Editorial

To publish a book is a bit like jumping off a cliff in the dark, without knowing what lies below, whether one will make a splash, or have a soft landing, or be broken on the rocks. Or at least, that’s what I feel in melodramatic moments, but then I tell myself to stop being silly, that all I am doing is throwing some ideas out for discussion in the hope that someone will pick them up and engage with them or even develop them. The book, then, is not so much a salto mortale as the opening of a conversation.

An infinity of thanks to Simon Susen and the other editors of the Journal of Classical Sociology for providing the stimulus and the forum for such a conversation about my book Crack Capitalism. This is a great honour and a great pleasure for me. It is also exciting and a little bit frightening, especially because it takes me beyond my usual haunts (Marxist or activist journals) to a possibly rather different audience. I find it difficult to imagine what the readers’ response will be.

Crack Capitalism is a follow-up to my Change the World without taking Power, published in 2002. The argument of the earlier book was that it is more important than ever to address the question of revolution or radical social change, but that it can no longer be seen as a process that focuses on the winning of state power. This left many questions open, principally ‘then how?’ The later book seeks to take the debate further by suggesting that the way forward is to crack capitalism: that is, to refuse-and-create, to create spaces or moments in which we refuse to follow the logic of capital and try to create a different form of sociality. This proposal is understood as an attempt to grasp changes that are already taking place in the organization and understanding of anti-capitalist struggle. The book discusses the difficulties of this approach and suggests that the cracks in capitalist domination can be seen as the revolt of doing against labour, the revolt of an activity that pushes towards self-determination against the labour that constitutes capitalism. This revolt against labour, the book argues, is opening a new anti-grammar of struggle, a new way of thinking about radical social change.

I chose the contributors to this collection in consultation with Simon Susen. It was a difficult choice, a bit like inviting people to a dinner party or a closed seminar. They did not have an interaction with one another, but the aim was to put together a collection that would be diverse and stimulating, a collection that would open up a discussion. I chose some people I have worked with closely and who, I knew, would have no problem understanding the argument of the book. But I wanted to avoid having just a conversation among cronies, and tried to take up the challenge offered by the forum of exposing my book to other views. These range from feminist critique to critiques coming from the tradition of radical sociology (where I could expect some sympathy but a different theoretical approach) to less sympathetic critique. I am immensely pleased with the outcome. I find the debate very stimulating, the critiques very challenging. I feel that I have been pushed into new areas and it is very rewarding.

I am not going to summarize the arguments of the different articles. The summaries can be found in the abstracts of each article and, in any case, I do not think it would be proper for me to summarize my critics. Any summary would be bound to smooth the rougher edges, conveniently forget to mention the points that I find most disturbing – and there are sharpnesses and roughnesses that give the collection an added bite.

The collection of commentaries is completed by a response by me to some of the points raised. The response is an inadequate one, of course, but that is all right. For me the collection opens doors, and my hope is that for the readers it will do the same.