Change the World without Taking Power

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / English

Really?

John Holloway

How ridiculous to call a book Change the World without taking Power.

Ridiculous. Surely those of us who were young in the late ‘sixties and early ‘seventies should have matured enough by now to know that the world can’t be changed in the way that we dreamed? And those who were born later are immune from that sort of romanticism, aren’t they?

Doubly ridiculous. Even if it were possible to change the world, then surely the only way to think of that is in terms of power? It seems obvious that it is only by winning power that we can change things effectively.

Why then pose the doubly ridiculous issue of changing the world without taking power? Because there is no option. The world has become more, not less, horrific. We see the horrors of capitalism, the bodies being dragged from the rubble of Palestine and Afghanistan, the millions of children living in the streets of the world, the 35,000 children who die each day of curable diseases, the obscenity of a world in which, in 1998, the assets of the 358 richest people were more than the total annual income of 45% of the world’s people (over two and a half billion). We see all that and a scream grows inside us, a scream so intense that there is no option: we cannot abandon hope for a different world. No matter how hopeless the situation, no matter how much we know that our hope is hope against hope, we have no choice: we have to ask how we can change the world, we have to return to that tired old question of revolution.

And yet we cannot do it in the same way as before. All the failed attempts at revolution over the last century have shown that we cannot think of revolution in terms of the taking of state power. The attempt to make the state the fulcrum of radical change has not worked. The state as a form of social relations is too deeply a part of capitalist society for it to be possible to conceive of using the state to bring about a revolution. The experience of a century of failed revolutionary attempts confirms that which is in any case becoming clearer, namely, that the state is not the centre of power that it appears to be.

There is no alternative, then, but to ask “how do we talk about revolution in a new way? How do we break the link between revolutionary change and trying to gain control of the state? How can we pose the question of changing the world without taking power?” It would be a very abstract question if it were not something that is already very much in the air. The great achievement of the zapatista uprising in Mexico has been to make explicit the break between revolutionary change and the attempt to gain control of the state: the zapatistas say they want to make the world anew, but without taking power. That is surely the key to their extraordinary resonance throughout the world. The idea of changing the world without taking power is one which resonates through the new anti-capitalist movements of recent years.

But what can it mean to speak of changing the world without taking power? How can we even pose the question without falling into a sea of absurdity? To think seriously about the question is to shake to their foundations all the categories of mainstream thought, all the categories of that thought which tells us that the question is ridiculous. The aim of the book is to push forward into this largely uncharted territory, to confront the question which both the right and much of the left would dismiss as insane, the question which is so urgent: how can we change the world without taking power?

The starting point for thinking about the issue is to see that the concept of “power” conceals two opposed meanings. The simplest meaning of power is that it refers to our capacity to do. In this sense, we feel that reading a good book or taking part in a good political meeting makes us feel powerful, or we feel a sense of our own power when we succeed in doing something. This power, power-to-do, is always a social power. Our doing things always depends on the present or past doing of others: our doing is always part of a social flow of doing, no matter how individual we feel our actions to be. As I sit here at my computer and write this, I feel it to be an individual act, yet I know that in reality it is part of an immense flow of doing, that it would not be possible were it not for the work of the people who made the computer, installed the electricity in the house, built the house, grew the food that gives me energy, and so on and so on. My doing is part of a flow in which the done of myself or others becomes the precondition of further social doing.

This social power-to becomes converted into its opposite, individual power-over, when doing itself is broken, when certain people (the powerful, the capitalists) seize the done and claim it as their own. Since the done of the past is the precondition of present doing, this seizure of the done as their property allows them to exert power-over present doing. Power-to, the capacity to do, now exists in the form of power-over, the capacity to control other people’s doing. The social flow of doing is ruptured, its relevance denied. Power now appears as the attribute of individuals, and those who do not exercise power-over become invisible, or appear, at most, as victims, as the mere objects of power.

Power-over, then, rests on the breaking of the social flow of doing. Capital is a process of separation: separation of the done from the doing, but also therefore of the doers from their own doing, of the doers from each other (since their coming together is not a conscious process but decided by the owner of the means of doing, the capitalist). This process of separation (conceptualised by Marx as alienation and later fetishism, and often referred to as reification) penetrates all our doing and all our thinking. It separates conception from execution, production from consumption, separates too the process of maintaining order from the immediate control of the doing of others by those who own the means of doing, thus constituting the economic and the political in their separation. Perhaps most fundamental of all, the breaking of doing, with its breaking of the unity of conception and execution, thinking and doing, implies the homogenisation of time, the subjection of doing to that which is, the subordination of doing to being. The central category of bourgeois thought comes to be identity, is-ness.

It is clear, then, why changing the world radically cannot be a question of taking power. Power-over is not something to be taken: it is a process of separation. The state is part of this process, so that to get involved in the pursuit of state power is already to take part in this process of separating. The struggle for conscious social control of social development, however, is just the opposite: it is a movement of bringing together, a movement of making explicit the sociality of doing. There is thus a fundamental a-symmetry in the social struggle: the struggle to change the world cannot reproduce the forms of capital, for to reproduce capitalist forms is to reproduce capitalist domination, no matter what the content of the measures adopted. What is at issue is not the taking of power, but the emancipation of power-to, the construction of a sociality in which the social flow of doing is explicit.

How can we emancipate our power-to? How can we construct an alternative sociality? The book does not answer these questions in detail – that is for the next book, or for the many movements against capitalism, to answer. The book concentrates rather on developing the theoretical implications of this approach, its consequences for the way we conceive the world, and on showing that the struggle against power already has a strength far, far greater than is normally perceived to be the case. The struggle against power (and not for power) is the stuff of most people’s everyday lives. Often it takes the form not of open insubordination but of a simple refusal to subordinate, an obstinate struggle to live our lives in the way that we want to. This is usually discounted as being quite insignificant, both by the left and by the right, but in fact our everyday refusal to subordinate our lives to the dictates of capital has a fundamental impact on social development. This is the basis of the Marxist theory of crisis, although it is not often seen in this light.

The future remains open as a question. But it is an anguished question. If the present organisation of society is not changed radically, if capitalism is not abolished, in other words, then it is very probable that social tensions will continue to intensify, that the world will become a more and more miserable and violent place, and that humanity will destroy humanity. Social science cannot be a process of charting objectively the self-destruction of humanity. If science is to have any meaning at all, it must be part of the struggle to change society. “Revolution”, that tired, derided concept, is an unavoidable question. But it is a question, not an answer. There is no certainty of a happy ending. Our dialectic is rather a negative dialectic, with absolutely no guarantee of a happy home-coming. That is precisely why it is so important to struggle and to hope, and to understand our writing as part of that struggle and that hope.