Capital & Class

John Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power is an attempt to translate the Zapatista experience into Marxist categories—an undertaking fraught with many difficulties. This review interrogates the four key issues addressed by Holloway: the state, the nature of power, commodity fetishism and the meaning and relevance of revolution.

Born in Dublin and now living and working in Mexico City, John Holloway is one of a small group of intellectual—activists whose work emerges from and contributes to an autonomist reading of Marxism. Holloway's work within this milieu has largely been concerned with revitalising a Marxist comprehension of the state—that is, until January 1994, when the masked Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, burst onto the global scene. After this, he became a commentator on the role and impact of the Zapatistas on the resistance to exclusive forms of globalisation. Indeed, his most recent work, Change The World Without Taking Power, is an attempt to translate the Zapatista experience into Marxist categories. Holloway is often criticised for focusing so heavily on the Zapatistas, but in his defence, they do seem to constitute a significant shift within the emancipatory imagination and, as such, their contribution warrants further scrutiny and reflection. In examining Holloway's contribution, I will address four key issues: the state, the nature of power, commodity fetishism and the meaning and relevance of revolution.

The NHS LIFT (local improvement finance trust) programme is a new form of privatisation of UK primary care, based on the private finance initiative but going beyond it in important ways. It covers half of all English primary care trusts, and the approach has also been extended into education (the Building Schools for the Future’ programme). The LIFT model embeds multinational capital and corporate forms into UK primary care and affects both staff and services, but challenges to it have been patchy and low-key. There is a need to theorise what this new development means for public services, and to examine the potential for resistance to it.

This article documents the resurgence of US prison work programmes under neoliberalism, investigating the dynamics through which state and private corporations have erected factories inside public prisons, moving manufacturing jobs behind bars. It contends that the corporate use of inmate labour has not resulted from an autonomous capital's quest for profit, but rather that it is a strategy that has developed through and cannot be abstracted from the US state as it has restructured in order to author processes of globalisation, and as it has adopted the neoliberal domestic policy of mass incarceration.

This article examines proposals for the reform of the relationship between internal security and state-society relations in Northern Ireland and finds a divergence from the usual liberal package of police reforms. These proposals embraced the political nature of security provision and aimed to create authentically democratic institutions endowed with sufficient power to contest the state's control over the monopoly of force. Through a Habermassian lens, the research analyses the emancipatory potential of these proposals, and examines the reasons why they were rejected in favour of a state-centric, liberal model that did not deliver the structural transformation of police— society relations sought by the people of Northern Ireland.