AUT: Re: The Limitations of "Open Marxism"

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

WARNING: THESE ARE ROUGH NOTES.

This is an interesting piece (if I remember correctly, Mike wrote for Common
Sense a few times), but it is also full of relatively important weaknesses.
I will attempt to address them in some detail.  Note that I am sending out
my own review for publication this week, so I am not going into my own
points in any detail just yet.

Oddly, the journal What Next? seems to be a sort of psuedo-Trotskyist
something with a lot of Socialist Alliance members.  Anyone care to
elucidate on the Socialist Alliance?

Cheers,
Chris
"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the
false." - Debord

> The Limitations of "Open Marxism"
>
> Reviewed by Mike Rooke
>
> John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto, 2002.

> JOHN HOLLOWAY has written an important book. It is a sustained
> critique of orthodox (ie. Leninist) Marxism from the standpoint of the
> Open Marxism of which Holloway is an exponent (along with others
> such as Richard Gunn, Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis).

This may seem trivial, but it is not simply a critique of Leninist Marxism.
Holloway critiques all kinds of Engelsian Marxism, the Hegelian Marxists
from early Lukacs to the Frankfurt School to the
structuralist/post-structuralist Marxism of the Deleuze-Guattari-Foucault
influenced strands of Autonomia via Negri.


> The central argument is that the strategic orientation of the
> (principally) Leninist tradition has focused on the capture and
> wielding of state power, and the conception of socialism
> characteristic of this tradition has been marked by a subordination to
> this goal (the state illusion). More specifically he targets the
> scientific- Marxist partyism of this orthodox tradition (p.84),
> which he rejects for its pretensions to be an all-encompassing theory
> of reality (a scientific epistemology). The greater part of the post-
> Marx Marxist tradition, therefore, has become a reified theory and
> practice, reflecting an accommodation to the structures and thought of
> bourgeois society. Its fetishisation of state power (its capture) has
> led to the consistent betrayal of revolutionary aspirations, and the
> reproduction, rather than the abolition, of oppressive power
> relations. While such criticisms of Lenin and Third International
> Marxism are not new, a large part of the uniqueness of Holloways book
> derives from his use of fetishism as a critical category with which to
> construct a conception of revolution as the dissolution of power (as
> anti-power).
>
> He begins from the scream, a starting point that is ontologically
> prior to doing.

John's approach is NOT ontological.  John is opposing all ontological
starting points because he rejects starting from 'being'.  Anti-ontology
forms a central theme of the book, even if that is not always apparent.
Screaming and doing do not form separate moments for John.  Hell, just look
at the verb: screaming.  Its from the verb 'to scream', which is an action
verb, not a being verb.  This does not bode well.

> In contradistinction to metaphysical materialism
> (which begins from the primacy of the material world) Holloways
> conception of doing is that of practical negation. But human doing
> is broken when the powerful separate the done from the doers and
> appropriate it for themselves, bringing about a destruction of
> subjectivity.

There are no meaningful prior 'powerful'.  Mike here inadvertantly creates a
teleology where 'the powerful' set about separating the done from the doers.
What does this mean historically, genetically?  The people who separated the
doers from the done had a long way to go which involved the flight of some
Feudal lords from the immobility and insubordination of serfs, and that is
only in some cases, in Western Europe, in a handful of countries (Englands,
The Netherlands, France, mostly).  The process involved the recreation of
pre-capitalist social relations of labor, in slavery, which combined with
enclosures, and political struggles between mutually intertwined propertied
classes, etc.

Positing 'the powerful' prior to the doers already causes historical chaos
and also misses John's point that the doers, often in the process of fleeing
the land (manor, demnse, etc.) helped to produce their own separation
because it was often, in the beginning, a means of gaining freedom.  That
this changed should not surprise us, and that capital would eventually
spread not from the flight of pre-capitalist propertied classes from their
being bound to serfs, but from capital fleeing the insurgency of the new
proletariat.

Also, subjectivity is not destroyed.  This is wrong.  Our subjectivity still
exists, but in alienated, fetishized form (in the mode of being denied).  If
our subjectivity ceased to exist, capital would not get value from our
labor.  In fact, as George Caffentzis points out in his article on machines
and value in a book on high tech, labor is only value creating because it
has a negating element within it which is hostile to the process.  Our
ability to struggle is exactly why we are capable of creating exchange value
while machines cannot.

> This results in the struggle of the scream to liberate
> power-to from power-over, to liberate subjectivity from its
> objectification. Holloway argues that his notion of power-to is not
> captured by traditional revolutionary concepts of power (which seek to
> establish a counter-power rather than an anti-power).

But it does have precedence in Autonomia and the notions of potestas and
potentia.

> In his
> discourse of the rupture of doing and done, Holloway relies on Marxs
> category of alienated labour. The attempt to develop Marxs category
> is based on a critique of orthodox Marxisms way of conceptualising
> the working class and capital. The problem, now well elaborated in the
> texts of Open Marxism, is that in orthodox Marxism the working class
> is understood as standing in an external relation to capital, where
> the antagonism is one of separately constituted entities.

Yes and no.  In orthodox Marxism, labor is understood as a function of
capital, not the other way around.  Orthodox Marxism relegates class
struggle to a merely mediatory position in a larger capital logic, typified
by the base-superstructure metaphor.

Some elements in autonomist Marxism actually put forward the idea of capital
and labor standing externally to each other as two opposed subjects, two
armies at war.  Open Marxism was always at pains to show that capital was
nothing but our alienated subjectivity and that there is no actual 'us' and
'them', but us against ourselves.

> Holloway
> argues that rather than seeing the working class as labour (it
> actually constitutes capital in its acceptance of the wage relation),
> it should be seen as the struggle against labour, and therefore
> against capital. In a clear reference to the failed revolutions of
> the 20th century, Holloway argues that conceptualising the labour-
> capital relation as an external one is responsible for a view of
> struggle which leaves both sides essentially unchanged, and merely
> reproduces the old power-over relation after any seizure of state
> power.

This is a place where a critique of John might be levelled in posing class
as the struggle against labor.  This has come up on the list before
(anti-work), and I think that we all need to be clear that labor is not a
simply unified category.  There is labor as the metabolic relation between
human beings and nature and alienated labor in the form of capitalist labor.
We oppose the latter, but not the former.  John may not always be
sufficiently clear on this or prefer a good turn of phrase to cautious
formulation.  But his intent is clear enough.

> How then can such a fetishised view of struggle and power be overcome?
> The first step is to see categories as the manifestation of forms of
> struggle  ie. as open and therefore contested: we exist against-and-
> in-Capital (p.90). A scientific (Marxist) approach involves
> dissolving the categories of thought in this way, in Marxs words to
> grasp the absolute movement of becoming. In parallel with this is
> the flow of doing, the struggle for self-determination which
> constitutes the actual struggle against fetishisation in daily life.

Parallel gives the image of separation again.  Doing and doing's alienated
form are not separate.  Alienated doing is the way in which doing takes
place in capitalist society.  Appearance is the mode of existence of
essence.  There is no separation (Plato, Kant) nor a collapse of them into
simply appearance (Hume, Nietzsche) or Being (Heidegger)

> In developing this argument Holloway draws on both Marx and Lukcs,
> but employs his own distinctive categories: doing and done;
> power-to and power-over; and anti-power. I wondered throughout
> whether Holloways discourse of doing and done adds anything
> qualitatively new to Marxs labour- capital antagonism.

These are not exactly new categories.  I think that John attempts to get
away from terms which have been damaged by popular use and also as a
pedagogical tool for explaining the real content of Marx's notion of
production and practice.

> In his
> insistence that the separation of the worker from the means of
> production must be seen as only part of a more general separation of
> subject and object, of people from their activity, Holloway draws the
> conclusion that value production cannot be the starting point of the
> analysis of class struggle (p.148).

Labour here means capitalist labor, which cannot be the starting point
because it is already embedded in the capital-labor relation.  The struggle
Mike discusses below, as well as the anti-colonial struggles, stemmed from
pre-capitalist labor's attempt to reject the specific form of alienation
that came with capital, as expropriation and enclosure.

> Holloway has in mind those
> struggles (such as the peasants of the Chiapas) not directly rooted in
> capitalist production. We cannot just start from labour, he declares.
> This, no doubt, explains his inclination throughout the book to
> collapse the category of (alienated) labour into the more general
> category of alienated doing, and thus to straddle (in my view, not
> too successfully) Marxs historically specific dialectic of labour and
> a more general ontology of doing.

Again with this ontology.  If ontology is about being, we can hardly site
John for an "ontology of doing", which is an oxymoron.  According to the
online Philosophical Dictionary, Ontology is the "Branch of metaphysics
concerned with identifying, in the most general terms, the kinds of things
that actually exist. Thus, the "ontological commitments" of a philosophical
position include both its explicit assertions and its implicit
presuppositions about the existence of entities, substances, or beings of
particular kinds."

As such, I suspect that Mike Rooke does not simply understand what is going
on.  John is attempting to return to the content of Marx's notion of human
practice and labor in the sense of the meabolic relation with nature I
mentioned earlier.  As such, the point is that there are two kinds of labor:
alienated (in specific ways, such as the capital-labor relation) or
non-alienated, also in specific ways.

> This is directly contrary to the approach of Marx, who between the
> 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse and Das Kapital progressively
> concretised the category of labour (and its dialectic), precisely in
> order to specify the central dynamic of the capitalist mode of
> production. Marx was not oblivious or indifferent to struggles
> originating outside this property relation, only insisting on the
> primacy of the wage-capital relation because it was the dominant means
> of pumping the surplus out of the direct producers.

Now 'wage-capital' relation is certainly a new formulation.  The wage is
certainly a form of labor as capital, so its a bit like saying the
capital-capital relation.  Also, while wage-labor may appear to be the
dominant means of pumping surplus value out of the direct producers, this
limited view has been critiqued by autonomists like Leopoldina Fortunadi as
failing to grasp the production of surplus value in housework, ie
predominantly by women outside the wage-labor environment.  Others have
critiqued the relation of slavery to capital formation and the struggles
against the imposition of the capital-labor relation which formed the basis
of many struggles since 1883.  Even so, Marx also recognized the possible
importance of the latter types of struggles when he began his research on
Russia and the struggle against the imposition of capital in the form of the
peasant collectives.

The capital-labore relation is also not simply constituted at the level of
production, but also at the level of exchange and circulation, prerequisites
for the realization of that funny thing called exchange value.  As such,
what John does try to do is to grapple with the capital-labor relation as a
total social relation.  As such, John is not trying to focus on the areas
outside of the capital-labor relation, which includes its imposition and its
non-waged forms (housework, sex work, students [as reproduction of labor
power and replacement for apprenticing], not simply the wage-labor form.
Marx, in critiquing political economy might be forgiven for focussing on
this aspect, but to put forward the idea that this is a sufficient critique
perpetuates the idea that predominantly white, male waged-labor constitutes
the 'real' working class.  It ignores all of the important matters raised by
autonomist Marxism, the Situationists, feminism, the anti-colonial, student,
and Black Liberation movements

> If we do not start
> from labour, as Marx did, then we lose sight of the specific character
> of the exploitation of human labour under capitalism, and the property
> relation that dominates all others. If this is lost sight of, then we
> fail to ask the very question that Marx criticised the classical
> political economists for not asking: what sort of labour is it that
> produces value? The upshot of this is that Holloway not only de-
> historicises the category of labour, but also the category of
> fetishism. This is a pity, since it is one of the noticeable failings
> of the mainstream Marxist tradition (with the exception of Lukcs,
> Rubin and Debord) to have underestimated (or simply ignored) the
> centrality of fetishism for an understanding of capitalism and its
> overthrow.

And yet Holloway does not lose the specificity of Marx's inquisition nor of
the points made by Rubin, Lukacs and Debord.  He rather attempts to
integrate their critique into a world in which struggles at the point of
waged-labor production are not the only struggles against capitalist labor
in its specific form.  John could just as easily discuss the separation of
the producers from the means of producing, but it has all of the economistic
terminological hangovers, and so he chose to formulate the problem in a new
way.  In so doing, he does not fail to specify that the kind of separation
committed by capital is qualitatively different from that under feudalism
and that is has different ramifications.

> In Marx we see commodity fetishism as a necessary form of existence of
> alienated labour. Fetishism consists in the way in which the
> participants of value production experience the (de facto social)
> connections between themselves as relations between things. Lukcss
> notion of reification was an elaboration on this, drawing attention to
> the way in which the atomisation and fragmentation of social life had
> penetrated deeply into, and shaped, social consciousness. It is a
> category, however, that is indissolubly related to the value form of
> production, and one that loses its explanatory force when generalised
> beyond (abstracted from) that context. Unfortunately, Holloways
> commentary does precisely this. It follows from the specific meaning
> that Marx attaches to commodity fetishism, that the struggle to
> dissolve it is inseparable from the task of dissolving commodity
> production: the de-commodification of social labour. This is the
> principal reason why Marx privileged the proletarian struggle above
> others.
>
> Holloways tendency to understate the historical specificity of (wage)
> labour and fetishism finds a further expression in the absence of a
> conception of history as necessary development. Marxs idea that there
> is a logic to the historical process has become distinctly
> unfashionable in these days of the celebration of contingency and
> indeterminacy.

What we have here is a complaint about the abscence of a "historical
materialism", a theory of how history develops from one stage to another.
Well, it's Marx's weakest point, as Richard Gunn explains in Open Marxism
Vol. 2 and as Cyril Smith explains in an article he wrote critiquing
'histo-mat', ironically enough, for the journal Historical Materialism.  In
fact, the moments where Marx elicits a theory of historical development, it
is not one of necessity, not a teleology, but one of class struggle.  To say
that all previous history has been a history of class struggles imputes no
teleology, not necessary progressions from one 'stage' to another.

John does fail to engage with the idea of history as a history of class
struggles and therefore does fail to grapple with historical movement
adequately.  Cyril Smith, ih his review for The Commoner makes the same
point.  But I don't think that John misses that because his notion of
fetishism is not grounded in commodity production and as commodity
fetishism.

Not only is fetishism about how we "experience the (de facto social)
connections between themselves as relations between things" but also about
how they constitute themselves.  Defetishization is not simply an
ideological process, but a material process of undoing the capital-labor
relation.  Defetishization means the struggle against the material
constitution of alienated labor in social practice, as well as our
experience of alienated social relations.  That is why John insists on the
notions of fetishization and detishization, as active practices, processes,
struggles.  And he never has them separate from the specific form of
alienated labor which he speaks about.  The separation of the producers from
the means of producing is unique, qualitatively, to capital as a social form
which relies on the constant process of primitive accumulation (The Commoner
2 and 3, articles by Werner Bonefeld, Sylvia Federici, Midnight Notes and
Massimo de Angelis).  Nowhere else is labor free from the means of laboring
so completely and also free from from personal bondage (patriarchy) to the
exploiting class.  John is certainly all over this aspect of labor which is
specifically capitalist and which constitutes fetishism in its specific
form.  (pp. 179-187 where John discusses its historical development and
specificity to capital.)

> But beginning with The German Ideology, and continued
> at length in the Grundrisse, the notion that the development of the
> division and productivity of labour through various forms of property
> gives rise to the material pre-requisites of communism, was, for Marx,
> central.

This is mixing issues.  First, Marx certainly saw material prerequisites for
communism as necessary.  Communism, contrary to some anarchism, was not
always a leap of consciousness away, but had become possible on the basis of
certain types of social relations creating both the social and material
preconditions for communism.  Secondly, there is this idea that history
represented a series of necessary stages from Slavery to Feudalism to
Capitalism.  Slavery did NOT have to give rise to feudalism.  There was not
logical progression from other pre-capitalist social relations to capitalism
either.  The necessity of this progression is read backwards into history,
in part by Marx who wanted to equate the bourgeois revolutions with the
proletarian revolutions, a rather dubious idea on at least two separate
accounts, and which was NOT central to Marx's critique of capital and the
possibility for communism.

Capital itself, however we got here, provided a sufficient basis for
communism.  That we got here by class struggle does not tell us that WE had
to get HERE.  It has no teleological component and to the degree that Marx
attempts to impose one, he creates and a prioristic theory of history which
contradicts the core of his work.

> Since Holloway claims to be continuing the scientific
> inquiry begun by Marx (expressing the dialectic of negativity), it is
> incumbent on him to confront the question as to why the practical,
> daily struggle against fetishism should lead to the liberation of
> humanity  to communism (for Holloway talks of the endlessness of the
> struggle for communism [p.152]).

Maybe I am being obtuse, but on the next page, John takes up exactly the
dual nature of labor as capitalist labor but also as doing, creativity,
practice.  Defetishization leads to communism because defetishization
involves the material transformation (which Mike Rooke misses in only
focussing on 'experience') of social life.  Labor is our self-activity
divided against us, which is John's whole point and the point of take off
for communism.  I think that Rooke misses the point of the dualism of labor
and the content of free labor which John goes into in detail as key.  He is
VERY historically specific in this whole discussion.

> It may be the case that Holloway
> fights shy of any commitment in this direction due to his (justified)
> antipathy towards the Engelsian dialectic as an objective movement of
> nature and society independent of the subject (the positivistic brand
> of Marxism). Whilst his critique of this tendency is suitably
> incisive, the bending of the stick in the direction of treating
> everything as struggle becomes a too one-sided de-historicising of
> categories.

And here's the rub.  'everything as struggle becomes... too one-sided'.
Indeed, who now departs from Marx?  If not struggle, then what exactly does
give rise to the existing relations?  Metaphysical structures?
'Categories'?  What categroies exist in abstensia from struggle?  Rooke
opens the critique but does not finish with his alternative.

>Although, as with Marx, Holloway identifies communism with
> the absence of fetishism, a slippage into the abstraction of power in
> general is a constant throughout this book. Just as the eternal
> separation of doing and done is not Marxs starting point, neither is
> communism simply reducible to the absence of power-over. Marx never
> abstracted communism from the material preconditions brought into
> being by capital.

This is really stretching things, as if John had not discussed this
elsewhere.  At the same time, I agree with him that the refusal to talk
about the content of communism, and not its form, which is largely
indeterminate outside of struggle, is a huge hole in the work.  I just don't
think that it stems from his discussion of ideas like power-over/power-to
and doing/done.  It has a rather more material source which my review picks
up.

> We see this abstracting tendency at work when Holloway deals with
> value analysis. In contradistinction to the mainstream Marxist
> tradition, which has never fully appreciated the centrality of
> fetishism, Holloway makes it central to his account, which is informed
> throughout by the focus on the struggle against-and-beyond capital.
> But again he reverts to thinking in terms of doing and done, and
> power in general, leaving the discussion without sufficient historical
> specificity. Nowhere in Marx will you find a posing of labour,
> exploitation, domination, in general. There is no doing and done
> in general, only historically specific forms of labour associated with
> similarly specific modes of surplus extraction.

It would be intersting to see Rooke explain where John talks about 'power in
general'.  He does not go over all of the categories of capital in depth,
such as use-value versus exchange-value, but he does talk about his
understanding of Capital as Marx starting from alienated labor and fetishism
and moving to ever more concrete and therefore ever more mediated forms of
the capital-labor relation.  He spends quite a bit of time on value, in
fact, but without the intent of recapitulating Capital.

Why should he in a book which is not about the critique of political economy
but about conceptualizing revolution and fundamental categories in Marx for
the 21st century?

> The Zapatista rebellion is a constant reference point for Holloway, an
> exemplar of the practical negation of the fetishisation of daily life.

And also an example which he treats as very specific and not a 'model'.

> The discussion of popular struggle in this book (the material reality
> of anti-power as Holloway refers to it) is cast in terms of the re-
> appropriation of the means of doing. In order to be truly
> emancipatory, movements of the oppressed must rely on a fluidity of
> organisational forms, leadership (all must become leaders) and
> political programmes. Clearly, the orthodox Marxist models of party
> and programme, not to mention the idea of a proletarian state, have
> the effect of reproducing the power- over that it is the aim of
> revolution to abolish. Holloway rejects the politics of organisation
> in favour of an anti- politics of events (p.214). The aim is not to
> reproduce and expand the caste of militants (the organisation), but
> to blast open the continuum of history (p.214).
>
> Much of this is a necessary critique of some of the truly fetishistic
> organisational forms and practices of the Third and Fourth
> International traditions (and is reminiscent of the approach of the
> Socialism or Barbarism/Solidarity current of the 60s and 70s). But
> it conceals a serious lack. In his important attempt to re-cast
> Marxism as a truly radical theory of anti-power  the dissolving of
> all externality (p.176)  Holloway has avoided any concrete
> investigation of the relation between party and class and the
> organisational forms which these take. He poses the question of re-
> appropriation of the means of doing repeatedly throughout the book,
> with, it has to be said, originality and power. But there, at a fairly
> high level of abstraction, Holloway leaves it, taking refuge in
> warnings of fetishised thinking: To think in terms of property
> [expropriation of  M.R.] is, however, still to pose the problem in
> fetishised terms.
>
> But the question of organisation  of unions, of factory committees,
> of neighbourhood committees, of soviets/ workers councils  and the
> relation of these to the organisation of revolutionaries, remains
> central to revolutionary tactics and strategy in situations of dual
> power and transition. It is the site of the practical testing out of
> the relation of theory to practice. Struggle, of course is always a
> shifting interrelation of leaders, programmes and mass action, and
> will never exist in an unfetishised form  the Zapatistas included. It
> is interesting that the historical examples that Holloway mentions
> approvingly as examples of leaderless, protean, struggle  May 1968 in
> France, the Stalinist collapse in Eastern Europe, the Zapatista
> rebellion, and the anti- globalisation movement  while certainly
> being event centred, are perfect examples of movements characterised
> by a lack of organisational focus and strategic coordination, and
> which stop short of challenging the social order in a fundamental way.
> In this Holloway bows unnecessarily before spontaneity in celebrating
> the abstraction of pure, elemental, unfetishised rebellion.

Some of this is indeed true enough.  In fact, John fails to grapple with the
content.  Rooke here seems a bit fixated on the forms, which are not so
simple to gauge and not necessarily predictable.  But the content of
different types of organization should have been dealt with.  John bends the
stick not so much, IMO, because of theoretical weaknesses, but for other
reasons.

> Within the limits set by his own categories, Holloway has drawn out in
> a consciously dialectical fashion the opposing poles of fetishised
> power (manifested in party and state) and anti-power. His discursive
> method involves a continuous interrogation of categories, attacking
> all fixity, and drawing out the negative content. The book therefore
> becomes a dialogue between closed and open ways of apprehending the
> fetishised results of human practice. The result is an incisive and
> original demolition of the reified categories of much mainstream
> Marxist theorising. And theorising it is, since the retreat of Marxism
> into the academy has reduced it to the status of a classic school of
> social science. But in a strange paradox, Holloway has ended up almost
> fetishising struggle itself, identifying it as an absolute negation
> of creativity, rather than seeing it also as that which makes struggle
> possible.

This last sentence is hyperbole.  It simply does not hold up in a close
textual reading, IMO.

>For Marx there was no struggle without organisation, and his
> entire lifes work was inextricably bound up with the task of moulding
> revolutionaries into organisations capable of connecting with workers
> struggles. What is missing from Holloways book is a consideration of
> the dialectic of consciousness and organisational form at different
> stages of class struggle. Holloways dialectical presentation remains
> too abstract, missing the more concrete dialectic that exists between
> these two. This perhaps explains why there is no substantial
> engagement in the book with the actual experience of the Russian
> revolution and the degeneration of the Soviet state, and why the
> critique of Stalinism in this book is too abstract.

Why not the Spanish Civil War?  The critique of Leninism IS a critique of
Stalinism.  "The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control" by Brinton showed that
Stalinism represented very little break with Bolshevism.  The "degeneration
of the Soviet State" is a typical sort of Troskyist phrasing that sounds
like a leftover from an ill-digested self-critique.  John's whole point was
that the creation of a "Soviet state" indicated the murder of the
revolution.  Paresh Chattopdhyay's work, among others, confirms this.
Should John have spent a hundred pages on... that?

> In the political work of the Left Opposition (Trotsky, Serge,
> Rakovsky), and the Left-Communist/Council Communist tradition
> (Pannekoek, Gorter, Ruhle, Korsch, Mattick), we have an invaluable
> record of how revolutionaries grappled with all the unavoidable
> problems of counter-power in the circumstances of transition beyond
> the rule of capital. Given the focus of Holloways book  the
> exploration of a future beyond the fetishised structures of the
> present  this surely deserved more attention.

Yes, but in content, not in form, a task which would require a much larger
and very different book.  This is asking the impossible in the way it is
phrased. And again the focus on the Left Opposition, but never the Workers'
Opposition or the Left Communists in 1918.  Or Voline, Makhno and other
anarchists.  Half-steps, always half-steps.

> There is therefore a major lacuna at the end of this book. On the
> vital and immediate question of how revolutionaries should organise
> themselves in relation to class struggles, Holloway has no practical
> perspective to offer. He makes the following admission: How then do
> we change the world without taking power? At the end of the book, as
> at the beginning, we do not know. The Leninists know, or used to know.
> We do not (p.215). This really is taking the humility of Marxist
> theorising too far!

No, it it as much the admission that no one can claim to have answered that
question.  It is a demand to listen to the struggles around us, to think
through them and try to grapple with what they raise, not simply try to
impose our preconceived forms upon them.  But to have made this argument
effectively, John would have had to raise the question of oganization in a
very different way.  In so far as I was also dissatisfied with this aspect,
I concur with Rooke that there is a critique to be made.  But Rooke does not
make it from the right end.

> After the collapse of Stalinism and the Communist parties, and with an
> increase in the variety and tempo of anti-capitalist struggles, the
> relevance of Marxism for the struggle for communism has never been
> greater. Holloways book is in this context a valuable contribution to
> the discussion about how regenerate Marxism. It deserves to be widely
> read and debated.

Something I have noticed in the couple of reviews I have seen is that no one
has captured the importance of John's book as a critique on the real
competitor for self-understanding in the misnamed anti-globalization
movement: the various post-alities of Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault,
Althusser, etc. all re-read through Negri.  Leninism is less appealing to
many of the people now participating, but also, through Althusser we should
remember that Leninism and (post-)structuralism do not have to be at odds
and that it can resurface in various ways, as in Negri's apologias for
Leninism and Zizek's love of Lenin's desire to 'take power without changing
the world', a reactionary perspective indeed.  I have even had
Marxist-Humanists tell me grinningly of Zizek's love of Lenin's
ruthlessness.  Such lust will hardly win adherents, but it comes covered in
different trappings.

John's book is an antidote to this too.




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