Change the World without taking Power

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / English

John Holloway

The book is an invitation to discuss, and to all those who have commented on the book, however adverse their criticism, I am very grateful for their acceptance of the invitation.¹ The experience of the last two years has been rather like playing at the edge of the sea and being hit by big waves of enthusiasm and criticism which roll me over and over: an exhilarating and sometimes confusing experience in which I occasionally lose the thread of the argument. Coming home to Capital & Class is perhaps a way of finding my feet before the next wave comes.

The central thread is that the struggle against capital is a struggle against fetishism and that fetishism must be understood as a process of fetishisation. The argument has its roots in the CSE debates of the 1970s². In the state group of that time, we developed an understanding of the state as a particular form of the capital relation, an aspect of the fetishisation of social relations under capitalism. In this we were influenced by the German state derivation debate (see Holloway and Picciotto 1978) but sought to go beyond that debate, both politically and theoretically (see CSE State Group 1980, LEWRG 1979/ 1980). For me, the most important turning point in this discussion was the argument that fetishism has to be understood not as fait accompli but as process, as form-process or process of formation, as struggle.³

The book is intended to draw out the implications of this argument – already considerably developed in the pages of Common Sense and the three volumes of Open Marxism. The distinction between fetishism-as-accomplished fact and fetishism-as-process is important because it is the dividing line between an authoritarian understanding of Marxism and a libertarian understanding. To see fetishism as a accomplished fact leads to an elitist understanding of theory and to the view either that revolution is impossible or that it must be led by an emancipated vanguard acting on behalf of the working class: this leads to a focus on the state, which is precisely a form of organisation on behalf of, that is, a form of exclusion and repression. To see fetishism as a process of fetishisation, on the other hand, is to start from a self-divided subject (of which theory is a self-contradictory moment) struggling (contradictorily) against its/ our own alienation or fetishisation, driving towards social self-determination – necessarily pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, as it were, because there is no possible saviour, no possible emancipated vanguard. The struggle starts from where we are and what we are, the struggle is a refusal of where we are and what we are: we are in-and-against, against-and-in. But more than that: in order to be sustained, the struggle in-and-against must become a moving against-and-beyond – a point being emphasised increasingly by the current struggles against capitalism.

To think of communism as a movement against fetishism is to set the stakes as high as possible, as I think Marx also did (but that’s not the point).⁴ A movement against fetishism is a moving against all that stands in the way of social self-determination, a drive towards becoming our own true sun, without alibi or saviour. The drive towards social self-determination is global communism (commun-ism), because since all doings are interwoven, there is no other way in which to imagine social self-determination. It is a drive against history understood as determination of the present by the past, since social self-determination is necessarily a liberation from determination by the past, a waking from the nightmare of history. It is a struggle to shoot clocks, break duration, dissolve the homogeneity of time, overcome all separation between constitution and existence, to transform time-in, the “abstract and homogeneous progression leading from past to present to future” into time-as, the “temporality of freely chosen actions and projects”. (Gunn, 1985). It is the revolt of verbs against nouns, for self-determination means a world of doings, of active subjects, not of objects.⁵

Communism, so understood, is both utopian star and urgent necessity. It is not a policy, or a model, or a set of rules, it is a direction, a moving beyond and towards. It certainly does not mean that there should be no engagement with existing capitalist forms, such as money and the state.⁶ On the contrary, it is precisely because such engagement is inevitable that it is important to understand the implications and the dangers. The state (or any fetishised form) involves a particular way of organising social relations, of subordinating relations between people to relations between things – a way that impedes the recognition and assumption of social human subjectivity. It would be lovely to turn our back completely on the state and money, but generally we cannot do that – though certainly the zapatistas’ Juntas de Buen Gobierno are an impressive move in this direction. Most of us have to engage with the state and other capitalist forms in some way, but the question is how do we do it? We recognise their specifically capitalist character, we criticise their form. We struggle in-and-against-and-beyond those forms, we try to see our own struggle as a-symmetrical to the forms of capitalism, we try to establish other forms of organisation, forms which subordinate relations between things to relations between people. That is what I mean by anti-power: the necessary a-symmetry between our forms of organisation and capitalist forms. The a-symmetry of form is no guarantee that the struggle will not be integrated into capital, but it is certainly an important way of fighting against it (as Marcos points out in his discussion of the practice of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno in his “Leer un video” communiqué of August 2004). What are these a-symmetrical forms? This is always a matter of invention and experimentation, but the tradition of council organisation and the concepts of direct democracy⁷, horizontality and the overcoming of the separation between the political and the social are obviously central here⁸.

How to engage with the state or money or other capitalist forms is always a difficult question, and precisely for that reason we have to be aware that any engagement with the state pushes us in the direction of reconciliation with capital. Do we have to cede to that pressure? No, we do not, but in the struggle not to cede to the pressure it is crucial to understand the class character of the state as a form of social relations and to develop our own distinctive, a-symmetrical forms, forms which move against-and-beyond the fetishisation characteristic of capitalist forms.⁹

Do we now know how to make the revolution? No, we do not, and only a charlatan can claim that we do. To criticise the book for wanting to confront our lack of certainty¹⁰ is nonsensical. As Michael Löwy puts it, “We all are searching our way, no one can say he has found the true and only strategy.” The book is intended to be part of that searching. If the book has had an impact, it is because it is part of a more general searching for a way forward, part of a more general attempt to reinvent revolution.¹¹

References

Bonefeld, Werner; Gunn, Richard; Psychopedis, Kosmas (1992): Open Marxism, Vols. I and II. Pluto, London

Bonefeld, Werner; Gunn, Richard, Holloway, John; Psychopedis, Kosmas (1995): Open Marxism, Vol. III. Pluto, London

Callinicos, Alex (2003): “How do we deal with the state?”, International Socialism

Clarke, Simon (1991): The State Debate. Macmillan, London

CSE State Group (1979): Struggle over the State. CSE Books, London

Gunn, Richard (1985): “The only real Phoenix: Notes on utopian and apocalyptic thought”, Edinburgh Review, no. 71, pp. 91-103

Holloway John (2004): “Power and Democracy: More than a Reply to Michael Löwy”, New Politics no. 36, pp. 142-144

Holloway John and Picciotto Sol (1978): The State and Capital: A Marxist Debate. Edward Arnold, London.

London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1979/ 1980): In and Against the State. CSE Books/ Pluto, London

Thwaites Rey, Mabel (2004): La autonomía como búsqueda, el Estado como contradicción. Editorial Prometeo, Buenos Aires

Zibechi, Raúl (2003):Genealogía de la Revuelta. Letra Libre, La Plata

 

 

Other references are to articles contained in this number of Capital & Class.

 

The full discussion of the book, in all languages, can be found in Herramienta’s web page: http://www.herramienta.com.ar