Can prefigurative politics prevail? The implications for movement strategy in John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism

Marxist theory and the dual nature of labor

Holloway foregrounds Marx’s fundamental insight about the ‘dual nature of labor.’ Marxist theorists and activists have typically focused their attention on the labor market, where capitalists extract surplus value by paying workers for their labor power while selling the resulting commodities at their (much higher) market values. The common understanding of alienated labor revolves around this dynamic: the workers, in selling their labor power, lose control over the production process. But Holloway highlights a less-emphasized Marxian insight, that there are in fact two components to this alienated labor. In addition to the loss of control over the work process, the worker also loses control over the disposition of the product, a process which becomes controlled by impersonal market exchanges. This second component of alienation, designated by Holloway as ‘abstract labor,’ engulfs even those producers who control the production process but sell their products in the capitalist market. ² Self-employed workers are thus subject to the coercion of market forces, for they must satisfy the substantive demands of the market for specific products with specific features as well as maximize the monetary return on their labor in order to purchase their means of subsistence. In this way capitalist markets deprive workers of the ability to undertake ‘free, conscious activity,’ forcing them instead to produce commodified goods for exchange rather than concrete use (Marx quoted, p. 89).

Though still in technical control over the work process, those subject to the discipline of abstract labor are pressured to become indifferent to what goods (and the quality of goods) they are making – producing cluster bombs or poison gas if the market commands, rather than producing life-saving medicine or cleaning up a polluted river (which they might prefer to do). And Holloway is careful to remind us that this form of alienation reaches well beyond the traditional petit bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and self-employed craftspeople. It extends to high school instructors who prepare their students for standardized tests instead of promoting the critical thinking they themselves treasure; to architects who design buildings that facilitate the herding of public supplicants instead of enabling the public use of public space; and to social service workers who process caseloads instead of collaborating with clients to foster self-expression and empowerment.

Holloway rightly argues that Marx’s insight into the antagonism between alienated/abstract labor and ‘free, conscious life activity’ has been largely ignored by most subsequent Marxists and activists. Labor unions have overwhelmingly focused on limiting the rate of capitalist exploitation; only in their most radical moments have they sought even partial worker control over the work process. When successful, the focus on the work process has reduced the alienation that flows from the commodification of labor power. But even the revolutionary elements in historic working-class movements have not sought to replace production for the capitalist market with production for use, choosing instead to postpone attacking market tyranny until after the assumption of state power. Holloway bemoans ‘the terrible hold of abstract labour over the anti-capitalist movement’ (p. 150) and calls for prioritizing the quest for freedom and control. He offers the concept of ‘doing’ as a contrast to abstract labor, designating it as voluntarily undertaken activity that ‘we consider necessary or desirable’ (p. 84) and that is unmediated by markets. Efforts to recapture partial or full control over the work process are key elements of a liberatory activism; without such control, the process of challenging abstract labor cannot proceed. ‘Doing’ involves control of production by those engaged in it as well as decision-making input regarding the disposition of the product.

The quest for control over the work process has a long and rich history. Workers around the world – anarchists and otherwise – have struggled to retain, recapture, and expand their control over the work process, as Holloway briefly notes (compare Clawson, 1980; Montgomery, 1980). There have also been many intellectual challenges to the tyranny of abstract labor. The ‘participatory economics’ model of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel (1991) is perhaps the most detailed of a range of proposals for alternative economic institutions to have emerged in the past quarter-century. Their model revolves around workers’ and consumers’ councils that would oversee economic planning, production, and allocation; all workers would help to determine how jobs are organized and would be remunerated based on effort and sacrifice. Other academics and activists have elaborated a range of additional alternatives, most in the same spirit of the quest to overcome alienating, degrading labor and capitalist commodification (for example, Devine, 2002).

Nonetheless, Holloway is correct that most Marxist writers, and more importantly most working-class movements, have neglected the struggle for control over production and distribution. In the postwar United States the union movement has focused almost entirely on how to limit the time spent working while maximizing wage and benefit levels – while also suppressing the union radicals (often Communist-led) who articulated demands for substantial control of the work process (Buhle, 1999; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2002). Holloway’s critique also applies to many labor unions in underdeveloped countries, where limited industrialization and massive unemployment have often given rise to ‘labor aristocracies’ which, like their US counterparts, have abandoned any effort to challenge the regimented work process or market tyranny over the types and quality of products.

And even post-revolutionary leaders as diverse as Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Fidel have failed to fully confront the abstraction of labor. They have instead focused attention on the redistribution of wealth and income while downplaying the need for workers’ control over the work process and permitting workers virtually no input in decisions about distribution – such decisions have been controlled by the state or, in some variants, global capitalist markets. In Holloway’s view, a revolutionary movement for a ‘self-determining society’ (p. 208) must confront both the extraction of surplus labor by the capitalist and the abstraction of labor itself (either by markets or by state decision- making). Holloway thus concludes, quite accurately, that the ‘revolutions of the twentieth century failed not because they were too radical but because they were not nearly radical enough’ (p. 260). ³

Directing attention to the dual nature of labor is a valuable contribution, in terms of both understanding the past and present and guiding our efforts to make future activism more productive. But Holloway’s treatment contains two sources of ambiguity. First, what exactly constitutes ‘doing’ (that is, self-actuated labor), and how can one tell when it is occurring? Second, if ‘life is the antagonism between doing and abstract labour’ (p. 190), what role do social movements not directly rooted in the production system (including gender, race, ethnic, and even national struggles) play in the quest for ‘doing’? In our view each of these elements must, and can, be made more rigorous, in order to give a clearer sense of how resistance might contribute to social transformation.

The basic definition of ‘doing’ seems clear enough in theory: it is, in Marx’s words, the ‘free, conscious activity’ that is voluntary, stimulating, socially useful, and psychologically rewarding; and which produces goods and services directly for use (by the producers or their community) rather than commodities for exchange in an impersonal market (quoted, p. 89). Many activities would clearly fall under this category, such as cultivating a personal or community garden, singing in a church choir, or choosing to bake a cake for one’s friends (Holloway’s recurring example). In contrast, many activities clearly seem to constitute abstract labor: working on a Ford assembly line, flipping burgers at McDonald’s, teaching history from government-selected textbooks, or writing advertising copy for Coca-Cola.

But some examples seem more complex. What of counter-institutions such as the recuperated worker-controlled factories in Argentina that continue to operate within a capitalist market system? The new labor regime inside the plants has overcome certain forms of alienation by eliminating the sale of labor power and giving the workers collective control over the production process. But most of the recuperated factories are still producing goods for exchange in the surrounding capitalist market, meaning that workers are still alienated from the products of their labor (Sitrin, 2006). ⁴ They are therefore engaging in the abstract labor that Holloway correctly identifies as the nub of the oppression they experience. The tyranny of the market implies that the workers in the recuperated factories may not have much choice about what they produce, about the quality of the product, or about who will ultimately utilize it. The tyranny of market competition may even undermine their control of the production process, force them to externalize the costs of manufacture, and eventually (by Holloway’s impeccable logic) lessen the workers’ energy and moral commitment to the collective enterprise. How, then, do we understand the recuperated factories? Can we reject them as non-liberatory because they do not frontally challenge abstract labor? Certainly Holloway does not think so and neither do we. But in accepting them as liberatory, we also imply a gradation of liberation in which they might fall somewhere above average.

At the other end, even within abstract labor activities such as assembly-line work there is the constant potential for small rebellion, as Holloway indeed emphasizes. There is a certain liberatory element in, for instance, the efforts of assembly-line workers to slow down the pace of the conveyor belt, since it is an assertion of self-actualization and can create a tiny realm of worker control over the production process. Another example offered by Holloway is the individual who breaks away from the (labor market-driven) drudgery of housework to spend two hours reading a favorite novel in the park. These examples and a multitude of others constitute a whole world of small, but real, liberatory actions.

Thus, instead of a dichotomy where some actions are liberatory and others not, it makes sense to think of abstraction and liberation as endpoints on a continuum, with different liberatory actions falling at various points. Actions can be liberatory if they push in the direction of self-determination and away from the tyranny of abstracted labor, but there is wide variation among those actions. This point is not clear in Holloway’s discussion, and we think it deserves emphasis.

If even tiny steps toward self-determination and away from the tyranny of abstract labor are progressive, are there any acts of rebellion that are clearly not liberatory or even counterproductive? The obvious contrast between the recuperated factory movement in Argentina and the Barack Obama electoral campaign of 2008 – both of which expressed rebellious attitudes against the status quo – can give us some sense of how to draw the line. The factory movement in Argentina involved two intermingled liberatory projects: taking possession of the factories and then running them. Both of these broke with the oppressive routine of factory life, and both were (and continue to be) fundamentally prefigurative, since the process involved the workers in direct democracy, ‘doing for themselves.’ They did not depend on the state or outside institutions to deliver benefits to them.

The Obama campaign also involved two intermingled projects: electing the candidate and running the executive branch of the US government. But neither of these involved the campaign workers or voters ‘doing for themselves.’ The campaign itself was a regimented top-down activity in which activists performed appointed tasks under supervision of the central organization, and the outcome was the election of Obama. The central message of the campaign was that electing Obama was the best strategy for achieving substantive change in society; Obama was presented as a savior who would obviate the need for independent and sustained collective action on the part of the electorate. Once elected, Obama quickly proceeded to demobilize his activist base until the next campaign season rolled around. Neither the process nor the outcome was prefigurative, and in fact the campaign managers intentionally sought to avoid such a possibility.

The question of what constitutes liberatory action emerges in a different form when considering the ‘new’ social movements of the late twentieth century (Buechler, 2011: Ch. 10; Mellucci, 1989). Holloway fully supports the feminist, antiracist, LGBT, environmental, and indigenous movements, maintaining that ‘the unifying thread’ among these disparate formations is the revolt against ‘the abstraction of doing into labour’ (p. 198). ⁵ But is he saying that they are reducible to the struggle against class or labor exploitation? He does not address this question directly, which is ironic considering his experience studying the Zapatistas.

Holloway implicitly elevates the class struggle (both against capital and against abstract labor itself) above other forms of struggle, but not in the same crude way that some Marxists do. The abstraction of labor is, historically speaking, ‘prior to other conflicts’ (p. 223) like gender, racial, or national divisions, which were created or at least fundamentally transformed by capitalism. One illuminating chapter shows how the rise of capitalism was also ‘the brutal and bloody creation of a new hierarchy between men and women’ and a new sexual normativity, linked to the need to reproduce the labor force and train its members in the ‘performance principle’ (pp. 119, 122 [quoting Marcuse]). Yet the question of how these other forms of oppression emerged historically is different—and in our view much less important—than the question of how one goes about combatting them in the present. On the latter question, Holloway is not class-reductionist. He clearly supports struggles for ethnic, racial, gender, or LGBT rights, and would never dismiss them as subsidiary or diversionary or reflections of ‘false consciousness.’

Thus, ‘the antagonism between doing and abstract labour’ (p. 190) that Holloway says is the essence of human life might be flexibly interpreted as the antagonism between doing and abstract living – that is, the conflict between having control over the decisions that impact one’s life and being subject to the constraints that prevent ‘free, conscious life activity.’ This antagonism extends well beyond the workplace and the market to the social community, the home, the body, and indeed to all realms of life. In this context, we can see a common denominator that unites all the movements that erupted around the world in 2011 (as well as the movements that erupted in 1968). Had he written the book in 2012 instead of 2010, Holloway certainly would have emphasized the commonality among these struggles, and declared them liberatory precisely because they moved the needle toward a ‘self-determining society’ by engaging in ‘conscious life activity’ while demanding or enacting changes in the larger structure. ⁶

Nonetheless, the place of non-class identities and struggles remains under-theorized. Rarely does Holloway directly address this question, and when he does he seems to imply that any liberatory struggle almost by definition ‘means the refusal to accept sexism, racism, ageism and all those other practices which treat people not as people but as the embodiment of labels, definitions, classifications’ (pp. 39–40). But he seems to ignore the fact that it is possible to struggle for ‘doing’ in one realm of life while ignoring or even exacerbating the abstraction of labor in another realm. What of the all-too- familiar struggle for control over the labor process that reproduces or even amplifies gender, racial, or other hierarchies within it? The 1676 Bacon Rebellion in western Virginia was a radical struggle for self-determination against landed elites to the east, but it was also motivated by a profound racism toward Native Americans. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, skilled craft workers throughout Europe and the United States fought valiantly and often successfully to retain control over the work process while also joining and sometimes initiating the persecution of non-whites, immigrants, and women. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalist exceptionalism remain prevalent in unions today. Conversely, antiracist, feminist, and LGBT struggles have often failed to challenge the class oppression inherent in capitalism, the imperialism of the rich nations, and other forms of oppression not deemed central to their struggles (Buhle, 1999; Foner, 1982 [1974]; hooks, 2000 [1984]; Kolhatkar and Ingalls, 2006: Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1984 [1983]; Puar, 2007; Robnett, 1997; 169–196; Scipes, 2010). This historical experience complicates the question of when action is liberatory.

Here Holloway’s argument might benefit from closer attention to the concept of intersectionality, which emphasizes the mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing nature of distinct oppressions (Albert et al., 1986; Crenshaw, 1991). Portions of the left in Latin America practiced something akin to this approach in the early decades of the twentieth century, often guided by indigenous, anarchist, and flexible Marxist traditions (for example, Becker, 2008; Hylton, 2003). In the United States, radical women-of-color movements of the 1960s and 1970s were particularly important in developing a more explicit concept of intersectionality (Combahee River Collective, 1977; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1984 [1983]).

Holloway does not address the fact that many movements do not embrace intersectionality, and nor does he say how activists can ensure that ‘the refusal to accept sexism, racism, ageism and all those other practices’ is embedded in the movements they join. These questions are vital, since the current weakness of the US left is partly attributable to a lack of appreciation of the multiple and interrelated forms of oppression in society. Greater appreciation of such realities could strengthen individual organizations and facilitate the growth of movement coalitions across traditional divides. The issue of intersectionality is closely tied to another fundamental question that Holloway also leaves ambiguous: how can the multitude of ‘cracks’ coalesce into the fractures that are necessary for large-scale change? We return to this question below.

The dialectics of the everyday: Possibilities and pitfalls

Crack Capitalism is noteworthy for its focus on what might be called the dialectics of the everyday – for Holloway the conflict between abstract labor and doing is ‘a constant living antagonism’ (p. 98). Here again, Holloway makes a number of brilliant points but also leaves several crucial questions unanswered or ambiguous.

For Holloway, the liberatory thrust is endemic to daily life. The drive toward self-determination is apparent not just in overt rebellions but in countless individual and collective activities:

[This book] is the story of the composer in London who expresses his anger and his dream of a better society through the music he composes. It is the story of the gardener in Cholula who creates a garden to struggle against the destruction of nature. Of the car worker in Birmingham who goes in the evenings to his garden allotment so that he has some activity that has meaning and pleasure for him. Of the indigenous peasants in Oventic, Chiapas, who create an autonomous space of self-government and defend it every day against the paramilitaries who harass them. Of the university professor in Athens who creates a seminar outside the university framework for the promotion of critical thought. Of the book publisher in Barcelona who centres his activity on publishing books against capitalism. Of the friends in Porto Alegre who form a choir, just because they enjoy singing. (p. 4)

These acts are part of a constant dialectic between the logic of abstract value and the logic of doing, with all the above united in their rejection of the former in favor of the latter. Holloway urges leftists ‘not to draw dividing lines but to see the lines of continuity’ among these acts (p. 25). Organizers must ‘develop the sensitivity to recognise the revolts that exist everywhere’ and must realize that self-conscious progressives have no monopoly on the liberatory impulse: ‘We are ordinary people. If we think we are special, distinct from the masses who are happily integrated into the capitalist system, we immediately exclude the possibility of radical change’ (p. 258). Resistance is pervasive, if usually hidden (compare Scott, 1990).

The existence of a widespread liberatory impulse in human society should be cause for great optimism among left organizers. And although Holloway’s argument is not primarily empirical, it happens to be supported by a wealth of empirical data. Even within the United States, where leftists often view the general population as co-opted and apathetic, there is much reason for hope. Polls of the US public have long indicated widespread progressive sentiment, particularly on economic issues and international affairs, and almost unanimous desire for more input in the policymaking process (Kull, 2010; Page with Bouton, 2006; Page and Shapiro, 1992). Millions of people in the United States already participate in worker-owned enterprises, land trusts, consumer cooperatives, and other ‘experiments in equitable cooperation’ (Alperovitz, 2011; Hahnel, 2005). The pervasiveness of the desire for self-determination is even reflected indirectly in the rhetoric of the demagogic politicians who seek to strengthen corporate domination over people’s lives, for they must appeal to ‘libertarian’ impulses and manipulate anti-authoritarian sentiment to attract popular support.

If resistance is endemic, then elite hegemony is much more fragile than we often assume. Holloway formulates this idea beautifully, saying that the dominance of capitalism requires ‘constant reconstitution’ (p. 168), that it must be continuously ‘created’ by the members of society (both elites and otherwise) in order to negate the tide of resistance that is constantly eroding established constraints. Holloway proceeds to argue that primitive accumulation – the separation of people from commonly held resources that Marx considered largely complete in the nineteenth century – is actually a constant feature of the present. On this point, he adds depth to Harvey’s (2003: 137-82) argument that global capital is constantly engaging in the expropriation of the ‘commons’ ⁷ by emphasizing that this expropriation process is the frontier of struggle in which ordinary people can and do often prevail (even if only in tiny ways). Holloway concludes that ordinary people have great potential power. Since non-elites are essential participants in capitalism’s constant re-creation, this participation means ‘we can stop creating it and do something else instead’ (p. 124). This argument is a welcome affirmation of the potential for human agency. ⁸

These points are important, if not entirely new. Though Holloway does not cite Gramsci, he shares Gramsci’s emphasis on the need for the continual reconstitution of hegemonic relationships and therefore on the power of ordinary people to overturn them. ⁹ His conception of political organizing is also Gramscian in that it entails ‘drawing out that which is already present in repressed and contradictory form’ (p. 225). For Gramsci, political organizing was likewise about drawing out the ‘healthy nucleus’ within the ‘contradictory consciousness’ of the worker. The organizer’s task was not to instill consciousness but to expand upon the healthy nucleus so that it could ‘be made more unitary and coherent’ (1971 [1932]: 333, 328). Holloway’s argument for dialogue as opposed to monologue in the process of organizing also recalls the popular pedagogy model of Paulo Freire (1970 [1968]) and others.

There is much value in Holloway’s argument about the ‘cracks’ created by the dialectics of everyday life, but there are also three major ambiguities: a conflation of individual with collective action; a lack of detail on how the cracks might ‘connect’ into a larger movement; and the related problem of the obstacles faced by the emergent counter-institutions that Holloway sees as the vehicle for consolidating the cracks into fractures. We have already raised the latter two issues, but here we will describe what we hope is a useful if partial resolution.

The conflation of individual with collective action reflects an under-emphasis on organization and is apparent in Holloway’s lists of examples (see above). Joining a choir or skipping work to read in the park may be subtle challenges to the logic of capital, but are qualitatively different from occupying a factory. Though Holloway warns against romanticizing the solitary individual rebel and acknowledges a difference between individual and collective struggle, he does so in passing and sometimes seems to be ignoring his own warning. His distaste for authoritarianism and paternalism at times seems to slip into antagonism against all forms of organization and particularly ‘institutions’: ‘Any institutionalisation of struggle is problematic,’ he says, though he hints that organizations may be positive as long as they are ‘open and flexible’ (p. 224). ‘There is no recipe to be applied,’ he argues, ‘just millions of experiments’ (pp. 254–255). This attitude is common to many progressive activists and intellectuals, and stems from an entirely healthy aversion to the authoritarianism and bureaucracy that has so often characterized labor unions, political parties, and revolutionary regimes. The dangers of oligarchization of leadership and co-optation are inherent in formal protest organizations (Piven and Cloward, 1979; Schwartz, 1976; Schwartz et al., 1981).

But some activists take that aversion too far and equate organization itself with illegitimate hierarchy. Doing so is a fatal mistake. It is only through organization (and even institutions) that the multitude of cracks can coalesce into an intersectional movement that does not work at cross-purposes and is strong enough to generate tectonic fractures in the system.

If the ‘millions of experiments’ are to survive, they must connect and eventually expand and scale upward. Countless liberatory activities have begun full of hope and energy, only to fizzle out after a few days, months, or (sometimes) years, their organizers demobilized and demoralized or in some cases incarcerated or even killed. Holloway does recognize this problem, but his answer is again underdeveloped. He indicates that the smaller acts must coalesce into a multifaceted and coordinated movement, but provides little concrete advice about what one might do to connect the cracks beyond simply being sensitive to their commonality. His vision of ‘contagion, emulation and resonance’ (p. 78) has some basis in reality – activists certainly do draw inspiration and lessons from their counterparts elsewhere, as the Arab Spring and global revolts of 2011 have shown – but he offers little to indicate how these connections can be harnessed to large-scale and coordinated actions capable of altering capitalist trajectories. Here we think Holloway’s inattention to organization is particularly telling. Instead of attacking the critical questions about how to create and sustain large-scale collective action without succumbing to oligarchization, he sprinkles the text with warnings against institutionalization. At rare moments, he suggests that institutions can be liberatory and perhaps crucial to the survival and expansion of the cracks. One example is a passing remark that ‘the schools, the clinics, the cooperatives, the Juntas de Buen Gobierno’ are central to the Zapatista project (p. 239). These things certainly qualify as institutions, with the Juntas serving to govern and connect multiple communities, but Holloway never accepts his own invitation to analyze how and when such institutions can be successfully constructed, how they can become connected into a larger network of liberatory institutions, and under what circumstances activists can hope to engage in pressing beyond local cracks to larger fractures. And perhaps most important in this context are the sorts of organizational forms that might help to enact intersectionality and thus overcome the strong tendency for acts of rebellion to be liberatory for one group and oppressive to another.

Holloway’s hints about liberatory organizational forms seem reminiscent of Trotsky’s idea of dual power, the situation of ‘double sovereignty’ that develops prior to the actual overthrow of the state by an insurgent class (Trotsky, 1932: 206–215). Alternative institutional structures like the Zapatista Juntas or worker-owned enterprises may be the present-day parallels of the soviets in Russia in 1905 and between the February and October revolutions in 1917. ¹⁰ Trotsky’s great insight was that dual power exists when ordinary people stop obeying the dictates of the state and start acting collectively through bodies like the soviets—as Holloway would put it, they stop re-creating the existing power structure through their compliance ‘and do something else instead’ (p. 124). But in Holloway’s vision, these counter-institutional areas of dual power can exist in every arena of society – from factories to community gardens to a single classroom or one individual on a park bench. Though Holloway is thus more expansive, he shares with Trotsky the idea that these alternative power bases emerge while the capitalist system is intact and constitute the vehicle by which the existing structure is eroded away.

We think this vision is a worthy one, but Holloway shies away from any direct discussion of how these islands of dual power can grow together and overcome their contradictory tendencies. He does not adequately address the many difficulties faced by emergent counter-institutions and is mute on the strategies for surmounting them. Chapter 9 briefly confronts some of the obstacles: for instance, the recuperated factories’ problem of finding suppliers, clients, and creditors, state efforts to co-opt and repress radical movements, and the continuation of hierarchy and oppression within movements themselves. One solution, Holloway suggests, ‘is to construct links of mutual assistance between the different cracks,’ and he offers the interesting example of the Zanón ceramics factory (now known as FaSinPat) in Argentina, which buys raw materials from Mapuche indigenous cooperatives in Chile (p. 69). The Zapatistas, of course, have survived largely because of their ability to maintain the sympathy and material solidarity of outsiders. But lacking in the analysis is a systematic exploration of how and when it is possible ‘to construct links of mutual assistance between the different cracks’ and how this process can overcome the contradictions created by racism, sexism, and the other non-class divisions in global society.

Liberatory struggle, reform, and the state

Holloway is best known for his argument that revolutionaries can, and must, ‘change the world without taking power’ (2005 [2002]), which distinguishes him from twentieth-century Marxists, who focused on the seizure of the state. He argues that the construction of a new system can and must take priority over the destruction of the current one. For him ‘the only way to think about revolution is in terms of the creation, expansion and multiplication of cracks in capitalist domination’ that prefigure the new society they wish to see (p. 51). ‘It can only be done from below’ (p. 206).

The argument is appealing, for several reasons. First, as Holloway argues, engagement with dominant institutions can warp the character of a movement: ‘To gain influence within the state or to capture what appears to be control over the state, the organisation must adopt those forms of behaving and thinking which are characteristic of the state’ (p. 59). In working through the state, even a radical movement with a strong liberatory thrust can come to mirror the authoritarian operation of the state and foster ties of dependency that inhibit autonomy and empowerment. Second, capturing state power does little to transform the fundamental structure of society; the state is ‘a false, illusory totality’ (p. 206). The new revolutionary regime must inevitably confront numerous roadblocks, both foreign and domestic (and internal to itself), that limit its ability to transform society. A hierarchical structure cannot ‘create a self-determining society’ (p. 208). And, third, there are historical examples of systemic transformations occurring via the spread of cracks, as opposed to the ‘ten days that shook the world’ style of revolution (pp. 10–11); here Holloway cites the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Holloway is not as far from classical Marxism as he suggests in proposing incrementalism as an alternative to the ‘ten days that shook the world’ model. Certainly the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions were incrementalist, eschewing working within the existing state and instead establishing liberated areas governed by revolutionary practices and then expanding them over years and even decades of struggle. Holloway might criticize their practice, but he must acknowledge the overlap of their theory with his own vision. ¹¹ Moreover, virtually all of the classical activist-theorists, including Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg, argued against the usefulness of turning the capitalist state into an instrument of liberation. In The State and Revolution Lenin offered an argument almost identical to Holloway’s, that the capitalist state is structured to serve the ruling class and cannot be turned into an instrument of working-class liberation. ¹² Certainly the history of corporate capitalism in the United States, including the ever-intensifying corporate control over politics in recent decades, supports such a view (Ferguson, 1995).

But as with other aspects of his analysis, Holloway seems to take what we feel is an insightful argument just a bit too far. Like Holloway, Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg all argued that pre-revolutionary struggles for reforms were absolutely essential to building toward the ultimate overthrow of the system (Lenin, 1965 [1920]; Luxemburg, 1925 [1906]; Marx, 1963 [1852];). On this basic point we see little disagreement between Holloway and the classical Marxist activist-theorists. Disagreement becomes apparent, however, on the question of whether movements should engage in direct struggle with the state.

Holloway sometimes seems to suggest that the movement should act as though the state does not exist, creating prefigurative and counter-insitutional structures that do not interact with the government. The classical theorists disagree with this view. As Marx suggested in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1963 [1852]), capitalist states are not simply executive committees of the ruling class but sites of contestation whose degree of subservience to ruling-class interests is variable and subject to change based on outside pressures (compare Poulantzas, 1978). Lenin (1965 [1920]) emphasized that the revolutionary must be willing to engage with reactionary institutions as a way of advancing the revolutionary struggle. And Rosa Luxemburg (1925 [1906]) argued that political demands were necessary and appropriate even at peak moments of working-class initiative. We are not sure whether Holloway would disagree with these propositions, since he does not offer a sustained analysis of the relationship of the struggle to the state. But we feel that the classical theorists are correct in arguing that the judicious engagement of the state is an essential part of the movement’s toolkit.

Radical activists around the world have often practiced this philosophy with success. In the 1930s the US Communist Party played a vital role in building the labor movement that won major concessions like the right to organize and substantial social welfare provisions, combining on-the-ground actions like sit-down and rent strikes (which fit comfortably into Holloway’s template) with demands for altered state policy such as recognition of unions and rent control (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2002). The US Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s combined direct liberatory actions with a clever manipulation of state forces, pitting segregationist southern governments against the federal judiciary and executive (Robnett, 1997). Peasant movements in Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and other Latin American countries have compelled the state to enact land reforms by combining a range of legal and extralegal tactics (Becker, 2008: 128–131; Gotkowitz, 2007; Zamosc, 1986).

Furthermore, Holloway does not adequately address the incontrovertible reality that many revolutionary regimes have greatly ameliorated human suffering, even if they have deemphasized or suppressed the quest for a ‘self-determining society.’ The Cuban Revolution has made strides against poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, and other forms of suffering that put wealthier countries to shame. The 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, and elected left regimes in countries like Chile (1970–1973) and Venezuela (1999–present), have also brought impressive social gains, at least for a time. Holloway seems a little too quick to dismiss these reforms, even if he does warn against ‘condemning reformism’ (p. 35) and acknowledges in passing that the Cuban Revolution brought some valuable changes.

The need to work through the existing state system is perhaps nowhere clearer than on the issues of climate change and nuclear proliferation, both of which could result in catastrophic human suffering long before there is any realistic chance of erecting the alternative institutions capable of addressing them. Holloway acknowledges the urgency of these two issues but arrives at a contradictory and problematic solution:

The imminence of catastrophe seems to push us towards a positive conception of totality, some idea that we need a world state. Certainly, some form of global coordination would be desirable in a post-capitalist society, but the forms of global coordination that presently exist are so bound up with capital and the pursuit of profit that they offer little hope of a solution. It is becoming more and more clear that any solution to the problem of climate change can come only from a radical change in the way that we live, and that change cannot come from a state or some sort of world body, but only from the rejection of abstract labour, from our own assumption of responsibility for the way we live. (p. 210, emphasis added)

Clearly international governance bodies like the United Nations have generally failed to ensure global peace, justice, and environmental sustainability; the UN, for one, has typically either been captive to the wealthy and powerful in the rich nations or been too weak to enforce regulatory or punitive rulings against those interests. Nowhere has this pattern been more evident than in the record of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in seventeen meetings has failed to produce an enforceable global deal on emissions reductions that would stave off devastating climate change. ¹³ But when scientists are giving the world just a few short decades to avert potentially catastrophic climate change, is it really sufficient to exhort individuals to assume ‘responsibility for the way we live’ and hope that alternative institutions will somehow replace corporations before it is too late? The realistic progressive has little choice but to continue targeting states and international institutions given the dire urgency of global warming. We desperately need to reduce net carbon emissions, and right now only states have the power to sign treaties, enforce emissions reductions, and redirect national investment. We must target states, international bodies, and polluters through a variety of means – civil disobedience, boycotts, legislative struggle, the monitoring of carbon-offset trading, and so on — at the same time that we construct alternatives for the future (Hahnel, 2011: 157–242).

Modern states are indeed corrupt, and fundamentally so, but until we have adequate alternative institutions in place we can ill afford to forsake all interaction with them. Unqualified antistatism ignores real possibilities for improving people’s lives through engagement with states and other dominant institutions, and at its worst can end up empowering the private corporations and financial institutions that are even less accountable than government. Moreover, states are not monolithic, but rather are constituted from a mélange of mutually contradictory institutions encompassing multiple levels of government. The United States is extreme in the extent to which corporations control politics, but not all levels of government are equally dominated by corporate money. A thousand protesters targeting the president will probably have no effect, but a thousand protesters targeting the local school board or city council might well move the needle at least a little in a liberatory direction. While the US movement for universal healthcare has had little success at the federal level, a grassroots struggle in the state of Vermont has recently won a state-level universal healthcare bill. ¹⁴ Many movements have succeeded in part by exploiting the conflicts between differing components of government, as the US Civil Rights movement did in the 1960s (Robnett, 1997), and as various anti-colonial and indigenous movements in Latin America have been doing for centuries (Serulnikov, 2003; Stern, 1993 [1982]). At times the state apparatus might even be harnessed to sponsor prefigurative institutions, as seems to be suggested by the Venezuelan communal councils and the adoption of participatory budgeting schemes by city and regional governments in countries like Brazil, India, and Spain (Baiocchi, 2005; Ellner, 2009).

Too often the left assumes that a choice must be made between working for reforms and working for revolution. Holloway’s commitment to building the future society within the interstices of the current system is a powerful rebuttal to this false dichotomy, since each liberatory act improves the lives of its practitioners. But the construction of these liberated areas cannot proceed without the state and other outside forces attempting to derail, co-opt, or destroy them. Just as guerrillas must constantly defend their liberated territory, all activists engaging in prefigurative liberatory struggles must be able to defend their gains from elite backlash. A defense strategy must involve an attempt to alter the behavior and policies of the institutions that constitute the state and its capitalist environment.

On this point, Holloway’s partial vision is similar to Robin Hahnel’s (2005) argument that we must find ways of ‘fighting for reforms without becoming reformist.’ A general strategy for doing so is to ‘combine reform work with experiments in equitable cooperation.’ This strategy is not two separate tracks, but one unified struggle. Reforms like wage increases or anti-discrimination policies can greatly improve people’s everyday lives, and no revolutionary struggle can gain momentum without them; conversely, reforms unaccompanied by revolutionary agitation are more vulnerable to rollback by elites, and only revolutionary change can ensure their long-term durability. Reforming dominant institutions themselves is also necessary to protect liberatory experiments. The collectives that establish liberated areas – whether they be fully counter-institutional formations like the Zapatista Juntas, or tiny realms of liberation like the community assemblies in Argentina – must possess the tools needed to defend themselves against the attacks of the dominant institutions around them and, in the process, change the functioning of these institutions. From this necessity emerges yet another guideline: building an organization that is powerful enough to win these reforms from the state can only succeed if the internal structure is itself prefigurative of the liberatory goals of the movement. That is, the reform struggle must be conducted in a way that intentionally promotes the prefigurative relationships, revolutionary consciousness, and self-actuating power that Holloway argues are fundamental to meaningful social change.

Holloway is right to emphasize the danger that state-centered protest will corrupt the protesting group. The fact that so many popular organizations have developed authoritarian tendencies and been co-opted into reformism in the process of engaging with dominant institutions attests to this possibility. But there are some ways to mitigate the threat. Belinda Robnett (1997) argues that the success of the 1960s US Civil Rights movement was largely due to the movement’s organizational structure, which included both the formal leadership of the big national organizations (with dangerous tendencies toward oligarchy and co-optation) and an often-ignored ‘bridge leadership’ tier closer to the community level. This latter category was composed of southern blacks (most often women) embedded in black communities in the South and committed to the radical democracy that was historically associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee. Bridge leaders formed the essential links between these communities and big organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and were responsible for articulating much of the movement’s grass-roots radicalism. Formal leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, on the other hand, were restrained by the need to maintain conciliatory relationships with the white power structure. Robnett’s theoretical conclusion is that ‘[b]oth types of leadership are required, and neither the bridge leadership nor the formal leadership is more important than the other. Rather, the two operated in a dialectical relationship marked by symbiosis and conflict’ (1997: 21). The outcome of this dialectic was the movement’s remarkable ability to extract concessions from dominant institutions while sustaining (and for years, expanding) liberatory practices at the ground level. This template cannot be mechanically applied in other circumstances, but we feel it demonstrates that the route to successful liberation requires building complex organizations that unite prefigurative liberatory movements into formations capable of engaging dominant institutions, particularly the state.

Conclusion: Some (unoriginal) guidelines for revolutionary organizing

Holloway’s book is a solid starting point for understanding how to build the ‘self-determining society’ that Holloway and most of us want. Our reading of his book has led us to focus on three questions that we feel are central to this concern: the role of political organizers and organizations, the role of alternative institutions, and the posture of the movement toward the state and other dominant institutions.

Political organizations have a crucial role to play in deepening, sustaining, and connecting the cracks that Holloway describes. The first and most important task of such organizations is, as Holloway says, to ‘draw out that which is already present in repressed and contradictory form.’ This conception differs from many visions of the organizer’s role: rather than instilling consciousness, organizers and the organizations they inhabit should provide the tools for critical inquiry into one’s social surroundings and a forum for discussions about alternatives to present systems of oppression. In Paulo Freire’s words, ‘The revolutionary’s role is to liberate, and be liberated, with the people – not to win them over’ (1970 [1968]: 84). Organizations must be the vehicle for converting individual and small group activities into much more powerful collective action, which is also central to Freire’s pedagogy. Organizations must also connect different liberatory struggles materially, politically, and psychologically, fostering the growth of mutual assistance networks as well as a consciousness of common struggle. We believe that the intersectional consciousness and practice essential to revolutionary change can only be achieved through self-conscious organization. ¹⁵

Despite their strong tendencies toward oligarchy, organizations are not inherently stifling. The trick is to have structures in place that ensure democracy, accountability, and fluidity within organizations and an approach that values diversity within solidarity. Diversity, in both the demographic and strategic sense, tends to strengthen movements provided that the proper structures are in place to prevent internal stratification. Movements that have greater demographic diversity and appreciate the interrelated nature of different oppressions tend to be more powerful. Likewise, a diversity of organizations and strategies can be an asset, keeping opponents off balance and complicating the tasks of repression and co-optation (McAdam, 1982: 153–156).

Institutions are also necessary as soon as the cracks begin to coalesce into durable formations; they will be vital to ensuring accountability, equity, and efficiency in distributing resources, even when the distribution system is not tyrannized by markets. The trick to avoiding devolution of the process into the trading of abstract labor is relentless democracy. The historical experiences of the Paris Commune, the Spanish anarchists, the Zapatistas, worker-run factories in Argentina, indigenous communities around the world, and diverse other liberatory experiments offer a rough guide of what those institutions might look like. Economic and social planning should be participatory and involve workers’, consumers’, and community councils. Individuals should have input in the degree to which they are affected by particular decisions. Representation should be revolving and any delegates subject to immediate recall (Albert and Hahnel, 1991, 1992; Lavaca Collective, 2007 [2004]; Sitrin, 2006). These are just loose guidelines, and liberatory movements will not all adopt the same forms. But there must be a self-conscious effort to construct these sorts of structures at the earliest moment in the process of coalescing liberatory actions. Experimenting with alternative institutions in the present can empower participants, prove that another way of living is possible, and become the most powerful tool for extending the cracks into fractures.

As we construct these alternatives, we must simultaneously work for reforms in dominant institutions, both to achieve tangible improvements in living conditions and to protect incipient liberatory formations from attacks by the state and other elite interests. Survival requires pressing for needed reforms in the functioning of dominant institutions, both to stop repression and to reduce the continued encroachment of abstract labor and its associated tyrannies. Our antipathy toward states, markets, and other illegitimate institutions must be accompanied by a constant reassessment of what strategies and tactics are likely to be most effective in improving people’s lives (both in the material sense and in the sense of expanding their areas of self-actuation) in the here and now. ¹⁶

Holloway’s vision of liberation through the construction of ‘cracks’ is compelling and, we think, practicable. But it must involve self-conscious commitment to large-scale collective action that is capable of moving the national and global needle in a liberatory direction, a process that requires large organizations and institutions capable of confronting and reforming established institutions.