Re: John Holloway debate/McLaren

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In message , MARIPOWER716@xxxxxxx writes

> I would suppose that everyone strives to find a certain comfort zone in life
> and in the workforce a billion and one different social acts take place, which
> one could identify as "resistance" to "capital" but is hardly the meaning of
> class struggle.

Hi Melvin,

When Holloway says

> "Our struggle is clearly a constant struggle to get away from capital, a
> struggle for space, for autonomy, a struggle to lengthen the leash, to
> intensify
> the dis-articulation of domination. This takes a million different forms:
> throwing the  alarm clock at the wall, arriving late for 'work', back pain and
> other  forms of absenteeism, sabotage, struggles over tea breaks..."<

he's not in my view saying that this is the meaning of class struggle or
the main form our struggle should take - he's simply saying that this is
in fact what we all want to do, 'get away from capital' (don't we?), and
citing evidence for this.

As a former union organizer, I'm sure you you wouldn't want to uphold
unions as models of revolutionary organization. While historically
they've been important in defending workers from the depredations of
capital, and in certain periods and places have made important gains in
terms of workers wages and conditions, by and large they've danced to
the tune of capital instead of struggling to 'get away' from it or go
beyond it. Politically, through their association with and support for
social democratic and reformist parties, they've by and large functioned
to reproduce capital (Lenin's good on this as I recall). Even after all
Blair's crimes against humanity (including workers!) the trade union
movement in the UK still supports New 'Labour', i.e. neo-liberalism,
though some sections are defecting. This suggests that besides working
in and through established working class institutions we need to work
outside them and develop new forms of struggle. This seems elementary.

> All that is being stated is that
> no one can escape the system because you are born into a certain specific way
> of living and producing whether you like it or not.

Well, *Holloway* is not saying this. He thinks capitalism has to go, the
sooner the better, and furthermore that we can do it.

> Many of them - academic Marxist, came to the conclusion that capitalism can
> be transformed on the basis of a fight within the mediated forms and altering
> these forms to produce a correct vision of the world.

Again, this is not in my view what Holloway is saying, just the
opposite: we have to crap off the mediated forms ('power over') and
concentrate on 'power to', i.e. precisely what you call 'the material
aspects of production'. So you actually agree!

> How to take power without political revolution is an absurd question that can
> only originate in the mind of the bourgeois and petty bourgeoisie -
> degenerate, intellectual.

Holloway as I read him is not saying that we don't need a revolution,
including a political revolution. On the contrary! But to achieve it we
need a different approach from the the old model of seizing power,
dismantling the capitalist state and instituting a worker's state with
the vague assurance that this state will 'wither away' some time. He's
not talking at all about 'how to take power' in the sense of 'power
over', rather about how *not* to, while changing the world.

Mervyn