julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / English
John Holloway
How do I see the World after the invasion of Iraq?
The image that keeps on coming to my mind is a nightmarish image inspired by a story by Edgar Allen Poe. We are all in a room with four walls, a floor, a ceiling and no windows or door. The room is furnished and some of us are sitting comfortably, others are not. Some do not notice, but the walls are advancing inwards gradually, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, making us all more uncomfortable, advancing all the time, threatening to crush us all to death.
There are discussions within the room, but they are mostly about how to arrange the furniture. People do not seem to see the walls advancing. From time to time there are elections about how to place the furniture. These elections are not unimportant: they make some people more comfortable, others less so, they may even affect the speed at which the walls are advancing, but they do nothing to stop the relentless advance of the walls. Lula is not quite the same as his opponents of the right, Kirchner is not the same as Menem, López Obrador would not be the same as Fox, Gore would not have been quite the same as Bush: but no rearrangement of the furniture does anything to halt the relentless assault of the walls. And the more the walls advance, the more the people seem to accept it as something normal.
But there are those within the room who say that the important issue is not the furniture but how to stop the walls before we are all crushed to death. We throw ourselves at the walls, we bang our heads against the walls trying to find a crack, trying to find a way of breaking through, screaming “let us out, we want to build another world!” And we begin to realise that it is not just some of us, that many, perhaps all of us are banging our heads against the advancing walls of “reality”, only some are doing it so discreetly that we do not notice at first.
But how can we get out? How can we break through to another world? We see that the walls are made of a fine mixture of alienated labour and property and state and violence, all cemented by a peculiar claustrophobic Reason that tells us that there is no reality beyond these walls. And we search and search for a way through, we look in desperation for cracks. In recent years the walls have been advancing more quickly: capitalism has become more aggressive than ever and the Bush administration is clearly pushing hard for a rapid destruction of all humanity.
And then we see them: two big cracks in the wall. And one is called Work and the other is called State. And then we begin to see other cracks all over the place. What are we to do? “Patch them up, patch them up!” say some. “No”, we say, “they are our only hope, let us throw ourselves at them, let us do everything we possibly can to open them as wide as possible!”
The first crack we see is in Work.
Employment is central to capitalist domination. In capitalism we are separated from the social flow of doing, from the results of the doing of others. We are separated, in other words, from the means of production and survival. Our only way of surviving is to sell our capacity to do (our labour power) to a capitalist (or some capitalist institution) in return for a wage. We then have to spend our days doing what the capitalist tells us to do. If we rebel against the command of our master, we lose our job and fall into poverty or starvation. Through our employment we are controlled, forced to conform.
But employment is changing. More and more people are being thrown out of employment. More and more young people know that they are unlikely ever to have the life of secure employment that their parents “enjoyed”. More and more of the world’s population are not only an “industrial reserve army” but completely redundant from the point of view of capital. This is unlikely to change. It is unlikely that capital will ever employ even a small percentage of the thousand million or more who are currently unemployed. From capital’s perspective, the most sensible thing would be simply to destroy those absolutely redundant millions.
Unemployment affects not just the lives of the unemployed, but those of the employed as well. The threat of unemployment makes it much easier for capital to enforce its command at work, so that the expansion of unemployment is accompanied by the growth of stress and desperation at work.
We can think of unemployment (and the increasing stress of employment) in two ways. We can think of it as a misfortune, a personal catastrophe. It is difficult not to think of it like that, because unemployment means both poverty and being cut off from the sociality of doing which gives meaning to life. But it is more than that, and this becomes clear if we think of it not individually but collectively. Unemployment is a major crack in the domination of capital. If employment is the most important way in which capital controls us, then unemployment means a loosening of capitalist control. We are forced to look for other ways of survival that do not involve the selling of our labour power. In many cases, this means simply turning to “crime”, to individual attempts to gain access to the richness of the products of social doing in a way that poses no problem for capital. But there are also many cases in which people get together collectively and create a new sociality of doing, a new community of work. These people say that what they want is not employment but the opportunity to develop “genuine work”, dignified work, activity which is meaningful to them and controlled by them as a community, in terms of what they do, how they do it, when they do it. Some of the piqueteros in Argentina (especially those of the Anibal Verón) are saying this very clearly, but, in one way or another, the struggle for “genuine work” or meaningful activity plays an important role in the lives of nearly everybody.
What do we do? What do we say? Do we call on the government to adopt measures to increase employment, knowing that such measures will at most have a limited effect because they will never create a capitalism based on full employment or anything like it? An increase in employment will of course solve problems for some people, but it will intensify domination. Do we say that those people who are struggling to create a world of genuine work do not matter because there are only a few hundred thousand of them and because there is no unity among the unemployed? Or do we throw ourselves into the struggle for genuine work and say “yes, yes, yes! Here is a light, here is a hope, here is a possible way out of capitalism, out of this claustrophobic room that is gradually destroying us”? Do we say “No, this is not a revolutionary situation. All we can do is rearrange the furniture until a revolutionary situation comes along (possibly at the downturn of the next Kondratieff long wave)”? Or do we say “Let’s go for it, this is a crack, a hope, let’s do all we can to widen it, let’s do all we can to re-think the world in the light that shines through this crack”? And when we see that these groups have enormous difficulties in gaining access to the richness of social doing, blocked as it is by private property and the police, do we say “I told you so”, or do we do everything possible to find a way forward?
I think we choose the second option. It is obvious that the attempts to develop “genuine work” or meaningful activity within a world of alienated work face enormous difficulties, but that is a reason for concentrating our efforts on overcoming those difficulties. If we do not start (in thought and in practice) from the fissures in capitalist command that already exist, it is hard to see how we can escape from this room that is suffocating us.
State
The second crack is in the state.
The state is another crucial form of capitalist domination. Capital is the separation of people from the means of survival (from the sociality of human doing). This is done by the assertion of property, but behind this assertion stands the state and its threat and use of violence to protect property (the process of separation). If capital is understood as a process of separation, then the state is an integral part of that separation. The state controls us not just by violence but by separating us from one another, by separating us from social control of our lives (through elections and bureaucracy), by separating British from Pakistanis, the public from the private. It controls us by channelling all protest into social forms compatible with capitalist appropriation. When we bang our heads on the walls that are advancing to crush us, the state says “No, if you are unhappy, come and vote in the election to decide which way to arrange the furniture.” The state is part of the claustrophobic Reason of the room we are in, imposing on us all the time the idea that there is no possible world outside this room of the advancing walls.
The state is a form of domination, but it is a form of domination in crisis. Everywhere in the world, people are saying “No, we will not channel our struggles through the state. We will not organise ourselves in parties. We will not try to conquer control of the state. We do not want to become professional politicians. They are all corrupt”. This is shown everywhere in the fall in active participation in political parties and in the growth of non-party forms of organisation (the so-called new social movements). It is not necessarily reflected in figures for participation in elections, where other considerations (the choice of the least bad) operate.
Neoliberal globalisation and now the dominating aggression of the US government make this tendency much clearer, because they are destroying completely the old myth of national sovereignty. It is clearer than ever that what a state does (and can do) depends on a global web of capitalist social relations, on which elections have very little impact. It becomes more and more obvious that “national leaders” are more responsive to the movements of global capital (as transmitted through the markets and, to some extent, though the US and other governments) than to the opinions of the people of the country. Everywhere there is what is often referred to as a “crisis of representation”.
This is the second major crack in capitalist domination today. Just as unemployment is a crack in domination-through-employment, so the crisis of representation is a crack in domination-through-the-state. This is reflected not just in the growth of non-party forms of organisation, but in the deliberate adoption of forms of action and organisation (horizontality, for example) that do not dovetail with the mechanisms of the state. This can be seen in the working of the asambleas barriales in Argentina as forms of community organisation which specifically try to express communal dignity rather than the abstract individualism embodied by the state. And of course it is expressed brilliantly in the “¡Que se vayan todos!” One politician is just the same as another because what is wrong is not this or that party but state-centred politics itself.
What do we do? What do we say? What do we do with the “¡Que se vayan todos!”? Do we point out that “¡Que se vayan todos!” is an ambiguous slogan with many different meanings for different people? Or do we seize upon “¡Que se vayan todos!” as a scream against the state, a brilliantly concise expression of the huge gap between people and the state, and try to open up that gap, developing as far as we can the revolutionary, anti-capitalist implications of the cry? Do we say that the asambleas barriales are not so terribly important because they involved, at their peak, only a few hundred thousand people? Or do we say “here is a crack in the wall, here is something that shows us the way through to a different sort of society, let us pick it up, celebrate it, discuss its problems, do everything we can to strengthen it, to widen the crack”? Do we say that these asambleas are not so important, so the Left should focus on building a party or coalition for the election? Or do we say that these asambleas are very, very important, so they themselves must decide how they to use the elections to strengthen their own existence? Do we say that what is important is to build up a left party, so that one day it may gain control of the state apparatus and bring us radical change, or do we say “no, the radical change is already happening, we must do all we can to strengthen and extend it”?
A Science of Hope
Employment and the state are in crisis, and these crises are likely to grow, all over the world. In each case we have to think how to react to this crisis. Do we say this is not a revolutionary situation, so all that can be done is try to improve the present, to rearrange the furniture, to pretend that the walls are not moving and that capitalism is a stable system of domination? Or do we see that capitalism is a fierce and constant attack on humanity and focus all our attention on the fissures that exist?
We must, of course, start from the fissures that exist. We must try to think the world from the perspective of those fissures. This means challenging in every way possible the claustrophobic Reason that tells us that there is no world outside the walls, that there is no hope. This means thinking critically, thinking dialectically, thinking imaginatively, poetically, doing everything we can to dissolve those walls theoretically and practically.
There is no certainty in all this. The more the walls advance upon us, the less possible it seems that humanity can survive. But a possiblity exists and we have to bet on that possibility.
This means a different concept of science. Science cannot be a dispassionate, objective account of the advance of the walls up to the point where humanity is destroyed, at which point we can cry “you see, we were scientifically correct, there was no possibility of another world” (but there would be nobody left to hear us). No, science, if we understand it as part of the struggle for the survival of humanity (for communism, in other words), can only be a science of potential. A science which bets upon the possibility of breaking out of the room, a science which looks for cracks and, seeing those cracks, does everything possible to make them bigger. It is a question of looking at situations not objectively (as though we stood on the moon), but of looking at situations to find their potential and seeing how we can develop that potential critically and practically. There is always potential because we are human, because we are always struggling against oppression and because oppression is always full of the cracks which our struggles create. A science of potential is a science of hope, and there is always hope – until one day, perhaps, there will be hope no more, but then there will be no one to despair.
No hay comentarios