Book Review: Change the World Without Taking Power — John Holloway
If there was ever a book with a misleading title, this would be it. John Holloway’s Change the world without taking power neither presents a blueprint of how what the title suggests is possible nor does it, contrary to its subtitle, engage in an academic discussion on how we should redefine revolution (or if such an exercise is necessary to begin with). However, this is not a flaw of the book but its central feature. Throughout the book, Holloway emphasises one key theme, the power of negation. The book itself is a contribution in that direction, Holloway asserts that “We need revolution, but not like the revolutions of the twentieth century” (xiii), what follows is a scathing and necessary critique of the state-centred revolutionary projects of previous socialist regimes and their accompanying theoretical debates. While this critique leaves much to be desired when it comes to the all too present question of what is to be done? It presents impressive interventions that can be integrated into our understanding of revolutionary change making this an indispensable book.
While the theme of negation has its critical weaknesses, the popularity and importance of Holloway’s positions have seen his book reproduced over four editions with an initial publication date of 2002 [1]. This makes me, and this review, a significant latecomer to his ideas. My goal through this article is to explore three of Holloways, key arguments. First, his emphasis on negation. Second, the importance of fetishization in creating a “divided subjectivity” (145, 157). Third, and finally, the idea of anti-power as everyday revolutionary activity. While these themes emerge as intertwined within the book, I will attempt to distil them here for the benefit of presenting a more salient assessment of Holloway’s ideas which are worth reading as they stand.
The power of negation
Holloway begins the book by introducing the concept of “The Scream” in an attempt to answer the question of where does resistance come from? The scream, according to Holloway, is a near-universal and intrinsic rebellion against things as they are. It is not limited to specific sections of society and does not manifest itself in a uniform way (150). However, it is a uniting experience that transforms the subjectivity of one into a collective “we”. While pluralistic, and, in cruder terms, unrefined, this “we” highlights the antagonisms that exist within our lives (5) and creates an “arc” like tension between what exists now and what could exist in the future (7). The scream is universal because it is inescapable. Even if we try to convince ourselves that there is no escape from how things currently are, and therefore resign in acceptance, we continue to be confronted by the horrors of capitalism and the inequality, self-destructiveness, violence, and hunger that stem from it (9). No matter what, then, the scream reemerges as an ever-present feature of our lives.
Holloway, however, identifies that the scream alone is not enough. The scream, he argues is “always tainted by that which it is a scream against. Negation always involves a subsumption of that which is negated. That can be seen in any struggle against power: a merely negative response to power reproduces power within itself” (151–152). He continues to argue that this does not mean that what we scream against is always bound to recreate oppressive power dynamics, but that the scream, and the reflection we submit ourselves and the world to by virtue of this scream, evolves. It is this sense of “not-yet-ness” (152), the yearning to escape from the things that make us scream, which drives and is transformed into emancipatory action. The engine of not-yet-ness does not only counter capitalism, but it will (or at least should) continue to drive progress after a revolutionary moment resisting institutionalisation and entropy.
Although the scream is tainted by the power it is struggling against, Holloway also argues that it possesses a positive quality in its striving to be something other than it already is. “the scream” he says, “in its refusal of that which exists, it projects some idea of what might exist in its place”. The positive attribute of the scream becomes amplified in a collective setting.
The experience of shared struggle already involves the development of relations between people that are different in quality from the social relations of capitalism. There is much evidence that for people involved in strikes or similar struggles, the most important outcome of the struggles is often not the realisation of the immediate demands, but the development of a community of struggle, a collective doing characterised by its opposition to capitalist forms of social relations (208).
It is these struggles, in their plurality, which “though generally invisible, can flare up in moments of acute social tension” (159).
By taking the scream as his starting point, Holloway collapses two processes into one creating an important weakness. Hollway’s use of scream to explain where resistance and rebellion originate is surely justified and necessary to develop a self emancipatory politics as this review will explain in the following sections. However, using the scream to explain the transition from individual reaction to collective resistance leaves several questions unanswered.
There is no doubt, as Holloway points out, that the scream and the ties of solidarity it can create (since individuals can share a common scream) are indispensable for revolutionary movements. The existence of a certain level of autonomy or collectivity has been identified as necessary for revolutions by resource mobilisation (Tilly’s CATNETs) and structural (Skocpol’s peasant communes) theorists alike. Even rational choice theorists, infamous for their focus on the individual as the unit of analysis, have had to concede that social relations create (moral) systems of reward and punishment that encourage specific behaviours, something Holloway also acknowledges (159).
However, in his focus on the centrality of self-emancipation as the crucial element for a successful socialist revolution, Holloway seems to get himself stuck in a somewhat voluntarist narrative in which the working class, if left to its own vices, will inevitably march towards revolution. If that is the case then why has this yet to happen? Holloway does not explicitly answer this question, but he does, in the spirit of negation, field a rightful critique of classic Marxist answers and their pitfalls.
Marxists, Holloway explains, argue that the proliferation of a dominant ideology leaves the working class powerless to overcome the power of capitalism on their own. This understanding of the working class as an entity that needs to be led recreates a dynamic that centres the power of a party over those seeking emancipation. He points out that within that approach
The emphasis on the lack of understanding of the working class is usually (inevitably?) accompanied by an assumption that the working class is a ‘they’. ‘They’ have the wrong ideas, so our role (we who have the right ideas) is to enlighten them, to illuminate them, to bring them true consciousness (55).
Holloway argues that this approach has, at its core, an error of emphasising ideology over fetishisation, the process of separating workers from their labour (or the product of their labour) (55). By separating ideology from the economic process, Marxists, he claims, distinguish themselves as the intellectual leaders of the working class, which, in turn, distinguishes themselves from the class whose self-emancipation they are purportedly seeking. The danger of this approach is that struggle itself becomes instrumentalised and a hierarchy of struggle emerges in which some struggles are given preference over others as they are seen as necessary to the capture or retention of power (16).
However, even if the distinction between ideology and fetishisation is collapsed (something that Hollway does not seem to do), or we make fetishism the centre point of developing a critique of power as opposed to ideology, then what? How does the need to make fetishisation a centre point in the class struggle become proliferated enough to successfully challenge the power of capitalism, its ability to recreate itself, and violently crush or deny the development of serious opposition to it?
While Holloway’s thoughts on the matter remain unclear, it would seem logical that the type of organisation he is striving for is one which simultaneously maintains the autonomy of workers as the self-emancipatory subject, but also assists in the development of their consciousness from an individualistic scream to collective resistance. This would ultimately require any organisation to centre negation into its practice.
Divided subjectivity and the revolutionary subject
While Holloway’s focus on alienation underplays the role of ideology and organisation, it does present a useful answer to the question of who is the revolutionary subject? The book presents a convincing argument that the working class does not exist as an a priori empirical unit of resistance. Neither can the forging of the working class be seen as a task separate from or more important than other forms of struggle (39). Indeed, the ways in which alienation functions produce a multiplicity of antagonisms (41–42) under capitalism that, nevertheless, can be traced back to a binary form expressed in the form of those doing, and those having things done to them (39).
The dual nature of this power and the function of the “working class” (those doing and being done to) reveals, simultaneously, a complicity in the reproduction of capitalism (51 — 53) and an identitarian expression of opposition within it (64). The complicity stems from the fact that in the act of doing (what capitalism tells us we should do) we (as workers) are contributing to its reproduction including providing the material power needed for capitalists to continue their domination of us — this even though we are compelled to do what they tell us. However, even when we do what we are told to, a multitude of antagonistic identifications (based on race, gender identity, etc) emerge which contain within them a negative quality. Hollway explains by giving two examples:
To say ‘I am black’ in a society characterised by discrimination against blacks is to challenge the society in a way in which to say ‘I am white’ in those same societies clearly does not: despite its affirmative, identitarian form, it is a negative, anti-identitarian statement. To say ‘we are indigenous’ in a society that systematically denies the dignity of the indigenous is a way of asserting dignity, of negating the negation of dignity, of saying ‘we are indigenous and more than that’. The negative charge of such statements, however, cannot be understood in a fixed manner: it depends on the particular situation and is always fragile.
The process of identification (be it self-identification or imposed identification) represents nothing but a struggle of imposing a layer of stability (maintaining the separation of doing and done) and the resistance to it (99). The tension created by this alienation-based identification results in a “divided subjectivity” (145) or a divided self where we are torn between subordination and insubordination (157). This divided subjectivity means that there is no one single revolutionary subject. In fact, we should reject the idea of overt militancy and “ask about the force of all who refuse to subordinate themselves, the force of all who refuse to become capitalist machines. It is only when grounded in the ubiquity of resistance that revolution becomes a possibility” (175).
Two things become possible when we focus on the divided subjectivity which emerges from alienation and the processes of identification that are associated with it. First, we can highlight the prefigurative relations that emerge through the struggle such as “relations of comradeship, of solidarity, of love” (153). These positive attributes of negation can form the basic building blocks of an emancipatory practice in the struggle against capitalism and help transform the scream from an individual reaction into a collective one. Second, our complicity within the reproduction of capitalism reveals categories (work, money, class, identity) as relationships and processes of composition, decomposition, and re-composition (162). This, dialectically, empties categories of their import and opens them “to reveal that their content is struggle” (89). This revelation allows for the hope necessary to fight for change.
The everyday revolution
Understanding the multiplicity of resistance and divided subjectivity is key to Holloway's negation of the power-driven thesis of revolution. Alienation, he argues, cannot be overcome by capturing state power, but in recouping our sense of agency by understanding the power we possess in what we already do. This includes understanding that the objects we create through alienated labour emanate from us. The social process of production means that the process of recovery is social and not individual further empowering the scream (114). While this is not a deviation from Marxist interpretations, Holloway criticizes some Marxists for seeing the fight against alienation as a cumulative one, that revolution will not happen until specific conditions are met. In this way, alienation is taken as something that closes the possibility of revolution by separating what is being done from who is doing it instead of opening it (137).
In opposition to this conception, Holloway argues that the real struggle is not only to transform external power relations, but to also transform ourselves (166). By transforming ourselves we can become active agents intensifying the disintegration of capitalism (204). This is as our position within the doing-done relationship makes us the immediate weakness of capitalism if we so choose to utilise it (221). Resistance, therefore, stops being a “continuous process of organisation building” (214) done by a party apparatus, but emerges as forms of self-organisation that promotes discontinuities which he describes as
flashes of lightning which light up the sky and pierce the capitalist forms of social relations, showing them for what they are: a daily repeated and never predetermined struggle to break our doing and to break us, a daily repeated struggle to make the abnormal seem normal and the avoidable seem inevitable (214).
Resistance must therefore become less about the practices of organising and more focused on the practices of creating “events” that force openings of discontinuity within the day-to-day functioning of capitalism. Holloway’s calls for creating such disruptive events fall in line with the use of direct action tactics used by the likes of the Industrial Workers of the World and other anarcho-syndicalist unions. However, even in those unions, there remains a tendency to prioritise organisation over doing. While these two things are not diametrically opposed, it is easy to focus on one in a way that eclipses the other. Holloway’s focus on doing is thus a well-placed warning for any political organisation.
How to change the world without taking power provides an important look into the power of negation as a revolutionary engine. While it leaves some questions unanswered, it paves the way for a self-emancipatory philosophy of revolution that is up to each of us to develop within our everyday practices.
[1] The page numbering used in this review is from Pluto Press’ 2019 fourth edition of the book
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