Many thanks for this, Gerry,
John
El 15/11/10 13:34, "glevy@pratt.edu" <glevy@pratt.edu> escribió:
>
>
> http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004169
>
>
>
> (A review of John H's book in the CPGB journal: not
> surprisingly it's very critical. / Jerry)
>
>
>
> Weekly
> Worker 841 Thursday November 11 2010 Capitalism crackedAndrew Coates
> reviews John Holloway's ‘Crack capitalism’ Pluto Press,
> 2010, pp320, £16
>
> How do we make a “break”
> with the “world ruled by money, by capital”? In *Crack
> capitalism* we learn there are spaces in between “exploitation,
> starvation
> and injustice” where we can find thousands of
> “interstitial” fissures. Where
> we can see that communism
> is “an immediate necessity, not a future stage of
> development” (p26). Can we “scream ‘No’ so
> loud” to bring it about? For John
> Holloway, from Walter
> Benjamin’s *Jetztzeit* (now-time) “moments of
> creativity”, we can begin “walking through a looking
> glass” into a “world
> that does not exist” (p36).
>
>
> John Holloway is Irish-born and by training a lawyer. For 20
> years he has
> been an internationally known, Mexican-based academic
> and
> ‘anti-globalisation’, pro-Zapatista activist. He
> refuses point-blank to
> accept the world as it is. In *Change the
> world without taking power* (2002)
> Holloway stated that the
> “starting point of theoretical reflection” is
> “opposition, negativity, struggle”. We begin not with left
> political
> organisation, but “a scream of refusal”.
> Leninism, social democracy, ‘the
> party’ - any type of
> state-centred political activity - are dead-ends.
> Instead, through
> this yelling, we assert our ‘anti-power’, a “drive
> towards
> social self-determination”.
>
> Holloway
> admires the Zapatistas. Their uprising in Chiapas (south-east of
> Mexico) and council-based organisation of a quasi-autonomous territory
> is
> the nearest to a model he offers. In *Change the world* he
> claimed their
> strategy “does not have the state as its focus,
> and that does not aim at
> gaining positions of power”. They
> showed that one could “change the world
> without taking
> power”. Short on the details of their successes (or mention
> of
> Mexico’s more pressing problems at the time, from the end of PRI
> rule to
> Narco-trafficking), we were told that they were
> “ordinary-therefore-rebellious”. They illustrate the
> importance of direct
> democracy, of do-it-yourself politics, as
> opposed to party-building focused
> on capturing political power, the
> central “state illusion” of the left for
> the last
> century.
>
> *Crack capitalism* is Holloway’s latest version
> of the same argument. Its
> first ‘thesis’ (small chapter)
> cites La Boétie (1530-63). In his youth, this
> friend of
> Montaigne wrote the *Discours sur la servitude volontaire*. The
> essay is a landmark. It tried to explain why people came to endure, even
>
> accept, tyranny. People are subjugated at birth; they think
> arbitrary power
> normal and put up with every indignity and cruelty.
> The weight of custom and
> religion bolsters the autocrat. He diverts
> unrest by laying on public
> entertainment - “*les farces, les
> spectacles, les gladiateurs*”. Above all,
> for La
> Boétie, the ruler was the head of a pyramid of violent minions,
> holding a monopoly of violence.
>
> Yet, the 16th century author
> said, ultimately despotism is our own creation,
> propped up by our
> tacit consent. By withdrawing this support it would be
> overthrown.
> We could “resolve to serve no more” - and, thus, we would
> become
> free. The *Discours* alludes to some (unnamed) French royal
> tyrants, and the
> bloodthirsty henchmen must have been still around
> (he died just as France
> entered 35 years of wars of religion). This
> is no doubt one reason why the
> essay was not, prudently, published
> until 13 years after La Boétie’s death.
>
> La
> Boétie’s call to “stop making the tyrant” (but
> not his explanation of how
> we become servile), is Holloway’s
> starting point: “We can refuse to perform
> the work that
> creates the tyrant” (p7). Capitalism is the modern despot we
> should stand aside from. Holloway makes no allusion to the historical
>
> context of the *Discours*, or tries to unpick its complex
> implications,
> including the obvious fact that not obeying was too
> risky a strategy for La
> Boétie himself. Everything is reduced
> to one portentous statement: serve no
> more.
>
> *Crack
> capitalism* is generous with examples of “ordinary people”
> that show
> such a “movement of
> refusal-and-other-creation”. These “rebels, not victims”
>
> include, apart from overtly political activists, the Birmingham car
> worker
> who spends his evenings on an allotment. Amongst a host of
> other local
> heroes there is the girl in Tokyo who spends her day in
> the park, reading
> rather than going to work, and the young Frenchman
> who is devoted to
> building dry toilets. They are as devoted to doing
> something different to
> the “labour that creates capital”
> as the activist out in the jungle
> determined to “organise
> armed struggle”.
> Abstract labour
>
> *Crack
> capitalism* binds these homely tales to a version of Marxism. Its
> roots lie in the theory of commodity fetishism and abstract labour, as
>
> developed in the 1920s Soviet Union in II Rubin’s *Essays on
> Marx’s theory
> of value* and the writings of Evgeny Pashukanis,
> who extended Marx’s
> critique of political economy to law and
> the state. For these writers the
> legal system, government and
> administration were completely moulded by
> capitalist
> value-production. Holloway takes Rubin’s emphasis on the
> “process
> of impersonalisation or equalisation of labour”
> - abstract labour - as the
> template for all social relations.
> “The state by its very form, and
> independently of the content
> of its action, confirms and reproduces the
> negation of subjectivity
> on which capital is based. It relates to people not
> as subjects, but
> as objects or - and this amounts to the same thing - as
> subjects
> reduced to the statues of mere abstraction” (pp58-59).
>
> The ‘state-derivation’ debate of the 1970s illustrates these
> themes.
> Holloway’s first publications drew on them in
> opposition to Marxist
> theorists, like Nicos Poulantzas, who
> developed an explanation of the
> “relative autonomy” of
> politics and ideology. In Poulantzas’s later efforts
> the state
> was a “condensation of class struggles” and ideology was the
> place
> where the dominant links of “knowledge and power”
> were challenged by
> opposing class forces.
>
> Holloway both
> denies these conflicts their individual specificity and
> criticises
> their ultimate tie to the fight of labour against capital. In *Crack
> capitalism* politics and ideology are always immediately reduced to the
>
> dance of commodities. Instead of labour class struggles, we have the
> battle
> against entering the process - work, ‘abstract
> labour’ - in the first place.
> To engage in the state, or try
> to ‘capture’ power (or adopt the strategy of
> Poulantzas,
> mixing direct and representative democracy in a ‘transition to
> socialism’) is to succumb to the tunes of capital. Rebellion has
> to find
> “another melody” for our own ball. Instead we
> should encourage, “collective
> coming-to-eruption of long
> stifled volcanoes”, resting on the refusal to
> serve no more
> (p225).[1]<http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004169#1>
>
>
> Abstract labour and the fight against it dominate everything.
> One wonders
> why Marx bothered to write his studies of the
> revolutions of 1848, and the
> 1870-71 French civil war. Or went into
> the details of how states, political
> parties (including those with
> such ‘fetishes’ as support for rival
> dynasties,
> Orleanists and legitimists), class and power blocs (apparently
> ‘above’ them, as with Louis Napoleon) were formed. Or wasted
> his time
> drawing portraits of individual politicians. Why Marx
> engaged in the
> delicate work of helping create and sustain the First
> International. His
> efforts to unite ‘labour’ (that is,
> those who fought for better conditions
> for “the subordination
> of our doing to alien control” (p157) with the full
> gamut of
> 19th century labour movement opinion, ranging from anarchists,
> moderate social democrats, left republican revolutionaries to
> “every kind”
> of socialist, is another mystery. He was no
> doubt fooling himself in
> thinking that “political struggle is
> the struggle to take state power”
> (p158). All he really needed
> to do was announce that workers should no
> longer participate in
> ‘abstract labour’. We can see that only the 19th
> century
> anarchists rival Holloway’s ‘political indifferentism’.
>
> Expressive totality
>
> The basic flaw of *Crack capitalism*
> is that it places us in what Louis
> Althusser called an
> ‘expressive totality’. That is, a concept of capitalism
> in which “each part is *pars totalis*, immediately expressing the
> whole that
> it inhabits in
> person”.[2]<http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004169#2>The
>
> process of abstraction is always present, giving rise to immediate
>
> contradictions that express the general nature of capital. Holloway
> writes:
> “One form of doing, labour, creates capital, the basis
> of the society that
> is destroying us. Another form of doing, what we
> calls simply ‘doing’,
> pushes against the creation of
> capital and towards the creation of a
> different society”
> (p85). Everything derives from the dialectic between
> ‘doing’ and ‘abstract labour’.
>
> Not
> that Holloway is without criticisms of those often seen as part of the
> same ‘autonomist’ camp. He opposes the idea that the economy
> is so
> solidified around abstract labour that it cannot be
> challenged. We can
> refuse to submit to it. But he does not see any
> positive revolutionary
> subject emerging from the process either. To
> him the Italian ‘autonomist’
> theories of Paul Virno,
> Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri believe in the
> ‘multitude’, “diverse forces of social
> production”. To them the multiple
> contradictions with
> post-Fordist capitalism and the world polity of empire
> form the
> basis of a “new political agent”.
>
> Holloway by
> contrast asserts: “The post-operaista, post-structuralist
> theories extend into the crisis of abstract labour the thought-prison
> that
> was part of the domination of abstract labour.” So that
> “What gets lost is
> the crack, the ek-statis of concrete doing,
> the standing out-and-beyond of
> useful doing from abstract labour
> ...” (p193). Even the German Krisis group,
> who get good marks
> for their work on the crisis of ‘society of labour’ faced
> with automation, fail to dig at the “two-fold character of
> labour”. That is,
> between doing and abstraction. To Holloway,
> all these theorists cannot see
> that the opposition to abstraction is
> always negative: “Revolution is not
> about destroying
> capitalism, but about refusing to create it” (p252). Which
> is
> another way of saying that the contradiction between abstraction/doing in
>
> every aspect of our lives, everyday, directly, leads us to
> “stop making
> capitalism” and to “make” ...
> well, what?
>
> Certainly not socialist and Marxist political
> parties. They are thoroughly
> tainted by the drive for political
> power. Daniel Bensaïd has observed of
> John Holloway’s
> earlier writing, that “he has reduced the luxuriant history
> of
> the workers’ movement, its experiences and controversies to a single
>
> march of statism through the
> ages.”[3]<http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004169#3>
>
> *Crack capitalism* does nothing but reproduce this caricature.
> Parties are
> riddled with hierarchy - because of their adaption to
> statism and the lure
> of changing the world “from above”.
> Their totalising strategies focus on the
> state, which is in fact a
> “false, illusory totality” (p206). Exit electoral
> work,
> party-building or, to put it another way, talking to the wider public,
> and organising amongst the masses and working class in a structured way.
>
> There are only minor internal problems left for other ways of
> organising.
> Those with some experience of them would disagree: the
> ‘tyranny of
> structurelessness’ or, more commonly, sheer
> futility are heavy obstacles to
> their progress.
>
> *Crack
> capitalism* is in many senses timeless. Its dialectic has unravelled
> since the dawn of the production of exchange value. Yet there are some
>
> present-day references. Capitalism “is in its deepest crisis
> for years”
> (p250). The fall in the rate of profit is,
> apparently, due to “a failure to
> subordinate ourselves to the
> degree that capital demands of us” (p151). In
> the age of
> globalisation national politics are less important than they
> were.
> The state, we are no doubt surprised to learn, is a national form,
> when capitalism is international.
>
> Holloway does not discuss
> what this implies, that political movements should
> develop
> strategies that take account of the reality of inter-state bodies
> (the European Union, for example). Or that programmes and not yells and
>
> cracks are needed to build a social base and bring about the kind of
>
> transformation of politics that could begin a transition to
> communism/socialism. Indeed how and through which structures socialists
>
> would “socialise the means of production and abolish wage
> labour” (*ibid*)
> on an international level is not discussed.
> Though for some things “some
> form of global coordination would
> be desirable in a post-capitalist society”
> (p210). On that
> little more can be said. There is, at the moment, no “right
> answer” to the question of what is to be done. Instead there are
> “millions
> of experiments” for those who wish to be
> “against-and-beyond capital”
> (p256).
>
> So
> perhaps we should return to our allotments, to our parks, to our dry
> toilets, and keep scrambling around looking for cracks.
>
> *Notes*
>
> 1. J Holloway, S Picciotto (eds) *The state and
> capital: a Marxist debate
> * London 1978.
> 2. L Althusser
> *Reading Capital* London 1975, p17.
> 3. ‘Commodity fetishism
> and revolutionary subjectivity’, a symposium on
> John
> Holloway’s *Change the world without taking power* in *Historical
>
> Materialism* Vol 13, No4, 2005.
>
>
>
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Received on Mon Nov 22 23:37:49 2010
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