ABSTRACT
In his ‘Critique of Violence,’ Walter Benjamin famously contrasts the general strike to what he calls the ‘political strike.’ It is fairly often acknowledged that Benjamin’s notion of the general strike is anarchist, but it is not as often noted what exactly that entails; how, that is to say, the general strike is anarchist and how that anarchism allows human beings to engage in a practice of non-violence. Returning to Benjamin, people see that as long as they do not directly challenge archism they remain trapped, just like the political strikers, in a feedback loop where they cannot possibly beat the State at its own violent game. Insofar as God is omnipresent even while occupying one spot from which all of divine rule issues, human political power, which is modeled on God similarly issues from a spot even as it seeks to be ubiquitous.
