Human strike has already begun‘Grève humaine’ is the French expression for ‘human strike’,
designating the most generic movement of revolt against any
oppressive condition. It’s a more radical and less specific strikethan a general strike or a wildcat strike.
Human strike attacks the economic, affective, sexual andemotional positions within which subjects are imprisoned. It
provides an answer to the question “how do we become somethingother than what we are?” It isn’t a social movement although
within the uprising and agitations it can find a fertile ground uponwhich to develop and grow, sometimes even against these.
For example, it has been said that the feminist movement in Italy
during the 1970s demolished the leftist political organizations,but it hasn’t been said what the leftist political organisations weredoing to the women who were part of them. Human strike can be arevolt within a revolt, an unarticulated refusal, an excess of workor the total refusal of any labour, depending on the situation.
There is no orthodoxy for it. If strikes are made in order to improvespecific aspects of the workers’ conditions, they are always ameans to an end. But human strike is a pure means, a way tocreate an immediate present here where there is nothing but
waiting, projecting, expecting, hoping.
Adopting a behaviour that doesn’t correspond to what others tell
us about ourselves is the first step of the human strike: thelibidinal economy, the secret texture of values, lifestyles anddesires hidden by the political economy are the real plain ofconsistency of this revolt.
“We need to change ourselves”: everyone agrees on this point, but
who to become and what to produce are the first questions thatarise as soon as this discussion takes place in a collective context.
The reflex of refusing any present that doesn’t come with theguarantee of a reassuring future is the very mechanism of theslavery we are caught in and that we must break. To produce thepresent is not to produce the future.
“How do I do it and where do I start?” Surely everyone knows thisbetter for oneself than anybody else ever could: no more leaders,no more teachers, no more students, here comes the time ofinventing new mediations between people, and we are already inthe midst of the work of the human strike. There are nopreliminaries, no intermediary steps, no organisers in charge ofthe logistical aspects. The work of the human strike strikes against
itself. It transforms at the same time what we see and the organs
we see with. It transforms both ourselves and the people who
made this transformation possible. It kills the bourgeois in all ofus, liberating unknown forces.
Explaining what human strike is, how to map it, how to articulate
it, is like giving a technical lesson of sexual education to theperson we wish to seduce. It is like describing to ourselves theoverwhelming ocean of our possible madness whilst sitting safely
on the shore. A female voice from the movement of ’77 said: “Thereturn of the repressed threatens all my projects of work,
research, politics. Does it threaten them or is it the truly politicalthing in myself, to which I should give relief and room? (…)Silence
brought the failure of this part of myself that desired to makepolitics, but it affirmed something new. There has been a change, I
have started to speak out, but during these days of silence I feltthat the affirmative part of myself was occupying the entire spaceagain. I convinced myself of the fact that the mute woman is themost fertile objection to our politics. The non-political digs tunnels
that we mustn’t fill with earth.” Writing about the human strike isitself the experience of a double bind, it’s like walking on asuspended wire between making things possible and exorcisingthem through language.
There are no lessons of human strike, it is nothing but adisquieting possibility that we must remain intimate with.
We are remunerated neither for the work of love nor for being
able to find the right words to bridge the social fractures that
separate all of us. We do not get paid for making everyday life
more enjoyable or simply possible for ourselves and for otherpeople. The unremunerated labour of the affects continuously
crushes the insulting pyramid of capitalistic values but this conflictis effaced day after day.
Without the mothers’ excess of love for their children there would
be no one left to exploit. Without the refusal to believe that we canstill communicate non-commercial sensations and feelings to eachother, the prostitutional business of advertising would lack eventhe syntax to make itself understandable. Wherever it takes place,human strike declares the end of the criminal fiction of theequivalence between money and time, money and space, moneyand food, money and bodies.
If the current negotiations on the right to pollute the planet havereached a dead end, we could already read in a French newspaper

on May 11, 2009 that “in order not to ignore the irreparable
damage that the development of industrial civilisation causes tothe ecosystem, we have decided to put a price on the natural
resources that are pillaged day by day. It’s established that one
hectare of forest is worth 970 euros and that one hectare ofmeadow is worth 600 euros. It’s established that the value of theextinction of the bees is calculated on the basis of the cost of
artificial pollination made by humans.” There was no mention of
the cost of the extinction of the humans who would not know whata bee is, its presence in the warm air, its colours, the wax, thehoney, the flowers inclining under its weight or the meaning ofMandeville’s tale. No logical movement can oppose such a state ofthings, a new wave of irrational actions must disorganize theordinary progression of the disaster. Human strike simply declares
the effective bankruptcy of the market economy that pretends toown life but endlessly annihilates it.
No mourning of the impossible revolutions can get in the way ofthe human strikers because human strike is not a mission, nor a
project or a program. It is the gesture that makes legible the silent
political element in everything: women’s life, the dissatisfaction ofrich people, the anger of privileged teenagers, the refusal tosubmit to the mediocrity of necessity, ordinary racism, and so on.
When we inhabit language we place ourselves on the permeable
membrane between life and desires, where it clearly appears thatlife and desires are made of the same fabric. Desiring together
makes things come true even when they are not technically true.
Witches were burned for having truly been flying in the night andfor having actually kissed Satan’s ass. When we come out of prison
we are delinquents, even if we were innocents when they firstarrested us by mistake.
We constantly become what other people want us to be, but
starting a human strike means inverting that movement andrefusing to act upon the actions of others through the use power;
it means opposing a philosophy of management with the materialpresence of potentiality.
Reality can be more than what any realistic representation of thefacts offers. The very concept of reality progressively starts to fadewhen we loose touch with the possible and the impossible thathuman strike points to.