From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Fri May 16 2003 - 09:01:48 EDT
Spectrezine.org Book Review John Holloway Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London, Pluto Press 2002) "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun." (Mao Tse Tung) As we know from history Mao gained power in China after a long civil war, including the Long March. At the beginning of 2001 the Mexican Zapatistas marched from Chiapas to the capital Mexico City. They did not come to power but spoke in the Mexican parliament and on the Zocalo, the main square of the Mexican capital. John Holloway is one of the theoretical backers of the Zapatista insurgency. In his new book Change the World Without Taking Power - The Meaning of Revolution Today, he draws a picture of a new form of revolution. While in Mao's understanding power was located in the military forces of the capitalist state which had to be defeated by revolutionary firepower and guerrilla warfare, the Zapatistas, though armed, renounce provoking a military confrontation with the Mexican army. Instead, they are promoting the concept of ordinary-therefore-rebellious, a concept that rejects a view of revolution led by an avant-garde of professional revolutionaries and the view that revolution is made by taking power. Their strategy is the strategy of low intensity revolution, a revolution that changes society from the inside without taking the power but by destroying the power. Holloway supports the Zapatista style of uprising by backing this new understanding of struggle theoretically. His argument is different from the classical anti-imperialist and revolutionary view of struggle, preferring "a refusal to accept" (p. 6), a refusal of the daily experience of exploitation and injustice, whether experienced as direct injustice - being sacked by a boss - or cognitively perceived - by knowing about millions of children that have to live in streets, or the fact that the world's income is unjust distributed. This feeling of being trapped in an unjust world like "flies caught in the spider's web" (p. 5) is the energy that fuels resistance. Holloway's "scream" is a primarily emotional rejection of the capitalist system, because it is in capitalism that injustice has to be located. The scream proves that 'we are' and above 'what we are not yet' (p. 7). So the identity of people who are screaming is first of all a negative identity. It is the identity of negating the present capitalist state of world society. Its negativity forbids thinking in terms of classic forms of identity such as working class, women or race. Holloway states that old forms of revolutionary theory have been outdated as they have not brought the success expected and for this reason places his theory beyond the state and beyond power. He asserts that former leftist theory whether it was Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Ilich Lenin or Eduard Bernstein always had as its focus for social upheaval the taking of state power. Whether it was by elections (Bernstein) or by revolution (Luxemburg/Lenin), the object of desire was the state. Since the state is embedded in a network of power relations, the world cannot be changed by taking state power. The state itself is only a node in the net, but not equivalent with society. Holloway maintains that all "major revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century: Rosa Luxemburg, Trotzky, Gramsci, Mao, Che" (p. 18) shared this logic. Further on he asserts that history has shown that this concept has not been successful full: http://www.spectrezine.org/reviews/holloway.htm
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