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13Holloway Forum

FORUMOn John Holloway’s Change the World WithoutTaking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

CONVENED BY ANA C. DINERSTEIN

This Forum discusses John Holloway’s Change the World Without TakingPower. Inspirational and provocative, the book is a call for emancipatoryreflection and thus an important contribution to the politics of resistanceof our times. Contributors to the Forum explore and engage passionatelywith the controversial arguments contained in the book, from ‘practicalnegativity’ and ‘anti-power’ as ways to radically trans-form the world,to the rejection of the state as a tool for revolutionary change. Theauthors, who include John Holloway himself, collectively push thediscussion beyond their own limits, thus opening up an exciting polemicabout the meaning of revolution today.

A call for emancipatory reflection:Introduction to the Forum

Ana C. Dinerstein

Not long ago, the demiurges of post-modernism seemed to have beenrelatively successful in spreading the ideathat to change the world (or even tothink about it) was the task of incorri-gible activists, who deserved a specialplace in a museum of modern dreams.But in recent years, an extremely rich‘repertoire of actions’ (Tarrow, ),from Chiapas to Seattle, from BuenosAires to Mumbai, has made the absur-

dity of this belief apparent. ‘Anotherworld is possible!’ has become the mobi-lising, utopian cry of our time; whatunlocks the feelings of liberation, andallows the creation of new spaces forparticipation and debate, is precisely thevagueness of this statement. But is thisimprecision also a symptom of thedifficulty inherent in developing a generalstrategy, able to shelter and nurture theplurality of struggles while simultan-eously providing political and ideologicalconsistency to resistance?

The originality of the present mo-ment lies in the way that the regaining ofthe streets by a variety of actors not only

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represents a reaction to globalneoliberalism and its consequences, butalso shows an enthusiastic determinationto discuss the meaning of revolutiontoday. The present Forum is acontribution to this task. The debatewithin it about John Holloway’s book,Change the World Without Taking Power: TheMeaning of Revolution Today, has beeninspired by previous debates and will,hopefully, encourage further polemicswithin Capital & Class and elsewhere.

The reasons for engaging with thisparticular book are several. It would behard to refuse Holloway’s call for whatZizek () has called ‘emancipatoryreflection’. Holloway’s work has beenwelcomed across the world at a timewhen intellectual contributions to radicalchange are scarce. Holloway standsagainst both those who have succumbedto the sirens of either ‘empirical reality’or abstract theory, and those whobelieve that the new anarchist times donot need any theoretical elaboration(see for instance Klein, ). Loyal tothe autonomous spirit of his time, andenchanted by the Zapatista project,Holloway neither searches for confir-mation of his theses, nor provides closeanswers to his questions.

Three key issues for Marxists andthose advocating radical change, offeredin the book and interconnected,constitute the kernel of this debate: theunderstanding of praxis as ‘practicalnegativity’; the idea of ‘anti-power’; andthe rejection of the state as a tool forradical change.

As a continuation of his previouswork, Holloway invites us to reflect onthe weakness of what is conceived of asinalterably powerful, i.e. capital. Hesuggests that, in this world, it is onlyhumans (rather than the fetishisedforms of their work) who retain the

capacity to create and change the world:‘It is labour alone which constitutessocial reality. There is no external force;our own power is confronted by nothingbut our own power, albeit in alienatedform’ (Holloway, : ). Capitalistcontradictions are in no way external,but are in fact inhabited subjectivity.However, capitalist societies are basedon permanent processes of ‘objecti-fication of subjective doing’ (p. ). By‘doing’, Holloway means much morethan work and physical action. ‘Doing’is the movement of ‘practical negativity’:‘doing changes, negates an existing stateof affairs. Doing goes beyond,transcends’(p. ). The power impliedin doing is negative: ‘The doing of thedoers’, Holloway argues, ‘is deprived ofsocial validation: we and our doingbecome invisible. History becomes thehistory of the powerful, of those whotell others what to do. The flow of doingbecomes an antagonistic process inwhich the doing of most is denied, inwhich the doing of most is appropriatedby the few’ (pp. -).

The notion of subjectivity asnegativity is powerful: ‘The world thatwe feel to be wrong’ (p. ) must benegated, including our identity. But thispresents a real problem to the organi-sation of resistance: one significant pointof contention in Holloway’s proposal isthat, whereas the negation of ‘what weare’ is essential to insubordination, themoment of negation cannot be graspedwithout considering the moment ofreinvention of identities, organisationsand strategies which follows negation.If class struggle is, as Holloway argues,‘the struggle to classify and against beingclassified at the same time as it is,indistinguishably, the struggle betweenconstituted classes’ (p. ), how do wethen theorise the struggle for human

15Holloway Forum

realisation and social recognition againstthe expansion of indifference entailed inthe expansion of value? In other words,if the ‘scream of insubordination is thescream of non-identity’ (p. ), how dowe nourish the revolutionary potentialof new organisational forms of resistancelike the World Social Forum, or theBrazilian landless movement MovimentoSem Terra, to use just two examples,which emerged as negation was takingplace and which became the formsthrough which resistance asserts itself?Is it ‘practical negativity’, or rather the‘contradictory tension’ between‘negativity and positivity’ (Laclau &Mouffe, ) that gives rebellion its realforce?

One lesson that can be learned fromthe Argentinian experience sinceDecember is that, on the onehand, the struggle to recompose thepolitical fabric and develop new formsof democracy and participation by avariety of social movements fired directlyat the heart of the system of corruption,exploitation and domination entailed byneoliberal stability. The rejectionentailed in Que se vayan todos!—‘Out withthem all!’—was followed by a momentof intense mobilisation and theemergence of new forms of resistancevis-à-vis the institutional crisis.Autonomous and ‘disorganised’ move-ments became central to political pro-cesses, thus overshadowing institu-tional politics.

On the other hand, the search forautonomy found its limits in therecomposition of state power in thehands of traditional political elites. Doesthis mean that there was no politicalchange in Argentina after December? Where do we look for ‘politicalchanges’? The recomposition followingthe December crisis re-established the

separation between ‘civil society’ andthe ‘state’ in a way that intensified thesocial movements’ dilemma, broughtabout by ‘anti-politics’: the contradi-ction between the need to create apolitical movement able to coordinateaction and dispute the power of thestate, and the free development of apluralist movement of resistance basedon autonomous practices and self-affirmation (Dinerstein, ; ).

The second controversial issue inHolloway’s book is the idea that anti-power is the route to emancipation.Holloway is not concerned with strategicorganisation, but rather advocatesuncertainty and anti-power: ‘How canwe change the world without takingpower? The answer is obvious: we don’tknow’ (p. ).

What we do know is that practicalnegativity is anti-power, and anti-powermeans the rejection of any revolutionaryproject aimed at taking the power of thestate. Following Holloway, ‘the problemof the traditional concept of revolutionis perhaps not that it aimed too high,but that it aimed too low. The notion ofcapturing positions of power … missesthe point that the aim of the revolutionis to dissolve relations of power, to createa society based on the mutualrecognition of people’s dignity’ (p. ).

But is anti-power a real possibility,or a rhetorical device that reflects thefragmentation and uncertainty of ourtime? Does the defence of oppositionalstruggles, which embrace the idea ofpraxis as practical negativity, adequatelyengage with the reality of presentstruggles?

Does it give democracy—accordingto Löwy, the ‘absent concept’ inHolloway’s proposal—the central placethat it deserves?


The third matter of discrepancywithin this Forum is Holloway’s proposalthat a revolutionary movement shouldnot seize the power of the state. Theimpact of Zapatismo on the world lies,according to Holloway, in that it ‘movesus decisively beyond the state illusion… The state illusion understandsrevolution as the winning of state powerand the transformation of societythrough the state’ (: ). That arevolutionary movement must have asits goal the taking of the power of thestate is highly debatable. What seems tobe clear is that to reject such a project isnot the same as to deny that the state is,due to the very nature of capitalism, oneof the main institutional forms ofmediation of capitalist social relationsof production and, therefore, of classstruggle too.

Holloway made a significantcontribution regarding this matter a longtime ago, when he highlighted the factthat the state was not a thing but thepolitical form of the social relations ofcapital (Holloway & Picciotto, ).One cannot get out of the ‘state-yes/state-no’ loop until one regards the stateas such. As a social form, the state ‘isand is not’. Then, why should thepossibility that the form of the state canbe disputed and fought over on behalfof the interests of the majority beoverruled by Holloway’s proposal? IsHolloway disregarding state power? Ifso, can the power of the state bedisregarded? Or is the search for ema-ncipation a contradictory process ofgoing in, against and through the state?These and more questions are posed inthe contributions that follow. In the end,‘each thought is a force-field, and justas the truth-content of a judgmentcannot be divorced from its execution,the only true ideas are those which

transcend their own thesis’ (Adorno,: -). The polemic is open.

Notes. All page references, unless otherwise

stated, are from John Holloway() Change the World Without TakingPower: The Meaning of Revolution Today,Pluto, London.

. I would like to thank Claire Rigby forher assistance in the editing of thisForum.

ReferencesAdorno, T. () ‘Message in a bottle’,

in S. Zizek (ed.) (a) MappingIdeology (Verso) London, pp. -.

Dinerstein, A. C. () ‘Beyond crisis:The nature of political change inArgentina’, in Pratyush Chandra etal. (eds.) The Politics of Imperialism andCounterstrategies (Aakar Books) NewDelhi, pp. -.

Dinerstein, A. C. () ‘Power orcounter power? The dilemma of thepiquetero movement in Argentinapost crisis’, in Capital & Class, no., pp. -.

Holloway, J. () Change the WorldWithout Taking Power: The Meaning ofRevolution Today (Pluto Press) London( ) pp.Also available online at <http://www.endpage.com/Archives/Sub-versive_Texts/Holloway/Change_The_World_Without_Taking_ Power.htm>.

Holloway, J. () ‘Zapatismo and thesocial sciences’, in Capital & Class,no. , pp. -.

Holloway & Picciotto () ‘Capital,crisis and the state’, in Capital &Class, no. , pp. -.

Holloway, J. () ‘The freeing ofMarx’, in Common Sense, no. ().

17Holloway Forum

Klein, N. () ‘Qué demoniospueden hacer hoy los intelectuales?Los Irrelevantes libres’, a talk givenat Arte y Confección: La Semana Culturalpor Brukman, May to June,Buenos Aires; transcript.

Laclau, E. & C. Mouffe () Hegemony& Socialist Strategy: Towards a RadicalDemocratic Politics (Verso) London &

Sympathy for the devil?John Holloway’s MephistophelianMarxism

Alex Callinicos

John Holloway’s Change the World WithoutTaking Power stands alongside Hardt andNegri’s Empire as one of the two key textsof contemporary autonomist Marxism.This does not mean that the two booksrepresent identical positions. Hollowaymakes much more of an effort to makehis ideas accessible than Hardt andNegri do (although not whollysuccessfully). There are also importantsubstantive differences: Holloway offersa cogent critique of Empire (pp. -),

to which Hardt and Negri, regrettably,have not responded in their new bookMultitude.

Finally, the philosophical frameworksof the two books are quite different.Hardt and Negri rely on a Deleuzianvitalism that celebrates the fullness ofBeing. Holloway, by contrast, privilegesnegativity: ‘Rather than to St Francis ofAssisi, perhaps communists should lookto Mephistopheles, the negating devil inall of us’ (p. , note ). Hardt andNegri are anti-humanist Marxists forwhom Spinoza is the great anti-Hegel.But for Holloway, Marxism is a tributary

New York.Tarrow, S. () Power in Movement:

Social Movements, Collective Action andPolitics, Cambridge Studies inComparative Politics (CambridgeUniversity Press).

Zizek, S. (ed.) () Revolution at theGates: Selected Writings of Lenin from (Verso) London & New York.

of ‘negative thought’ (p. ): it is thetradition of Lukács and the earlyFrankfurt school that provides the mostimportant theoretical thread connectingthis tradition to the present. In thecelebrated opening sentence of Changethe World Without Taking Power—‘In thebeginning is not the word, but thescream’ (p. )—we should hear theechoes of Adorno’s Negative Dialectic.

This gives a particular tonality toHolloway’s humanism. Negativity, thescream, comes first not as an affirmationof our humanity but because of its denial(p. ), and therefore presupposes ‘anotion of humanity as negation’ (p. ).Subjectivity itself is defined in terms ofnegativity, as ‘the conscious projectionbeyond that which exists, the ability tonegate that which exists and to createsomething that that does not exist’ (pp.-). Indeed, the key to Holloway’snegative ontology is a radical subjecti-vism. Rather like Fichte, he takessubjectivity as ‘the starting point’, but aself-differentiating subjectivity that ‘canexist only in antagonism with its ownobjectification’ so that ‘it is torn apartby that objectification and the struggleagainst it’ (pp. -).

Capital, as it strives to constituteitself from our labour, must accordinglybe understood through the lens of this‘binary antagonism between doing and


done’ (p. ), or more specificallythrough that of fetishism, ‘the name thatMarx uses to describe the rupture ofdoing’ (p. ). What fetishism does is topetrify the flow of negativity; to per-suade us to see the world as a set of stableobjects and relations. The great errorof mainstream, ‘scientistic’ Marxismwas to take capitalism on its own,fetishised terms and analyse it as atotality of structures governed byobjective laws. But Holloway’s refusal totake the world as ‘done’ takes him a longway beyond modes of production and thetendency of the rate of profit to fall: weshould not think of chairs and computersas objects with a durable identity, thoughstars, not being human products, liebeyond the limits of doing.

Arguably, this kind of lapse intoFichtean subjective idealism was apossibility always inherent in HegelianMarxism from the time of Lukács andKorsch onwards. What is interestinghere is less the familiar philosophicaldifficulties indicated by Holloway’sdesire to liquefy chairs and classes intothe flux of doing, than its political effects.Driving form analysis to its limit byconceiving capital purely as fetishism (orrather as fetishisation, since the struggleto conquer rebellious subje-ctivity iseternal) dehistoricises capital. Negri andthe Regulation School are taken to taskfor their shared ‘paradi-gmaticapproach’; that is, for distin-guishingbetween historically specific phases ofcapitalist develop-ment. Thereby ‘[t]heworking class refusal … is slotted into aworld of order’ (p. ). But Holloway’salternative seems to be the portrayal of aperpetual crisis in which this refusal forcescapital to expand credit, in the hope ofdeferring confrontation and defeatinglabour, only to intensify the conflict inthe longer term and thus to demand

harsher measures such as the neoliberalwave of new enclosures (ch. ). As sooften with Open Marxism, the concreteis subsumed under a rarefied set ofabstractions portraying an eternalcapitalism; we are accordingly left withlittle guidance about how to address,either analytically or politically, thespecific features of the world wecurrently confront.

As for the famous slogan ‘Change theworld without taking power’, this isjustified by a combination of misrepre-sentation and vagueness. ThoughHolloway says that ‘it is important toavoid crude caricature’, nevertheless theentire classical Marxist tradition isidentified with a preoccupation with ‘thecapturing of the state’ (p. ). And whatelse is the following summary of RosaLuxemburg’s views but the crudest ofcaricatures? ‘Struggle is not a process ofself emancipation which would create asocialist society (whatever that mightturn out to be) but just the opposite:struggle is an instrument to achieve apreconceived end which would thenprovide freedom for all’ (p. ). Onecan see why Luxemburg should be anembarrassment for Holloway, since shecombined a highly objectivist theory ofcrises with an exceptionally strongconception of struggle as a process ofself-transformation (notably in The MassStrike). But such genuine contradictionsare distracting complexities for anargument that seeks to sweep all versionsof Marxism but those sanctioned byHolloway onto the rubbish heap.

Vagueness conquers almost all whenit comes to political strategy. Like Hardtand Negri, Holloway conceives thedefeat of capital through the metaphorof flight, which takes the form of ‘therefusal of domination, the destructionand sabotage of the instruments of

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domination … a running away fromdomination, nomadism, desertion,flight’ (p. ). But he goes beyondthese now-familiar rhapsodies,acknowledging that ‘[t]o break fromcapital, it is not enough to flee’ (p. ).This is for a familiar Marxist reason: ‘Aslong as the means of doing are in thehands of capital, then doing will beruptured and turned against itself. Theexpropriator must indeed be expropriated’(p. ). But this expropriation cannot‘be seen as a reseizure of a thing, but asthe dissolution of the thing-ness of thedone, its (re)integration in the socialflow of doing’ (p. ).

Holloway’s snake thus eats its tail: hisentire argument traces the circle ofsubjectivity as negativity. But what ‘thedissolution of the thing-ness of thedone’ means, in terms of concretedemands and struggles, remains amystery. So, too, is how we are supposedto carry through this expropriationwithout—not capturing—but confront-ing and breaking the state, which mayindeed be a fetishised form of socialrelations, as the Open Marxistsconstantly remind us, but is alsonevertheless a harsh material reality thatstands in the way of any movement that

seeks to change the world. Themateriality of the state no doubt dependson, amongst other things, our tacit orexplicit acknowledgement of its power.But, as Holloway himself acknowledges,‘[t]he fetish is a real illusion’ (p. ): theimplication is, surely, that politicalstrategy cannot simply pretend the statedoes not exist. But then, this is a bookthat disavows strategy, and makes avirtue of its own lack of precision.Holloway admits: ‘Revolutionarychange is more desperately urgent thanever, but we do not know any more whatrevolution means … We have lost allcertainty, but the openness of uncertaintyis central to revolution’ (p. ). Anuncharitable reader might conclude thatChange the World Without Taking Powerseems often to affirm the primacy, notof the scream, but of the wish.

Notes. All page references, unless otherwise

stated, are from John Holloway() Change the World Without TakingPower: The Meaning of Revolution Today.

. Holloway, J., ‘Reply to MichaelLöwy’, in Herramienta, available onlineat <www.herramienta.com.ar>.

¡Que se vayan todos!Out with them all!

Néstor López & Luis Menéndez

The super-limo of the general managerof the BBV—the most important Spanishbank in Argentina—drove solemnlythrough Solano, one of the poorestsections of Greater Buenos Aires. Letus use our imagination: it is sunset onthe th and th of December ;

on the eve of the year . We can seethis banker, sitting comfortably in hisarmchair in a luxurious apartment in avery exclusive neighbourhood. Sitting infront of his TV set, smoking his cigar—imported from somewhere in theCaribbean—watching the news thatshows the mobilisation of the people inBuenos Aires. Demonstrators arestopping vehicles on the streets; mostof them are doing this for the first timein their lives. Let’s imagine himabsorbed, his eyes glued to the screen,


where the neighbours of some sectionsof the city of Buenos Aires, night falling,are hitting lampposts with stones … witha piece of wood … with a plastic bottle… tac, tactac, tactactac … steadily,without stopping. And let’s imagine thesame general manager watching as thesepeople and many others put on theirwalking shoes and march to the nearestpark, or square, in the open air. It’s therethat the tac, tactac, tactactac of the postsmingles with the clan, clanclan, clanclanclanof kitchen pans: a very strange andcollective symphony.

Let us now imagine the feeling ofapprehension that overcomes this manof high finance, as he watches DoñaMaría, a recognised, decent housewife,walking side-by-side with a well-knownprostitute from the neighbourhood:doctors and the unemployed; engineersand children; students and very oldpeople, meeting in the streets. Eachencounter giving birth to a flow ofkisses, embraces; creating new friend-ships and even new couples! joiningkitchen pans, empty bottles, tin andplastic cans … And all making up anenormous orchestra, playing in the windof the night: ¡Que se vayan todos!

Now let’s go back to the district ofSolano, where the limousine was stillmaking slow progress over the hungrymouths of the holes pitting the mudstreets. The whole district—very poor,with thousands of unemployed or poorly-employed people—was astonished. Neverbefore had such a luxurious car traversedthose streets. But the neighbours knewthat the Spanish gentleman would be in it,and that he was here to meet the piqueterosof the [Unemployed Workers’Movement], a group representing theunemployed.

The general manager had requestedthe meeting because he was worried by

the ‘lack of judicial security’, as he putit, which had developed in Argentinafollowing the popular revolt ofDecember -, .

He had, at first, attempted to holdthe meeting in his office, in BuenosAires’s downtown financial district.‘Not in your office but in our barrio[neighbourhood], with those involvedpresent, in an assembly of piqueteros …and in front of all our comrades,’ hadbeen the piqueteros’ reponse. ‘If it is notin the bar r io, there won’t be anymeeting,’ they had insisted, to theastonishment of the Spanish banker.

The general manager got out of hislimo, stepping into the mud—not withthe regal appearance of a modern-dayFrancisco Pizarro, but confused,wondering why he had agreed to appearin this place where he was watched bysmiling children and stray dogs. Hesniffed the rotten smell in the air. Usedto fine perfumes, he did not realise thatthe nauseating stench was coming fromthe stagnant water in a nearby ditch,hidden by a musty, yellowish cover ofdust, and he put his right leg, up to theknee, straight into the putrid mud.

By the time he entered the MTD basehe looked like a defeated, downheartedCaptain Morgan, with his rigid woodenleg. Smiling, he tried some small talk andsome purely formal questions, before hebecame serious and decided to get tothe point. Then he said:

‘Is it really true that you do not want totake power?’ ‘Yes, it’s true,’ replied thepiqueteros. ‘We do not want to take powerinto our hands.’ ‘But then … what thehell do you want?’ ‘We want all of youto go away! We want capital to go away.We don’t want capital anymore; wedon’t want to reproduce capital; wewant dignity and social change.’

21Holloway Forum

Neither the famous Double Herme-neutics that he had studied in theUniversity of Madrid (‘la Complutense’),nor the most modern of economictheories were of any use to him inunderstanding this reply. He left Solanoabsolutely confused. He felt so uneasythat, before getting back into his shinylimousine he stepped—again! into theditch, with his other leg—the one thathad up-to-now been clean. And now helooked like an astonished pirate, his pridemutilated by the sticky mud all over hislegs, and by the everyday ordinaryness ofthe barrio, prickling his eyes.

Let’s imagine this same generalmanager later that night in bed beneaththe smooth fabric of his expensivesheets, lying open-eyed, thoughtful;trying hard to find, within his store ofideas, an explanation that might help himto understand these crowds who do notwant to take hold of power; who do notboast of taking hold of the state; whosay only: Out with you! Out! Out! And herealises that these demonstrators are notorganised into trade-unions, nor into theclassic left-wing groups. There are noflags, no loudspeakers. Political parties,he thinks, always have a party line, andslogans; they always want somethingfrom the state; they have deputies,councillors; they elaborate projects; laws…. He knows, too, that left-wing partiesalways have a certain style oforganisation: left-wing organisation. Butamong these people there are no fixedrules; they seem to have only one goal:Out with them all!

And, last but not least, let us imaginethat the same gentleman—this generalmanager of a powerful bank—seems tofind the answer some months later, whileperusing books in a bookshop on one ofthe city’s most fashionable avenues. Hewas looking for a tourists’ guide to the

Caribbean, of course—for his holidays—when all of a sudden, on one of theshelves, he sees a volume—a dark coverwith yellow letters; the title ‘Change theWor ld Without Taking Power ’; anillustration: beaten-up kitchen pans ….

Has he found an answer to themystery? An answer he hadn’t been ableto find up until now? Could it be thatthe author of the book has discovered away to change the world? Had thepiqueteros from Solano read JohnHolloway’s book before his encounterwith them in the mud, surrounded bystray dogs? And the people whooverflowed the Plaza de Mayo inDecember : had they read the bookbefore, and all of those who met inassemblies too, and those who were ableto reopen closed factories?

Let us try to give him an answer: No.None of them had read the book. It wasprinted some months after the revoltthat overthrew governments thatDecember. Maybe quite a lot of them—the overwhelming majority—will neverread it.

The manager will not find a preciseanswer to his doubts in this book,because there are no teleological truthsamongst its pages. It does not indicate‘how’ to change the world withoutachieving power. It deals with things thatseem to have been there since thebeginning of time. With phrases thatemerge from the scream; from therejection with which millions of peopleevery day, everywhere and in differentways face the world of capitalism.

It denies with the rebels’ denial. Andwhile it asks questions about thequestions, the book has no certainanswers. Holloway writes in the first-person plural, making apparent theinsubordination that we so oftenpractice in silence; our resistances, small


but irreverent, to the forces that pushus to reproduce capital.

There is no doubt that this is not abook that can be read with peace ofmind. As soon as we open it, we want toargue with it, oppose it.

That is perhaps one of its principalmerits: promoting discussion; pushingfor debate. Its pages are not a proposal;they are a challenge. That is why onetries to find weaknesses; mistakes thatmight allow our return to what is ‘sure’,to the ‘one and only’ right path; to thetraditional revolutionary canon.

Change the World Without Taking Poweris a book that appeals to us from therealm of the absurd, in the same spiritwith which the piqueteros of Solano

answered the general manager’squestions that afternoon, on theoutskirts of Buenos Aires. The same‘absurd’ that resounded in the nights,in the pots and pans together with thesmiles and the hope. The urgent andessential absurd: Que se vayan todos, queno quede ni uno solo: Out with them all—each and every one of them!

NoteThe authors would like to thank AlbaInvernizzi for the translation of thisarticle from Spanish.

To change the world we needrevolutionary democracy

Michael Löwy

John Holloway’s book is a remarkableessay, thought-provoking and trulyradical in the original sense of the word,of ‘going to the root of the problem’.Whatever its problems and weaknesses,it brings to the fore, in an impressiveway, the critical and subversive powerof negativity. Its aim is ambitious andtopical: ‘sharpening the Marxist critiqueof capitalism’.

The key philosophical chapters of thebook deal with fetishism andfetishisation. Creatively drawing onMarx, Lukács and Adorno, Hollowaydefines fetishism as the separation ofdoing from done, and the breaking ofthe collective flow of doing. This is a veryinsightful viewpoint; but Hollowayseems to identify all forms of objectivitywith fetishism. For instance, he

complains that, in capitalism, ‘the objectconstituted acquires a durable identity’.Well, would a good chair produced insocialism not become ‘an object with adurable identity’? His refusal todistinguish between alienation andobjectivation (cf. note of ch. )—amistake the young Lukács did not make,in spite of his late self-criticism of —leads to a denial of the objectivemateriality of human products.

Another powerful argument is hiscriticism of ‘scientific Marxism’, i.e.those theories which attempt to enlistcertainty on the side of socialism, andwhich claim to explain and predicthistorical change according to ‘scientificlaws’. This section is one of the mostimportant of the book, and a significantcontribution to a critical Marxistapproach to politics.

Among the ‘scientific Marxists’, Hollo-way includes Kautsky, Lenin’s ‘What is tobe done?’ (), and Rosa Luxemburg’s‘Reform or Revolution?’().

23Holloway Forum

However, he seems to ignore thelatter’s pamphlet on ‘The Crisis of SocialDemocracy’ (), which represents aradical methodological break with thedoctrine of scientific certainty, thanksto a decisive new formulation: thehistorical alternative between ‘socialismor barbarism’. This essay is a real turningpoint in the history of Marxism,precisely because it introduces the‘principle of uncertainty’ into socialistpolitics.

Now I come to the main bone ofcontention, which gives the book itstitle: changing the world without takingpower. Holloway suggests, at first, thatall attempts at revolutionary change sofar have failed because they were basedon the paradigm of change throughwinning state power.

However, as he acknowledges in note of p. , historical evidence is notenough, since all attempts to change theworld without seizing power have alsofailed, so far. He attempts, therefore,to ground his claim on the distinction,introduced in chapter but whichpervades the whole book, between‘power-to’—the capacity to do things—and ‘power-over’—the ability tocommand others to do what one wishesthem to do. Revolutions, according toHolloway, should promote the first anduproot the second. I must confess thatI am not persuaded by this distinction. Ithink that there can be no form ofcollective life and action of humanbeings without some form of ‘power-over’.

Let me try to explain my objections.They have to do with the idea ofdemocracy: a concept that hardlyappears in the book, or which is dis-missed as a ‘state-defined process ofelectoral influenced decision making’ (p.). I have to disagree. I believe that

democracy should be a central aspectin all processes of social and politicaldecision-making, and particularly in arevolutionary process—an argumentpresented by Rosa Luxemburg in her(fraternal) critique of the Bolsheviks(‘The Russian Revolution’, ).Democracy means that the majority haspower over the minority. Not absolutepower: it has limits, and it has to respectthe dignity of the other. But still, it haspower-over. This applies to all kinds ofhuman communities, including theZapatista villages.

For instance: in , after twelvedays’ fighting, the Zapatistas decided tostop shooting and to negotiate a truce.Who decided? The Zapatista villagesdiscussed the matter, and a majority—perhaps there was even a generalconsensus—decided that armed fightingshould cease. The villages then gave theorder to the commanders of the EZLNto cease fire: they had power over thecommanders.

And, finally, the commandersthemselves obeyed the orders of thevillages, and instructed the Zapatistafighters to stop shooting: they hadpower over them. I don’t pretend thatthis is a precise description of whathappened, but it is an example of howdemocracy requires some forms of‘power-over’.

One of my main objections toHolloway’s discussion of the issue ofpower, anti-power and counter-poweris its extremely abstract character. Hementions the importance of memory forresistance, but there is very littlememory, very little history in hisarguments; very little discussion of themerits or limits of the real historicalrevolutionary movements eitherMarxist, anarchist or Zapatista, since.


In one of the few passages in whichhe mentions some positive historicalexamples of anti-fetishism and self-determination, Holloway refers to ‘theParis Commune discussed by Marx, theworkers’ councils theorised byPannekoek, and the village councils ofthe Zapatistas’ (p. ).

Yet it is demonstrable that, in eachof these examples, there were forms ofdemocratic power requiring some formof power-over. In the Paris Communethere was a new form of power: nolonger a state in the usual sense, it wasstill a power, democratically elected bythe people of Paris in a combination ofdirect and representative democracy,and it had power over the populationwith its decrees and decisions.

It had power over the NationalGuard, and the commanders of theGuard had power over their soldiers(‘let’s go and put up a barricade onBoulevard de Clichy!’). And thispower—the democratic power of theParis Commune—was literally ‘seized’,beginning with the act of seizing thematerial instruments of power: thecannons of the National Guard. As forthe council communist AntonPannekoek, he wanted ‘all power for theworkers’ councils’, and he saw thecouncils as a means for the workers ‘toseize power and to establish theirdomination over society’ (from a

essay by Pannekoek).What I feel is also lacking in

Holloway’s discussion is the concept ofrevolutionary praxis—first formulatedby Marx in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’—which for me is the real answer to whathe calls the ‘tragedy of fetishism’ and allits dilemmas: how can people so deeplyenmeshed in fetishism liberatethemselves from the system? Marx’sanswer is that, through their own

emancipatory praxis, people changesociety and change their own conscious-ness at the same time. It is only by theirpractical experience of struggle thatpeople can liberate themselves offetishism. This is also why the only trueemancipation is self-emancipation, andnot liberation ‘from above’.

Any self-emancipatory action, indivi-dual or collective, however modest, maybe a first step towards the ‘expropriationof the expropriators’. But I don’t believethat any and every ‘No’, howeverbarbaric, can be a ‘driving force’, asHolloway suggests on p. : I don’t,for example, think that suicide, goingmad, terrorism, and other sorts of anti-human responses to the system can be‘starting points’ for emanci-pation. I likethe conclusion of the book—without anending. We are all seeking our way; noone can say he has found the true andonly strategy. And we all have to learnfrom the living experience of struggles,like those of the Zapatistas …

Note:. All page references, unless otherwise

stated, are from John Holloway() Change the World Without TakingPower: The Meaning of Revolution Today,Pluto, London.

25Holloway Forum

Hopeful voyage; uncertain point ofarrival?

Alberto R. Bonnet

Change the World Without Taking Power isan extraordinary book. It’s a ship thatweighs anchor in search of thecontemporary meaning of the revo-lution; that clearly perceives the reefsconfronting its adventure and, notwith-standing its uncertain end, advancesconvinced of its arrival in port. Ourcritique can only be, then, an internalone—in both the standard sense of theword, and in the more intimate sensethat, in these pages, we’ll be travellingtogether.

John Holloway is right in supposingthat the starting point of a revolutionarycritique is negativity: the rejection of ourdaily experience of the relations ofexploitation and domination inherent incapitalist society. This starting pointrestores us, damaged subjects, into thecore of this revolutionary critique and,at the same time, demands of us anegative dialectic—in Adorno’s sense—as a dialectic of the revolution. And thisstarting point also restores the notionof fetishism—in the footsteps of theyoung Lukács—as the key notion of theMarxist critique of capitalist society. Agreat deal of the best pages in Holloway’sbook reflects on these notions offetishism and negativity as, for example,he outlines the contention between thetraditions of Marxism as critique andMarxism as positive science; or thedifference between hard fetishism andfetishisation-as-process, revealing itsrevolutionary thinking.

This is a good point of departure.But there is no point of departure, nomatter its theoretical firmness, that canguarantee us in advance that we will

reach a good political port. I think thatHolloway’s hopeful voyage, notwith-standing his capacity to navigate, has lostits direction and could take us to anunexpected point of arrival; that is tosay, to postmodern politics, i.e. versionsof liberal politics, instead of to revolutio-nary politics.

The first reef that Holloway confrontson his trip is that of class reductionism.Holloway seeks to resolve the importantpolitical problem of class antagonism byavoiding reducing the diverse socialsubjects into one—i.e. the working class—and, at the same time, by diluting theminto a multiplicity of the so-called socialmovements. His manoeuvre consists,then, of redirecting those subjects andstruggles into a common, binaryantagonism, between power-to and power-over, which fractures the social flow of doingin capitalism. This manoeuvre isvirtuous for many reasons. One of themrefers to praxis—unsuccessfully.Whereas his argument seeks to specifythe nature of the antagonism betweenpower-to and power-over, it cannotdistinguish it from the antagonismbetween labour and capital, nor derivefrom this antagonism the multiplicity ofsocial subjects and struggles. How toderive patriarchy, for example, from anantagonism between power-over andpower-to, which cannot be discernedfrom the antagonism between capitaland labour? Do the capitalist marketand the state exercise their powerthrough the identification of the workingclass as a class, or through the atomisa-tion of this class identity into an aggre-gate of citizens and sellers of their labourpower? The manoeuvre leads, then, toan undifferentiated aggregate of socialsubjects and struggles, with non-identityas a criterion for aggregation. Hollowayassociates these subjects and struggles


with workers and class struggle in abroader sense, certainly, but his ownsuppression of any criterion justifyingthis association, malgré lui-même, spreadsfertilizer on the populism of postmodernpolitics.

The second reef that Hollowayconfronts is the reduction of thecapitalist state to an instrument and,once again, this is another decisivepolitical problem for revolutionarythinking. Recovering his previouscritical insight into the state as a form ofcapitalist social relation, with referenceto the German debate of the Staatsa-bleitung, Holloway can face this reefsuccessfully.

The capitalist state is not a neutraltool that can be used for building anemancipated society and, consequently,the revolution cannot be conceived assimply taking state power. PerhapsHolloway exaggerates the degree towhich revolutionaries of the pastconceived the revolution in such asimple manner, but his argument againstsimplistic conceptions of revolution astaking the power of the state isconclusive, correctly posing a problemthat is still vital for revolutionary politics.Holloway restates the question of whatis to be done with the capitalist state,from the point of view of the revolu-tionary. But he risks his ship in a moreturbulent sea when he tries to find analternative answer to this question.

The manoeuvre consists, here, ofthe movement from the affirmation thatrevolutionary politics cannot be centredon taking the power of the state as ainstrument, to the affirmation that thestate itself is not central to powerrelations in capitalist society. This laststatement contradicts one of the keypremises of the critique of the state as aform of capitalist social relations: the

separation between the political andeconomic spheres in capitalist society.The state is the place of power because ofthis separation between the political andthe economic. Hence the particu-larisation of the state is an illusion—butan objective illusion, with effects thatcannot be disdained.

Holloway’s manoeuvre results in aparadoxical conclusion: that thequestion of what is to be done with thecapitalist state from a revolutionaryperspective becomes unimportant, sincethe state is only one amongst othercentres of power relations withincapitalist society. This manoeuvre leadsus to the micro-politics of the post-modernists, instead of to revolutionarypolitics.

Holloway’s ship is damaged afterhaving confronted the aforementionedreefs. The images in the book’s last pages—images of a merely expressive quasi-politics (a politics of events), constitutedby an aggregate of diverse, undiffe-rentiated activities (an area of activity),prosecuted by an aggregate of equallyundifferentiated social movements (aspace of anti-power)—reveal that damage.Holloway insists that these are imagesof revolutionary politics. And he canrightly say that his point of departure,his charts, and the reefs he confrontson his travels, belong to a rich traditionof revolutionary thinking. But thisargument is not enough. Holloway doesnot offer any criterion that could justifythe classification of the politics of eventsas revolutionary politics, and so itremains associated with postmodernpolitics. It is not by chance that Changethe World, along with Negri and Hardt’sEmpire, was received as a postmodernpolitical manifesto during the revolu-tionary days of the beginning of inArgentina.

27Holloway Forum

Contemporary struggle in Europe:‘Anti-power’ or counter-power?

Andrew Mathers & Graham Taylor

As soon as you abandon the idea of thestate merely as an institution, as afunction, and begin to recognise it as aform of social relations, a completely newway of struggle opens up. It is possible tosee many courses of action that canchallenge the form of the state’s processeswhilst we stay within the state. That isthe point: such actions cannot be takenfrom outside the state, only from within.(London-Edinburgh Weekend ReturnGroup [] : )

To struggle through the state is to becomeinvolved in the active process of defeatingyourself(Holloway, : ).

Much has happened in the decadesspanning these two quotations. Thecollapse of state socialism hasdemonstrated the contradictions ofseizing state power, and the retreat ofsocial democracy has reinforced thelimits of reformism. The pervasivepessimism of postmodernism has beenchallenged recently by an optimismbased on the wave of struggles that beganwith the Zapatistas’ rebellion in Chiapas.The utopian hope that ‘another worldis possible’ articulated by the anti-capitalist movement has not, however,been accompanied by a realistic strategyfor its achievement. It is becomingincreasingly apparent that there is a needto reconstruct the links betweenacademics and activists in order toproduce insights into the ways in whicheveryday struggles intersect withcapitalist power. The work of JohnHolloway contributed to significant

conceptual advances in our under-standing of social form and everydaystruggle in the debate that dominatedthe , and the pages of Capital & Class,during the late-s and the earlys. To what extent, however, doesChange the World Without Taking Powercontribute to our under-standing ofsocial form and everyday struggle in thetwenty-first century?

The earlier debates highlighted theextent to which capitalist power isembedded in the processes ofabstraction that constitute the totalityof the capital relation. The fetished and‘thing-like’ appearance of money andthe state is not illusory, but expressesthe reality of how social relations aremediated within a capitalist social order.The social forms of capital are thus boththe object and the result of class struggle:the imposition and refusal of bourgeoisforms of domination. The contradictorydetermination of the state provided thespace for an oppositional politics thatovercame the fetished categories of‘worker’, ‘client’, ‘patient’, etc. The

was an effective vehicle for translatingthis theory into a form that waspractically useful for state workers,council tenants and claimants, engagedin everyday struggles in and against thestate. In Change the World, Hollowaysuggests that, today, such a politicswould be ‘self-defeating’, owing to theways in which the purity of oppositionalstruggle would be corrupted by thepower relations of capital. He suggeststhat what is now required is a politics of‘autonomy’ and ‘anti-power’, in orderto articulate a negative ‘scream ofrefusal’. We would like to highlightseveral theoretical and practicaldifficulties with this proposition, in thecontext of examples of everyday strugglein contemporary Europe.


The main theoretical problem is thatthere exists an inconsistency betweenthe more abstract model of the statedeveloped by Holloway, and the way inwhich Holloway presented the state asan object of everyday struggle. Thisinconsistency contributes to Holloway’srejection of contemporary strugglesfocused on the state, and to a flawedunderstanding of the anti-capitalistmovement. In Holloway’s earlier work,there is an inconsistency between theproposition that the state is anexpression of the crisis of the capitalrelation expressed in a political form(Holloway & Picciotto, : ), andHolloway’s tendency to separate thestate as an ‘apparatus’ and the state as a‘social relation’, when discussingeveryday struggle (Holloway, :). As Clarke (: ) correctlynoted at the time, this separation of formand content risked a relapse intostructuralism and the notion that thestate apparatus is class neutral: as Clarkealso noted, Holloway avoided theresulting theoretical confusion byrecourse to ‘populist anti-theoreticism’.The same theoretical confusion seemsto underlie Holloway’s current rejectionof engagement with the state.

The neoliberal restructuring of thestate has excluded and marginalisedlabour, but this exclusion can never betotal owing to the contradictorydetermination of the state as a socialform. The same theoretical confusionhas thus led Holloway to draw adiametrically-opposed conclusionregarding the state and everydaystruggle two decades later.

Holloway’s argument for a politicsbeyond the state is premised on thefailure of Leninism, and an appeal to thegeneral anti-theoreticism of the anti-capitalist movement, rather than on a

careful assessment of how neoliberalrestructuring has changed the terrain ofeveryday struggle. The reassertion of theliberal moment of the state has closeddown oppositional spaces within thestate, while the processes through whichthe state ensures capitalist reproductionhave been effectively de-politicised. Thiscan be seen in the ways in which thestate sponsors various forms of‘strategic partnership’, as with theencouragement of initiatives such ass (Public Private Partnerships) ands (Private Finance Initiatives).

However, these developmentssuggest to us a strategy based not on adisengagement from a politics of statepower, but a reengagement and, indeed,an intensification of struggle in andagainst the state. Indeed, we can see thisoccurring in contemporary strugglesacross Europe.

Holloway (: ) claims the sanspapiers as a movement of ‘anti-fetishisation’. The main demand of themovement, however, is for residencepapers: a demand for identification bythe French state. The association of thesans papiers with groups campaigning forradical goals like ‘no borders’ suggeststhat linking everyday struggles withradical social change can be conceptual-ised as in, against and through the state.The struggle over council housing in the highlights this argument further. Inthe context of council tenants beingconsulted on options for the transfer ofhousing stock out of local authoritycontrol, tenants’ groups and housingworkers organised by have beencampaigning, along with the Campaignto Defend Council Housing, to maintainlocal authority control. Do we rejectsuch struggles owing to the antagonisticrelationship housing workers andtenants have with the state, and argue

29Holloway Forum

instead for what Holloway describes as‘autonomous community projects’(ibid: )? The latter would suggest theestablishment of housing cooperativesand a defence of their autonomy fromincorporation into state control. This,however, would shift the struggle ontothe terrain of the associational politicsof the Third Way, and compound the de-politicisation of public housingprovision.

A more positive strategy mightinvolve a reassertion of the contra-dictory relationship between the work-ing class and the welfare state, and areengagement in struggle over the formof the state.

In practice, this might meanmobilising an alliance of tenants,workers and housing activists aroundnot just the demand for retainingcouncil control of housing, but also forincreased spending and new democraticstructures for controlling housingprovision.

This struggle demonstrates thepotential for developing alliances thatchallenge the fragmentation of theworking class into categories (tenant,worker, etc.) through which it isincorporated into the state throughvarious partnership arrangements. Sucha challenge would also involve thetransformation of ‘working class’organisations and, in particular, wouldmean breaking the unions from socialpartnership and their reorientationaround social movement unionism().

Holloway, however, seems toconsign the labour movement to‘instrumentalism’, and thereby tocomplicity in neoliberal restructuring.But the situation in contemporaryEurope is contradictory, since thedominant strategy of ‘social partnership’

is challenged by a counter-tendency of, exemplified by the French unionSolidaires, Unitaires, Démocratiques (). was formed as a grass-roots union,and has its power-base amongst the mostmilitant sections of public-sectorworkers. It has used its resources to helpmobilise a wide array of social forcesagainst the social consequences ofneoliberal restructuring, which havebecome known collectively as the sans.

There is, of course, a real danger ofthis new militancy becoming incorpo-rated into the French state, but this isan unavoidable hazard facing allstruggles in and against the state. Toargue for the development of anti-poweris to side-step the problem and, frankly,does little to assist militants with the realdilemmas they face in their everydaystruggles.

Rather than making an intellectualcontribution to resolving these issuesfaced by collective organisations,Holloway retreats into a celebration andjustification of individual acts of resis-tance. However, surely a majorchallenge for engaged intellectualstoday, and especially the , remainsjust as it was more than years ago:

New relations established betweencapital and labour are not only anindirect response to working classstruggle, they also inevitably [originalemphasis] shape that struggle andcall forth new forms of organisation…One consequence of the neglect byMarxist theory of the analysis of thishistorical development of everydayrelations between the state and theworking class is that there has beenlittle attempt to understand thesechanges in organisational form.(, : )


In the context of neoliberalism, thesecomments would seem to be more,rather than less, relevant. Foracademics, it is not enough to championa ‘politics of events’ as pure expressionsof anti-power.

Rather, it is necessary to provide ananalysis of the new terrain on whicheveryday struggles are being waged.

Moreover, as argued, it isthrough such struggle that the processof ‘revolution’ is advanced. The aim isto encourage a ‘culture of opposition’,and democratic organisations as formsof counter-power that prefigure socialistforms of existence.

Reconvening the wouldrequire a trip on the East Coast Mainlinerailway. The loss of life at the Hatfieldand Potters Bar crashes reveals the realcost of a London-to-Edinburghweekend return on a privatised railwaysystem.

This is the kind of issue around whichacademics and activists can productive-ly engage in order to renew a politicsthat is in, against and beyond the state.

Notes. Sans travail—unemployed; sans logis

—homeless; sans papiers—withoutdocuments. The ‘sans’ are all lackingrights to a decent existence, andshare a common demand for aguaranteed income.

. The authors wish to thank AlexGordon for information and ideasabout railway privatisation.

ReferencesClarke, S. () ‘The State Debate’,

in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate(Macmillan) London.

Holloway, J. () ‘The State andeveryday struggle’, in S. Clarke (ed.)The State Debate (Macmillan)London.

______ () Change the World WithoutTaking Power: The Meaning of RevolutionToday (Pluto Press) London.

Holloway, J. & S. Picciotto ()‘Capital, crisis and the State’, in S.Clarke (ed.) The State Debate(Macmillan) London.

London-Edinburgh Weekend ReturnGroup () In and Against the State(Pluto Press) London.

Nouns and verbs; or, Holloway’sunderstanding of revolution

Pablo Ghigliani

Change the World Without Taking Power hasalready been widely debated, especiallyas regards the political connotations ofthe book. For that reason, it is difficultfor the reviewer to fuel the politicaldebate with fresh considerations; but ashort comment on the theoreticalground of the argument may holdinterest, nevertheless.

If the core of the book is the notionof fetishism, its starting-point is thescream against the horrors of capitalism:a two-dimensional scream thatcomprises rage and hope, and which isrooted in the experience of the evil ofcapital, and the projection beyond it ofan alternative otherness. Thus, Hollo-way stresses once and again that thestarting-point is an active refusal: ascream that implies a doing that pointsto the negation of what exists; doing notjust as work, but as the whole movementof practical negativity. Then, the base

31Holloway Forum

of his theoretical reflection would be the‘scream-doing’ and its movementagainst limits, against containment,against closure: in short, subjectivity.

Although Holloway qualifies thisstarting-point as a concrete scream-doing against the misery of capitalistsociety, I would argue that this is justthe rhetorical point of departure of hisargument.

Holloway does not offer anycharacterisation of the kind of negativepractice involved in this scream-doing,except for a short list of empiricalexamples composed of some predictablecollective struggles and individual acts.On the contrary, the actual starting-point of the argument is the mostabstract and universal notion of humandoing imaginable, but not the negativepractice that arises from our activescream of opposition to capitalism.

Holloway’s real premise is theamorphous social flow of doing, inwhich ‘past doing (of ourselves andothers) becomes the means of doing inthe present’ and ‘our doings are sointertwined that it is impossible to saywhere one ends and another begins’ (p.).

Furthermore, the material constitu-tion of the ‘we’ who scream is theoutcome of ‘the conscious and uncon-scious, planned and unplanned, braidingof our lives through time’ (p. )—notthe result of the movement of negativepractice.

After posing this theoretical premiseHolloway shows, by analysis, thatembedded in the social flow of doing liesa power-to-do, ‘a uniting, a bringingtogether of my doing with the doing ofothers’ (p. ). Power-to will be theimplicit material substratum thatbecomes power-over when both doingand its social flow are broken by the

separation and private appropriation ofthe done.

It is the critique of this separation—of done from doing, of existence fromconstitution, of conception fromrealisation, of subject from object—thatleads the argument to its ‘turning point’:the vulnerability of power-over; in otherwords, the dependence of the powerfulon the powerless, of the done on thedoer.

However, in order to grasp the sourceof this vulnerability it is crucial tounderstand, first, that the antagonisticmode of existence of the broken doingis the movement of the antagonisticrelations between contents and theforms of existence of these contents.

Power-to; doing; done, are thecontents dominated and denied by theirsocial forms—power-over; labour;capital. In short, the whole secretresides on quite a simple point: that nomatter how much the done dominatesand denies the doing, the done dependsabsolutely on the doing for its existence.Everything else is an illusion, albeit a veryreal one.

By this analytical path we arrive atthe notion of fetishism which is,according to Holloway, the way in whichthe rupture of doing was conceived ofby Marx. Then, the last theoretical stepof the argument will be to infusemovement into the notion of fetishism,by transforming the hard approach intoa form-process approach: fetishisation.

In my view, there are some fatal flawsin this argument. To begin with, changingthe world is reduced by Holloway to theemancipation of universal and trans-historical contents—power-to, doing,done—by the dissolution of the socialforms that deny them—power-over,labour, capital. By overemphasising thestatus of form as denial, the argument


neglects the analysis of the complex linksbetween content and social form. Thematerial and social development of thecontents has no role to play in thetransformation of the social forms in whichthey exist, and vice versa. There is no roomin the argument to wonder—even withinthe boundaries of capital—how far, say,different technologies, or different waysof organising labour processes, or differentforms of property, or different forms ofexercising collective authority, push orprevent the further socialisation ofdoing and done.

Similarly, despite all the rhetoricalenergy expended in talking aboutmovement and processes, this mode ofreasoning fails to offer a truly historicalaccount of social change. There ishistory—albeit mythical—in thetransition from feudalism to capitalism;but once capital is onstage, we are leftwith the never-ending circular genesisof forms. It is arguable that thisapproach is only possible when thetheoretical connection between socialforms and contents is broken.

Consequently, it is not surprisingthat, for instance, the crucial differencebetween primitive accumulation and thereproduction of capital is blurred.History, as the place where real illusionsare not dissolved theoretically, becomescontingent.

Between the ‘real’ and the ‘illusion’,Holloway opts to downplay the formerand emphasise the illusory side of anyform of capital brought about by theself-negation of doing. Where, then,does the power of capital to perpetuatethe illusion come from? In the face of anargument that refuses to concede a roleto the notion of structure as thehistorical crystallisation of humanpractices, should not we finally draw theconclusion that the survival of power-

over is just the outcome of our damagedconsciousness?

The book is often accused of failingto deliver what it apparently promisesin the title. In my view, this is just a formaland superficial claim: nobody canhonestly expect to find this kind ofpractical answer in a book. Instead,beyond the question of whether or notwe should take power in order tochange the world, the problem is that,given his theoretical horizons, Hollowayoffers no clue as to how we might embarkon the task of revolutionising both socialforms and their material contents.

Thus, he limits himself to discoveringthe verbs hidden behind the nouns thatconstitute the language of domination;to bringing instability to the world byopening up, on paper, the categories ofMarxism; and to conjuring the powerof capital away by repeating that itdepends on us.

Unfortunately, these are banalremarks; for the material dependenceon the sale of labour power that affectsthe daily lives of the vast majority of usis not dissolved by a movement of words.Without conceptual mediations, thetruism of abstract formulations becomespractical disorientation; social forms areemptied of material determinations. Thepower of capital stays mysterious. Evenworse, we feel guilty about this power.

Yet why have hundreds of politicaland social activists taken this argumentas a theoretical expression of their ownpractice? Why does this segment ofpolitical militants, who years ago wouldhave thought of themselves in rathervanguardist terms, reject the oldimagery and find the discourse of anti-power feasible? Why, indeed, when theyare often involved in daily negotiationsand confrontations with the state? Whydoes a sophisticated and vanguardist

33Holloway Forum

argument appeal to anti-intellectual andanti-vanguardist trends?

These are questions without obviousanswers. To find them, I think that weshould take seriously the methodologicalprinciple by which categories of thoughtare understood as manifestations of thereality to which they refer. Thus, we mayinterpret the success of this book as anexpression of the present fragmentationof collective struggles, as well as of the

The state as a contradiction

Mabel Thwaites Rey

In these notes, I want to discuss sometopics related to the concepts of stateand power that John Hollowayproposes. Holloway says that ‘theobjective of taking power inevitablyinvolves an instrumentalisation of thestruggle’, and that ‘[o]nce the logic ofpower is adopted, the struggle for poweris already lost’.

However, he also warns that thingsare not immutable but that, at the sametime, they express their negation. But ifthere are no identities, why, in that case,is the struggle for power always a vehiclefor instrumentalisation? If there isalways a contradiction between what isand what is not, and if this contradictionis what allows us to think about change,why is it, then, that the objective ofdefeating power is inevitably a way tothe instrumenta-lisation of everystruggle?

I do not think that by saying we aregoing to ‘eliminate’ power by the simplemandate of our will, we can resolve themultiplicity of issues that this involves.Because if this decree of our will is reallyrelevant, it must necessarily be

collective; and where there is acollective, there is a need to assume thedisputes that the non-desired manife-stations of power imply. If clear rulesand mechanisms with which to resolveconflicts are not created, these conflictswill eventually be resolved somehow, butwithout any guarantee of respect for thecollective will.

Holloway proposes the concept of‘anti-power’ as a way of resolving thecomplex question of power. This meansthat power over others can be dissolvedthrough the decision of an autonomouswill, which refuses to be subjugated, andrefuses to reproduce the existing order.The question seems more complex thanthe solution he proposes.

How do we build a non-powersociety in the midst of one in which thereal power not only exists, but alsooppresses us? Holloway’s solution is toignore this power.

Understanding what the struggle forpower means, and the enormous perilsthat it entails, is a very good starting-point for thinking about new forms ofdemocratic, participative and horizontalways of political articulation. But thecrucial problem is not yet solved: howto confront, in an effective and concreteway, such a ‘powerful power’? The

disillusionment of a whole generation ofpolitical activists with the bureaucratic anddogmatic practices of the traditional left.

Notes. All page references are from John

Holloway () Change the WorldWithout Taking Power: The Meaning ofRevolution Today.


opposite of power is not necessarily anti-power; it may well be simple impotence.And the scream of the oppressed thatcannot be potent may be even morefrustrating.

How to go from individual rejection;from the oppressed scream of eachperson; from the act of hurling away thealarm clock that calls us each morningto the slavery of tedious work, to aconcrete and common action, capableof expressing the disruptive power in therejection of this oppressive system? Howcan a scream, a rejection, tie us togetherin a socially useful way, i.e. with relevanteffects for the whole?

There is a problem in Holloway’sapproach. The neoliberal hegemony hasbeen accompanied by high levels ofdespair with regard to political activity(reformist, revolutionary or anarchist).This has been a clear victory forneoliberalism. The loss of confidence inpolitical action has strengthened theworld of capital for decades. Not in vainhave the beneficiaries of capitalism beenfighting to reduce the role of the state asan articulator of wider social interests.Holloway states, correctly, that

The fact that [the state] exists as aparticular or rigidified form of socialrelations means, however, that therelation between the state and thereproduction of capitalism is acomplex one: it cannot be assumed,in functionalist fashion, either thateverything that the state does willnecessarily be in the best interests ofcapital, nor that the state can achievewhat is necessary to secure thereproduction of capitalist society.The relation between the state andthe reproduction of capitalist socialrelations is one of trial and error.(: -)

This point is crucial. If the state is oneform of a contradictory social relation,its actions and its very morphologyreflect this contradiction. This is alsoexpressed in workers’ battles for betterliving conditions. Since the state is morethan the mere expression of capital’slogic, it should not be forgotten that isin the state apparatus that the complexrelations of force that specify thecapitalist social relation understood asa whole, materialise. Therefore, theform taken by the capitalist state cannotbe a matter of indifference to workers.It is not the same thing to have protectivelabour laws as it is to have job flexibility.It is not the same to have legally-guaranteed social security benefits as toleave them to the movement of marketforces. Workers’ historical achievementsshould be defended, not with referenceto a mythical welfare state that has nevertrespassed capitalist frontiers, but withreference to the social dimension thatshould resolve the interests of themajority.

It should be noted that the state issynonymous with repression but, toparaphrase Holloway, it-is-is-not-and-may-be (is-is-not-and-could-be)protection for the weak too. The richhave always wanted ‘less state’, to payless ‘common expenses’, and to investthe minimum in legitimating theirdominant place within the socialstructure. Therefore, it is this contra-dictory dimension of the state that shouldbe recovered. Fighting in and against thestate at the same time is fighting toeliminate its repressive forms, and towiden what it has of collective sociability.Of course, Holloway would say, this isimpossible because the state is a form ofsocial relations.

This line of reasoning ends up in acul-de-sac: if the state is a monolithically-

35Holloway Forum

defined form, then we are falling intothe thing-ness that destroys thecontradictory dimension whoseexistence Holloway notes withincapitalist social relations, and whichallows us to think about change andrupture with the present. Following thisrationale, we can say that, as is any form,the state is and is-not.

Tearing away that which is-not,taking possession of it, snatching it inthe popular interest, should be part ofthe struggle: it cannot be left outside.Because far from avoiding, as Hollowaysays, being trapped by the logic ofpower, to turn our back on this struggleis to glorify it as an immovable thing-ness.

Holloway on power and the ‘stateillusion’

Atilio A. Boron

According to Holloway, ‘the nucleus ofthe novelty of Zapatismo is the projectof changing the world without takingpower’ (Holloway, a: ). In apenetrating literary metaphor, theZapatistas proclaimed that ‘it is notnecessary to conquer the world. It isenough to create it anew!’ Hollowayargues that the innovation of Zapatismoallows the left to overcome the ‘stateillusion’, a doctrinal relic linked to astate-centred conception of revolutionin which the latter was assimilated to ‘theconquest of state power and thetransformation of society by the state’(ibid: ). For Holloway, the classicMarxist controversy that contrastedreform with revolution hides, despiteapparent differences, a fundamentalagreement regarding the state-centredcharacter of the revolutionary process.From there, he asserts that ‘the biggestcontribution of the Zapatistas has beenthe breaking of the link betweenrevolution and control of the state’(ibid: ). His reasoning not only hasan undeniable merit of its own—inasmuch as the problems to which herefers are of great theoretical and

practical transcendence—but it alsoillustrates a range of concerns andtheoretical approaches common to agood part of the alternative andprogressive thinking of the twenty-firstcentury. In a previous work, this authorhad dealt extensively with the subject(Holloway, ). ‘The revolt ofdignity’—he said on that occasion—‘cannot aspire to take the power of the state’given that ‘the rejection of state poweris simply an extension of the idea ofdignity’. And he completed hisargument in the following way:

The revolt of dignity can only aspireto abolish the state, or moreimmediately, to develop alternativeforms of social organisation andstrengthen the (anti) power of theanti-state. … The problem ofrevolutionary politics, then, is notthe taking of power, but thedevelopment of ways of politicalarticulation that would oblige thosewho retain state office to obey thepeople. (Holloway, : , mytranslation)

Let us briefly examine the variouspossible objections to Holloway’sassertion. In the first place, attentionshould be drawn to an ignored featureof fundamental importance in his


exposition: that it is capitalist societyitself that has increasingly adopted state-centred features.

If, in classic Marxism, the relevanceof the state as a social institution appearsto be highlighted, this is for two goodreasons. On the one hand, it is becauseMarxism as a social theory reproducesat the level of thought the events,processes and structures that exist inreality. It would be a major blunder ifthe evident ‘statification’ of capitalismwere to pass unnoticed by Marxisttheorists. On the other hand, it isbecause as a theory Marxism cannot—and should not—remain immune to theinfluence exerted over the exploitedmasses by the predominant form oforganisation of the oppressors. This wasperceived with unique clarity not onlyby such outstanding theorists andsocialist leaders as Lenin and Gramsci,but also by intellectuals who are alien toMarxism, such as the Germansociologist Georg Simmel. If capitalismincreasingly stresses the state’s role inthe perpetuation of its conditions ofdomination, it would not seemreasonable for its opponents to ignorethat feature in order to concentrate theirefforts—both in theory as well as inpractical struggles—in other areas.

How to ignore the unabashed‘statification’ of capitalist societies sincethe early s? This phenomenonbrought to the fore the importance ofan essential feature of the capitalist state:its role as a focus where the powers –economic, political, and ideological – ofthe dominant classes were concen-trated; its role as the organiser ofcapitalist domination and, simul-taneously, as the principal ‘disorganiser’of the subordinate classes. And eventhough the state has been weakened toa large degree in the peripheral

countries, remaining at the mercy of theplutocracies that control the ‘markets’;even in these cases it has continued tofaithfully fulfil the aforementioned tasks.An insurgent, anti-capitalist forcecannot afford to ignore or underesti-mate such an essential aspect.

The governments of the industrial-ised democracies foster a doctrinairecrusade against the state, while inpractice never ceasing to strengthen andassign new tasks and functions to it.Actually, the ‘state illusion’ would seemto be nested in those conceptions,which, despite evidence to the contrary,fail to distinguish between anti-staterhetoric and the ‘statifying’ practices ofthe capitalist governments. Or toperceive the ever-increasing strategicnature that the state has assumed inorder to guarantee the continuity ofcapitalist domination.

The shortcomings of Holloway’sdiagnosis become even more clamorouswhen he endorses an idea dear toneoliberal thinking, and to postmo-dernism in general, by affirming ‘thatstates are not the centres of power thatthey were assumed to be in the state-centred theories of Luxemburg andBernstein’ (ibid: ). This reasoningculminates by proclaiming the allegeddisappearance of national capital, andits replacement by a global capitalcompletely detached from a national-state base, and operating from thesupport that the globalisation ofeconomic operations offers to it.()Several authors have shown the errorscontained in this interpretation, and thedamage it can cause to the anti-capitalistforces that may adhere to thisperspective. The belief that the mainplayers on the global economic scene—the huge ‘mega-corporations’—havebecome completely detached from any

37Holloway Forum

‘national base’ is nothing more than aneoliberal legend disproved every singleday. How can the supposedly ‘post-national’ character of large globalcorporations be reconciled with the factthat less than per cent of executiveboard members of the American andEuropean mega-corporations areforeign, and the fact that more than

per cent of all their technologicaldevelopments originate from withintheir own ‘national’ borders? In spite ofthe global scope of their operations,which is not in question, Boeing andExxon are American firms, just asVolkswagen and Siemens are German,and Toyota and Sony Japanese. When agovernment threatens their interests, orwhen an allegedly ‘disloyal’ competitorquestions their market domination, it isneither the Secretary General nor theSecurity Council that intervenes in theaffair, but rather the ambassadors of theUnited States, Germany or Japan, whotry to correct the course and protect‘their’ businesses. In the same line ofreasoning, Ellen Meiksins Wood wrotenot too long ago that ‘behind everytransnational corporation there is anational base that depends on its localstate to sustain its viability, and on otherstates to give it access to other marketsand other labour forces’. Theconclusion of Holloway’s analysis is that‘the central point of globalization is thefact that competition is not only—noteven principally—between individualfirms, but between national economies.And as a consequence the nation-statehas acquired new functions as aninstrument of competition’ (: ).That is why national states continue tobe key players in contemporarycapitalism.

But there are other problems thatemanate from the idea of the ‘state

illusion’. In multiple writings, Gramsciargued that the establishment of the‘intellectual and moral’ hegemony is acondition of the conquest of politicalpower, and of any possibility of thesuccessful implementation of a radicalproject (: -).

Thus, ‘intellectual and moral’leadership and political domination aretwo inseparable sides of the one-and-only revolutionary coin: without thefirst, social insurgence falls in thequicksands of the logic of apparatuses,armed or otherwise; and without ‘powervocation’, the political struggle decaysinto an ethereal, postmodern culturalcontroversy.

It seems to us that in Holloway’s workthe second part of the Gramscianprogramme—the section dealing withpower, state control and domination—vanishes into thin air. A new world isnot constructed, as Zapatismo wants,unless the correlation of forces isradically modified, and very powerfulenemies are defeated. And the state isprecisely the place where thecorrelation of forces is condensed. It isnot the only place, but it is by far themost important one. It is the only onefrom which, for example, the victors cantransform their interests into laws, andcreate a normative and institutionalframework that guarantees the stabilityof their conquests. A ‘triumph’ on theplane of civil society is extremelyimportant but lacks imperative effects—or does anyone doubt the clear victorythat the Zapatistas reaped with theMarch of Dignity? Nevertheless, shortlythereafter the Mexican Congressenacted outrageous legislation thatdated back to the worst moments of thecrisis, and that was antithetical to theoverwhelming ‘climate of opinion’prevailing in civil society.


From the above it can be inferredthat the idea of the ‘power illusion’,which includes the above and preachesthe necessity of abandoning theconquest of political power, can nolonger be acceptable. ‘It is not a projectto make us powerful—says Holloway—‘but rather to dissolve the relations ofpower’ (a: ).

We will concede by hypothesis thatHolloway may be right, but we shouldalso admit the legitimacy of the followingquestions: how can those crystallisedpower relations that, for example inChiapas, have condemned the nativepeople to more than five hundred yearsof oppression and exploitation bedissolved?

Is it reasonable to presume that thebeneficiaries of an incurably inhumaneand unfair system—the latifundistas(owners of large estates), theparamilitaries, the local political bosses,etc.—will humbly and peacefully accepttheir defeat in civil society and thebreakage of their power structures,without offering a bloody resistance?How are those ‘alternative forms’ ofsocial organisation and ‘the anti-stateanti-power’ going to be constructed?Will it be possible for the revolutionrequired in order to found thesealternative forms to ‘advance just byasking’?

Holloway has argued that progressiveforces cannot ‘first adopt capitalistmethods (struggle for power) to latergo in the opposite direction (dissolvepower)’ (b).

It seems to me that the struggle forpower, especially if we place it in themost concrete terrain of politics, andnot in that of philosophical abstractions,cannot be conceived of as a ‘capitalistmethod’ based on the affirmation thatthe ‘existence of politics is a constitutive

moment of the relation of capital’. Whatdoes this mean? That there was nopolitics before the birth of capital? Don’twe run the risk of culminating thatreasoning by affirming that all that existsis nothing other than a reflection of theall-embracing power of capital? In thatcase, wouldn’t this lead us to a kind of‘left-Fukuyamanism’, except thatinstead of celebrating the definitivetriumph over capital, we are supposedto sing funeral marches for thecontesting forces locked up forever inits supremacy?

ReferencesGramsci, A. () Selections from the

Prison Notebooks (InternationalPublishers) New York.

Holloway, J. () ‘La revuelta de ladignidad’, in Chiapas, no. (Institutode Investigaciones Económicas)México.

Holloway, J. (a) ‘El Zapatismo y lasciencias sociales en América Latina’,in OSAL, no. , June (CLACSO)Buenos Aires.

Holloway, J. (b) ‘La asimetría de lalucha de clases. Una respuesta aAtilio Boron’, in OSAL, no. , June(CLACSO) Buenos Aires.

Meiksins Wood, E. () ‘Trabajo,clase y estado en el capitalismoglobal’, in OSAL , no. , June(CLACSO) Buenos Aires.

39Holloway Forum

Change the World Without TakingPower

John Holloway

The book is an invitation to discuss, andto all those who have commented on thebook, however adverse their criticism,I am very grateful for their acceptanceof the invitation. The experience of thelast two years has been rather like playingat the edge of the sea and being hit bybig waves of enthusiasm and criticismwhich roll me over and over: anexhilarating and sometimes confusingexperience, in which I occasionally losethe thread of the argument. Cominghome to Capital & Class is perhaps a wayof finding my feet before the next wavecomes.

The central thread is that the struggleagainst capital is a struggle againstfetishism, and that fetishism must beunderstood as a process of fetishisation.The argument has its roots in the CSEdebates of the s. In the CSE StateGroup of that time, we developed anunderstanding of the state as aparticular form of the capital relation:an aspect of the fetishisation of socialrelations under capitalism. In this, wewere influenced by the German statederivation debate (see Holloway &Picciotto ), but sought to go beyondthat debate, both politically andtheoretically (see CSE State Group, -). For me, themost important turning-point in thatdiscussion was the argument thatfetishism has to be understood not asfait accompli, but as process; as form-process or process of formation; asstruggle.

The book Change the World WithoutTaking Power is intended to draw out theimplications of this argument—already

considerably developed in the pages ofCommon Sense, and in the three volumesof Open Marxism. The distinctionbetween fetishism-as-accomplished-factand fetishism-as-process is important,because it is the dividing line betweenan authoritarian understanding ofMarxism and a libertarian under-standing.

To see fetishism as an accomplishedfact leads to an elitist understanding oftheory, and to the view either thatrevolution is impossible, or that it mustbe led by an emancipated vanguardacting on behalf of the working class: thisleads to a focus on the state, which isprecisely a form of organisation on behalfof; that is, a form of exclusion andrepression.

To see fetishism as a process of feti-shisation, on the other hand, is to startfrom a self-divided subject (of whichtheory is a self-contradictory moment)struggling (contradictorily) against its/our own alienation or fetishisation,driving towards social self-deter-mination—necessarily pulling ourselvesup by our own bootstraps, as it were,because there is no possible saviour, nopossible emancipated vanguard. Thestruggle starts from where we are andwhat we are; the struggle is a refusal ofwhere we are and what we are: we arein-and-against, against-and-in. But morethan that: in order to be sustained, thestruggle in-and-against must become amoving against-and-beyond—a pointbeing emphasised increasingly by thecurrent struggles against capitalism.

To think of communism as amovement against fetishism is to set thestakes as high as possible, as I think Marxalso did (but that’s not the point). Amovement against fetishism is a movingagainst all that stands in the way of socialself-determination; a drive towards


becoming our own true sun, withoutalibi or saviour. The drive towards socialself-determination is global communism(commun-ism), because since all doingsare interwoven, there is no other way inwhich to imagine social self-deter-mination.

It is a drive against history under-stood as determination of the presentby the past, since social self-determi-nation is necessarily a liberation fromdetermination by the past; a wakingfrom the nightmare of history. It is astruggle to shoot clocks, break duration,dissolve the homogeneity of time; toovercome all separation between consti-tution and existence; to transform time-in, the ‘abstract and homogeneousprogression leading from past to presentto future’ into time-as, the ‘temporalityof freely chosen actions and projects’(Gunn, ). It is the revolt of verbsagainst nouns, for self-determinationmeans a world of doings, of activesubjects, not of objects.

Communism, so understood, is bothutopian star and urgent necessity. It isnot a policy, or a model, or a set of rules;it is a direction, a moving beyond andtowards. It certainly does not mean thatthere should be no engagement withexisting capitalist forms, such as moneyand the state.

On the contrary, it is preciselybecause such engagement is inevitablethat it is important to understand theimplications and the dangers. The state(or any fetishised form) involves aparticular way of organising socialrelations, of subordinating relationsbetween people to relations betweenthings—a way that impedes the recogni-tion and assumption of social humansubjectivity. It would be lovely to turnour backs completely on the state andmoney, but generally we cannot do

that—though certainly the Zapatistas’Juntas de Buen Gobierno are an impressivemove in this direction. Most of us haveto engage with the state and othercapitalist forms in some way; but thequestion is, how do we do it? Werecognise their specifically capitalistcharacter; we criticise their form. Westruggle in-and-against-and-beyondthose forms; we try to see our ownstruggle as asymmetrical to the forms ofcapitalism; we try to establish otherforms of organisation, forms thatsubordinate relations between things torelations between people.

That is what I mean by anti-power:the necessary asymmetry between ourforms of organisation and capitalistforms. The asymmetry of form is noguarantee that the struggle will not beintegrated into capital, but it is certainlyan important way of fighting against it(as Marcos points out in his discussionof the practice of the Juntas de BuenGobierno in his ‘Leer un video’ commu-niqué of August ). What are theseasymmetrical forms? This is always amatter of invention and experi-mentation; but the tradition of councilorganisation, and the concepts of directdemocracy, hor izontality and theovercoming of the separation betweenthe political and the social are obviouslycentral here.

How to engage with the state ormoney or other capitalist forms is alwaysa difficult question, and precisely for thatreason we have to be aware that anyengagement with the state pushes us inthe direction of reconciliation withcapital. Do we have to cede to thatpressure? No, we do not; but in thestruggle not to cede to the pressure, it iscrucial to understand the class characterof the state as a form of social relationsand to develop our own distinctive,

41Holloway Forum

asymmetrical forms: forms that moveagainst-and-beyond the fetishisationcharacteristic of capitalist forms.

Do we now know how to make therevolution? No, we do not; and only acharlatan would claim that we do. Tocriticise the book for wanting toconfront our lack of certainty isnonsensical.

As Michael Löwy puts it, ‘We all areseeking our way, no one can say he hasfound the true and only strategy.’ Thebook is intended to be part of thatseeking. If the book has had an impact,it is because it is part of a more generalsearching for a way forward, part of amore general attempt to reinventrevolution.

Notes. A full discussion of the book, in

various languages, is available on thewebsite of the journal Herramienta, at<http://www.herramienta.com.ar>

. As Mathers and Taylor point out intheir comment.

. This argument is developed in mypaper ‘The state and everydaystruggle’ (first published in Spanishin ; first published in English inClarke, , together with Simon’scriticism of the article for being‘populist’).

. The extreme implications of Marx’stheory seem to disturb AlexCallinicos who, in an earlier reviewof the book, comments that‘Holloway espouses an extreme formof Marx’s theory of commodityfetishism’ (Callinicos, ).

. Pablo Ghigliani commentsdisparagingly: ‘Thus, he limitshimself to discovering the verbshidden behind the nouns that

constitute the language ofdomination.’ He is wrong todisparage: if the book helps at all todissolve nouns into verbs, it will havefulfilled all my dreams.

. Mabel Thwaites Rey and AndrewMathers and Graham Taylorinterpret the book in this sense, butthis was certainly never my intention.

. A critique of fetishism necessarilyincludes a critique of representativedemocracy and a drive towardsdirect democracy; this is a distinctionthat Michael Löwy seems reluctantto make. See my reply to him inHolloway, .

. For an important discussion ofemerging forms of struggle, seeZibechi, .

. That is surely the main point of theold state debate, whatever MabelThwaites Rey and Mathers andTaylor may think. More specifically,I see no incompatibility between theargument of the book and (/), although I agree thatthere is a shift in emphasis.

.As do Alex Callinicos and manyothers.

. Authors’ assessment of the book hasmuch to do with their assessment ofthe present situation. PabloGhigliani, Atilio Boron and (in adifferent way) Alberto Bonnet all seethe book as a symptom of thedecadence and fragmentation ofcurrent struggles. Néstor López andLuis Menéndez see it as part of anexciting upsurge of revolutionarystruggles. Let us hope, for everyone’ssake, that López and Menéndez areright.


ReferencesBonefeld, Werner, Richard Gunn &

Kosmas Psychopedis () OpenMarxism, vols. I & II (Pluto) London.

Bonefeld, Werner, Richard Gunn &Kosmas Psychopedis () OpenMarxism, vol. III (Pluto) London.

Callinicos, Alex () ‘How do wedeal with the state?’ in Socialist Review,no. , pp. -, March.

Clarke, Simon () The StateDebate (Macmillan) London.

State Group () Struggle overthe State ( Books) London.

Gunn, Richard () ‘The only realphoenix: Notes on utopian andapocalyptic thought’, in EdinburghReview, no. , pp. -.

Holloway, John () ‘Power anddemocracy: More than a reply toMichael Löwy’, in New Politics, no. ,pp. -.

Holloway, John & Sol Picciotto() The State and Capital: A MarxistDebate (Edward Arnold) London.

London Edinburgh Weekend ReturnGroup (/) In and Against theState ( Books/Pluto Press) London.

Thwaites Rey, Mabel () LaAutonomía como Búsqueda, el Estado comoContradicción (Editorial Prometeo)Buenos Aires.

Zibechi, Raúl () Genealogía de laRevuelta (Letra Libre) La Plata.

Other references are to articlescontained within this Forum.

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