Revolt and Revolution

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / English

Or
Get out of the Way, Capital!

John Holloway

How do we tell capital “Get out, clear off! This relationship has lasted far too long already. Now get out, go away!”?

The issue is posed with brilliant simplicity by recent events in Argentina. “¡Que se vayan todos!” – “Let them all go away!” is the cry of a people who have lost all respect for their politicians, who just want them to go away, all of them, irrespective of party. And for many the “them” refers not just to the politicians but to their capitalist friends, their accomplices in the rampant corruption and exploitation of recent years. But for many the cry refers to all those who exploit and all those who live as parasites of exploitation. The anger against capitalism, against that system which is such an obvious disaster, takes on a personal colour, turns not just against capitalism but against capitalists, against all those who live by exploiting the misery of others. Get out, all of you! ¡Que se vayan todos!

And of course it is not just Argentina. Everywhere there is a widening gap not just between rich and poor but between governments and governed. Everywhere it is becoming clearer that those who claim social authority are nothing but the corrupt, sick instruments of a social system that attacks humanity more and more violently. We have lived in this stupid, oppressive relationship for about three hundred years, exploited and ruled by people for whom we have no respect, and now it is time to say “Enough, get out, go!”

But is it really possible?

The question would be an empty abstraction if it were not for the fact that nearly everybody says “go away!” to capital nearly all the time: perhaps not with the same clarity, but with similar intent. There must be very few people in the world who actively support capitalism, who actually think it’s a good way of organising society, rather than simply taking it for granted or thinking that there is no alternative. There can be very few people who think that a society is good in which 35,000 children die needlessly each day, as a result of the way in which production and distribution are organised.

The vast majority of us try to escape from capital all the time. We do it in different ways. We flee. We flee by throwing the alarm clock against the wall when it rings in the morning and tells us to go to work. We flee when we phone up and say we’re unable to go to work today. We flee when we watch a Hollywood movie and reassure ourselves that the world is not so bad really, that it will all turn out all right in the end. We flee by leaving our job and trying to survive on the dole. We flee when we open up a small shop or set up a small business – anything to avoid the direct command of capital. We flee when we migrate, hoping that conditions will somehow be better on the other side of the fence. For some of us flight is more complicated, more contradictory. In some ways we like what we do. We like to be teachers, doctors, nurses, joiners. We think that what we do makes sense in some ways and like the personal relations involved. The problem is the restrictions and the direction that capital imposes on us: we want to teach well, to treat our patients well, to do whatever it is we are doing well, but not to worry about profit, nor about imposing discipline, nor about closing our eyes to the horrors we see around us. We flee from capital by fighting for what we are doing against the limits and blinkers imposed on us by the capitalist form of organisation.

Capitalism is repulsive, deeply repulsive. All forms of domination are repulsive, but in capitalism this repulsion is a basic principle of social organisation. The repulsive character of capitalism is what liberal theory calls freedom.

Slavery and feudalism are repulsive too, of course. Slaves hate their masters and would like to be free of them, but they are tied by the bond of ownership; slave-owners too despise their slaves and consider them lazy and stupid, but it may not be so easy to sell them and buy other, better ones. In feudalism, the situation is even worse, for the bond is for life. The serfs cannot walk away from their lord, no matter how cruel or demanding he is; but neither can the lords walk away from their serfs, no matter how stupid or disobedient they are. The mutual repulsion of lord and serf is contained.

This changes with the transition to capitalism. The serfs win their freedom: if they do not like their lord-turned-capitalist, they can leave him. If the lord-turned-capitalist does not like his workers, he can sack them. The pent-up hatred of centuries, the repulsion each side feels for the other, finds expression in the new freedom of capitalist society.

This is a real freedom. The former serfs are at last able to say to their masters “Go away! Leave us in peace, leave us to get on with our own lives the way we want to!” The masters are at last able to say to the former serfs “You’re fired! We don’t want you.”

This is an illusory freedom, of course. The former serfs have to produce or to do something in order to survive, but the only way in which they can do that is by having access to that which they (or their forbears) have done in the past, or to land. But when they try to do this, they find that what they have done in the past and the land too is private property, all enclosed and marked with signs saying “This is mine!” They must go then, cap in hand, to the capitalist (the property-owner, the person who has marked everything with “this is mine!) and ask for access to the means of survival. The capitalist (the former lord and slave-owner) finds too that, once the serfs are gone, he has no source of wealth unless he employs the now-free workers. And so a new relation is born. The former serfs sell their labour power (their capacity to work) to the former lords and become workers, working again for the people that they had fled from. The former lords too are forced into a new relation of dependence: they depend now not on the serfs but on the workers they have contracted.

The relationship is not the same as before, however, because mutual repugnance, flight, freedom in other words, is now built into the core of the relationship. Capital is structured around mutual repulsion: capital is repulsive. This repulsion finds expression in the ability of capitalists to flee from their workers whenever they want. Flight and the threat of flight is the principal way in which capital imposes its discipline (quite unlike the lords of feudal times). But workers too are free to flee, by working slowly, by not turning up for work, by putting the desire to do things well before the interests of their employer, by dropping out.

The flight from capital is central to our lives. That is surely the starting point for thinking about revolutionary change.

Fleeing from capital is easy. The problem is to maintain that flight, to avoid being recaptured. Maybe the same could be said for slaves and serfs. They too could run away, their problem was to avoid being recaptured. But when they ran away, they were already in breach of the law and in danger of direct physical punishment. When we run away, there is no breach of the law, no threat of punishment. Our master’s leash is much longer. We run away and everyone says “Fine, you’re free to do what you like”. The problem comes when our lack of access to the means of doing means that we starve.

There are two elements, then, in thinking about the possibility of revolutionary change. The first is telling capital (and capitalists and their politicians) to go away. ¡Que se vayan todos! Most of us do it in some form or another much of the time. The problem is to do it effectively and collectively. The second element is to think how to survive once the relationship is broken, how to avoid being recaptured, forced back into submission by our lack of access to the means of doing. The distinction can be expressed in terms of revolt and revolution. Revolt is inherent in our existence in an oppressive society, revolution refers to the question of how we maintain the impetus of revolt.

These elements are interwoven, interdependent and yet distinct. The first element (¡que se vayan todos!, revolt) expresses a deep and urgent anger. Capitalism is so terribly, terribly destructive that we cannot wait until we have a plan for survival before we say “enough!” To a woman who is being beaten by her husband you cannot say “but how will you survive without him?” No, there is only one thing to be said now: “get out, husband, go!” Of course the demand will gain force if the woman already has a plan for survival, but to regard such a plan as a precondition for saying “get out!” would be insulting. If necessary, finding the means to survive is something that has to be developed in the process of breaking the relationship.

We cannot tell capital to go away by trying to take state power, either by parliamentary or by violent means. Going to the state (by whatever means) is like going to a marriage counsellor. Its raison d’être is to preserve the relationship that we are determined to break. The time for trying to reform the relationship, to make capital more human, is long past. This lesson has been hammered home daily since the 11th September as we see bodies pulled from the rubble in Afghanistan, Palestine, and where next, and all pretence of giving capitalism a human face has been abandoned. Now it is more urgent than ever to break the capital relation.

The second element (how can we survive?, revolution), unless it is grounded in the anger of the first (¡que se vayan todos!) becomes an abstraction. But the first element, unless it leads on to alternative forms of survival, is unable to maintain itself. To speak of revolution makes sense only if it is grounded in revolt; and revolt can maintain itself only if it tends towards revolution.  The initial “Get out! ¡que se vayan todos!”, has to lead on to the construction of alternative forms of sociality. It cannot be a question of replacing one set of rulers with another, but of building a different sort of social relationship. The initial anger inevitably takes a personal form, but thoughts about how to survive push us beyond the understanding of capital in personal terms to seeing capital as a social relation, so that throwing capital out can only mean developing alternative forms of social relations, alternative forms of sociality.

The sociality of doing is the central issue. To live, to survive, to be human, we do. Doing, in the sense of projecting, changing and changing ourselves, is central to human existence – “for what is life but activity?” (Marx 1975, p. 275) But doing is always social doing, always part of a social flow of doing. In order to do, we connect in some way, consciously or unconsciously, with the doing of others, we integrate our doing with the doing of others. I cannot imagine a doing that is purely individual. I may think of writing this chapter as an individual action, but obviously it is not: it is a blending of my doing with the doing of others who have written or talked about the issue, with the doing of the people who made the computer I’m using, with that of the people who put electricity in the house and so on and so on. My doing is not necessarily co-ordinated with the doing of others, but it is none the less a social doing. My doing blends with that which others are doing or have done in a flow of doing through time and space.

Then comes capital, that horrible, horrible relationship that we want to break. Capital is the fracturing of the sociality of doing. Capital is the separation of that which has been done from the flow of doing. Capitalists appropriate that which has been done, they take it and say “this is mine! This is my property!” The seizure of the done is of course the seizure of the means of doing (since our doing depends on that which has been done), so that our access to doing (that is, to the social flow of doing) now has to pass through the capitalist. In order to integrate our doing into the social flow of doing (in order to be able to do at all), we must sell our capacity to do (our labour power) to the capitalist and do what he tells us to do. We are torn from any direct determination of the social flow of doing, we are torn from that conscious projection of our own doing which distinguishes us from animals, we are torn from the direct participation in the sociality of doing which gives social validity to what we do and mutual recognition to each of us as participants in the flow of human doing.

Capital stands as the gatekeeper to the sociality of doing. Unless we go through capital, unless we sell our labour power to the capitalist or participate in some way in capitalist social relations, we are isolated, impoverished (or indeed annihilated) both materially and socially. Capital stands as gatekeeper, supported of course by all the politicians, soldiers, police, professors and the like who make it unthinkable for us to question the “this is mine!” upon which capital stands. When we say “Go! Get thee gone!” to capital and its henchmen, we are saying “Get out of the way, we want direct access to the sociality of doing.” We no longer accept that the relation between our particular doing and the social flow of doing should pass through capital. We ourselves want to determine how our doing should be integrated into the flow of doing of all. It is only by integrating our doing into the sociality of doing that we can maintain our flight from capital.

How can we tell the gatekeeper to clear off and what does it mean? It cannot be a question of appointing a new gatekeeper, the party or the state. That does not make sense, we want no gatekeeper at all. It cannot be a question of converting private property into public property: any form of property is a breaking of the social flow of doing. It is the abolition of property that is required, the dissolution of this dam that breaks the flow of human doing.

If we were to think of replacing one gatekeeper by another, as in the old concept of social transformation, that would already suggest a model of revolution and of organisation. To replace one gatekeeper with another, there must be direct confrontation. Direct confrontation was understood as taking place at the level of the state, as though the state marked the limits of society – now obviously (but always) a remarkably silly idea. It is probably not helpful to think of revolution now in terms of direct confrontation: not only because it has not worked in the past, not only because we would almost certainly lose, given the means of violence which the states have at their disposal, but also because direct confrontation means adopting the forms of social relations inherent in capital. Direct confrontation implies adopting a mirror image of the enemy. One army looks very much like another, and it never really matters which wins.

This suggests that we should think of revolution not (or not just?) as punching the gatekeeper on the nose, but rather in terms of flowing around him, establishing alternative forms of sociality, making him an irrelevant and despicable laughing-stock.

In some ways, Lenin’s great question “what is to be done?” is much more urgent now than it was a hundred years ago. But the question was perhaps not an innocent one. The formulation (“what is to be done?” rather than “what do we do?”) already suggests an instrumental approach. It carries with it the idea of “what is to be done to get from point A to point B?” or “what is the best way of reaching point B?” It separates the end from the means, and subordinates the means to the end. Any means are justified to reach the goal of communism. However, by detaching the means from the end, this conception deprives the means of their emancipatory content (emancipation is seen as coming after the revolution). Thereby, the relationship is reversed: since the end can be nothing other than the product of the means, the end produced (the communism of the Soviet Union) was necessarily non-emancipatory. The apparent subordination of means to end necessarily means in reality the subordination of end to means. It is important, then, in distinguishing between the two elements of our problem (¡que se vayan todos! or revolt, and how to survive? or revolution), that we see the relation between the two as internal, not external. The development of an alternative sociality is not to be seen as something that comes after the revolution: it is rather the movement from revolt to revolution.

The idea of flowing around the capital-gatekeeper makes it clear that there is no one correct way, that rather the strength of the flowing around lies in the fact that the movement is made up of a million different initiatives, a million different experiments going beyond the limited but very adaptable confines of the capital-gatekeeper’s imagination, a million different explorations of different ways of establishing social validation and mutual recognition. Of course there is confrontation as capital tries to stop us and impose its stupid, violent “This is mine!”, but the response cannot be to adopt the logic of capital but to laugh and overflow, to expose its violent stupidity. Our strength lies not in working through capitalist structures but in developing forms of action and forms of relations that do not dovetail with the capitalist forms, that do not correspond to the logic of capital.

We can make the same argument in terms of power. Our power is fundamentally different in quality from the power of capital. This difference in quality is hidden if we speak of “counter-power”, as do traditional discussions of revolution. The problem with the term “counter-power” is that it leaves open the question of whether our power is symmetrical to the power of capital or in some way fundamentally non-symmetrical. In other words, the term “counter-power” conflates two quite different meanings of the word “power”.

Our power is the power of the social flow of doing. It is the blending of our doing with the doing of others that gives us the possibility of satisfying our material wants and living in a world based on dignity, on the mutual recognition of one another as doers, as active subjects. Our power is the social capacity to do, to realise our projects.

The power of capital is the fracturing of social doing. The power of capital is its capacity to appropriate the done and say “this is mine”. The power of capital is the power to deny us access to the sociality of doing. Capital separates: capital separates us from that which we have done, from the means of doing, from the possibility of determining our own doing, from one another, from the sociality without which our individual existence becomes meaningless.

The power of capital (power-over) separates. Our power, anti-power, power-to-do, brings together. The logic of the two powers, their grammar, their syntax, is fundamentally different.  They are two totally antithetical movements (for more on this see Holloway 2002). If we (whatever we call ourselves, be it working class, trade union, revolutionary party) adopt the logic and grammar of separation, then we are struggling on behalf of capital, whatever our intentions. There is no symmetry between the two sides of the class struggle.

Revolution, then, is not the struggle to take power from them, but rather the movement of our own power, the movement of power-to. But what does that mean? Our power, the power to do, is the social flow of doing, but it exists in a society in which that social flow is fractured. Consequently, it can only be understood as a movement against that fracturing, the struggle to recompose and assert our own power. Our movement is negative, a movement-against, but it is not an empty negativity, rather a negativity filled with the assertion of our power-to against that which negates and fractures it.

Revolution is the movement of power-to. This is still very abstract, and in some ways it is more a question than a statement, but a number of points are clear.

Firstly, it is possible to refer to power-to as the “forces of production”, since human doing is the only creative force, the only force of production. However, the way in which the phrase “forces of production” has been understood in the (post-Marx) Marxist tradition, as referring to technology, conceals the basic point: it is the developing power of human creativity (of the social flow of doing) which comes into constant conflict with the existing relations of production, based as they are on the fracturing of social creativity. The idea of a clash between “the forces of production” and the “relations of production” has been associated with a deterministic view of social development as an objective process of which we are the “bearers”, but no more. If, however, we think of a conflict between our power-to and the fracturing of that power-to by capital, it is clear that we, as subject, are in the centre of the process, that we are the movement of history.

Secondly, it is clear that the movement of power-to against its own fracturing cannot take place through the state, since the state itself is part of that fracturing. The state is a process of fracturing in various senses: it divides the political from the economic, the public from the private, the national from the foreign. The sociality of doing is not a national sociality. It does not stop at the frontiers of the state. To think of the explicit socialisation of doing in terms of the state is nonsensical. It is clear from the history of the so-called “socialist states” that the result of identifying sociality with the state was to cut the doers in those countries off from the global sociality of doing, with disastrous consequences in terms of intellectual and material impoverishment. The movement of power-to cannot be a national movement.

Thirdly, and following from that, we cannot think of the movement of power-to as being a “political” process of collective deliberation separated from the economic. “Neighbourhood assemblies” and other forms of communal deliberation are certainly of crucial importance, but we must not forget that capital-as-gatekeeper separates us not just from collective deliberation but also from the material richness produced by social doing. Overcoming the capital-gatekeeper must involve the development of forms of doing that participate in all the richness of social doing.

In other words (and fourthly), the movement of power-to cannot be conceived in terms of a retreat from sociality. Saying “go away, capital” can easily lead us to turn inwards, to turn our back on capital and try to develop our own little projects for survival. This is very understandable and probably necessary in many cases. How else do we try to develop alternative ways of doing, other forms of sociality, if not by creating our own spaces? We establish our own seminars or discussion groups away from the usual academic pressures, we set up or participate in community projects of one sort or another, social centres, unemployed workers’ centres, co-operatives for the production of organic vegetables and so on. There is a temptation to turn inwards, to defend and consolidate “our own space”. But probably the notion of “our own space” is illusory – and perhaps we should think in terms of time and not of space. In such projects, the issue always arises of how we connect to the global flow of doing – what do we do with the organic vegetables, how do we avoid the social centre becoming isolated and inward-looking, the discussion group becoming arid and sectarian? The strength of such projects ultimately depends on the degree to which they find ways of integrating their doing into the social flow, without going through the fracturing forms of capitalist social relations. Their strength depends not on turning away from the capital-gatekeeper-to-sociality but on flowing around it.  The movement of power-to cannot be understood as a movement towards poverty, austerity and isolation. The richness of the Zapatista movement, for example, derives not from their defence of indigenous traditions but from their openness to a world of struggle.

Fifthly, it used to be said that there was a difference between the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the transition from capitalism to communism in that the former was interstitial, a gradual building up of bourgeois power in the interstices of feudalism, whereas the latter could only be achieved at one blow, through a climactic Revolution-Event. This argument leads almost inevitably to a vanguardist conception of revolution as the seizure of power and the identification of the state with the whole of society. However much one may want capital to drop dead tomorrow, the idea of revolution as the movement of power-to probably means that revolution can only be conceived of as interstitial – or rather (perhaps a better image) as a progressive flowing around capital, a progressive overflowing, outsmarting, ridiculing, jumping to a different plane. This does not mean a gradualist approach to revolution, a conception which depends on the linearity of time, but rather the progressive destruction of the linearity of time, a moving beyond all the linearities and definitions of capitalism.

Sixthly, if the movement from revolt to revolution is the development of an alternative sociality, then it is important to see that this movement is just as much rooted in everyday practice as is the movement of revolt. We develop social relations all the time that are not commodified and that are in implicit or explicit tension with capitalist social relations: relations of love, of solidarity, of co-operation, of dignity. Obviously these relations do not exist in a social vacuum, they are in no sense pure prefigurations of a non-capitalist society, but their existence nevertheless points against and beyond capitalist social relations. The development of an alternative sociality is not something that has to be created from nothing, it already exists, albeit embryonically, in the daily practice of people against and beyond capital.

Seventhly (and perhaps most important), understanding revolution as the movement of power-to means not following the agenda of capital. There is a tendency in left thought to focus on what capital (through its mouthpieces) is saying and doing, and to criticise that. That is no doubt important, and yet it is wrong, it is completely upside down. Capital cannot be the starting-point of revolutionary thought. We are the doers, the only creators. Capital runs after us, trying to contain what we are doing, to define it, to appropriate it, to convince us that it is the only subject and that we are nothing. Our doing constantly overflows the bounds of capital: capital is a movement of containment, absorption, integration. To follow the agenda of capital is to accept that it is the Subject, to lose sight of our own power-to-do (and capital’s absolute dependence on that power). Revolutionary theory can only be the recuperation of our own exclusive subjectivity, our power-to-do: not that theory can recover our subjectivity on its own, but that it makes sense only as part of the struggle to do so.

We are the only subject, the only creators, the only gods. Capital runs around us proclaiming “this is mine, I am the only subject, you cannot have access to the social flow of doing unless you go through me”. The power of social creativity moves ahead and capital runs about developing new concepts of property in the effort to contain it – as witness the enormous expansion of the concept of “intellectual property” in recent years as capital seeks to enclose new forms of activity. Time and again it leaps in front of us as gatekeeper and says “you cannot have access to music on the internet unless you pay your toll to me, you cannot have access to software, you cannot have access to medicines for the treatments of AIDS unless you pay me what I demand, you cannot plant this type of maize because now I have patented it”.

How do we develop forms of doing that flow around the gatekeeper-capital and feed directly into a global sociality? We do it all the time. What is to be done, yes, but it must be grounded in what is being done already, and what is being done already is rich and wonderful. There are millions of different projects already in existence: small-scale projects in cities and in indigenous rural communities, projects to develop the creativity of the millions and millions (billions) of people that capital has simply spat out as irrelevant to its own expansion, large movements like the zapatistas in Mexico or the landless peasants in Brazil, global projects constructed through the networks facilitated by the internet. A surge of movements, of people trying to develop their power against and beyond capital, a surge of which the iceberg-tip can be seen in Seattle, Genoa, Barcelona, Porto Alegre. A host of people trying to find a way of surviving without entering into the oppression of capital. A contradictory, often chaotic movement – but then that is the only way we can think of getting around capital, the gatekeeper to sociality.

The future is frightening and uncertain, for capital fights back,  like any gatekeeper. It represses violently and viciously, it tries to absorb and contain. It defends its property and develops new forms of property, new ways of saying “this is mine”, trying to appropriate all that is produced by human creativity. The more absurd its existence becomes, the more violent it becomes. But we do not need you, capital, get out! Get out of our way and let us develop our own power to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity.

References

Holloway John (2002)
Change the World without taking Power (London: Pluto Books)

Marx Karl (1975)
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart)