Variations on different themes: A response

I

Better jazz than a cockfight.

Now that I have received all the commentaries on Crack Capitalism, I am delighted with the result, and thank all the contributors very much indeed. Overwhelmingly, the contributions are written with the intention of carrying the debate forward, not for the purpose of scoring points. The challenge for me in writing this response is not to defend the book but to take the themes forward, explaining, where necessary, why I am not in agreement with the points made by the other contributors.

It is striking that the commentaries focus on very different aspects of the book’s argument, although there are certainly common themes that weave themselves through the various articles. At times I feel that I am being attacked from all sides at once, but this is also a very rewarding experience, because each article presents me with a new reading of what I myself have written and each presents a slightly different perspective on how (and whether) we can think of changing the world radically.

In what follows, I shall try to respond to what seems to me the most important or most interesting point of each article. There is no way that I can cover all the points, and in any case my aim is not to close the debate: better that it should be left open, with straggly bits hanging out for others to latch on to.

Jazz, then. Discordant and experimental, no doubt, but with the clear aim not of winning a debate but of joining with the other authors to make good music. Not harmonious music; rather a music that goads and stirs.

II

Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding suggest that Hegel and La Boétie are engaged in battle for my theoretical soul. They are quite right, but first I should draw attention to an even fiercer struggle being waged within my theoretical breast: that between T.W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch.

Adorno returned to Germany after passing the war years in exile in the United States to warn against the facile optimism of the revolutionary left. After Auschwitz, we can no longer think of a dialectic that leads us ineluctably to a happy ending, he argues in his Negative Dialectics (1990). History is not the inevitable advance of progress, but just the opposite. It is in this sense that Marcel Stoetzler quotes Adorno at the beginning of his article, in implied criticism of the argument of Crack Capitalism: ‘The optimism of the left repeats the insidious bourgeois superstition that one should not talk of the devil but look on the bright side’ (Adorno, 1978: 114).

Ernst Bloch returned to Germany from the same exile with a different emphasis. After Auschwitz, he argued, we must learn hope. ‘Its work does not give up, it is in love with success rather than failure’ (Bloch, 1986: 1). And he devoted his great work The Principle of Hope to elaborating a theory of hope based on the presence here and now of that which is not yet.

I do not think that Adorno’s and Bloch’s arguments are incompatible. Adorno speaks of the darkening night of humanity; Bloch urges us to find hope in the face of this darkening night. My sympathies lie closer to Bloch, however. While I share fully Adorno’s analysis of the tendency of history, I feel that little is served by telling ourselves how bleak the outlook is. The real political and theoretical challenge is to find hope where there appears to be none. We need a theory not of domination but of the fragility or crisis of that domination, of the possibility of cracking that domination. It may well be that this general orientation leads me to pay insufficient attention to the difficulties of some of the paths proposed – and a number of the comments suggest that this is indeed the case – yet the general point remains that we need a theory that opens, that points beyond apparent impossibilities.

The reason for this prefatory explanation is simply that the charge of an exaggerated optimism is one that recurs in a number of the commentaries. As we shall see, it comes in various forms, but is often related to the composition or contradictions of the We, a term that recurs frequently in my argument.

III

The criticism of a blind optimism in the argument of Crack Capitalism is at the core of Richard and Adrian’s discussion of my attempt to combine influences from La Boétie and Hegel.

They argue, correctly, that the book’s argument is marked by a tension. I rely on La Boétie to pose the issue of revolution in terms of Serve no more and the tyrant will fall. They point out that this suggests ‘[t]he notion that undistorted freedom already exists in a tyrannical society’, and argue that a consequence is that ‘it makes the non-occurrence of revolution all but inconceivable, and presses aside (in a triumphalist fashion) difficulties and discouragements which a revolutionary project must face’ (p. 179, this issue). The same point might be phrased in terms of the Pure Subject (an uncontradictory We – the preoccupation of other contributors, as we shall see): La Boétie’s formulation suggests that there might be a pure revolutionary subject ready to overthrow the tyrant by refusing to obey.

Referring to their own understanding of Hegel’s Phenomenology (which I share, for Richard has long been my teacher in all things Hegelian), they propose that ‘the notion of contradiction must be placed centre-stage’ (p. 181, this issue). Freedom (or self-determination, or mutual recognition) exists now in contradictory form, as alienated freedom, contradicted freedom, freedom in the mode of being denied. In this view, revolution is ‘a transition from contradicted or alienated to uncontradicted and non-alienated freedom’ (p. 182, this issue).

This Hegelian critique of La Boétie is certainly the substance of the central theoretical argument of Crack Capitalism. Concrete doing (the impulse towards the self-determination of our own activity, the drive of freedom, in Richard and Adrian’s terms) does not exist independently of its form as abstract labour. Abstract labour is the existence of concrete doing in the form of being denied, so that we can understand concrete doing (or the subject, or freedom) only as existing in-against-and-beyond its form as abstract labour (abstract labour being necessity, tyranny). Concrete doing is not a pure subject.

Behind Richard and Adrian’s argument lies a critique, which I share, of autonomist or operaista theory, or, as they put it, ‘the euphoric and triumphalist poetry that prevails in various Autonomia-influenced accounts’ (p. 182, this issue). Their suggestion is that in the book I lean too far in the direction of autonomist theory and that this is incompatible with my own theoretical basis, and with a sound understanding of the possibility of revolution.

Are they right in suggesting that there is an inconsistency running through the argument of the book? Yes, undoubtedly, they are gloriously and elegantly right. And yet …

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and yet it is perhaps only fools who can make a revolution. Although we are aware that there is no pure subject, that we are all crippled, that freedom exists now only as alienated freedom, perhaps the only way to conceive of radical change is for the subject to pretend to an innocence that she does not and cannot possess, for the fool to pretend that she is an angel and launch herself in to the air. Perhaps the true image of the revolutionary is the figure of Baron von Munchausen, who saves himself and his horse from sinking into the mud by pulling them both out by his own pigtail: self-emancipation of the working class.

The issue is the relation of action to theoretical reflection. Although it is clear that theoretical reflection makes sense only as part of the movement against capital, there is perhaps a sense in which action is prior, and also requires a pretence of innocence. Leap before you look, if only because we are being pushed over the cliff. Act first and then doubt. It is through experience that we acquire understanding. In the beginning is the scream, it is from there that we can think of the appropriate forms of organizing, developing assemblies, and so on. First La Boétie, then read the Phenomenology.

This is crudely put, and yet there is a sense in which we must start from mistakes. Richard and Adrian speak of La Boétie as ‘a false theoretical start’ that ‘generates as many problems as it claims to solve’ (pp. 187-188, this issue). But can we start from anywhere other than the wrong place? Is not the movement of rebellion an asking-walking, a taking of wrong paths and creating others?

One is reminded of Adorno’s distancing of himself from the student movement in the late 1960s and his exchange of letters with Marcuse on the subject, both discussed in an excellent article by Adrian Wilding (2009). There is much to be said for Adorno’s criticism of the dangerous naïveté of the students, and yet surely they were right to take to the streets.

Should La Boétie’s serve not be seen, phenomenologically, just as a moment of innocence at the start of the book, to be overcome (aufgehoben, if you will) in the process of subsequent reflection? I think not, for innocence remains essential. Let the concept walk behind, in due humility.

IV

Marcel Stoetzler, too, feels that the argument of Crack Capitalism is over-optimistic. He warns of the danger that the anti-capitalist cracks may lead not to a self-determining or communist society, but, on the contrary, to something even worse than capitalism: ‘[T]here are reactionary, anti-emancipatory forms of anti-capitalism, and as these were decisive factors in the catastrophic history of the twentieth century their theoretical reflection needs to be more than a critical afterthought; it needs to be central’ (p. 192, this issue).

I agree entirely with Marcel that there is a real and probably growing presence of anti-emancipatory reactions against capitalism, and I agree too that any reflection on the possibilities of radical change should pay considerable attention to the dangers involved. I would not put this quite at the centre of the discussion, simply because we are trying to open possibilities, not to close ourselves in, not to surround ourselves by fears of what might happen. On the substance of the matter, however, I think we are in complete agreement: if we start from people’s scream against the current ordering of society, how can we try to ensure that this anger contributes to the construction of a better world and not something worse? We live in a world of intensifying anger against an obscene and aggressive system: is there any way in which we can influence the movement of that anger, help it to move in the direction of a better world?

I agree very much with Marcel’s general argument that

… how we will come out of the revolution will depend very much on how we will go into it. Humanity will need to have built up the necessary social, intellectual, mental, emotional resources to come out of the apocalypse singing and dancing rather than shooting and biting, ‘destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’.

For me the point of thinking of cracks is precisely to see them as spaces or moments of communization, moments in which we try to create a different way of doing things, in which we try to construct a different sort of social cohesion. A fundamental characteristic of such movements is their asymmetry in relation to capitalist social relations. Where this asymmetry (which is, of course, always experimental) does not exist, then the movement may well be a reaction against capitalism but is not anti-capitalist in the sense of seeking to break with capitalist social relations. There is an ambiguity in the term ‘anti-capitalist’, and I think that Marcel and I use it in slightly different senses: by anti-capitalist I mean a reaction not just against capital (his use) but directed towards the breaking of capital as a social relation and, therefore (since we cannot live without some form of social relations), the construction of a different sociality.

But how do we think of an asymmetry in relation to something so fluid and mobile as capital? In the book I formulate the crucial asymmetry in terms of the contrast between abstract labour and concrete doing. By concrete doing I understand the drive against the alien determination of our activity that I consider inseparable from that alien determination. It is clear, especially after reading the contribution of Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding, that this drive against alien determination is not pure subject, but self-contradictory. The habits and forms of thought derived from abstract or alienated labour reproduce themselves within the rebellion against it, with the possible disastrous consequences that Marcel Stoetzler indicates. How can we guard against that, how can we distinguish between a communizing movement and a movement in the opposite direction?

I do not think we can do it on the basis of the social provenance of those who push in a particular direction. The fact that the protagonists of a particular movement are manual workers, or women, or black does not guarantee anything.

There are no guarantees. Certainly we should use our critical faculties to argue for one direction rather than another, but there is no criterion of correctness that can be externally applied. Perhaps the best we can do is to look to the organizational movement of mutual recognition.

Movements of rebellion tend to throw up forms of organizing that break bring people out of their voiceless invisibility. Assemblies, councils, communes, are forms of organizing that promote a mutual recognizing of people as subjects, as dignities, as people with particular qualities and failings. These are anti-identitarian in the sense that they break in practice the labelling of people who appear to be different from us: or, in other words, they recognize people as different on the basis of their particularities, not on the basis of general classifications. It is important to retain the anti-identitarian thrust of such organizational forms as the best protection against the identitarian labelling (of Jews, blacks, migrants, women) that is at the core of the dangers of which Marcel speaks. For this reason, the organizational forms must be kept as open as possible, as any closure or institutionalization will tend to produce new labellings.

V

The issue of identity is at the core of Cynthia Cockburn’s critique. Cynthia, too, criticizes my book for its optimism, which she sees perhaps not just as naïve but as blind. The core of her argument is clearly stated in her Abstract:

I suggest that Holloway’s representation of ‘difference’, such as that between women and men, or people of conflictual ethnicities, as a matter of theatrical ‘masks’ that may be discarded at will seriously understates the significance of division and mutual oppression among the ‘we’. I argue that gender, ethnic, racialized and other oppressions cannot be reduced to effects of capitalism. Rather, they manifest distinct, though intersected, dimensions of power, positioning us in objectively antagonistic relations.

Cynthia’s criticism is profound and important. And yet I feel there is a kind of blurring, a slight mist, between us, which makes it difficult for me to see to what extent we are actually saying the same thing in different ways, and where it is that we do disagree. There are certainly differences, but many of the points of criticism directed against the book reproduce the criticisms that I direct against others. Whereas with Richard Gunn, Adrian Wilding and Marcel Stoetzler there are differences in opinion, but a feeling that we all come from the same theoretical stable, with Cynthia there is a bond of friendship and sympathy, but a greater theoretical divide to be crossed.

One of the general points that she makes is that ‘[t]he reduction of the material to the economic is a serious deficiency in Crack Capitalism’ (p. 214, this issue). This affirmation leaves me perplexed because my understanding of the book is precisely the opposite. I think that Cynthia refers to the fact that I insist on putting the organization of human activity – doing – at the centre of the argument, so much so that the subtitle of the book in the Spanish editions is ‘Doing against Labour’. For me, this is so far removed from the ‘the reduction of the material to the economic’ that I feel that I must try to explain.

The reason why I put human doing at the centre, rather than identities or ideologies or discourse or religion, is that I think the central problem is how we can change the world, and I can conceive of changing only as doing: to the extent we can change the world at all, we can do so only by our action, our doing. (This is anthropocentric, but not in the sense of dismissing the importance of other forms of life or natural forces; rather in the sense of saying that we have to assume our specific responsibility as humans.)

Human doing I see as infinitely rich, slithering from one thing to another, weaving people together and letting them slip apart, sliding from singing to love-making to painting to cooking to urinating to cleaning to computing to building houses to planting to harvesting to making dresses to talking to playing to thinking to sleeping to hugging to writing books to washing to learning to teaching – an unending flow of doing in which there is no clear distinction between one person’s contribution and another’s, no distinction between labour and non-labour and none between what is useful and useless, and certainly no distinction between the economic and the non-economic. In this concept of doing, there is certainly diversity, with different preferences and different capacities, but there are no clear lines. There is also no clear distinction between sexual and non-sexual activity: sexuality is polymorphous, present in all our doing, so that there is no reason to conceive of it in genital terms or to think of people as being divided into just two genders. I think of this doing not as lost paradise, but as potential, as that which in present society exists in the mode of being denied, as real force, as not-yet.

Something happens to this dance of doing, to this human creativity, that pushes it into the dynamic of death and destruction in which we now live. The answer I suggest is the way in which we establish relations between our activities. It is the sociality of our doings that pushes them in the direction of destruction. It is the way in which our doings come together that is the source of the problem: that is what we have to change by creating a new sociality, and I think this is precisely what anti-capitalist movements are trying to do.

The socializing might be described as the imposition of the power of men over women, and certainly this is a fundamental part of it, but as an explanation it leaves me unsatisfied, because this assumes the prior dimorphization or genitalization of sexuality, the prior identification of men as men and women as women. I feel that we must go a step further. For the world to be understood in terms of separate identities, there must first be a separating out of doings, a fixing or institutionalization of doings such that they begin to be attached to separated people – a freezing of doings such that the tense of our thought shifts from doing-becoming to being. This (past and continuing) separating-out of doings is what I understand by the concept of abstract labour. It is the abstraction of doing into labour that is at the source of all our other abstractions, including both 2 + 2 = 4 (see Sohn-Rethel 1978) and the reduction of the infinite spectrum of sexuality to the bipolar separation between women and men. In practical terms, this means that the struggle is not just against the domination of men over women (though I agree completely that this is of crucial importance), but must also be seen as the struggle against the very constitution of women and men (and indeed any other label, whether it be gay or transsexual or whatever). This may sound complete nonsense but, even with my very limited knowledge of the discussions in the area, I find something similar put forward by Marcuse, Stoetzler, Mieli or Marge Piercy. When Cynthia and I wrote In and against the State together in 1979 as two parts of the London–Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (she and others in London, I and others in Edinburgh), it was either she or our late mutual and wonderful friend Jeannette Mitchell (also of London) who advised me to read Marge Piercy’s marvellous novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), where Piercy’s image of the ideal society is very much along the lines of the world of doing outlined above. My reply to Cynthia is no more than an elaboration, with deepest thanks, of her gift to me.

I agree completely then when Cynthia says of radical change that ‘[i]t requires a transfer of resources, privilege and entitlement. Men would have to increase dramatically the daily hours they devote to reproductive labour and reduce dramatically their entitlement to sexual servicing and indulgence’ (p. 213, this issue). It is just that I want to push the horizons much further, and it seems to me that this is what current struggles are doing: we want a world in which the infinite variations in sex and sexuality are recognized, a world that overcomes the rigid separation of people into women and men.

There is another point that I think important to clarify. It should be clear by now that when I say that in order to speak of the antagonism between women and men we must first see the way in which the organization of our doing constitutes women and men as such, I do not intend to establish a hierarchy of antagonism, with the struggle of labour against capital as the prime contradiction, and the struggle against patriarchy at a lower level. Capital, labour, man, woman, state, economy, money, Mexico, Scotland – all are historically specific forms in which the flow of human doing exists. In all these forms the social flow of doing exists not transparently, but in the mode of being denied. The struggle for a self-determining society is the struggle for the emancipation of human doing from the forms in which it exists, from the forms of its own negation (or fetishization, reification, alienation).

This means that the struggle for the emancipation of doing involves a struggle against what we are, against our identities. Struggle is necessarily anti-identitarian, directed against the existing forms of social relations.

This does not mean that these forms are epiphenomena (a charge also made by Simon Susen). On the contrary, they are the forms in which social relations are historically constituted and have an enormous force, and certainly cannot be simply discarded at will. Despite the enormous force of these social forms, I argue in my book that we can and do try to go beyond them in the struggles of daily life. By this I do not mean that we should ignore identities, but that we do and should constantly push beyond them.

Cynthia mentions an example that may help. It is of the Muslim in India attacked by her (or his) Hindu neighbour. This illustrates precisely the murderous nature of identification: the Muslim is attacked simply because she is labelled by others as being Muslim. Identification is central to the dangers that Marcel Stoetzler pointed to in the current situation. Identification is already an aggression. If our response is limited to the same grammar of identification, we get nowhere at all; we simply reproduce the feud. Yet our struggle can only move from where we are, from our sense of identity. If we are attacked as Muslims, we will inevitably respond as Muslims. Cynthia’s Muslim says ‘I must affirm the validity of my sense of self, my self-worth, as a Muslim among others with whom I share a history and feel cultural affinity’ (p. 209, this issue). Yes, absolutely, but if we do not also go beyond that and say ‘But also I am more than that’, if we do not try to break the logic of identities, then the world is condemned to be a sorry place for ever, an eternal quarrel between Irish and English, Muslims and Hindus, Greeks and Turks. An Irish childhood makes it impossible not to be deeply aware of, and nauseated by, the sterility of such logic. The logic of identity is deadly, deadly, deadly. Yes, certainly we must start from where we are, from our identity, yes, we must say ‘I am black and I am proud’, or indigenous, or gay, or a woman, or whatever, and of course these struggles are real and important, but if we cannot go beyond that, then the world is a place of no hope, not even worth writing about. The Mexican state’s struggle has always been to box the Zapatistas into an indigenous identity; the enormous merit of the Zapatistas has been to refuse to be boxed in, to say that they are proud to be indigenous and fighting for indigenous rights, but that their struggle is for humanity. In other words, our struggle is in-against-and-beyond: we affirm our identities to push against and beyond them, or we close the world.

There is no question here of false consciousness (an absolutely useless concept that I never use, but which Cynthia ascribes to me), as there would be if the forms in which social relations exist were mere appearances or epiphenomena. If I say that I am a man, then it is not false, but it conceals far more than it states: it says nothing of the way in which I have been historically constituted as a man and of the possibility that in another society I would not be so classified; it says nothing of the way in which my ‘manhood’ is part of the constellation of forms arising from the way in which human activity is organized, nor of the violence which this identification implies both for me and others, nor of the way in which it limits my thoughts and actions. The concept of false consciousness really does not help us at all, nor does the idea of correctness. Critique is what is important, moving in-against-and-beyond in thought and in action.

I have not done justice to the intricacies of Cynthia’s argument, but perhaps enough has been said to stir further discussion. There are other people at the table, and there are ways in which Cynthia’s comments flow into others’, so let the conversation move on.

VI

The concept of intersectionality which is important in Cynthia Cockburn’s commentary comes up again in the contribution of Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz: ‘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’ (p. 226, this issue).

My response to the point made by Kevin and Michael is that I feel uncomfortable with the notion of ‘distinct oppressions’. It is not that these different forms of oppression do not exist, but everything in me pushes to try to understand the underlying unity of these distinct oppressions, to try to understand their unity as arising from the way in which human activity (doing) is organized. I want to understand the differences as a difference-in-unity, their unity as a unity-in-difference. I have no wish to deny their differences, but I want to understand the dynamic and the fragility of these forms of oppression, and I find this difficult unless I can understand their underlying unity. In other words, I feel the need to criticize the distinctness of these forms – criticize in the sense of genetic criticism, the drive to understand the origin of these distinct forms of oppression in the organization of human doing. It seems far better to understand the relation between the struggles against these different forms of depression not as an alliance between differences (as the term ‘intersectionality’ suggests to me) but as a unity-in-difference, difference-in-unity.

The emphasis on intersectionality seems to reflect an institutional thinking, a thinking in terms of movements rather than a complex and constantly changing flow of social rebellion. Certainly it is important to point, as both Cynthia and Kevin and Michael do, to the fragmented nature of the ‘we’, and to the mutually reinforcing nature of the distinct forms of oppression – if I did not make this acknowledgement clear in the previous section, I should have. What makes me hesitate about the term ‘intersectionality’ is that it seems to suggest a certain rigidity, a fixity of the differences, whereas I see the disagreeing and learning and respecting among the different aspects of the ‘we’ in much more fluid terms. If I think of the experiences of the rebellions of the last year, for example, I find it hard to visualize what has been happening in the squares of the world in terms of intersectionality. I see rather the surging together of many different angers, prolonged and patient discussions that at times reproduce patterns of oppression but that on the whole have been very conscious of the importance of struggling against sexism and racism in their organizational forms. I see, in Sintagma Square, Athens, for example, the attempt to create a world of many worlds, spaces in which people can discuss particular problems and particular forms of oppression. I see, in Zuccotti Square, New York, for example, very careful processes of dealing with the specific issue of sexual harassment within the movement. For me, this is not an alliance between sections; it is rather a gradual process of mutual recognition, a respecting of dignities, a working out of our unity-in-difference, difference-in-unity. ‘We’ for me is never a simple affirmation, always a question, an aspiration, a direction to move in. It is the hazardous moving of mutual recognition.

As Kevin and Michael point out, ‘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?’ (p. 226, this issue). I agree that this point is fundamental, and that I leave it ambiguous. I do not think that the cracks could or should ‘coalesce’ (come or bring together to form one mass or whole, according to my dictionary – where now is your intersectionality?). I prefer to speak of a confluence of the cracks, for two reasons: it leaves more lasting independence for the cracks as potentially separate streams or rivulets; and it is intransitive. To pose the question of the confluence (con-flowing would be better) of the cracks puts us in our place, as critical participants, but not as ‘revolutionary organizers’, as Kevin and Michael would have it. We are back with the issue raised earlier, that of the humility of the concept. There is a sense in which, individually, we must say, ‘This is as far as I am able to take the argument for the moment; I hope someone else will pick it up.’ But also we must be able to say collectively: ‘We can suggest, we can enthuse, we can point a way forward, we can criticize, but at the end of the day we are part of a flow that we do not control.’ When Kevin and Michael end their contribution with a consideration of whether my vision is ‘practicable’, I am delighted, amazed and perplexed. The question of whether it is practicable had not occurred to me: I see the book rather as trying to understand the shifts taking place in the struggle against capital, and, by understanding, to participate with suggestions as to how we can think a way forward.

Just a quick comment on the state: Kevin and Michael say that ‘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”’ (p. 232, this issue). To which I would respond: ‘Young and Schwartz do not adequately address the incontrovertible reality that many revolutionary regimes have deemphasized or suppressed the quest for a “self-determining society” even if they have greatly ameliorated human suffering.’ The struggle is not for justice, but for dignity. It is only the push for self-determination that can break the dynamic of death in which we find ourselves entrapped.

VII

A very similar point arises in John Foran’s contribution. He explicitly poses the struggle in terms of justice and also takes me to task for not being more open to processes of change that are led by the state. But this is precisely the issue. I pose the question in the book in terms of a distinction between a politics of poverty and a politics of dignity. If we want to help the poor, create a more just society, then the state may well be an adequate form of organization: it can be made to act for the benefit of others, and in many respects the achievements of the states in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia are impressive in this respect. However, even if we limit our perspectives to justice, we must bear in mind that, as long as the overall context of capital accumulation remains in place, any achievements in creating a more just society are bounded by the state’s need to create attractive conditions for capital accumulation.

I have nothing against justice (just as I have nothing against men ceding more resources to women in the earlier discussion), and I certainly do not regard those who seek to bring about justice through the state as enemies (or at least not unless their course leads them to espouse directly the logic of the capital-assault against us, something that can happen very easily and quickly). I just don’t think that justice is the important issue. We live in the midst of a tidal wave of destruction that is probably unstoppable as long as human activity is determined by money, by the search for profits. The only way to stop this destruction, and the only way to stop, too, the constant generation of injustice and violence, is by reversing the flow of determination, by pushing for the social self- determination of human activity. If the struggle is for self-determination (dignity), then clearly we need forms of organization that articulate this self-determination. This means councils, communes, assemblies – a host of organizational forms and experiments that are central to the enormously rich tradition of anti-capitalist struggle. It cannot mean the state, because the state, with its history, its language, its traditions of behaviour, above all its body of full-time officials charged with acting for our benefit, on our behalf, is an organizational form that excludes. However admirable the achievements of the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia in terms of social justice, they are also countries filled with people who have been excluded from their own revolution.

As simple as that: think of revolution as alleviating poverty and creating greater justice and go through the state (you may well be disappointed with the results, but no matter); think of revolution as the struggle for self-determination and dignity, and it cannot be through the state, it must be through other forms of organization.

This is where Marx comes in. John would like me to leave Marx aside as difficult and unnecessary. I disagree. The starting point of rebellion (the scream) is easy, but to go very far beyond that requires thinking, and there is no reason to suppose that thinking against capitalism is easy. And secondly, Marx is important because he does not let us get away with posing the struggle for radical change in terms of justice: he puts the determination of our doing at the centre. That is what Capital is about: read it.

VIII

Karl Reitter’s critique comes from the opposite direction, from a defence of a more orthodox understanding of Marxism. Again I shall not do justice to his argument, but just focus on one point which I find particularly interesting. He argues that there is a shift in position between Change the World and Crack Capitalism, and that I have moved closer to what is known as ‘value critique’, a term used in German debates to refer to a position which Karl summarizes as follows:

… in this approach, social synthesis – that is, the way in which social elements are joined to form society – is conceived of exclusively as happening through the exchange of commodities mediated by money. Socialization through labour, as well as the relation between state and society, is not theorized at all. The evil character of capitalism is located not in the capital relationship as such, but rather in the social validity of abstract labour, the overarching prevalence of which determines the course of society. According to this approach, capitalism is primarily a society of labour and only secondarily a class society. The notion of social domination is rendered completely devoid of meaning as everyone in society, capitalists as well as proletarians, poor people as well rich, men as well as women, is supposedly subject to the domination of anonymous laws without any possibility of action on his or her part.

I find this interesting because I was dimly aware of a shift in emphasis between the two books, without posing it in terms of value critique, and Karl’s comment helps me to think this through.

This shift is a response, I think, to a shift in the nature of anti-capitalist struggle. Increasingly, struggle is seen not in terms of winning state power or in terms of formulating demands on the state, but rather in terms of the attempt to create autonomous spaces. There is a shift, then, in the meaning of revolution: it comes to be seen not as the taking of state power but as the dismantling of capitalism, the cumulative uncoupling of these spaces or moments or activities from the logic of capitalist accumulation. Inevitably, there is a movement in the theoretical understanding of capitalism: if the struggle is to uncouple ourselves from the logic of capital, we want to understand what it is that binds us into that logic, what is it that constitutes the social cohesion or social synthesizing of capitalism. The answer is, and must be: money. Money binds that which at the same time produces it as social form: the existence of human activity as abstract labour. The social cohesion is established through the constant weaving together of our activities in a way that subordinates these activities to the rule of money, the law of value, and, conversely, the rule of money or law of value is this contant binding of our activities in this way. This weaving together of our activities is what I understand by abstract labour, or, better, the abstraction of doing into labour. It is an ever-intensifying process simply because the dynamic of the interrelation means that what counts as value is the socially necessary time required to produce a commodity and this is constantly being reduced. It is this ever-tightening social cohesion that makes attempts to construct autonomous spaces so difficult.

This shift leads to a more radical reading of Capital. Karl says that in this approach, ‘[t]he evil character of capitalism is located not in the capital relationship as such, but rather in the social validity of abstract labour’. I would modify this slightly to say that ‘the evil character of capitalism is located already in the social validity of abstract labour, even before we come to the capital relationship as such’. This is Marx’s constant argument in the early chapters of Capital, as also in the Grundrisse; this is the source of his repeated critique of Proudhon, who advocated a return to a simple commodity-producing society as a solution to the evils of capitalism. Marx’s constant argument is that the problems of capitalism are already inscribed in the exchange relation, in the way in which we bring our different activities together. Marx starts from the commodity, not as a warm-up for what is to follow, but because the root of the problem lies there, in the commodity, or rather in the dual character of the labour that produces the commodity, as abstract and as concrete labour. The existence of our activity as abstract labour is inseparable from the way in which our activities are connected, through commodity exchange.

This adds an extra dimension to the critique of the capital relation; it does not detract from it. The commodity relation does not exist independently of capital: it is only when labour power itself becomes a commodity that the commodity relation assumes the significance it has as the dominant form of social cohesion. To think that we can struggle against the capital relation without simultaneously struggling against the existence of money and the existence of human doing as labour had disastrous consequences in the last century. The struggle against capital must be understood as struggle against money, value, abstract labour and all that goes with it: the objectification of nature, homogenization of time, dimorphization of sexuality, totalization of social relations, and so on. Again, the focus on abstract labour extends the horizons of struggle.

The final part of Karl’s description of value critique quoted above may apply to some approaches, but cannot be said to apply to mine:

The notion of social domination is rendered completely devoid of meaning as everyone in society, capitalists as well as proletarians, poor people as well rich, men as well as women, is supposedly subject to the domination of anonymous laws without any possibility of action on his or her part.

For me, the understanding of capital in terms of the antagonism between concrete doing and abstract labour places class struggle squarely at the centre of everyday life, so that anti-capitalist action is not only possible but an integral part of life. Social antagonism (which I certainly think of as class struggle, so that there is no such thing as non-class struggle, as Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz would have it) permeates every aspect of social life: there is nothing outside it.

IX

Christian Garland’s intervention is a very welcome one in that it places the discussion very firmly in the context of the struggles that have erupted in so many parts of the world in the last year. Citing De Mattis, he argues that these struggles should be seen as a movement of communization:

Communisation will be the moment when struggle will make possible, as a means for its continuation, the immediate production of communism. By communism we mean a collective organisation that has got rid of all the mediations which, at present, serve society by linking individuals among them: money, the state, value, classes, etc. The only function of these mediations is to make exploitation possible. While they are imposed on everybody, they benefit only a few. Communism will thus be the moment when individuals will link together directly, without their inter-individual relations being superimposed by categories to which everyone owes obedience.

I agree with Christian that there is a new immediacy in struggle, that communism is immediately on the agenda, and that the only way to think of communism is as the movement of communizing. The idea of socialism really does not help us any more. Socialism is so bound up with the experience of ‘left’ governments that have, by necessity and often by choice, promoted and intensified the accumulation of capital that it is probably a concept that has been lost to us. Certainly there is still the ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’ proclaimed by the Chávez government in Venezuela, but, as I have explained in my book, I do not feel that that is the way to go.

There is really no choice between reproducing the social structures of a system we know to be destroying the world and trying to construct a different sociality, or rather different socialities. There is no middle ground in between, no transitional form that reproduces capitalism but prepares the ground for something else. There is no neutral ground in between, but most of us have little option but to ride both horses at once, to live contradictory lives in which we reproduce capitalist forms while we throw our energy into creating different ways of doing things. Communization is inevitably a confused and impure movement, a movement that advances interstitially, through creating, expanding and multiplying cracks and promoting their confluence. All these cracks are so many communisms, so many communizings. Either we create a new world or we die with this one.

X

I have kept Sergio Tischler’s article almost to the end because we have a special relationship. To return to the jazz metaphor introduced at the beginning of this response, my interaction with Sergio is precisely that. We play a conceptual jazz in our joint fortnightly seminars and have done so for many years. One of us raises a theme, the other one picks it up and develops it in such a way that we hear something new, and so on.

In this case the theme that Sergio develops is that of the importance of seeing antagonism as rooted in everyday life. I have been thinking about that for many years, but Sergio’s presentation makes me see it in a new way:

If we think of everyday life as a defined structure, because it is such a structure and because of the relations of domination and exploitation, the logical consequence when thinking of a revolutionary change is that revolution is a rupture, that it emerges against everyday life, from outside everyday life, for everyday life is a closure which reproduces itself … . To put it briefly, according to this approach one could say that revolution is an event which concentrates on the time that denies everyday life, and the vanguard is a vanguard because it is an agent of the extraordinary, because it lies outside the structure of this everyday life and can operate upon its contradictions.

This is extraordinary, because it is exactly the way that most left theory and many left activists present everyday life: as a closed structure of domination. Revolution, then, comes from outside everyday life, an external irruption that breaks the habits of submission, the great event that breaks homogenized routine time. Consequently the revolutionary must stand outside everyday life, show contempt for what for most people are the pleasures of everyday life. The revolutionary must be a hero. Seen like that, the traditional revolutionary project is a tragic farce, doomed to failure from the outset. If revolution does not spring from the antagonisms and struggles of everyday life, how can it possibly be anything other than the re-creation of alien rule even if it succeeds? Of course this a caricature of what revolutionary movements do, yet contempt for everyday life is part of the currency of the left and perhaps its greatest blindness.

Revolution cannot come from outside everyday life. But can it come from inside everyday life? That is the core of the Zapatista gamble: ‘we are ordinary people, therefore rebels’, they say. But are ordinary people rebels? Or are they so worn down by the pressures of everyday life and so permeated by the images of television that they have no room in their lives for rebellion? Is there in my argument, Sergio wonders,

[a] romantic evaluation of a ‘spontaneous’ subject? An overestimation of the active force of negation in everyday life? … I have to admit that [Holloway’s] formulations cause me to feel uneasy, uncertain, doubtful; that is the result of my cautiousness before excessive optimism and of the embers of my Leninist experience.

We are back with the issue that weaves its way through the commentaries, that of excessive optimism. Hope against hope, hope in a dark night, is there any choice? Bloch suggests that the not-yet is present in every moment of oppressed existence: the dream of and projection towards a world free of oppression. Not with any certain outcome, but as inevitable drive rooted in the nature of oppression itself. This breaks the notion of the everyday as structure, as closure. See that person over there in the supermarket, that person walking in the street, and understand them as rebels: that is the great Zapatista-Blochian challenge. If we cannot take up their gauntlet, it makes no sense to pose the question of revolution. To break the idea of the everyday as structure is the pre-condition of any discussion of radical change; without that, we cannot even begin. But that does not give us any answers. How do we move from recognizing the rebellion seething inside that person in the supermarket to the reality of radical change? Baron von Munchausen’s pigtail again. Or, in the face of an intensifying dynamic of assault, cracks or interstitial ruptures expanding multiplying flowing together? Hic Rhodus, hic salta. The question is yours to answer, dear reader. (A hint to help you: look at what is happening in the world, look at the struggles of the last year, Munchausen and his horse in Tahrir, Sintagma, Zuccotti Puerta del Sol.)

XI

I have left Simon Susen’s contribution until last. This is partly because he is our host here in the Journal of Classical Sociology and I assume that his views will be close to those of many of the readers of the journal. But it is also because I find his comments particularly hard to respond to. There are so many points of criticism that an adequate response would require me to write a book, but also, and worse, would require me to take the path of ding-dong argument that I am reluctant to take. I am immensely grateful for his careful comments but, rather than undertake a detailed response, I am happy to let the charges stand. Some of his points are undoubtedly correct, some seem to me to be based on misunderstanding, some I simply disagree with.

I would rather address a central issue that seems to me to underlie his argument and that touches the very presence of this discussion in the pages of this journal. Marxist or radical discussion tends to go off on its own, to take place in Marxist and radical journals where many of our common assumptions go unquestioned. I am immensely grateful to Simon for the opportunity of breaking this convention, for inviting this type of discussion to flow over the borders of its usual zone of comfort and into the pages of a more mainstream journal of sociology.

What I admire enormously both in Simon’s invitation to do this number of the journal and in his article is his full-bodied rushing across boundaries. He is a disrespecter of limits, and this is a great achievement. There is, however, a problem here. In rushing across a border, one should perhaps address the border one is crossing. My admiration for Simon is very real, yet I feel that he neglects an issue that it is important to discuss. What is it that lies behind the difficulties of communication between the left/Marxist approach and more orthodox sociology? Is it that we have quite different projects? Is it that we have quite a different concept of what constitutes science?

We all start from some sort of experiential judgement (Horkheimer, 1972). We have a life of experience and thinking and reading that come together to constitute a basis from which we start to reflect, a basis upon which we construct an idea of what we are doing and should be doing. I am certainly not suggesting that this starting point should go unquestioned, but it may be important to recognize it, to stake out a base and say this is where I go from, this is what I understand by scientific activity.

My own starting point is the observation that we live in a society that has its core a dynamic of death and destruction that threatens the very existence of human life. Capitalism is not just a system based on injustice, violence, discrimination against certain groups, destruction of the natural environment, and so on; it has at its centre an accelerating dynamic, a movement of intensifying destruction. It follows that the urgent problem, for thought and for practice, is to break this dynamic and construct a different sort of society. All our efforts should be directed towards this end. This is true whether our activity is centred in the university (as is mine and probably that of many readers) or elsewhere.

I think that I am not alone in my starting point. I sense that most of the contributors are certainly close to it and several of them state this clearly before developing their points of criticism. I gather that Simon does not share this point of departure, though I am not clear what his starting point is. This is fine: I certainly do not insist that he should start from the same place as I do. The difference does, however, colour what we consider to be scientific and significant. When Simon criticizes me for not offering empirical evidence for what I say about the destructive nature of capitalism, then he is asking me to go back below my starting point, to retreat to the foothills far below the point at which I have pitched my base camp. There is an infinity of literature about the destructive character of capitalism; my argument is that we are at a point at which we have to move on and tackle the difficult and fundamental question of how we break the dynamic of capital. It is clear that the solutions offered by orthodox Marxism in the last century failed and now we have to rethink the matter, and this means developing new concepts, new language, new ways of expression.

Theory in this perspective makes sense only if understood as part of a more general movement that pushes against-and-beyond existing society. There is little sense, then, in the peculiar distinction that Simon makes when he says: ‘The author’s failure to provide substantive evidence in support of these claims may not be a source of objection for radical political activists, but it will prevent him from being taken seriously by critical social scientists’ (p. 296, this issue). This seems to imply that radical political activists do (and should) not think critically and that critical social scientists have (and should have) nothing to do with radical political action. I find it difficult to get my mind around this affirmation: it seems to come from a world that I thought (and hoped) no longer existed, echoes from an academia supremely self-confident in its blindness. My own feeling is that careful critical discussion has largely migrated from the universities or exists only in their fringes. Certainly radical activism is not necessarily reflective (see my earlier response to John Foran), but I think that its emancipation from the revolutionary parties with their correct lines means that there is an increasingly intense and sophisticated debate among activists.

I do not wish to dismiss Simon’s criticisms, and I certainly do not want to defend the book. However, if our main concern is to carry the argument forward, and to do so in a way that reaches a broader audience, then I do think there is an initial question to be answered: what do we think we are doing? As teachers, as students, as whatever, what do we think we are doing? To whom are we talking, and why?

XII

I come to the end of my response, very aware that I have left many points of criticism unanswered. I fear and hope that the reader will be left with many dissatisfactions, many issues that she feels have not been properly concluded. So it should be.

It remains only to repeat my immense thanks to the other contributors, to Richard, Adrian, Marcel, Cynthia, Kevin, Michael, John, Karl, Christian, Sergio and Simon. I feel greatly honoured, stimulated and provoked. The debate is begun.