In his book Changing the world without taking power, Holloway led a political and theoretical analysis of what are the social movements since the mid-1990s - driven in particular by the Zapatista uprising in 1994. Holloway shows that these movements are struggling for radical change, but in terms that have nothing to do with the radical struggles of the past that were taken of state power. Holloway asked about the how to reformulate our understanding of revolution as a struggle against power, not for power. After a century of failed attempts to carry out radical changes, and this far side of the revolutionaries as the reformists, the concept of revolution is in crisis.
p.13:
the beginning was the cry. We cry.
When we write or read, it is easy to forget that in the beginning is not the verb but the cry. A cry of sorrow at the mutilation of human lives caused by capitalism, a scream of horror, a cry of rage, a scream of refusal: no!
The starting point for reflection is in opposition, negativity, struggle. Thought is born of anger, not of peace, of reason. It does not arise in the act of sitting, reasoning or thinking about the mysteries of existence, referring to the conventional image of the thinker.
We, we begin by negation, by dissonance. The dissonance can take many forms: an inarticulate murmur of discontent, tears of frustration, a cry of anger, a confident roar, a deep disturbance, a deep desire, a critical vibration.
Our dissonance stems from our experience, but it varies. Sometimes it is the direct experience of operating plant, oppression at home, stress at the office, hunger and misery, or experience of violence or discrimination . Sometimes, the rage that overwhelms us comes from the experience that we experience indirectly through television, newspapers and books. Millions of children live in the street in some cities, such as single means of guaranteeing respect for private property, they were systematically murdered. In 1998, the assets of the 200 richest people in the world exceeded the total income of 41% of world population (that is to say, the income of 2 billion and half people). The gap between rich and poor grows ever more, not only between countries but also within each. E 1960, the states with the fifth richest people in the world had a per capita income 30 times higher than per capita income States bringing a fifth of the poorest population: in 1990, this ratio fell to 60 for reach a total of 74 times in 1995. The stock market climb whenever unemployment increases. Students fighting for free education are imprisoned, while those directly responsible for the misery of millions of people are covered with honors and receive shares of generals, defense ministers or presidents. The list goes on. It is impossible to read the newspaper without feeling rage and pain. And our anger explodes every day atrocities after atrocities.
In confusion, no doubt, we perceive that it is not isolated phenomena, a relationship exists between them, they are stakeholders in a defective world, a world that is fundamentally wrong. We always see more mendaints in the street while the stock markets are dying of new ceilings, the salaries of CEOs are reaching dizzying. We see perfectly well that the horrors of the world are not incidental injustices, but they are part of a deeply flawed. Even the movies produced by Hollywood (which may seem surprising) often begin with the presentation of a world fundamentally unfair before we explain (Which is much less surprising) that justice can be achieved by individual efforts. Our anger is not directed against a specific event, but against an impression: the world goes wrong, nothing runs and, in some ways, this world is false. When we encounter something particularly appalling, we raise our arms, horrified, and we exclaim: this is impossible! this is not true! "Yet we know that is true and understand that this is the truth of a false world.
How would a real world? We have a vague idea it would be a world of justice, a world in which people could maintain relations between them, as individuals and not as things, a world in which everyone could decide on his own life . But we do not need to have an idea of what real world to know that the world we know is very wrong. To understand this, it is not necessary to have already specified a utopia to replace it. There is no need either a romantic blue flower like "one day my prince will come, someday we will accede to a real world, to the Promised Land. We do not need to promise a happy ending to justify the rejection of a world we know wrong.
That indeed is our starting point: the rejection of this world that is wrong, the denial of this world perceived as negative.
p.25:
It seems hard to believe that someone is so happy with the world around him he feels no revulsion at the hunger, violence and inequalities. It is more likely that, consciously or unconsciously, he represses this repulsion or refusal, either to have a quiet life, far more simply, because the fact of not wanting to see or do not want to feel the horrors of the world it offers direct material satisfactions. To protect our judgments, our jobs, our visas, our earnings, our ability to get good grades, we pretend not to see, we purgeons our world view by filtering the pain, pretending to believe is far from elsewhere in Africa, Russia, it happened a century ago, in another world that is alien to us and allows us to evacuate our worldview any negativity.
p.157:
Criticism is an attack against the identity. The cry against things as they are by turns questioning. Why is there so much inequality in the world? Why are there so many unemployed people when so many people overwork? Why is there so much hunger in a world of such abundance? Why are there so many children living on the streets?
We attack the world with the curiosity of a stubborn 3 year old child, but unlike, perhaps, Why is our angry. Why we require a reason. Why we submit that exists in the opinion of the reason. Why so many children die of curable diseases? Why is there so much violence? Our reason is contrary to what is and is seeking to justify himself. Initially, at least, our identity and why attack wonder why this is, is now well.
p.159: Facing our
why identity is still trying to limit damage, recover and divert the question to his advantage, closing the debate within the identity framework. We're all used to. It is likely that by insisting: "why so many children living on the street? "We Stand a response in terms of" private property "convinced of the certainty of its immmuabilité, or even, perhaps, a" God has done, "answer with certainty that God is what it is. It is even possible to obtain a more simple, more direct: "thus" or "it has always been thus."
Most often, we accept these limitations. We accept that Implicit in our fight why have limits. We are fighting for better conditions inside the university, but we do not question the existence of this institution. We fight for better housing conditions, but we do not question the existence of private property, something so fundamental to the housing conditions. Our struggle is within the accepted framework of "thus." We know that this bounding or partially disabled everything that we say, yet we accept the pretext of achieving concrete goals. We accept boundaries of identity and thus, paradoxically, we are strengthening.
p.162:
The criticism of religion disillusioned man, he thinks, acts, shape his reality like a man disillusioned become reasonable, that he moves around him and by the following about its true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which moves around the man, as he does not move around himself. (Marx)
p.169:
The man who made religion is not a complete man is a sick man, wounded self-alienation: "Religion is really the conscience and sense of own man, who either has not yet found, or has already lost again. [...] Religion is the sigh of creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the soul of a world without heart, the spirit of an era without spirit. "(Marx)
p.220:
First, anti-power is omnipresent.
television, newspapers, speeches of politicians make little reference to the existence of anti-power. For them, politics is power, the political conflict is linked to the conquest of power, the political reality is the reality of power. For them, anti-power is invisible.
However, we must look more closely. We must look at the world around us, seen beyond political parties and institutions of the labor movement to see a world of struggle: the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas, the students of the University of Mexico, the Liverpool dockers, the international wave of protest against the power of financial capital, neighborhood assemblies and piqueteros in Argentina, the struggles of migrant workers and those workers around the world, against privatization. The reader will establish its own list: there are always new. There is an entire world struggles against power. There is an entire world struggles that sometimes do not do more than say "no! (Eg sabotage), but often while saying "no," develop new forms of self-determination and new design expresses a different idea of what the world should be. If the mainstream media provide information on some of these struggles, they are filtering through the spectacles of power, these struggles do are visible only to the extent they are considered to affect the political power. [...] The rebel movements are movements against invisibility. The most striking example is undoubtedly that of feminism, whose struggle has largely been to make visible what was not, or exploitation and oppression of women, and especially to make visible the presence of women in this world, to rewrite a story of where their presence had been largely eliminated. The struggle for visibility is also essential in the current indigenous movement, where it is expressed with energy use in the Zapatista ski-mask: we hide our face to be seen, our struggle is the struggle of the faceless.
However, we must emphasize an important difference. The problem of anti-power is not to liberate an oppressed minority (women, indigenous), but to emancipate oppressed non-identity, not the ordinary, everyday, invisible, the murmurs of subversion as we walk in the street, the volcano when we sit silent. Giving an identity to discontent, saying "we are women," we are natives , We impose new limits already, because we're defining it. Hence the importance of the Zapatista ski-mask, which is not only saying "we are indigenous fighting for our identity to be recognized," but also says something more profound: "our struggle is the struggle non-identity is the struggle of invisible, that of the voiceless and faceless. "
p.281:
greater the gap between the accumulation actual monetary and accumulation grows, the greater the gap opened between the real subordination and the subordination claims that the voracity of capital. To survive, it becomes increasingly demanding. "Kneel, kneel! Bow down! Sell your dignity to the last drop! That is the watchword of contemporary capitalism. The tendency to subordinate with increasing intensity all spheres of life is the essence of neoliberalism, which is an attempt to resolve the crisis through the stress and the reorganization of subordination. The separation of subject and object (the dehumanization of the subject) is pushed to new limits by massive recourse to money-king commanding anything. If, as at 18 th century, capital has established his dominance through the enclosure movement (that is to say, the separation of individuals from the ground), now the capital tries to overcome its crisis with a new "enclosure movement", seizing more and more areas of social activity, imposing the rule of money when the contingency was previously indirectly. The commodification of land, the increasing commodification of care and education, the extension of the property (which includes both software and the human genome) reduction of social protection in countries where it existed, work intensification, should be regarded as means of expansion and potentiation of subordination. Designing new spaces, this commodification proclaims: "These territories are now subject to the direct rule of capital, money! As the enclosures of the 18th century who had served as the behaviors became individual behavior-cons-on-equity condemned to be punished by law and by poverty, enclosures mean that current behaviors previously considered normal becomes gradually a threat to the capital. Thus, for example, the desire of indigenous peoples of Chiapas to maintain their traditional lifestyle is in conflict with the extension property, and similarly, the university, it is increasingly difficult to work on Plato Aristotle, as this type of study is now regarded as incompatible with the tendency of capital to make more and more intellectual work to their needs and finally, another example, the mere fact of playing with children or to celebrate a birthday becomes increasingly difficult to achieve because of the increased workload. While in many ways, capital we ordered to submit our lives more and more to its demands (the logic of the law of value), our lack of subordination becomes the object of a conflict that must be punished by poverty or by something worse. "Kneel, Kneel, Kneel, Kneel! "Shouts the capital. In vain, it is not enough.
In the 1930s, Paul Mattick (1978) had referred to "permanent crisis of capitalism": it seems that we lived the same situation, a prolonged crisis is not resolved. However, the assertion was Mattick too optimistic: the crisis of the 1930s was not permanent, it was resolved by the massacre of more than 30 million people, creepy!
And yet when it comes to crisis, nothing is set in advance. We are the crisis we are those-who-cry in the streets, in the countryside, factories, offices, in our homes, we are the ones who scream "No! Enough! There's enough of your silly games of power, enough of your stupid farms, enough of your stupid game of toy soldiers and head. We only operate that person and do not want not exploit anyone, we who have no power and did not want us trying to live a human life, we are the faceless and voiceless, we are the crisis of capitalism. "The theory of crisis is not only a theory of fear is also a theory of hope.
Affirm that you are an anarchist, and almost invariably you regard as a supporter of chaos. However, it must be said: nothing is further from the truth. And this contradiction is the result of decades of confusion carefully maintained around the idea of anarchism.
a first approximation, say that anarchism ects a political theory at the heart of vibrant which houses the idea of anti-authoritarianism, saying it was reasoned and conscious refusal of all forms of illegitimate authority and power . An old lady who fought in the war with Spain said the simplest way: "I am an anarchist: that I do not receive or give orders. "We can guess: the idea unforgivable ets, this ideal is unacceptable for all powers. It did neither admitted nor forgiven.
p.22:
Anarchism is defined as etymologically [ year -] (Private) [ archos ] (power, command or authority), he literally ets therefore lack of power or authority. This does not mean confusion or disorder, if one simply accepts that there are other possible orders that imposed by an authority: this is expressed as simply as possible, first assertion anarchism. This order in the absence of power, anarchist think it will be born of freedom - freedom that the mother of order, not his daughter, as stated Pierre Joseph Proudhon. In other words, anarchism think the disorder, after all, this may well be that "order less power," according to the beautiful word Léo Ferré.
Anarchists insisitent tirelessly on this aspect of their anti-authoritarian theory. For example, Sebastian Faure said: "Whoever denies the authority and fight ets anarchist" or Proudhon: "More authority, neither the Church nor the state nor in the earth or in the money . "It is easy to multiply quotes ...
p.31:
For some theorists, anarchism is a permanent tendency in the history of humanity, appearing somewhat in human nature. Kropotkin, one of the most important theorists of anarchism, is one of them. In 1910, in a famous article published presentation of anarchism in the Encyclopaedia Britannica , he argues that, throughout history, there is an opposition between an anarchist tendency on the one hand and hierarchical pattern of the other.
p.37:
What Chomsky expresses with anarchism as "trend, present throughout the history of thought and action humans, which prompts us to want to identify the structures coercive, authoritarian and hierarchical of all kinds for review and test their legitimacy when it happens that these structures can not be justified - which is most often the case anarchism leads us to seek eliminate them and thus enlarge the space of freedom. "
p.52:
Emile Armand is the author of the famous sentence:" Marriage ects a long-term prostitution, prostitution, marriage in the short term. "
p.62:
Bakunin recognized religion in one of the highlights of the humanization of the species. But he also believes that the time has come to put an end to what he called "divine slavery," become an obstacle to the humanization, the ultimate source of all authority and foundation of all other forms of slavery. "All human and temporal authority, he writes, proceeds directly from the spiritual or divine. But the authority is the negation of liberty. God, or rather the fiction of God, therefore ets consecration and the intellectual and moral question of slavery all over the earth and human freedom will not be complete until it has completely destroyed the fiction of a heavenly master. "The syllogism considered so scandalous that view which is well led known: "If God is, man is a slave, yet man can and must be free, so there is no God. "
His revolt then attacked the State," the younger brother of the Church "and other" historically necessary evil "but also destined to disappear. Fiercely anti-authoritarian, Bakunin is engaged in a fierce charge against any state, including one that purports to exercise its authority in the interest of the oppressed majority: "We reject any legislation, authority, influence preferred, patented, official and legal, even out of universal suffrage, convinced that she can never turn to benefit only a minority dominant and operates against the interests of the vast majority enslaved. That is why we are anarchists. "
p.64:
Bakunin predicted that the dictatorship of the proletariat dear to the Communists, far from leading to the decline of the state (this claim in his view" the most vile lies and the most formidable ever produced our century ") can only lead to a new and terrible tyranny, a "red tape" whose advent seemed inevitable. History has amply confirmed the accuracy of his prediction. "Take the most radical revolutionary, Bakunin explained yet, and place it on the throne of all the Russias or let him dictatorial power [...] within a year, it will be worse than the Tsar. "
[...] if it recognizes the importance of union action - partly prefigured his thinking anarcho-syndicalism, and he even advocated actions by small groups conspiring against the established order, however, Bakunin puts all his trust in the spontaneity of the masses. This destructive phase liquid old institutions - church, government, judiciary, banks, military, etc.. (Not to mention the transmission of estates, including land) - and allows the establishment of a free and egalitarian society, ensuring the participation of all its members become educated and freed from economic constraints, the common affairs: "Everyone, man or woman, coming to life, find ways almost equal to the development its various faculties and their use in his work "question, he writes," to organize a society, making every individual, whatever the operation of another's labor impossible, let everyone participate in the enjoyment of social wealth they helped to produce by his own. "
p.66:
Bakunin: I am truly free only when all human beings around me, men and women are equally free, so that the more numerous are the free people around me, deeper and wider was their freedom, and wider, deeper and wider was mine. "
p.73:
" Everything is all, Kropotkin wrote, since all they need, puisuqe all worked to the extent of their forces and that it is physically impossible to determine the share that could belong to everyone in the current production of wealth. "The surprising conclusion of these books is:" Suppose a company comprising millioons several people engaged in agriculture and a wide variety of plants. [...] admit that all adults are committed to working 5 hours a day from the age of twenty or twenty-two to forty -five or fifty years, and they s'emploinet in occupations to choose from, and any branch of human work considered necessary. Such a society could in turn ensure the well being of all its members-that is to say otherwise ease real than that enjoyed by the bourgeoisie today. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, remember how Kropotkin, next physical needs, such a company would work to satisfy the artistic needs, moral and intellectual of its members: "So many people, so many desires and society is more civilized, more individuality is developed, the more these desires are varied. "
p.77:
In Italy, Enrico Malatesta (1853-1932) was only 14 when he was arrested for the first time he ets accused of insulting the king, for a letter he sent to denounce an injustice. First disciple of Bakunin, Kropotkin he approaches and advocated direct action and the "propaganda by deed". "Anarchism is born of a moral revolt against social injustice," he writes, and his success is "the realization by those accustomed to obedience and passivity, their power and their real possibility. He proceeded to act in Benevento in 1877, when Malatesta and his companions distribute weapons to the inhabitants and burned the archives of the administration. At from that time, Malatesta was forced into exile and his life will be made for travel, activism, launches of magazines and publishing of manifestos, articles and books. He stressed in particular the need to know the organization of the anarchist groups.
p.104:
Lecoin The letter sent from prison to the military governor of the city of Paris , September 12, 1918, is well known. It says: "I firmly believe that a man can and should refuse to kill in another. War fomented by global capitalism is the worst of crimes. I protest against him by not responding to the mobilization order. By not obeying orders to the soldiers, refusing to let me militarize, I act in accordance with my anarchist ideal. "
p.111:
Kropotkin:" Lenin is not comparable to any other revolutionary figure in history. The revolutionaries had ideals. Lenin has none. It is a madman, a priest, anxious to burn, kill and sacrifice. What we call good and evil have what is called for him meaningless. He is ready to betray Russia for an experiment. "
p.112:
market economies as well as the centrally planned economies had, albeit for very different reasons, interest in baptizing" socialism "and "communism" the bloody experience. We know they would not deprived [...] the real stronghold of anarchism during the inter-war becomes Spain. It was there that he knows his history and experience that will conflict with the forces of fascism, capitalism and Stalinism combined to shoot him.
p.118:
(about the English Revolution) The agrarian collectivization is, of course, but also industrial and, in some areas it soon for all aspects of community life. Sat Dolgoff summarizes what he learned to work on these communities, which were made, he said, "without owners, without bosses and without putting up a competition to stimulate capitalist production. In most industries, factories, mills, workshops, transportation, utilities, workers, their unions and their revolutionary committees reorganized and administrated the prodcution, distribution and administration services without any high-salaried workers and by passing the authority of the state. [...] Their efforts were coordinated by free association in large areas and allowed an increase in production (especially agriculture), increased the number of schools and improved public services .
p.133: Economy
If you want to briefly characterize the anarchist position on the terms of the economy, we can say that from the 19 th century, it was self-managing and refused all his might what he called wage slavery, it was proposed to abolish qu'intolérable because all points of view. In other words, anarchism demanded that producers have control over their business. In this sense that Proudhon, for example, recalls that the willingness of producers and workers to organize by themselves and the production is "the fact revolutionary par excellence." This high requirement is still that of the anarchists who claim therefore, in accordance with all principles and values that are theirs, that individuals have, in the field of economics, the same freedom and they claim the same equality in all other spheres of human activity.
[...] More generally, across the diversity of ways of production and distribution of goods that were considered, there is always the ideal as anarchism Calls, consisting of places of trvail truly democratic and without hierarchy. We would find people working within a production system where everyone has a say as well about what is produced and consumed on the conditions of that production and consumption. It goes without saying that private ownership of means of production and wage-slavery wage-are seen as imperative to abolish calamities.
One can guess how such requirements, which are from the origin of the movement deeply rooted in the heart of anarchism, make sharp contradictions between it today to capitalism and market economy as they s 'yesterday opposed to economies of Central eplanification. In this last case, anarchists detested a fast authoritarianism of these economies and deplored their inefficiency, lack of democracy and freedom, such savings are intended to ensure there appears a class of "coordinators" as oppressive as possible they prophesied in the wake of Bakunin. This prediction has been amply confirmed by history.
p.135:
Michael Albert explains: "The propaganda has managed to convince everyone of the benefits of the market. But I personally think that the market is one of the worst creation of mankind. The market is something that the structure and dynamics guarantee the creation of a long series of ailments, ranging from alienation to antisocial attitudes and behavior through a unfair distribution of wealth. I am an abolitionist markets, even though I know they will not disappear tomorrow, but I'm the same way that I am an abolitionist racism. "
p.141:
After all, demand a pay rise, is not implicitly recognize someone the right to hire and thus perpetuating what was then commonly wage slavery? Also, request a particular reform, does not implicitly recognize to an authority the right to consent? If industrial action does that obtaining better working conditions and better wages, the anarchists refused to enter into this logic. Moreover, trade unionism linked to a political party, even a socialist, they seemed necessarily degenerate into parliamentarism and bourgeois and reformist politics.
p.149: Education
In the wake of the French Revolution, our current national education systems and state will gradually fall into place around the world from 19 th century. This event will be perceived, not without reason, as a project and a victory for the left. And it is true that even today, any attack against them is essentially right.
Yet right from the beginning of this adventure, anarchists, while recognizing the benefits that can be hoped, would show strong criticism. You may have guessed: it is no name in some form or other of elitism or because they would in defense of the old aristocratic order that anarchists emit grave and serious reservations about this development. However, it was inevitable that these anti-authoritarian recognize immediately - and they were left, almost the only ones to do with this relentless insistence, the dangers and threats to freedom that is the very idea a national education project as soon as they receive an appropriation by the state of brains of children. Hope of such education if it forms lobotomized? What to expect if the immolation of freedom on the altar of conformity and creativity that of common thought, fraternity on that narrow and ethnocentric nationalism? What sense, then, if not making people docile, obedient to the teachers and especially the bosses, and will be fully prepared - the First World War in sanglnate administer the decisive evidence to go to the front to die as soon as the order given?
p.151:
For Godwin, the history of the anarchist movement thus the educational achievements of concrete from the establishment of schools and educational institutions to develop educational materials and publication of newspapers and magazines for children. Hive Sébastien Faure, Cempuis Paul Robin, Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell of Beacon Hill and Summerhill by Alexander Neill are among the best known of these schools.
