11.11.2010
Capitalism cracked
Andrew 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]
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] 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] 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