“We Want to Win”

febrero 6, 2026 Latest news and Upcoming events

5th Annual David Graeber Memorial Lecture with John Holloway –
Thursday, February 12.
If you were unable to connect, you can find the lecture here.

David Graeber Memorial

We Want to Win

How?

We want to win. We need to win. We, the losers of always, want to and need to win.

What do we want to win? We want to win lots of things, a host of particular struggles. We want to get rid of Trump, Milei, Starmer, Macron. We want to abolish ICE, to get rid of immigration controls everywhere. To stop violence against women. To stop the growing power of the masters of war in all the world. To stop the rise of the extreme right. To stop fossil fuels and global warming. To stop the elimination of critical thought in universities. Some we win, some we lose, and that is important. Nothing that I say should be understood as a criticism of the inevitable particularity of struggles. Some of these things can be achieved within capitalism. But we know that it is not enough.

It is not enough because the aggressions keep coming. Great to win a battle, but the pressures will keep on coming. We live in a society based on the constantly intensifying aggression of money against life.

And we feel trapped. We feel that we are being pushed closer and closer to an abyss, to catastrophe if not extinction. There is a sense of urgency, of endgame, the endgame of humanity.

Just in this moment of everything getting worse, we need to raise the stakes. We need to go back to revolution.Resistance yes, rebellion yes, of course. The Zapatistas are right to focus on resistance-and-rebellion. But let’s not forget the other word: revolution.

Madness. Go out into the street after this session is over and try to imagine a revolution in your town. Madness, but perhaps a necessary madness. This talk is an invitation to join me in my madness.

We feel trapped because we are trapped. Any society is a system of social cohesion or confluence, where there are established patterns of relating to one another. In today’s society, those patterns are shaped above all by the fact that our creative activities are related to one another through the exchange of commodities, as Marx argues. From there he goes on to derive the consequences of this basic relation through analysing the forms to which commodity exchange gives rise. The commodity relation leads to the development and dominance of money, the transformation of human activity into abstract or alienated labour, the breaking of communities and the identification of the abstract individual, the rise and dominance of capital which derives its wealth and power from the exploitation of labour, and so on.

This society is characterised by an extraordinary opacity, social relations are reified. The how we relate to one another is frozen into certain social forms that appear to be separate and eternal. Capitalism is labyrinthine, a concatenation of forms that lead from one to another and contain us within established patterns of activity and social reproduction. A totality of apparently separate forms focused on obliging us to convert our lives into labour, a strange activity devoid of any meaning other than the need to produce profit that can be accumulated by others.

These forms – labour, money, state, capital etc, – stimulate an unprecedented creativity, but the creativity is perverted through the money form with its insatiable drive for profit, and produces enormous hardship and profound destruction of the preconditions of life. Think of the internet or the smartphone or artificial intelligence, extraordinary products of human creativity but, contained as they are within the drive for profit, they are not what they could have been and leave a trail of exploitation, distortion and destruction.

In Marx’s analysis, the focus is not on who or what but on how. How do we relate to one another? How do we interact with one another? This is perhaps the central point of what I want to say.

But the how exists in the form of unquestionable whats. Labour (abstract or alienated labour) is simply a thing we have to do, rather than a peculiar form of our human activity. Money is a thing that we either do or do not possess, rather than a strange, dehumanising way of relating to other people.

Fetishisation or reification is a process of what-ification. It is also a process of who-ification. The exchange of commodities breaks the communal we into a number of abstractly identified I’s: proprietors of the commodities being exchanged, without history, without memory, without dreams.

III

We are contained within the social forms of the existing system of social cohesion. These are forms that identify and define, that contain our activity within certain patterns of behaviour. We can all think of how our activities today, this day, are being constrained by labour, money, capital and the state. If these are forms of constraint and containment, then the breaking of the present social cohesion must be an overflowing. But how? How do we confront the how of containment with the how or hows of overflowing to create a different social cohesion? How do we confront the identifying forms of the capital relation with the anti-identitarian flow of new creation.

Revolution is the replacement of the established mode of social cohesion with another or others – a world of many worlds, as the Zapatistas put it. This how-against-how is sure to be expressed at some point as a who against whom: clearly those who benefit from the current how of social cohesion will want to defend it, while those who most clearly suffer from it are the ones likely to fight for a change. But the important thing is that the how-against-how should not be reduced to, or overshadowed by, a who-against-whom. It is the how-against-how that much shape our struggle and our creation of a different world.

The Marxist tradition, led by Lenin and by Engels effectively reduced the how-against-how to a who-against-whom, summarised in Lenin’s brilliantly concise phrase that power is a question of who-whom. A fabulous phrase with disastrous consequences. The who-whom is the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class, both identifiable and identified. The how of a radically new form of social cohesion is put in second place. There is a complete blindness to the question of form in the Russian revolution, to the point where both Evgeny Pashukanis and Izaak Rubin were executed for insisting on the centrality of form in Marx’s work. Money, state and above all labour were treated in practice as being ahistorical characteristics of any society.

Back to our starting point. We are trapped in these forms. We can be as militant as we like, but as long as we stay within the capitalist forms, we do nothing to stop the reproduction of the dynamic of destruction. There must be some way out of here! But how?

It is not enough to scream, or to dream. Let’s do it. Engels was right about that. In his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, he argued that it was not enough to fantasise, that we have to think scientifically about how we can transform society. Dream if you like, he said, but what is the material basis of your hope?

Engels’ and Lenin’s version of scientific socialism did not work, it did not produce the societies that those who lived and died in the struggle had hoped for, but just the contrary. It produced horrible societies that had and have nothing to do with the self-determination of our life activity. But their failure has left us with the question of How, how on earth can we bring about a radical transformation of the mode of social cohesion?

There is an obvious answer: we don’t know.

It is important to say that, not only because it is true. Fifty or sixty years ago we had the answer: take state power and change society from there. But that has been seen to be no answer at all. Capitalist social forms cannot be broken by acting through capitalist social forms. As we have seen, attempts to break the rule of money and capital through the state have failed completely.

But it is also very important to say that we don’t know the answer because not knowing is part of the answer. If we know, then we tell other people the answer and reproduce a monological discourse of authority that reproduces the style of the society we want to transcend. If we say that we don’t know, we at once enter into a politics of dialogue. Our “I don’t know” is a “This is what I think, but I’m not sure, what do you think?”, already breaking with the hierarchical grammar of the existing society and entering into the uncertain anti-grammar of the society we want to create and are creating.

I hope this talk can be understood in this way, as a “I don’t know, this is as far as I’ve got, can you take us further?”.

The orthodox answer of the strong, organised working class has not worked. This is, at least in part, because it was understood on the basis of a definitional, identitarian concept of the working class. The same can be said of the idea that the development of the productive forces would lead to a collapse of the relations of production: this ignores that the development of the productive forces develop conflictually in-and-against the relations of production at every moment of their development. In both cases, an externality is assumed which cannot exist in practice: there can be no complete externality between two moments of a single social cohesion.

I want to suggest – and this is really my second main point – that we can move forward by turning to Ernst Bloch’s concept of the Not Yet. His argument is that the world that does not yet exist but could exist, exists already. It exists as Not Yet, as present anticipation, as pushing-against-and-beyond, as misfitting, as dream, as rebellion.

In his great book, The Principle of Hope, he traces the presence and force of this Not Yet, this thrust towards a different world, in fairy tales, dance, architecture, music, political theory, religion, among other fields. The conclusion is that, with Marx’s discovery of the potential of the working class, the constant push of the Not Yet becomes a practical force for transforming the world. He does not question the meaning of the working class, but his song to the power of the Not Yet in so many different aspects of life, as a force constantly pushing against that which is, opens up a different way of thinking about the material basis of our revolutionary hope. The possibility of transforming the world radically depends on the strength of the Not Yet, of the discontent and inconformity and creativity that push in-against-and-beyond existing social forms.

The idea of the Not Yet does not stand opposed to the idea of class struggle, but it does suggest a different interpretation. Whereas the traditional concept of the working class is identitarian, the idea of the Not Yet is profoundly anti-identitarian, a constant pushing against boundaries. “To think is to go beyond”, as Bloch puts it. To understand the working or labouring class as Not Yet is to open up the concept and see what it conceals. The concept of labour conceals its own duality, as Marx pointed out, insisting that this was “the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns”. Underlying the abstract, alienated labour which is so readily visible in capitalist society there is what Marx calls concrete or useful labour, the sort of work or creative activity that exists in any society. The Not Yet here is the push of creative activity or doing in-against-and-beyond its containment within the bounds of abstract labour, that labour whose only meaning is that it contributes to the profitability of capital. The Not Yet is an overflowing. Similarly, the workers who are now classified or defined by being tied to the performance of labour push in-against-and-beyond their classification. Seen in this way, the Not Yet is working class struggle, the struggle of those currently trapped in capitalist labour in-against-and-beyond labour and in-and-against the entrapment which is their classification.

The Not Yet is closely related to the notion of a baseline communism that is so present in the work of David Graeber, as also in that of Kropotkin and Abdullah Öcalan, and indeed of the whole Kurdish movement. The basic idea is that any society, including capitalist society, depends for its functioning on the existence of a basic communism, a basic practice of mutual support in everyday life.

This can be seen as a sort of “yes, but” in response to the usual reading of Marx. As we have seen, Marx’s argument is that existing society is shaped by the fact that people come together through the exchange of commodities and that this leads to the development and dominance of money, the transformation of human activity into abstract or alienated labour, the breaking of communities, the rise and dominance of capital which derives its wealth and power from the exploitation of labour, and so on.

The idea of the baseline communism comes as a “Yes, but” in the sense of saying “Yes, that is true, But there is something else: a communism in which people relate to one another on the basis of need, of mutual recognition and support, of freely shared activity. In fact, the individualising, destructive society can exist only on the basis of the continuing existence of its opposite. In destroying this underlying communism, capitalism is destroying its own basis.”

I think this “yes, but” is already present in Marx’s Capital, but it has not been widely commented upon. It is present in the categories of use value, of concrete or useful labour and indeed in the concept of productive forces, all of which do not exist in complete subsumption into their capitalist forms but stand in constant tension to them.

Hope then lies in the strength of this baseline communism. This invites us to rewrite history not just in terms of domination, and not just in terms of rebellions like the Anabaptist insurrection led by Thomas Münzer, that Bloch wrote a book about, but in terms of the force of everyday communism. Yes, it is true that we are entangled in the world of money, but this world of money can only exist if there also exists a critical world of mutual support, of sharing and loving, of friendship and comradeship. This is a central theme in David’s wonderful book with David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. It is also a central theme in Abdullah Öcalan’s Sociology of Freedom, developed in the idea of “democratic modernity versus capitalist modernity”.

This baseline communism is the society which does Not Yet exist, but already exists materially as necessary counterpart to the rule of money. To see it through the prism of Not Yet is to see that it exists in-against-and-beyond its own negation. The mutual support that characterises everyday communism cannot stand outside the dominant capitalist sociality: inevitability it is opposed to it and is penetrated by it. Often it will take the capitalist form of giving somebody money or helping to find a job. There is no purity here. The social cohesion in which we live is an antagonistic one, in which the two sides constantly penetrate each other. It is important not to idealise or romanticise the baseline communism: it can only exist as struggle, and all struggle is contradictory.

VII

We want revolution, but it makes sense only if we recognise that there is no revolutionary purity. By virtue of living in capitalist society, we are inevitably damaged subjects, as Adorno puts it. At the same time, the fact that capital is a constant aggression means that we live not only in but also against this society and that we project beyond it. As damaged subjects, we live in-against-and-beyond our own damaged condition.

This is important when we think about revolution and what it means. Revolution, we saw, is a question of how. We need to replace the how of the present social cohesion with another, we need to replace the present pattern of coming together through the exchange of commodities and money with a different pattern or different patterns. The present coming-together or cohesion or confluence is antagonistic, characterised by an antagonism between the rule of money and the baseline communism that exists Not Yet. To think revolution is to think how we can strengthen that Not Yet, that communism-against.

This is above all a question of how. How do we strengthen the communising How against the capitalist How? Against the social forms of labour, how do we assert the anti-forms of free, self-determined activity? I have suggested before that the best way to think about it is in terms of creating cracks in the texture of capitalist domination, spaces or moments in which we say NO and create other ways of doing. Revolution can be seen as the recognition, creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of such cracks. The recognition can be understood as the recognition of the multiple manifestations of the baseline communism that we have been talking about. It is the confluence of such cracks that I have always found the most difficult to think through. It is clear that such a confluence should not be thought of in institutional terms, that probably the most important is a resonance created by songs, stories, pictures, perhaps even talks and books. But there is a theme that is coming through in present discussions that is very important: the idea of the commune as the basis both of the society that we want to create and in the organisation of present struggle to get there. The confluence of cracks, of refusals and social discontents can be thought of in terms of communising.

Marx said of the Paris Commune of 1871 that it was the political form “at last discovered” of working class emancipation. That is certainly true if we think of the working class not as a sociological grouping but as the oppressed pushing towards our own collective self-determination. If we focus on the revolution as a clash of hows, of different ways of coming together, then it is clear that revolution is a movement of communising, that is, both a push of self-determining activity against labour and, the movement of some sort of communal organisation against the state.

The state, any state, excludes people by its form, its separation of paid functionaries from society. The commune includes, seeks to articulate ideas from below and to reintegrate the organisation of society into society itself. The state is subordinated necessarily to the accumulation of capital by virtue of its dependence on capital for its income and survival. The commune seeks to free itself from subordination to capital accumulation by promoting other forms of production. The state is inherently racist by virtue of its definition by territorial borders, whereas the tradition of the commune, from Paris to Rojava has been strongly anti-racist and anti-nationalist. The state-oriented party is an instrument for achieving power, and accepts the present how of social cohesion in order to change it in an indefinitely postponed tomorrow. The commune is not an instrument to achieve power, it is already the expression of an advancing different form of social cohesion, here and now.

To struggle for a different way of coming together is to communise, to strengthen the emergent social cohesion(s). Öcalan has written recently that “while class struggle is indeed part of it, it is more accurate to read history as a long process of relation and conflict between communal development and anti-communal development extending back roughly 30,000 years.” This is very helpful, but I disagree with his separation between class struggle and the commune: if we think of class struggle as a how-against-how, then it is clear that it is the movement of communising against the anti-communal development that is capitalism.

The commune is more a question than an answer. It is best thought of as an assembly of damaged subjects. The Zapatistas’ insistence that they are just ordinary people is of fundamental importance, but of course we ordinary people are damaged people, often sexist, racist, patriarchal, bad-tempered and so on, and traditional communities are very often patriarchal. The revolutionary commune is necessarily a communising, a movement against itself, to overcome its own damaged condition, a verb and not a noun. A sort of bootstrapping through mutually recognitive debate.

VIII

Back to the beginning. Now, more than ever, it is time to talk of revolution. This is a time of great upheaval in world capitalism, and of great fragility. The centre cannot hold, has not held. The space for reformist improvements has become much smaller and it is likely to remain so. Now is the time to overflow, to say No, it cannot continue like this. Now is the time to struggle for the emancipation of doing from labour, of communal self-determination from the state.

The two Davids in the conclusion to their book, speak of “the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic – become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible.” I agree with them that this is such a time.

So, finally: This is what I think, this is as far as I’ve got, but I’m not sure, what do you think? Preguntando caminamos, asking we walk.

John Holloway.