"My arms are sticks now. Legs too," says Todd Ashker, the main conspirator in the 2013 California Hunger Strikes. "But the strike is not over. We have suspended it. If necessary we'll resume and go all the way, starve to death. This is a war."[footnoteRef:1] The above statement from Todd Ashker, reaffirms the intention of the Short Corridor Collective to protest the conditions of their living death in the corporatized prison. When read in constellation with Benjamins work, it presents a series of questions that can be valuable in understanding the nature of the hunger strike to the death and its implications. What would it mean to include the hunger strike to the death within the confines of Benjamins revolutionary general strike? Based on the organization of the prison hunger strikers and the stated intentions of the Short Corridor Collective, can the strike even be categorized within this construction? What does it mean to hunger strike to the death within a state of living death? Benjamins construction of the strike must be elaborated to probe these questions further. [1: Carroll, Rory. California Prison Hunger Strike Leader: If Necessary Well Resume. This Is War. The Guardian. Accessed February 16, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/california-prison-hunger-strike-todd-ashker.]

In the Critique of Violence, Benjamin contrasts Sorels classification of political and proletarian general strikes in relation to the use of violence in each.[footnoteRef:2] The former, according to Benjamin, stresses the continuous strengthening of the state with very little external modifications of conditions. The latter is revolutionary as it emphasizes the destruction of state power through the nullification of every social policy.[footnoteRef:3] The discussion of the proletarian general strike is a discussion of another Benjaminian category, pure means. The Critique asks whether violence can be used as a moral means even to just ends.[footnoteRef:4] Benjamins explanation of pure means is key in exploring this question. Pure means is anarchistic, annihilates all and produces no other effects besides destruction.[endnoteRef:1] Pure means rejects everything including law and laws aim to create Utopia.[footnoteRef:5] Yet, pure means (of which divine violence is included) in its destruction also expiates. Contemplating pure means forces a consideration of ends. According to the Benjaminian schema, pure means as the answer to fate-enforced violence in law must lead to just ends. A just end in this construction indicates the annihilation of all except the means itself. There is no assumption of a specific future, only that that the world must be transformed. [2: Benjamin, Walter. Critique of Violence. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 277300. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.] [3: Benjamin, Reflections, pp. 291] [4: Ibid. pp. 278] [1: ] [5: Ibid. pp. 281]

In Benjamins explanation of labor strikes, the political strike interrupts work in a violent way since it causes only an external modification of labor conditions.[footnoteRef:6] In contrast, the proletarian general strike as a pure means is non-violent, [f]or it takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state [].[footnoteRef:7] If the pure means in the general strike is contingent upon a transformed work, what does it mean to work in the context of the corporatized prison? To work in the solitary housing unit is to live in death. The SHU (solitary housing unit) prisoner is important to the state insofar as he demonstrate the force of legal coercion. Through the threat of sanctioned violence best epitomized in the states ability to kill (capital punishment and solitary confinement) legal supremacy is maintained. Yet, was the way the hunger strike framed by the Short Corridor Collective even that of a general strike with the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work? What would it even mean to transform the conditions of an existence of living death if this was the case? Is this appeal to transform the conditions of ones death allegorical? [6: Ibid. pp. 291] [7: Ibid. pp. 292]

In the revolutionary general strike omission of labor in all industries takes place simultaneously. It is considered revolutionary because within it exists the desire to overthrow the legal system that has conferred it.[footnoteRef:8] If the line between the hunger strike and the revolutionary strike ceased to exist, this new category of strike action, the revolutionary hunger strike, would attempts to internalize the divine intention of God to annihilate all (pure means) within the human body. A revolutionary rejection of all progress in preference for a transformation that at once annihilates and expiates. The political strike however, assumes a conscious readiness to resume the suspended action under certain circumstances that either have nothing whatever to do with this action or only to superficially modify it.[footnoteRef:9] In conversation with the Theses, this form of strike action can be interpreted as progress and not transformation. [8: Ibid. pp. 281] [9: Ibid. pp. 282]

The successes of the California hunger strike gives us some idea of how it could be categorized within Benjamins construction. The efforts of the Short Corridor Collective have led to: legislative hearings and efforts of reform by state politicians; more visits with loved ones; access to televisions and radios and the rights of SHU prisoners to own one pair of underwear, a cup and a bowl.[footnoteRef:10] The California hunger strike resembles more the latter than the former because of its reiteration of progress. However, this reiteration of progress is merely apparent. In the failure of the California hunger strike to create transformation is a non-intentionality that inverts the Short Corridor Collectives progress into transformation. [10: Rights, The Center for Constitutional. Pelican Bay Hunger Strike One Year Later: The Movement Against Solitary Confinement Grows. Huffington Post, July 11, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-center-for-constitutional-rights/pelican-bay-hunger-strike_b_5578295.html]

In Walter Benjamins work on Charles Baudelaire, essential moments are captured not through affirmation but through the negation of the way things appear. Benjamins vision of Baudelaire is not the ability to develop such a negative, but rather a presentiment of its real picture - that is, a vision of it in its negative state.[footnoteRef:11] Benjamin notes that much of Baudelaires work is allegorical and is driven by the mystery mongering of the conspirator.[footnoteRef:12] This conspirators intention is often guided by a non-intentionality driven by anger, discontent or drunkenness that leads to the very failure of that conspiracy. In the poem Ragpickers Wine, Benjamin notes, "From the litterateur to the professional conspirator, everyone who belonged to the boheme could recognize a bit of himself in the ragpicker. Each person was in a more or less blunted state of revolt against society and faced a more or less precarious future."[footnoteRef:13] The ragpicker is seen colliding against walls, swearing solemn oaths and encountering the police informers who dominate his dreams. The quality of drunkenness goes a long way in neutralizing the coercive effects of human intentionality.[footnoteRef:14] A failure is acknowledged that harnesses the essential qualities of the ragpicker in allegorical fashion, decentering human complicity in the idolatry of a world that needs to be opposed. Using failure as a means, Benjamin transforms complete failure into its inverse redeeming a past moment in order to alter his understanding of his own time.[footnoteRef:15] [11: Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press, 2006.] [12: Ibid. ] [13: Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life. pp. 54] [14: Martel, James. Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Ft 40] [15: Martel, Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory, ft 41 ]

The apparent failure of the hunger strikes, I claim is allegorical, revealing a more divine intention to transform. This failure is best represented in the question, Is this appeal to transform the conditions of ones death allegorical?