴ But this is very likely not the case. Indeed, no one has made a systematic argument that it is the other way around—that Benbow, the famed originator and evangelist of the general strike, in fact borrowed the idea from Wedderburn and reapplied it strictly to the English worker.¹⁵ McCalman's sometimes questionable characterization of Wedderburn, including the ludicrous claims that he was illiterate and had “little in the way of original political theory,” leaves no space for the possibility that the idea was generated out of the struggle against slavery.¹⁶ In fact, Wedderburn was arguably the most original political thinker of the period in England, and certainly the most radical; he was one of the only figures writing in Europe to systematically link slavery to capitalist exploitation and dispossession, finding common cause for resistance on both fronts and generating a vision of communism based in the deracinated condition of slavery and the volatile potentiality of marronage.

Let us quickly examine the evidence of transmission. While it is true that Spence and other radicals employed the language of jubilee before Wedderburn, the Spencean political jubilee only broaches land redistribution and bears no mention of a mass withdrawal of labor or modern racial slavery.¹⁷ It was Wedderburn who would first synthesize these elements, joining the jubilee concept to coordinated mass work cessation—that is, the fusion that would become the heart of Benbow's holiday. Though then primarily active in Manchester, Benbow was in London in the winter of 1816–17 as a delegate for a convention of radicals at the Crown and Anchor tavern, where he was in close contact with the ultraradicals, the Spenceans, of which Wedderburn was the leader and most visible figure. The year 1817 was the year of Axe's preparation and publication; in their meetings, Wedderburn would have likely spoken of its contents with Benbow, including its opening gambit: the call for a general strike of the Jamaican slaves as a “jubilee.”¹⁸ In fact, the multigenre periodical Axe contains a brief, furious rhapsody against the ruling class and the state titled “A Hodge podge Effusion produced by reading Cobbett's Register, Vol. 32, No. 34.” It turns out that this very issue of William Cobbett's weekly consists entirely of an open letter addressed to William Benbow (who was then imprisoned). Thus, in the very same periodical that lays out his theory of the general strike, Wedderburn addresses a text to his comrade Benbow, who would be credited with first articulating the general strike fifteen years later. Tellingly, Benbow does not show any interest in or idea articulating the general strike until after 1817, which means after his encounter with Wedderburn and the ultras, and after Axe was published—a publication Benbow would certainly have known, not only because of his association with Wedderburn (which continued through the 1820s) and similar radical circles (including publishers both men worked with) but because Axe contained a text that was effectively addressed to him.

Moreover, Benbow's direct borrowings from Wedderburn extend much further than the already central parallel of conceiving and calling for a general cessation of labor and linking it to “jubilee.” Indeed, essentially every other major element in Benbow's Grand National Holiday can be traced back to Wedderburn's Axe, and sometimes in near-identical language. Benbow's concerted emphasis on “UNITY OF THOUGHT AND ACTION” (his capitalization) is found in Wedderburn's aforementioned exhortation of “union among you” and “universality” in action among the enslaved Jamaican revolutionaries. For Benbow this generality, unity, and “universal[ity]” of the “appointed” grand national holiday is made possible by extensive organization, planning, and preparation; this can be traced to Wedderburn's own outline for the enslaved to employ “fugitive planning” (Harney and Moten) and revolutionary “counterlogistics” (Bernes), preparing for the strike a full year in advance, carving out zones of freedom in roads, markets, and kitchens to gather and plan the “appointed” time, including the storing of “provisions” (Wedderburn pays special attention to the tactical use of the enslaved's provision grounds) (HS 81, 86).¹⁹ Benbow advising the striking English workers to create their own institutions and “congress” derives from Wedderburn enjoining the enslaved Jamaicans to create their own institutions and parliament, with delegates and “assemblies” (“Have no white delegate in your assembly,” he writes, echoing Haiti's 1805 Constitution that forbade whites to own property [HS 90])—a dictatorship of the Black proletariat. Benbow's pessimism about petitioning for reform in Grand National Holiday finds its predecessor in Wedderburn's similar claim in Axe: “Do not petition, for it is degrading to human nature to petition your oppressors” (HS 82). Both texts target the liberal reformer Francis Burdett by name, and both directly invoke the medieval peasant revolt leader Wat Tyler. Benbow's subtle hints at mass passive labor withdrawal leading to organized revolutionary violence mirror Wedderburn's allusions to the Haitian Revolution. Additionally, in each case (though more ambiguously for Benbow), the general strike is meant to lead to real and not formal equality—a communist abundance and the eradication of private property, where generalization converges with communization: “all things common” (HS 99). The general strike thus invites the riot and gestates the commune. There are still further parallels, enough to dissolve most doubts that when Benbow outlined what would become known as the general strike in 1832, he based his entire program on that of his old comrade Robert Wedderburn's ultraradical abolitionist manifesto of 1817.

There is, however, one integral aspect that Benbow's reformulation of the general strike jubilee does not borrow from Wedderburn: the context of Atlantic racial slavery. Benbow's text mentions slavery numerous times, to be sure; but like in the discourses of so many white political thinkers and activists, slavery is conjured entirely as a metaphor for the miserable treatment and conditions of the English working classes, or as a limit-condition of degradation. Actual racial slavery, much less the particular Caribbean slave economies powering the British Empire and jump-starting industrialization—the main target of Wedderburn's Axe—are passed over in silence. The specifically abolitionist concern and context through which Wedderburn formulated the general strike have been quietly and completely excised. Where Wedderburn thought abolition and the general strike coinciding as a single real movement, a revolutionary motion toward communism, Benbow cleaves these two domains, presaging organized labor's frequent reluctance to embrace Black liberation later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Benbow's very title hints at its more limited scope—it is a national holiday, as opposed to Wedderburn's Black Atlantic internationalism that is to encompass and foment proletarian revolution in the Caribbean and in Europe too. Thus when the general strike is traced back to Benbow in 1832, at the moment of the formation of the labor movement in England and the coming into being of the category of the (waged) “worker” in capitalism, the occlusion or unthinking of slavery is repeated. It is true that after being reformulated and propagated by Benbow and the Chartists (which included many former Spenceans), the general strike was introduced at the First International by British trade unionists, whence it became a prominent concern of French Syndicalists, from there being taken up by anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, and on through Rosa Luxemburg, Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, Lucy Parsons, W. E. B. Du Bois, and various other twentieth-century iterations.²⁰ But this prolific itinerary of the general strike begins with abolition and emerges out of Black ultraradicalism.

The General Insurrect

When reconstructing the genealogy of the general strike to recover Wedderburn, and by extension, the centrality of Blackness, it is not a question of correctly attributing a proprietary claim to a concept that is fundamentally against property. Still less is it a historicizing gesture. Instead, this procedure involves approaching a concept's singular emergence and articulation from out of an excessive and insurgent field, a field that itself destitutes the world's conceptual and spatio-historical grid. This is essential for understanding the nature of the general strike's generalizing movement and force, how its velocity traverses thought, struggle, and history up to our present devastation and beyond. The general strike names an inoperative displacement—a destituent power—that while historically situated, exceeds linear time and scrambles chronology with its irradiant demand, constellating an atopology of revolt through the folds of time, earth, and flesh. Atopology could be said to assemble the world's nonplaces, the barred sites of generativity, disorder, and desire that cannot appear in the conceptual terms or spatiotemporal coordinates of the modern world—it gestures toward a general union of the nonrepresented.²¹ Properly inappropriable, the general strike is the inheritance of the disinherited: a conceptual weapon generated from the material force field of afflicted life, the “atopic lowest place.”²² This means that the energy to which Wedderburn gave voice did not simply begin with him one fine morning as an idea in one individual's head. The general strike heralds a movement that is anoriginal, preceding work, the worker, and the forces that seek to disassemble and crush it. Thus to proceed backward: If Wedderburn is Benbow's source, who and what are Wedderburn's sources? The well-documented influence of Spencean ultraradicalism certainly plays a role, but the real answer lies less in a further list of individuals (though a few names will bear mentioning), than in a general, anonymous insurgent social archive: the currents of slave resistance and rebellion in the Caribbean, especially those of enslaved women. It is here that one can encounter the general intellect of the general strike, the “collective genius” of abolition.²³

Wedderburn was born in Jamaica in 1762, growing up legally emancipated (though unacknowledged by his father) around plantation slavery in the immediate wake of Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica (1760) and Mackandal's raids in Haiti (the 1750s).²⁴ His discourse in Axe draws on these intellectual, practical, political, and theological traditions of Black resistance through what Vincent Brown calls “the radical pedagogy of the enslaved” in Jamaica, with Wedderburn alluding, for instance, to the Jamaican maroons and the still recent Haitian Revolution throughout.²⁵ The heart of Wedderburn's general strike jubilee—the hour of work refusal and pretending to sleep in—has its precursor in the long history of techniques of concerted idleness, malingering, and counterproductivity that enslaved people deployed, often collectively. In the Jamaican context specifically, Kamau Brathwaite mentions that “malingering was another form of protesting,” as was “com[ing] to work late.”²⁶ Even in the pages before his chapter on “The General Strike,” Du Bois first uses the term “general strike” to describe a widespread “negative attitude” toward work, and tactics of waste, slowness, and malingering among enslaved people in the southern United States.²⁷ Marx himself takes note of the afterlives of these tendencies after legal emancipation in a passage from the Grundrisse that discusses emancipated Black Jamaican peasants who “regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good,” and who till the earth not for profit and productivity but for subsistence and the communal luxury of free time, cultivating a common abundance that was precisely Wedderburn's postrevolutionary vision for both Jamaica and England.²⁸ Marronage, malingering, sabotage, machine-breaking, and resolute idleness were all tributaries of the general strike, as were the forms of commoning and covert assembly that went into organizing such (non)actions. All these figure into Axe materially, as part of the lived knowledge that inspired Wedderburn.

When the explorer Alexandre-Stanislaus de Wimpffen visited Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Haitian Revolution in 1789–90, he noted this attitude of negativity among the enslaved people there, who, even though subject to the most brutal tortures, related to their enforced work with a “universal yawn.”²⁹ We can link this general or “universal yawn” (yawns being notoriously contagious) to Wedderburn's call for a general or universal sleep (“the universality of your sleeping”) but also to the massive refusal of work that was the Haitian Revolution—a general strike under the “generic name” of Blackness.³⁰ Summoning this contagion of revolt in Axe, Wedderburn turns to the Jamaican planters (his father included) and writes: “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you” (HS 86). Accentuating the inner connection between work refusal and revolution, Wedderburn's Black ultraradicalism bears a certain knowledge of freedom and an intimation that every slave revolt is always also a strike, a withdrawal of labor-power, but always also exceeds the strike. It harbors a revolt against the very categories of the world that could create plantation-based racial slavery, that could even conceive of the total capture of existence that slavery entails and attempts, a revolt against work, against property as such by those who have been cast as property, and against not just the cosmos but the cosmology of the plantation and white supremacy.³¹ Hence Wedderburn's insistence on the abolition of private property after the prospect of a successful slave revolution: “You are not to hold [the land] as private property” (HS 83).

What courses into the general strike from slave resistance and rebellion is thus a cosmic and total delegitimation; it is a deracination, an uprooting of the world. Frank Wilderson has argued that the conceptual retention of work and productivity found even in much of Marxism dissipates “other post-revolutionary possibilities” like “idleness,” a problematic that can only be clarified by distinguishing between the demands of “the worker” and “the slave”: “The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself.”³² It is this demand of the unwaged (and unwageable) position of the enslaved—and the delegitimation of productivity itself—that inheres at the generation of the general strike. In excising the context of racial slavery, Benbow also excises this radical critique of work and productivity as such, retaining a valorization of work and the “productive classes” (his subtitle). Following C. L. R. James's claim that “the important point of the slave's contribution to civilisation is that he recognized and did battle with the slavery system every day,” especially in amassing “small equivalents of the strike action,” it becomes evident that the first theorists and practitioners of the general strike were the enslaved themselves.³³ And while the various currents of slave resistance and rebellion were not uniformly antiwork and antiproductivist in this way, Wedderburn aligns his discourse with Black Caribbean peasant movements from below and their demand for collective subsistence over the productivity-oriented and monocultural plantation paradigm, especially in his strategic recourse to provision grounds as sustaining a life in common.³⁴ He connected such practices with traditions of commoning and antienclosure resistance in Britain in the attempt to create a kind of inoperative internationalism against the global war on the commons.

The Maternal Source

So, the historical conditions and fugitive traditions of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean—their refusals, subterfuge, ideas, desertions, rituals, revolts, social forms, modes of covert assembly and communication, aesthetic practices, and evasion, all under the shadow of unspeakable violence—flowed into Wedderburn's Axe, which in turn led to Benbow and the idea of general strike as it would develop in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On a different scale than the vast revolutionary currents of the Caribbean and the “common wind” of communication and organizational networks among enslaved and free Black people that exchanged news, plans, and ideas, there is also Wedderburn's personal biography, and the lessons and techniques he drew from two radical Black women in particular: his mother Rosanna and his grandmother Talkee Amy.³⁵ In his abolitionist autobiography, The Horrors of Slavery (1824), Wedderburn discusses unflinchingly the violence, including the sexual violence, that his mother was subjected to at the hands of his father and other enslavers. At the same time, he returns repeatedly to Rosanna's attitudes and forms of resistance, even attributing his own revolutionary commitment to her: “From [my mother's] rebellious and violent temper . . . I have inherited the same disposition—the same desire to see justice overtake the oppressors of my countrymen”; and later: “I glory in her rebellious disposition, and which I have inherited from her” (HS 48, 59).

Numerous contemporary accounts of Wedderburn bear out this maternal devotion: one cartoon from October 1817—the very month Axe was published—depicts Wedderburn debating the utopian socialist Robert Owen in a tavern and invoking the legacy and knowledge of his enslaved mother (HS 80). Even though the cartoon's tone seems to be mocking and caricatured, the speech bubble of Wedderburn is apt insofar as it mirrors the importance of Rosanna as found in Wedderburn's writings and speeches. His critique of Owen begins by declaiming: “I understand Slavery well! my mother was a slave!” Similarly, an advertising handbill for a public discussion in 1819 of the question “Has a slave an inherent right to slay his Master?” lists Wedderburn as “the Offspring of an African Slave” (HS 113). The answer to the evening's topic was in the affirmative. In the case of Wedderburn and many others, this meant literally slaying one's father and uprooting the patriarchal line of legitimacy. Elsewhere, in one of his most radical injunctions, Wedderburn declared: “Acknowledge no Father” (HS 125). The unspoken underside of this refusal of the father is the embrace of the mother's touch.³⁶

Cruelly separated from his mother, Wedderburn was largely raised by his enslaved grandmother, Talkee Amy, on a plantation near Kingston. He describes Talkee Amy as a well-connected smuggler in Kingston and a venerable presence known for her subversiveness and care in equal measure. Talkee Amy was also an Obeah practitioner, and Wedderburn recalls a harrowing memory of seeing her beaten for suspicion of using witchcraft to sabotage a slaveholder's voyage. The syncretic spiritual, cultural, and botanical practices of Obeah, first criminalized in 1760 for its role in Tacky's Revolt, was associated by planters not just with insurrection and rebellion (a “medium of the conspiracy,” as C. L. R. James called Haitian Vodou), but with idleness, assembly, and “unproductive” collectivity.³⁷ As both an Obeah woman and a smuggler (and a verbal channel for information, suggested by Wedderburn's gloss of her name “Talkee”), Talkee Amy would be very familiar with hidden routes of transport, underground communication networks, and strategies of resistance that flowed along the common wind—that is, the social forms described by Wedderburn (and later Benbow) as organizational preparation for the general strike. Before Benbow and the Chartists, before Spence and the ultras, before Wedderburn, before even the Haitian Revolution, there were his mother and grandmother, Rosanna and Talkee Amy. They embodied the (pre)disposition toward rebellion, the “negative attitude” that led to the generation of the general strike—a bequest out of time, from these two and uncountable others.

Building on the work of historians Barbara Bush, Bernard Moitt, and others, Stella Dadzie has recently emphasized not just the strategies and actions but the “culture” of resistance that enslaved women had a “central” and “dynamic” role in forging and fostering.³⁸ In foregrounding “Wedderburn's maternal legacy of liberty . . . as the true wellspring of his political radicalization” in conjunction with these larger cultures of survival and resistance, especially those of enslaved women, it is possible to approach something like the field of generation, the “true wellspring,” of the general strike itself—the trace of its maternal touch.³⁹ For the general strike has no proper genesis or pure origin: its theory and practice arise from a font of “radically impure generativity.”⁴⁰ No proper names can remain securely inscribed in this common rush—but the names Rosanna and Talkee Amy bring us closer than any to the source.

Seen through the prism of Wedderburn's life, activity, and writing, the general strike's intimacy with maternal captivity and defiance further displaces the frame of the striker as only, or paradigmatically, a waged white male productive worker; while including this formation, the general strike precedes it, involving from the start an essential emphasis on care, collective life, and social reproduction—or perhaps, a social antiproductivity.⁴¹ Wedderburn's articulation of the general strike cannot be separated from his relationships with his enslaved mother and grandmother, and their practices of knowledge, struggle, and rebellion, which fastened his determination to “acknowledge no Father” and to accede to the embrace of the lost mother. It is from this most particular and particularly constrained condition of maternity that the strike opens onto a genuine movement of generalization—a generality generated out of maternality, a motherly jubilee. This last correspondence is old and deep. It is not a coincidence that the earliest known jubilee (a precursor to the biblical Jubilee) is the Ancient Sumerian amargi, a word often translated as “freedom” or “manumission” but meaning literally: a return (gi) to the mother (ama).⁴²

The Social Harvest

Wedderburn apparently maintained communication channels to the West Indies throughout his life. Understanding these occluded transatlantic currents is crucial for understanding the generalizing trajectory and logic of the general strike, which, while generated in the inferno of slavery, was intended by Wedderburn to encompass revolutionary activity in the British Isles and globally. Though Axe was subtitled “an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica,” Wedderburn was well aware that his local readers and hearers would be the largely—but by no means exclusively—white workers, radicals, and (lumpen)proletariat of London. He took care analytically to link oppressions of enclosure, dispossession, and the criminalization of subsistence in Europe, for example, with those of New World colonialism and racial slavery. He thought these formations together not to make an equivalence between two (commonly if unequally) subjugated groups but to attack the root of a larger world-system of racial capitalism that depended on both constituent formations, and depended on their (apparent) division or even opposition.⁴³

For Wedderburn, the linked causes and effects of this system would lead to the common “social harvest” of linked forms of resistance.⁴⁴ Benbow, we know, adapted this notion in devising the Grand National Holiday based on Wedderburn's general strike of the slaves, but Wedderburn absolutely meant for his English audience to take lessons and ideas from his abolitionist discourse on slavery. One evening at his infidel chapel on Hopkins Street, which functioned as a political organizing space, Wedderburn cited the example of West Indian slave resistance as a spur to British working-class resistance (beginning, as often, by invoking his mother Rosanna): “[Wedderburn] announced himself as the Descendent of an African slave—After noticing the persecutions of the Slaves in some of the West India Islands he said they fought in some instances for twenty years for ‘Liberty’—and he then appealed to Britons who boasted such superior feeling & principle whether they were ready to fight now but for a short time for their Liberties.”⁴⁵ The issue with Benbow, then, is not in his applying the general strike to a different context (from slavery to English workers)—Wedderburn explicitly encouraged this—but rather his losing sight of the global system that needs both racial slavery and wage labor, and thus inhibiting the general strike's generic possibility, its capacity for totally uprooting the world. For Benbow's influential discourse of the general strike not only excises slavery except as a structuring metaphor or an abstraction; it occludes the way racial slavery functions as the “source . . . of the capitalist totality itself, indeed, of the very distinction between the abstract and concrete.”⁴⁶ In both obscuring the capitalist totality and displacing the real generality, Benbow's degeneralization forges a (false) totalization, whereas the general strike elicits generalization as detotalization: the fragmenting power of the real movement.

In systematically (rather than analogically) suturing together Caribbean enslaved and European “free” proletarian revolution, Wedderburn can be said to have already recognized the later insight of C. L. R. James that enslaved people in the Caribbean were in fact the first industrial “modern proletariat.”⁴⁷ On other occasions, he brought Black comrades from the West Indies to his Soho chapel to speak on the struggle against slavery, and the chapel continued to function as a revolutionary hub of Black ultraradicalism, with Wedderburn preaching the abolition of slavery alongside the abolition of private property, emphasizing their inner connection.⁴⁸ This transatlantic connection between struggles, coupled with the embrace of the disreputable elements of society, also distanced Wedderburn from the mainstream abolitionists who shied away from anything that would harm the respectability of their cause. His chapel was developing into an armed insurrectionary cell with plans for a proletarian uprising—to the point of performing drills—when Wedderburn was arrested in 1819 for blasphemy and sedition and jailed for two years. Wedderburn's own stated “purpose,” he allegedly said, was “nothing short of revolution.”⁴⁹ He conceived of this revolution as a generalizing movement sweeping the Atlantic and the whole earth, what he called a “fermentation” that would be “universal,” or a “general rebellion” (HS 86, 61).

Although the vector of Wedderburn's general strike moves from slavery outward to encompass other revolutionary situations, he was as keen to bring Spencean and ultraradical ideas into the Caribbean struggle against slavery as he was to import weapons of slave resistance into London revolutionary discourse. Addressing the enslaved people of Jamaica in Axe, he writes: “Take warnings by the sufferings of the European poor, and never give up your lands” (HS 82), a passage on which Fryer comments: “Wedderburn was fired by the vision of a simultaneous revolution of the white poor of Europe and the black slaves of the West Indies.”⁵⁰ The historical record shows the planters to have been aware, and terrified, of such a prospect. A colonial commission in Barbados investigating Bussa's Rebellion (1816) cited the conjunction of Spencean and abolitionist ideas as an inciting cause, while, in 1817, the year of Axe's publication, the Jamaican Royal Gazette published a Spencean text by Wedderburn's closest comrade at the time, Thomas Evans (alongside a denunciation of its content, fearing its influence in the Caribbean and every “town in the kingdom”).⁵¹ Moreover, in 1820 government spies reported that Wedderburn's comrades planned to send “pamphlets . . . to [West] India to those suffering blacks to open their eyes, that they might strike for their long lost liberty.”⁵² Beyond the startling existence of this trace of transatlantic revolutionary communication, what is especially remarkable in this last record is the specificity of the word “strike.” The enslaved Black people of the West Indies will be exhorted not simply to revolt but specifically to strike collectively for their liberty, a general strike jubilee that seems unmistakably to allude to Wedderburn's Axe. This would be the enacting of Wedderburn's dream to foment, indeed to “ferment,” a general strike leading to revolution in the Caribbean and Britain, to inaugurate a new communist society without slavery and without private property or hierarchy of any kind.

Around the Christmas holiday in 1831, just such a general strike among enslaved people in Jamaica actually happened, one that turned into a massive revolt known as the Baptist War or Christmas Rebellion, led by the enslaved Baptist preacher Sam Sharpe. Sharpe had quietly organized large numbers of enslaved Jamaicans to go on a simultaneous strike for their freedom one morning, an act that scholars have described as precisely a “general strike,” a “strike action” meant “to stop work en masse,” and a “mass passive action.”⁵³ The strike was contagious and spread by resonance across the island, approaching a velocity of generalization that led to armed insurrection and the burning of plantations. Although the rebels were defeated, this rebellion—called “the revolt that ended slavery in the British Empire”⁵⁴—spurred the legal abolition of slavery by Parliament one year later in 1833. Given that Sharpe's revolutionary language “no doubt” drew on the “radical Methodists in England,” a current with which Wedderburn was associated, the possibility of Wedderburn's direct or indirect influence is a tantalizing, if unverifiable, prospect (he was, after all, raised by a smuggler).⁵⁵ Yet what is important here is not asserting direct causality, nor circumscribing a local historical particularity, but instead mapping a general intellectual, political, and social field of insurgency: a long tradition of Black radicalism and struggle out of which first arose the articulation of the general strike, via the conduit of Robert Wedderburn. In this way, the general strike is one of “the new forms of existence that are the gift of the Caribbean to the world.”⁵⁶

Sharpe's heroic Christmas rebellion was crushed in early January 1832. In a disquieting historical irony, Benbow's Grand National Holiday pamphlet was first published mere weeks later, on January 28, 1832. This means that a huge and important general strike of enslaved Black people in Jamaica—on a holiday, no less—was occurring just as Benbow was finishing and disseminating his idea for a work-stoppage “holiday” that would come to be known, wrongly, as the first articulation of the general strike and in a text that ignores slavery except as an abstraction and a metaphor for waged English workers. Slavery, even or rather especially when mentioned, remained (the) “unthought.”⁵⁷ Benbow's total elision of racial slavery was itself symptomatic of the growing tension between the nascent workers' movement and the abolitionist movement, especially as “worker” and “proletarian” became more strictly identified over the course of the nineteenth century and after. This tension became a cleavage, such that at the crucial early nineteenth-century moment of the formation of the self-conscious categories of “worker” and “working classes,” along with their concomitant institutions, the slave's cause and demand was often foreclosed by these new formations—and thus so too were foreclosed the ultimate demands of Black liberation, anticolonialism, and real equality and life in common: in short, communism.⁵⁸

The Descent of the Strike

When W. E. B. Du Bois invoked the general strike in relation to slavery in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), he engaged in a striking philosophical fabulation that was not without controversy, even down to the present. Du Bois has been charged, even by sympathetic admirers, with misuse of the term “general strike” and with anachronism. Yet Du Bois's overall emphasis on the “black worker” (the title of his first chapter) is intended to put pressure on both of those words—pressure that hits a boiling point in chapter 4, “The General Strike.”⁵⁹ Specifically, Du Bois used the term general strike to describe an emergent collective movement, literally a kind of motion: a mass of enslaved people abandoning the Southern plantations during the US Civil War: “The slave entered upon a general strike against slavery by the same methods that he had used during the period of the fugitive slave . . . This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people.”⁶⁰ The all-important word “general” here does not seem to be a question of quantity or proportion, nor simply a social or economic determination; it rather indicates a material vector of generalization, one whose contours are glimpsed in the figures Du Bois deploys to characterize the movement (ocean, swarm, flood, stampede, and so on—all of which resonate with Rosa Luxemburg's complex of metaphors in The Mass Strike). This burgeoning motion unfolds akin to what Du Bois, in his early work, called a “secondary rhythm” or “sudden rise”—“a something Incalculable.”⁶¹ And like in Wedderburn's vision of the general strike as a revolution sweeping from Haiti to Jamaica to Britain and back again, the movement emerges out of a matrix of Blackness but can be joined, as Du Bois suggests in the brief glimmer where the general strike of the slaves becomes a flood that sweeps up “black and white”: “The movement became a general strike against the slave system on the part of all who could find opportunity. The trickling streams of fugitives swelled to a flood. Once begun, the general strike of black and white went madly and relentlessly on like some great saga.”⁶²

Du Bois thus casts the general strike as an inherently abolitionist gesture, a destituent passage of “revolutionary exit” rendering the slave system inoperative through fugitivity and abandonment:⁶³ “They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left the plantations.”⁶⁴ In firmly allying the general strike with abolition, Du Bois is not so much joining as rejoining what was once united, and outside of linear and historical time, never ceased to be so. Far from anachronistically applying a concept from the modern European labor movement to enslaved people in the United States, Du Bois turns out to have retrieved the Black radical kernel, the anoriginal germ already latent in the concept of the general strike as he found it the 1930s. His translation of the strike from one context to another has in fact retranslated the strike into its original, unspeakable language, “brewing since times of sabotage enfolded in ancient memories.”⁶⁵

Even though in discussing the general strike in terms of slavery Du Bois was using the concept “properly”—that is, in line with its first articulation by Wedderburn—his usage is indeed anachronistic in another sense: that of generally disarranging the time of racial capitalism itself and returning the general strike concept to its atopic field outside of time. This field appears within time only as disorder—a swirl of chaos, a yawn, a dream⁶⁶—but persists in the NOW that could be called anarchronistic, given the general strike's close association with anarchism. It is the minimal nation's grand holiday, refracted through shards of captive time; the jubilee that was already going on before the work of the world. Thinking according to this anarchronism, the bent time and unending precedence of the strike, also unearths the strained ontological strata of racial capitalism. If the worker comes before capital (Mario Tronti's formulation), what comes before the worker is not slavery or “the slave,” but the inoperative, overfull social pleroma that the figure of the slave is demiurgically created to capture.⁶⁷ Though it is unlikely that Du Bois knew of Wedderburn, he deployed a concept that, before its use by twentieth-century leftists—who got it from anarchists and Syndicalists, who got it from trade unionists and former Chartists at the First International, who got it from Benbow, who got it from Wedderburn—was generated from the intellectual and practical field of Black insurgency and resistance to slavery. This is the tradition, the particular “philosophy of life and action,” that Du Bois channels and extols in the first chapter of Black Reconstruction.⁶⁸

In an extraordinary collision of Du Bois's “General Strike” with another key theoretical text on the general strike, Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” (1921), James Edward Ford III rethinks Benjamin's categories, like that of “divine violence,” to render them “uncanny.”⁶⁹ Noting the critique of work in both Du Bois and Benjamin's conceptualizations of the general strike, Ford further links the strike and Black radicalism to the notion of désoeuvrement (“worklessness” or “inoperativity”) found in Nancy and Bataille (and we might add Blanchot and Agamben), to stage an even more radical critique of work directed at “the forms of productivity violently imposed on plantations.”⁷⁰ While Benjamin, drawing on Sorel's concept of the proletarian general strike in the latter's Reflections on Violence, sees the strike as “pure means,” a form of “anarchistic” force that shatters the link between means and legitimating ends and destitutes the law, Ford prompts the question: What does the undoing of law look like from the position of the enslaved, whose very flesh or “mere life” (bloßes Leben) is barred from and by the law?⁷¹ With Ford's intervention in mind, the constellating of Wedderburn in the general strike's genealogy allows us to see Du Bois's discussion as coming, in a sense, “before” that of Benjamin (not to mention Sorel and Luxemburg). This, in turn, reorients and further radicalizes the Entsetzung (variously translated as deposing, suspension, or destitution) of law and the delegitimation of work, the police, and the state—of legitimation itself—found in Benjamin's “Critique of Violence.” Indeed, after the call for a general strike, abolition, and revolution, much of Wedderburn's Axe focuses on a critique of law and the violence of law's “invisible thread,” advising: “Have no lawyers amongst you” (HS 93). Anticipating Benjamin's dialectic of law-preserving and law-making violence, Wedderburn, in his text alluding to Benbow in prison, addresses the state and it functionaries with: “You are the law makers, law suspenders, and law breakers.”⁷² Antinomianism and antiwork converge in the general strike.

The general strike is an enigma that lies coiled at the heart of twentieth-century and contemporary thought, traversing so many significant sites, events, texts, and figures, and opening onto questions involving history, violence, law, inoperativity, potentiality, revolution, politics, action, economy, time, labor, collectivity, Marxism, anarchism, communism, and more. Above all, the general strike is the idea that calls work and productivity itself into question, even as much of actually existing state communism in the twentieth century made an idol of them—and sacrificed many to that idol. The general strike is so important for theory precisely because it is where theory touches and dissolves into praxis and where the question of “social totality”—or of generality—is raised with a unique intensity.⁷³ Recovering Wedderburn in the strike's genealogy disorients these lines of thought and relocates the general strike at the site of resistance on and to the plantation, the infernal laboratory that concocted the modern world, its philosophical and political categories, its social formations, its very ecologies and climate. As the “primitive” condition of possibility for capitalist accumulation and waged labor, the so-called pedestal (Marx) of capitalism that has never ceased to be stood upon, slavery and its afterlives also provide the most generalized and “most threatening” possibility of resistance, emerging from the modern capitalist world's constitutive outside.⁷⁴ And yet this understanding of the general strike's inceptive relation to slavery and Black radicalism is not about naming a proper historical agent or revolutionary subject but about a trajectory, a vector—a dark velocity from nowhere. It discloses a general unworking of generality itself, an affirmation that the only truly generalizing movement against the world must start from the constitutive outside of the world.

Only this outside movement—a swarm, a storm, a stream, a sea, an echo, a union of idle sleepers dreaming on and of the strike, the g/rêve—can be utterly deracinating, as it is itself groundless. In modernity, this means starting with the paradigmatically deracinated: the enslaved. This starting point does not preclude but in fact, as both Wedderburn and Du Bois stress, requires moving through other seemingly discrete and disparate struggles to open their point of rupture, including labor strikes, climate strikes, feminist strikes, debt strikes, rent strikes, campus strikes, and forms of collective action yet to be generated. Generalization can only come from below, and yet it moves not as a rising but as an undertow, an expropriation deracinating all logics of possession.⁷⁵ This clarifies Sorel's idea that the general strike appears to and in the prevailing order as a “catastrophe”—that is, a literal downturning (kata-strophe)—pure collapse.⁷⁶ Another name for this “interminably downward movement,” in the phrase of Jared Sexton, is abolition.⁷⁷ The case of Wedderburn reveals that the general strike emerges from the global Black freedom struggle and that it dwells, has always dwelled, in intimacy with abolition. Sexton's formulation of abolition as “dissolution” and the “affirmation of deracination,” of uprooting returns us to Wedderburn's abolitionist general strike: the axe laid to the root.⁷⁸

This ungrounding, generalizing movement from the outside ultimately—and perhaps only ultimately—coincides with Marx's formal definition of the proletariat as the constitutively excluded, as nothing but pure “dissolution” (Auflösung), and his definition of communism in The German Ideology as precisely a movement of abolition: “We call communism the real movement [wirkliche Bewegung] which abolishes the present state of things” (49).⁷⁹ In addition to its identification with abolition, Marx's definition stands out in light of the present discussion—Marx and Engels's own dismissal of the general strike notwithstanding—for two reasons: first, because it sees communism as a movement, which recalls the many figures that characterize the general strike as flood like motion, and with the German Bewegung faintly suggesting a movement that takes away (weg). Second, because the word “real” (wirkliche) affirms that the abolishing movement named communism is itself already (the) “real”—it is emphatically not a realization (of some “ideal,” potential, goal, telos, etc.), nor a movement of actualization or production (“communism is not . . . produced [hergestellt]”).⁸⁰ The realization of a potential belongs to the realm of energeia, which means putting to work (en + ergon). The general strike is the cessation of this work of production and the exposition of its never having begun.

_________________

A number of contemporary theorists have returned to the concept of the general strike to rethink its parameters and interrogate its powers of generalization from specific sites of struggle and forms of life. The collective author Claire Fontaine has theorized “the human strike” as “the most generic movement of revolt,” while the Argentinian activist and theorist Verónica Gago has been developing “the feminist general strike” in relation to Latin American movements for gender and reproductive justice, finding new cartographies through which the general strike's movement “produces generality.”⁸¹ Most notably, the recent work of Saidiya Hartman has taken up the general strike in a radically transformative way. Starting with an immanent critique of Du Bois, Hartman remarks that the particular labors, suffering, and resistance of Black women often “fal[l] outside of the heroic account of the black worker and the general strike” in Black Reconstruction.⁸² In 2019’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman both expands and deflects Du Bois's own expansion of the general strike, unfolding “another elaboration of the general strike” immanent in the lives of young Black women in early twentieth-century Philadelphia and New York, particularly in their unwaged, unruly forms of common life and care that escape the normative category of the worker.⁸³ In attending to the “everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls” so often ignored or dismissed, Hartman destitutes anarchism and the general strike to open their conceptual enclosures and return them to the “insurgent ground” of Black feminist refusal and survival.⁸⁴ In this account of the uncounted-on strike, the vital practices of sociality, collective knowledge-making, and aesthesis in the face of racialized and gendered violence come to the fore. Its contours share much with the general strike as first articulated by Wedderburn: not least the upending of work and work-time regimes, the indifference to authority, and the sense that preparing for the general strike, as a form of life immanent here in everyday moments of refusal, idleness, subversion, joy, queer desire, experimentation, and evasion, is the strike itself. The general strike does not cause the upheaval against work, state, and law, but, as Benjamin says, “consummates” its already proliferating festival.⁸⁵ Hartman thus returns the general strike to its (im)proper untimeliness and its excessive, atopic field, the insurgent ground out of which the general strike was generated: “the social poesis that sustains the dispossessed” in the struggle against slavery, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism.⁸⁶ It is from this same chorus of Black rebellion, and its refusal of “obedient disposition,”⁸⁷ that Wedderburn articulated the general strike, drawing on the “rebellious disposition” learned most of all from Black women: from Rosanna and Talkee Amy. In powerfully “mistranslating, augmenting, and expanding” the general strike,⁸⁸ Hartman both transforms and restores the concept—an instauration that perhaps began a decade earlier in her book Lose Your Mother, where the general strike is first broached by way of none other than Wedderburn.⁸⁹

Conclusion: Generation

Instead of “origin,” I have used the language of “generation,” not least because of the latter's etymological link with “general” but also to echo Joy James on the stolen and reclaimed “generative powers” of the Captive Maternal.⁹⁰ The general strike has no origin—no beginning, no genesis. It has no end(s), no apocalypse. It names only an interminable exodus, a flight moving obliquely along an atopology of before, outside, under, beyond (ultra), a shattered array of nowheres. Yet it is possible to cultivate its open field for moments of generativity, inf(l)ection points in a movement of generalization that surges down as deracinating, abolishing, and gathering. It is a generalization of struggle, of that which is nothing becoming everything; or rather, of that which is the nothing of everything becoming the everything of nothing. Attending to this milieu of struggle brings to light certain occluded aspects of the general strike and its lost generation, including its early transatlantic emergence at the crossing point of slave rebellion and the nascent workers' movement; this, in turn, deepens the strike's affinity with antiwork paradigms, gathers in questions of sociality and social reproduction raised by feminist theory and practice, and even opens the door to thinking mass withdrawal in connection to environmentalist degrowth. The case of Wedderburn, who places the unwaged and unthought figure of the enslaved at the heart of the general strike, reframes the entire genealogy of theorizing the general strike from Benbow to the present. It demonstrates that the general strike does not originate in the contingent category of (waged, industrial) worker,⁹¹ nor in European anarchism—though it assumes these important struggles as part of its essential movement and generalizing of antagonism. The key point is not just that the general strike is forged in the context of Atlantic racial slavery in the Caribbean, but that it is articulated from this concrete experience of absolute dispossession and deracination precisely as a nonlocal and generalizing tactic. This conception of the general strike certainly does not dislodge class struggle but provides another map for locating its nodes of intensification and generalization to deepen the dissolutive undertow of the class that is not a class: the proletariat. Most importantly, the Black ultraradicalism at the heart of the general strike reveals it to be an essentially and irreducibly abolitionist gesture. Endlessly entangled, the general strike and abolition together form an “axe laid to the root” of racial capitalism and its regimes of work, property, and capture.

The present opens a novel conjuncture in which to think the inceptive and ultimate unity of the general strike and abolition and to put this unity (back) into practice. The George Floyd rebellion of 2020—which exploded in the United States but sent global reverberations from Greece to Brazil—thrust to the fore the abolitionist organizing and analysis that Black radicals, especially Black women, have been engaging in for decades. This abolitionist movement targets the anti-Black institutions of police and prisons, placing in full view their origin and function as violent guarantors of racialized regimes of work and property. As the 2020 rebellion coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, this new opening for prison and police abolition converged with calls for general strike organizing emanating from sites of Black radicalism like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. Remarkably, Wedderburn's ultraradical vision of 1817 encompassed this demand too: “Have no prisons,” he writes to his Jamaican friends and relatives, seeing the abolition of prisons as part and parcel of the real movement to abolish slavery and private property (HS 93).

“The question of the strike,” writes Marcello Tarì, “has always been a question of temporality.”⁹² Strikes do strange things with time. In this other, anarchronistic history of the general strike, past figures appear in constellations with a renewed brightness and urgency. In between Wedderburn's time and the unnameable present, one Black radical in particular stands out: the anarchist writer and activist Lucy Parsons. In 1905, a year before Luxemburg's The Mass Strike and three before Sorel's Reflections on Violence, Parsons addressed the founding convention of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), saying: “My conception of the future method of taking possession of this Earth is that of the general strike.”⁹³ When the general strike takes possession of the earth, it takes away all possession.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for assistance and inspiration: Alex Dubilet, Che Gossett, Jack Halberstam, Shelby Johnson, the Critical Times editorial team, and the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

Works Cited