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.
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