<div dir="ltr"><div><br></div><div>it still seems to me that this hope of a purely soft transformation through self-organisation, without tackling state power, is utopian and illusory:</div><div><br></div><div>"<span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13.3333339691162px;text-align:justify">In that sense, let’s bear in mind that a precondition for the French Revolution was that, at a certain point, the social network of bourgeois relations no longer needed the aristocracy in order to exist. Likewise, we must work to reach a point where we can say “we don’t care if global capital isn’t investing in Spain, because we’ve built a mutual support network that’s strong enough to enable us to live with dignity.”</span></div><div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 10:21 PM<br>Subject: [Networkedlabour] Beyond the Wage-Labour Fixation and State-Dependency of the Traditional Left<br><br><div dir="ltr"><div><div><ul><li></li></ul>
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<p><strong>Peter sez:</strong></p>
<p><strong>John Holloway, who was once a UK political-economist of the
traditional left, argues in Roar Magazine, the necessity of surpassing
the wage-labour focus and (consequent) state dependency of that
tradition. I have been trying to say this, in arguing the need for a
global movement for the emancipation of labour. But, well, he does it
more theoretically, more forcefully and, I would say, more elegantly
than I am capable of doing. He raises, however, a major challenge to the
international left unionism, represented variously by such bodies as
the Global Labour Journal, the Global Labour Institute, the left
unionism in the Third World, and various other such. One (this one
anyway) would really like to see their response to this piece.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Now read on...</strong></p>
<div><h1>John Holloway: cracking capitalism vs. the state option</h1>
<p>by <span>Amador Fernández-Savater</span> on <abbr title="2014-09-29">September 29, 2014</abbr></p>
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<p><img src="http://media.roarmag.org/2014/09/JohnHolloway-main.png" alt="Post image for John Holloway: cracking capitalism vs. the state option" height="333" width="500"></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><strong>With left parties on the rise in
Spain and Greece, John Holloway reflects on his influential 2002
thesis: can we change the world without taking power?</strong></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><em>Interview by Amador Fernández-Savater. Translated by Richard Mac Duinnsleibhe and edited by Arianne Sved</em> <em>of <a rel="nofollow" href="http://guerrillatranslation.com/" target="_blank">Guerrilla Translation</a></em>.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">In 2002, John Holloway published a landmark book: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745329185" target="_blank"></em><em>Change the World without Taking Power</a>. Inspired by the ‘<em>¡Ya basta!</em>’
of the Zapatistas, by the movement that emerged in Argentina in
2001/’02, and by the anti-globalization movement, Holloway sets out a
hypothesis: it is not the idea of revolution or transformation of the
world that has been refuted as a result of the disaster of authoritarian
communism, but rather the idea of revolution as the <em>taking of power</em>, and of the party as the political tool par excellence.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">Holloway
discerns another concept of social change at work in these movements,
and generally in every practice—however visible or invisible it may
be—where a logic different from that of profit is followed: the logic of
cracking capitalism. That is, to create, within the very society that
is being rejected, spaces, moments, or areas of activity in which a
different world is prefigured. Rebellions in motion. From this
perspective, the idea of organization is no longer equivalent to that of
the party, but rather entails the question of how the different cracks
that unravel the fabric of capitalism can recognize each other and
connect.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">But after Argentina’s “<em>que se vayan todos</em>” came the Kirchner government, and after Spain’s “<em>no nos representan</em>”
appeared Podemos. We met with John Holloway in the city of Puebla,
Mexico, to ask him if, after everything that has happened in the past
decade, from the progressive governments of Latin America to Podemos and
Syriza in Europe, along with the problems for self-organized practices
to exist and multiply, he still thinks that it is possible to “change
the world without taking power.”</p>
<p style="text-align:center" lang="en-IE">:::::::::::::::::::::::</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><strong><em>Firstly,
John, we would like to ask you where the hegemonic idea of revolution
in the 20th century comes from, what it is based on. That is, the idea
of social change through the taking of power.</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align:justify">I think the central element is labor,
understood as wage labor. In other words, alienated or abstract labor.
Wage labor has been, and still is, the bedrock of the trade union
movement, of the social democratic parties that were its political wing,
and also of the communist movements. This concept defined the
revolutionary theory of the labor movement: the struggle of wage labor
against capital. But its struggle was limited because wage labor is the
complement of capital, not its negation.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><strong><em>I don’t understand the relation between this idea of labor and that of revolution through the taking of state power.</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align:justify">One way of understanding the connection
would be as follows: if you start off from the definition of labor as
wage or alienated labor, you start off from the idea of the workers as
victims and objects of the system of domination. And a movement that
struggles to improve the living standards of workers (considered as
victims and objects) immediately refers to the state. Why? Because the
state, due to its very separation from society, is the ideal institution
if one seeks to achieve benefits for people. This is the traditional
thinking of the labor movement and that of the left governments that
currently exist in Latin America.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><em><strong>But this tradition isn’t the only approach to a politics of emancipation…</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">Of course
not. In the last twenty or thirty years we find a great many movements
that claim something else: it is possible to emancipate human activity
from alienated labor by opening up cracks where one is able to do things
differently, to do something that seems useful, necessary, and
worthwhile to us; an activity that is not subordinated to the logic of
profit.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">These
cracks can be spatial (places where other social relations are
generated), temporal (“Here, in this event, for the time that we are
together, we are going to do things differently. We are going to open
windows onto another world.”), or related to particular activities or
resources (for example, cooperatives or activities that pursue a
non-market logic with regard to water, software, education, etc.). The
world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">The
rejection of alienated and alienating labor entails, at the same time, a
critique of the institutional and organizational structures, and the
mindset that springs from it. This is how we can explain the rejection
of trade unions, parties, and the state that we observe in so many
contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to the Greek or Spanish <em>indignados</em>.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><em><strong>But
it isn’t a question of the opposition between an old and a new
politics, I think. Because what we see in the movements born of the
economic crisis is that those two things come to the fore at the same
time: cracks such as protests in city squares, and new parties such as
Syriza or Podemos.</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">I think
it’s a reflection of the fact that our experience under capitalism is
contradictory. We are victims and yet we are not. We seek to improve our
living standards as workers, and also to go beyond that, to live
differently. In one respect we are, in effect, people who have to sell
their labor power in order to survive. But in another, each one of us
has dreams, behaviors and projects that don’t fit into the capitalist
definition of labor.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">The
difficulty, then as now, lies in envisioning the relation between those
two types of movements. How can that relation avoid reproducing the old
sectarianism? How can it be a fruitful relation without denying the
fundamental differences between the two perspectives?</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><em><strong>Argentina
in 2001 and 2002, the indignados in Greece and Spain more recently. At a
certain point, bottom-up movements stall, they enter a crisis or an
impasse, or they vanish. Would you say that the politics of cracks has
intrinsic limits in terms of enduring and expanding?</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">I wouldn’t call them limits, but rather problems. Ten years ago, when I published <em>Change the World without Taking Power</em>,
the achievements and the power of movements from below were more
apparent, whereas now we are more conscious of the problems. The
movements you mention are enormously important beacons of hope, but
capital continues to exist and it’s getting worse and worse; it
progressively entails more misery and destruction. We cannot confine
ourselves to singing the praises of movements. That’s not enough.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><strong><em>Could one response then be the option that focuses on the state?</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">It’s
understandable why people want to go in that direction, very
understandable. These have been years of ferocious struggles, but
capital’s aggression remains unchanged. I sincerely hope that Podemos
and Syriza do win the elections, because that would change the current
kaleidoscope of social struggles. But I maintain all of my objections
with regard to the state option.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">Any
government of this kind entails channeling aspirations and struggles
into institutional conduits that, by necessity, force one to seek a
conciliation between the anger that these movements express and the
reproduction of capital. Because the existence of any government
involves promoting the reproduction of capital (by attracting foreign
investment, or through some other means), there is no way around it.
This inevitably means taking part in the aggression that is capital.
It’s what has already happened in Bolivia and Venezuela, and it will
also be the problem in Greece or Spain.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><em><strong>Could it be a matter of complementing the movements from below with a movement oriented towards government institutions?</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">That’s the
obvious answer that keeps coming up. But the problem with obvious
answers is that they suppress contradictions. Things can’t be reconciled
so easily. From above, it may be possible to improve people’s living
conditions, but I don’t think one can break with capitalism and generate
a different reality. And I sincerely believe that we’re in a situation
where there are no long-term solutions for the whole of humanity within
capitalism.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">I’m not discrediting the state option because I myself don’t have an answer to offer, but I don’t think it’s the solution.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><em><strong>Where are you looking for the answer?</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">Whilst not
considering parties of the left as enemies, since for me this is
certainly not the case, I would say that the answer has to be thought of
in terms of deepening the cracks.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">If we’re
not going to accept the annihilation of humanity, which, to me, seems to
be on capitalism’s agenda as a real possibility, then the only
alternative is to think that our movements are the birth of another
world. We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognizing
them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking the
confluence or, preferably, the commoning of the cracks.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">If we
think in terms of state and elections, we are straying away from that,
because Podemos or Syriza can improve things, but they cannot create
another world outside the logic of capital. And that’s what this is all
about, I think.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><em><strong>Finally, John, how do you see the relation between the two perspectives we’ve been talking about?</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">We need to
keep a constant and respectful debate going without suppressing the
differences and the contradictions. I think the basis for a dialogue
could be this: no one has the solution.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">For the
moment, we have to recognize that we’re not strong enough to abolish
capitalism. By strong, I am referring here to building ways of living
that don’t depend on wage labor. To be able to say “I don’t really care
whether I have a job or not, because if I don’t have one, I can dedicate
my life to other things that interest me and that give me enough
sustenance to live decently.” That’s not the case right now. Perhaps we
have to build that before we can say “go to hell, capital.”</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">In that
sense, let’s bear in mind that a precondition for the French Revolution
was that, at a certain point, the social network of bourgeois relations
no longer needed the aristocracy in order to exist. Likewise, we must
work to reach a point where we can say “we don’t care if global capital
isn’t investing in Spain, because we’ve built a mutual support network
that’s strong enough to enable us to live with dignity.”</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">Right now
the rage against banks is spreading throughout the world. However, I
don’t think banks are the problem, but rather the existence of money as a
social relation. How should we think about rage against money? I
believe this necessarily entails building non-monetized, non-commodified
social relations.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE">And there
are a great many people dedicated to this effort, whether out of desire,
conviction or necessity, even though they may not appear in the
newspapers. They’re building other forms of community, of sociality, of
thinking about technology and human capabilities in order to create a
new life.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify" lang="en-IE"><strong><em>John Holloway</em></strong> <em>is
Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Humanities and Social
Sciences of the Autonomous University of Puebla in Mexico. His latest
book is <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330082&" target="_blank">Crack Capitalism</a> (Pluto Press, 2010)</em>.</p><span class=""><font color="#888888"> </font></span></div><span class=""><font color="#888888">
</font></span></div><span class=""><font color="#888888"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><ol><li><b><font><span></span><font size="1"><span><span>EBook, November 2012:</span> <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/" target="_blank">Recovering
Internationalism</a>. </span><span><font color="#ff0000">[A compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download formats]</font></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span></font></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><span><span>EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></font>http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/<font color="#ff0000"> </a></span></span><span><span><br></span></span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><span>Interface
Journal<span> Special (co-editor), November 2012:</span> </span><span style="font-weight:normal"><a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/" target="_blank">For the Global Emancipation of Labour</a></span></font></b>
</li><li><b><font size="1"><span lang="NL">Blog:</span><span lang="NL"> <a href="http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman." target="_blank">http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.</a>
</span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1">Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement Internationalisms. <a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/" target="_blank">See Call for Papers</a>, <font color="#ff0000">(Deadline: May 1, 2014). </font></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><a href="http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf" target="_blank"></font></font></span></font><font color="#000000">Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><font color="#000000"> <font color="#ff0000">(2005-Now!)<br></a></font></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><font color="#000000"><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/" target="_blank"><font color="red"><b>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.into-ebooks.com" claiming to be</b></font> Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a Globalised, Informatised Capitalism </a>(2011) <font color="#ff0000">Almost 1,000 pages of Working Papers, free, from the <a href="tel:1980" value="+661980" target="_blank">1980</a>'s-90's</font>.</font></font></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><font color="#000000">Google Scholar Citation Index:</font></font></font></b><br><span style="display:block"> <b><font size="1"><a href="http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ" target="_blank">http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ</a> </font></b><br></span></li></ol><ul><li><table cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr></tr></tbody></table></li></ul><font size="1">
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