A call for emancipatory reflection: introduction to the forum.

Not long ago, the demiurges of postmodernism seemed to have been relatively successful in spreading the idea that to change the world (or even to think about it) was the task of incorrigible activists, who deserved a special place in a museum of modern dreams. But in recent years, an extremely rich 'repertoire of actions' (Tarrow, 1995), from Chiapas to Seattle, from Buenos Aires to Mumbai, has made the absurdity of this belief apparent. 'Another world is possible!' has become the mobilising, utopian cry of our time; what unlocks the feelings of liberation, and allows the creation of new spaces for participation and debate, is precisely the vagueness of this statement. But is this imprecision also a symptom of the difficulty inherent in developing a general strategy, able to shelter and nurture the plurality of struggles while simultaneously providing political and ideological consistency to resistance?

The originality of the present moment lies in the way that the regaining of the streets by a variety of actors not only represents a reaction to global neoliberalism and its consequences, but also shows an enthusiastic determination to discuss the meaning of revolution today. The present Forum is a contribution to this task. The debate within it about John Holloway's book, Change" the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, has been inspired by previous debates and will, hopefully, encourage further polemics within Capital & Class and elsewhere.

The reasons for engaging with this particular book are several. It would be hard to refuse Holloway's call for what Zizek (2002) has called 'emancipatory reflection'. Holloway's work has been welcomed across the world at a time when intellectual contributions to radical change are scarce. Holloway stands against both those who have succumbed to the sirens of either 'empirical reality' or abstract theory, and those who believe that the new anarchist times do not need any theoretical elaboration (see for instance Klein, 2003). Loyal to the autonomous spirit of his time, and enchanted by the Zapatista project, Holloway neither searches for confirmation of his theses, nor provides close answers to his questions.

Three key issues for Marxists and those advocating radical change, offered in the book and interconnected, constitute the kernel of this debate: the understanding of praxis as 'practical negativity'; the idea of 'anti-power'; and the rejection of the state as a tool for radical change.

As a continuation of his previous work, Holloway invites us to reflect on the weakness of what is conceived of as inalterably powerful, i.e. capital. He suggests that, in this world, it is only humans (rather than the fetishised forms of their work) who retain the capacity to create and change the world: 'It is labour alone which constitutes social reality. There is no external force; our own power is confronted by nothing but our own power, albeit in alienated form' (Holloway, 1993: 19). Capitalist contradictions are in no way external, but are in fact inhabited subjectivity. However, capitalist societies are based on permanent processes of 'objectification of subjective doing' (p. 27). (1) By 'doing', Holloway means much more than work and physical action. 'Doing' is the movement of 'practical negativity': 'doing changes, negates an existing state of affairs. Doing goes beyond, transcends' (p. 23). The power implied in doing is negative: 'The doing of the doers', Holloway argues, 'is deprived of social validation: we and our doing become invisible. History becomes the history of the powerful, of those who tell others what to do. The flow of doing becomes an antagonistic process in which the doing of most is denied, in which the doing of most is appropriated by the few' (pp. 29-30).

The notion of subjectivity as negativity is powerful: 'The world that we feel to be wrong' (p. 3) must be negated, including our identity. But this presents a real problem to the organisation of resistance: one significant point of contention in Holloway's proposal is that, whereas the negation of 'what we are' is essential to insubordination, the moment of negation cannot be grasped without considering the moment of reinvention of identities, organisations and strategies which follows negation. If class struggle is, as Holloway argues, 'the struggle to classify and against being classified at the same time as it is, indistinguishably, the struggle between constituted classes' (p. 143), how do we then theorise the struggle for human realisation and social recognition against the expansion of indifference entailed in the expansion of value? In other words, if the 'scream of insubordination is the scream of non-identity' (p. 15), how do we nourish the revolutionary potential of new organisational forms of resistance like the World Social Forum, or the Brazilian landless movement Movimento Sere Terra, to use just two examples, which emerged as negation was taking place and which became the forms through which resistance asserts itself?. Is it 'practical negativity', or rather the 'contradictory tension' between 'negativity and positivity' (Laclau & Mouffe, 1999) that gives rebellion its real force?

One lesson that can be learned from the Argentinian experience since December 2001 is that, on the one hand, the struggle to recompose the political fabric and develop new forms of democracy and participation by a variety of social movements fired directly at the heart of the system of corruption, exploitation and domination entailed by neoliberal stability. The rejection entailed in Que se vayan todos!--'Out with them all!'--was followed by a moment of intense mobilisation and the emergence of new forms of resistance vis-a-vis the institutional crisis. Autonomous and 'disorganised' movements became central to political processes, thus overshadowing institutional politics.

On the other hand, the search for autonomy found its limits in the recomposition of state power in the hands of traditional political elites. Does this mean that there was no political change in Argentina after December 2001? Where do we look for 'political changes'? The recomposition following the December crisis re-established the separation between 'civil society' and the 'state' in a way that intensified the social movements' dilemma, brought about by 'anti-politics': the contradiction between the need to create a political movement able to coordinate action and dispute the power of the state, and the free development of a pluralist movement of resistance based on autonomous practices and self-affirmation (Dinerstein, 2004; 2003).

The second controversial issue in Holloway's book is the idea that anti-power is the route to emancipation. Holloway is not concerned with strategic organisation, but rather advocates uncertainty and anti-power: 'How can we change the world without taking power? The answer is obvious: we don't know' (p. 22).

What we do know is that practical negativity is anti-power, and anti-power means the rejection of any revolutionary project aimed at taking the power of the state. Following Holloway, 'the problem of the traditional concept of revolution is perhaps not that it aimed too high, but that it aimed too low. The notion of capturing positions of power ... misses the point that the aim of the revolution is to dissolve relations of power, to create a society based on the mutual recognition of people's dignity' (p. 20).

But is anti-power a real possibility, or a rhetorical device that reflects the fragmentation and uncertainty of our time? Does the defence of oppositional struggles, which embrace the idea of praxis as practical negativity, adequately engage with the reality of present struggles?

Does it give democracy--according to Lowy, the 'absent concept' in Holloway's proposal--the central place that it deserves?

The third matter of discrepancy within this Forum is Holloway's proposal that a revolutionary movement should not seize the power of the state. The impact of Zapatismo on the world lies, according to Holloway, in that it 'moves us decisively beyond the state illusion ... The state illusion understands revolution as the winning of state power and the transformation of society through the state' (2002:157). That a revolutionary movement must have as its goal the taking of the power of the state is highly debatable. What seems to be clear is that to reject such a project is not the same as to deny that the state is, due to the very nature of capitalism, one of the main institutional forms of mediation of capitalist social relations of production and, therefore, of class struggle too.

Holloway made a significant contribution regarding this matter a long time ago, when he highlighted the fact that the state was not a thing but the political form of the social relations of capital (Holloway & Picciotto, 1977). One cannot get out of the 'state-yes/ state-no' loop until one regards the state as such. As a social form, the state 'is and is not'. Then, why should the possibility that the form of the state can be disputed and fought over on behalf of the interests of the majority be overruled by Holloway's proposal? Is Holloway disregarding state power? If so, can the power of the state be disregarded? Or is the search for emancipation a contradictory process of going in, against and through the state? These and more questions are posed in the contributions that follow. In the end, 'each thought is a force-field, and just as the truth-content of a judgment cannot be divorced from its execution, the only true ideas are those which transcend their own thesis' (Adorno, 2000: 40-41). The polemic is open?

Notes

(1). All page references, unless otherwise stated, are from John Holloway (2002) Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, Pluto, London.

(2.) I would like to thank Claire Rigby for her assistance in the editing of this Forum.

References

Adorno, T. (2000) 'Message in a bottle', in S. Zizek (ed.) (2000a) Mapping Ideology (Verso) London, pp. 35-41.

Dinerstein, A. C. (2004) 'Beyond crisis: The nature of political change in Argentina', in Pratyush Chandra et al. (eds.) The Politics of Imperialism and Counterstrategies (Aakar Books) New Delhi, pp. 263-301.

Dinerstein, A. C. (2003) 'Power or counter power? The dilemma of the piquetero movement in Argentina post crisis', in Capital & Class, no. 81, pp. 1-7.

Holloway, J. (2002) Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (Pluto Press) London (ISBN 0 7453 1863 0) 237 PP. Also available online at <http:// www.endpage.com/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Holloway/Change_The_ World_Without_Taking_ Power.htm>.

Holloway, J. (2002) 'Zapatismo and the social sciences', in Capital & Class, no. 78, pp. 153-160.

Holloway & Picciotto (1977) 'Capital, crisis and the state', in Capital O Class, no. 2, pp. 76-101.

Holloway, J. (1993) 'The freeing of Marx', in Common Sense, no. 14 (CSE).

Klein, N. (2003) 'Que demonios pueden hacer hoy los intelectuales? Los Irrelevantes libres', a talk given at Arte y Confeccion: La Semana Cultural por Brukman, 27 May to I June, Buenos Aires; transcript.

Laclau, E. & C. Mouffe (1999) Hegemony, & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso) London & New York.

Tarrow, S. (1995) Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge University Press).

Zizek, S. (ed.) (2002) Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (Verso) London & New York.