Hopeful voyage; uncertain point of arrival?

Change the World Without Taking Power is an extraordinary book. It's a ship that weighs anchor in search of the contemporary meaning of the revolution; that clearly perceives the reefs confronting its adventure and, notwithstanding its uncertain end, advances convinced of its arrival in port. Our critique can only be, then, an internal one--in both the standard sense of the word, and in the more intimate sense that, in these pages, we'll be travelling together.

John Holloway is right in supposing that the starting point of a revolutionary critique is negativity: the rejection of our daily experience of the relations of exploitation and domination inherent in capitalist society. This starting point restores us, damaged subjects, into the core of this revolutionary critique and, at the same time, demands of us a negative dialectic--in Adorno's sense--as a dialectic of the revolution. And this starting point also restores the notion of fetishism--in the footsteps of the young Lukacs--as the key notion of the Marxist critique of capitalist society. A great deal of the best pages in Holloway's book reflects on these notions of fetishism and negativity as, for example, he outlines the contention between the traditions of Marxism as critique and Marxism as positive science; or the difference between hard fetishism and fetishisation-as-process, revealing its revolutionary thinking.

This is a good point of departure. But there is no point of departure, no matter its theoretical firmness, that can guarantee us in advance that we will reach a good political port. I think that Holloway's hopeful voyage, notwithstanding his capacity to navigate, has lost its direction and could take us to an unexpected point of arrival; that is to say, to postmodern politics, i.e. versions of liberal politics, instead of to revolutionary politics.

The first reef that Holloway confronts on his trip is that of class reductionism. Holloway seeks to resolve the important political problem of class antagonism by avoiding reducing the diverse social subjects into one--i.e. the working class--and, at the same time, by diluting them into a multiplicity of the so-called social movements. His manoeuvre consists, then, of redirecting those subjects and struggles into a common, binary antagonism, between power-to and power-over, which fractures the social flow of doing in capitalism. This manoeuvre is virtuous for many reasons. One of them refers to praxis--unsuccessfully. Whereas his argument seeks to specify the nature of the antagonism between power-to and power-over, it cannot distinguish it from the antagonism between labour and capital, nor derive from this antagonism the multiplicity of social subjects and struggles. How to derive patriarchy, for example, from an antagonism between power-over and power-to, which cannot be discerned from the antagonism between capital and labour? Do the capitalist market and the state exercise their power through the identification of the working class as a class, or through the atomisation of this class identity into an aggregate of citizens and sellers of their labour power? The manoeuvre leads, then, to an undifferentiated aggregate of social subjects and struggles, with non-identity as a criterion for aggregation. Holloway associates these subjects and struggles with workers and class struggle in a broader sense, certainly, but his own suppression of any criterion justifying this association, malgre lui-meme, spreads fertilizer on the populism of postmodern politics.

The second reef that Holloway confronts is the reduction of the capitalist state to an instrument and, once again, this is another decisive political problem for revolutionary thinking. Recovering his previous critical insight into the state as a form of capitalist social relation, with reference to the German debate of the Staatsableitung, Holloway can face this reef successfully.

The capitalist state is not a neutral tool that can be used for building an emancipated society and, consequently, the revolution cannot be conceived as simply taking state power. Perhaps Holloway exaggerates the degree to which revolutionaries of the past conceived the revolution in such a simple manner, but his argument against simplistic conceptions of revolution as taking the power of the state is conclusive, correctly posing a problem that is still vital for revolutionary politics. Holloway restates the question of what is to be done with the capitalist state, from the point of view of the revolutionary. But he risks his ship in a more turbulent sea when he tries to find an alternative answer to this question.

The manoeuvre consists, here, of the movement from the affirmation that revolutionary politics cannot be centred on taking the power of the state as a instrument, to the affirmation that the state itself is not central to power relations in capitalist society. This last statement contradicts one of the key premises of the critique of the state as a form of capitalist social relations: the separation between the political and economic spheres in capitalist society. The state is the place of power because of this separation between the political and the economic. Hence the particularisation of the state is an illusion--but an objective illusion, with effects that cannot be disdained.

Holloway's manoeuvre results in a paradoxical conclusion: that the question of what is to be done with the capitalist state from a revolutionary perspective becomes unimportant, since the state is only one amongst other centres of power relations within capitalist society. This manoeuvre leads us to the micro-politics of the postmodernists, instead of to revolutionary politics.

Holloway's ship is damaged after having confronted the aforementioned reefs. The images in the book's last pages--images of a merely expressive quasipolitics (a politics of events), constituted by an aggregate of diverse, undifferentiated activities (an area of activio,), prosecuted by an aggregate of equally undifferentiated social movements (a space of anti-power)--reveal that damage. Holloway insists that these are images of revolutionary politics. And he can rightly say that his point of departure, his charts, and the reefs he confronts on his travels, belong to a rich tradition of revolutionary thinking. But this argument is not enough. Holloway does not offer any criterion that could justify the classification of the politics of events as revolutionary politics, and so it remains associated with postmodern politics. It is not by chance that Change the World, along with Negri and Hardt's Empire, was received as a postmodern political manifesto during the revolutionary days of the beginning of 2002 in Argentina.