After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties,  there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”^[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common life. As Noam Chomsky would caution, the only strategy for assuring the uptake of this narrative would be the concentration of information and media, meaning, the consolidation of the voice and the imagination of what is possible. It was the belle époque of neoliberalism.

In her book, Networked Activism and Connected Multitudes (Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas:Comunicación y acción en la era de Internet), Guiomar Rovira tells the story of how that unitary discourse was questioned to open up new possibilities. It began with the emergence of activist networks that, taking advantage of the internet’s open and decentralized infrastructure, created new technological tools to share images, words and feelings distinct from the official narrative. These were the times of Zapatismo and anti-globalization. Later, with Web 2.0, the politicized use of networks became socialized, providing access to anyone. This was the time of connected multitudes, including 15-M and other movements spawned by the crisis.

#YoSoy132

Guiomar’s account distinguishes itself from regular academic production in two ways. To begin with, the book is fundamentally affirmative, rather than critical. It affirms the political power of technologies once people have seized their ownership. The author does not view the world from the angle of power: she does not reinforce our impotence, or how dominated and manipulated we are, nor does she victimize us. On the contrary — she speaks about what’s been done, what’s being done and what can be done. She contemplates the world from the perspective of potentiality.

Secondly, it is a lived book. The author’s personal experiences – through punk, Zapatismo or Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement – form a basis for reflection. Guiomar Rovira is a Catalonian journalist and writer living in Mexico since 1994. She is the author of numerous essays and a teacher in Mexico City’s UAM-Xochimilco University.

Amador Fernández-Savater: “Activist networks” is how you characterize the first historical period described in your book. One of its fundamental ingredients was punk, something that you personally experienced while living in Barcelona during the eighties. How did punk influence the creation of these networks?

Guiomar Rovira: I like it that you want to start there. “No future” is one of the most important messages in punk. In a way, contemplating that “there is no future” opens up a new politics, a much more prefigurative politics. It’s no longer a question of waiting and dreaming of utopias, but of doing what we need to do here and now, and in the ways we can and want to. We’re not waiting for further instructions or permissions to get started. We will take ownership of music and spaces. In punk, anyone can pick up a guitar while someone else starts singing, speaking, doing. This is where we find the DIY spirit, with whatever you have at hand. The cultural becomes political: it is a way to exit the defined boundaries of the system that constantly procrastinates and sacrifices in service to the promise of a non-existent future.

In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem.

Zapatismo and the Hope International

Amador: There is a second social movement that would be central to the creation of those activist networks. I’m referring to Zapatismo which, unlike punk, wouldn’t be a “dark” movement. Zapatismo opens a horizon of hope, removed from the metropolis. What can you tell us about the relation between Zapatismo, technologies and communication?

Guiomar: We have to take into account that in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and we lived in a unipolar world marked by the “end of history”. But suddenly, from the most surprising and unexpected place, there is rebellion, hope, and a movement that speaks to us, and where I found myself.

I feel that the significance of Zapatismo is that it allowed for a global common framework. This was a moment marked by despondency across all struggles: the global left was despondent, the Latin American guerrillas were in the doldrums, and so on.  Suddenly, an interpellating framework that rescued us from isolated processes of resistance was born. A framework for active mobilization that allows many different struggles to have a shared sense of identity and a common foe. It is humanity against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas say. And who proposed this framework? The indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the most forgotten, the smallest, coming from a corner of the world where many weren’t even aware that there were indigenous communities, or resistance, or the possibility of struggle.

This was still a global media event, accordingly relayed by traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television). The World Wide Web was barely a year old, hardly anyone was using it. After a few days, though, the newspapers and radio dropped the story. Nevertheless, people sought ways to keep abreast and intervene in what was happening in Chiapas, supporting this rebellion as a locus of hope for the world.

Amador: This is when the appropriation of the Internet takes place. At that time, it was a new means of communication. How did that come about?

Guiomar: The appropriation was almost natural, spontaneous even. Given the lack of information from the traditional media, alternative media moved to occupy that space. Like many others present, I was participating and publishing in hegemonic media, important newspapers…but I was also sending a wealth of information to alternative radio stations, alternative media, fanzines…

In the midst of all this, these gringos (sometimes gringos can also bring about good things!) kept telling us, “you have to use the Internet”. They were the first hackers, tramping around with their spiky hair, installing modems and strange artefacts in your computer. We had no clue what those maniacs were on about. Less than three months later, we were all using the Internet. When I say “all”, I’m referring to the journalists, the NGOs, the activists. The first websites covering the revolution in Chiapas appeared spontaneously. Some US students decided to follow the situation and began publishing the EZLN’s communiqués. These were sent by fax and then published in the website (called Ya Basta). More people turned up spontaneously and started translating to English, French…

That is how information began to be shared and an informational scaffolding was built around the situation in Chiapas. This was huge: at that time the Mexican government was still quite invested in pushing a positive image internationally (that is no longer the case). But information was not the only thing circulating; many people were travelling to Chiapas, visiting the communities, and generating even more information. There were inputs and outputs, a communicative atmosphere supporting an indigenous rebellion and indigenous rebellion proposing the idea that another world is possible. An interpellation finding resonance in many places around the world and allowing for common action, aside from any differences in our ways of doing.

Walter Benjamin: Power above all things

Amador: I want to pose a question a bit beyond our conversation about activist networks and connected multitudes, about the support you find in the classic author Walter Benjamin. What is it about Benjamin, what kind of ally is he?

Guiomar: What I find in Benjamin is a profound metaphorical, poetical and political inspiration. In the darkness of his time he was able to see the light, more so than any other member of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin helps me understand this need of mine to find the power in each moment, each place.

Technique is not our enemy. It also represents the possibility of living in a fuller world, where our covenant with nature is not hostile, nor does it force the violence by which we survive or perish. Predatory capitalism, based on artificially created pain and scarcity, undermines the potential of technique. The blame for the expulsion of life and accumulation through dispossession lies not with the Internet, but with a montage, a global system, that takes technique and, rather than put it in the service of humanity, gifts it to capitalism and the predatory production of scarcity. Benjamin invites us to conceive of another, non-capitalist modernity.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin sees the democratizing possibility enabled by the fact that we can all take ownership of technique, become authors, and have fuller lives, our own voices. There is another idea of his, which appears in Theses on the Philosophy of History, the concept of jetztzeit: the radiant moment that constellates a kind of epiphany in the here and now where everything opens. This is the idea of the constellation, which I keep coming back to in the book. Those that precede us implore us to see that justice is done. At the same time, there isn’t a single genealogy for all movements. Rather, every movement constructs its own history, shines a light on its radiant moments and, from there, articulates its own destiny. It is a tremendously creative way of understanding that the political also represents an opening to the past.

Benjamin is an inspiration. He died in Portbou, my grandparents’ village. This summer I went to see his grave. He lived a terrible life and never achieved the recognition he deserved. Still, he was the most optimistic, the most creative of the intellectuals of his time. It’s ironic that the one who suffers the most is more able to see the openings, the possibilities, the power.

Connected Multitudes: Technology in anyone’s hands.

Amador: First there is networked activism, the appropriation of technology by activists (punk, Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement), but then there would be a second movement marking a radical transformation from networked activism, which would be the “connected multitudes”. I would like you to tell us about that transition.

Guiomar: The communicative environment of networked activism remains permeated and populated mainly by militants — people with political consciousness. The shift to connected multitudes is highlighted by the fact that the leading voices are no longer limited to those coming from activism. Anyone using a social network has a voice, without necessarily having been previously politicized or part of any specific activist space. And this can happen in politically incorrect spaces like Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube, which are privative networks.

For example, take Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement. Not all the Ibero-American University students that started the protests were already politicized, but they did feel aggravated, and used tools to voice that discontent and be heard in the media after remarks were made about president Peña Nieto’s visit to their University. The video they uploaded to YouTube had impressive consequences, generating a wave of indignation that many sorts of people felt identified with. Everybody wondered how it was possible that such an important movement hadn’t come from the UNAM^[2], or from the groups that had been cutting their teeth for years, denouncing unjust situations. Instead, this came from a totally unexpected, unpredictable collective.

In those protests we see a phenomenon that Manuel Castells calls Mass Self Communication: everyone becomes an information producer, a remixer, a retweeter. Everyone takes part in conversations and strengthens the movement with his or her own ability, for example, graphic arts. The processes of putting out and taking in become fuzzy; the entrenched notions of origin, authority and attribution become somewhat “lossy”.

Amador: The book highlights the positive character of the shift between these two stages of alternative communication. This is a process of democratization: if networks had previously been in the hands of activists, now the political use of technology is in the hands of anyone. But, doesn’t this mean that we’ve also lost sight of the importance of technological infrastructures and technological sovereignty? These elements, crucial to the hacker mentality, seem to have been sidelined in favor of “ease of use” in the distribution of content, thanks to social networks made freely available by the same system we are trying to undermine.

Guiomar: While what you’ve mentioned is undoubtedly important, I can’t fully agree with your assertion of what it is we’ve lost. I think that we’re shifting from a very uninformed and automatic use of networks to a more conscious usage due to the Snowden or Wikileaks revelations on spyware. I think that we’re seeing the emergence of a new movement that is far more aware about surveillance, control and data appropriation in social networks. This awareness is something new and we’ve reached it thanks to the work of certain hackers. I see Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange as hackers. They’ve shown why we need to be careful and use Tor, use free software, why we need to have secure passwords and use the web responsibly. We’ll see what comes of that.

Doing it together

Amador: Instead of intellectuals raising a finger to tell us: “be careful, this is not going well”, what we need is more social appropriation of technology, more learning, more technological literacy, more hacklabs. I think that this is one of the key messages in your book. You acknowledge that the Internet is taking a somber turn, while asserting that the solutions will not be found outside the Internet.

Guiomar: Discursive critiques of technology never solve anything. How can we teach ourselves about sociability in networks? By appropriating spaces, constructing them collaboratively, sharing what we know…by doing what we feel like doing, in ways we feel like doing it, and generating new ways. This is what, in my book, I describe as “hacker unfolding.” This is not just a technological possibility; to me, the concept of hacking goes far beyond technology. The hacker takes something apart to then build something new, deconstructing what is offered as a black box to open new possibilities. And this is not limited to technology, it can be done anywhere. Widen your scope and construct new potentials, whether it’s in the university, or in human relations. As Fernanda Briones, the hackfeminism expert, says “Let’s do it together”.^[3]

Amador: How do you consider of the relation between technology and bodies, between the world of bytes and the world of atoms.

Guiomar: My position is that, beyond the differentiation between online and offline worlds, everything occurs on-life. Seen this way, the corporeal experience of encountering is the key. Going out, looking at each other, experiencing the body-to-body connection. Physical encounters, opening spaces for emergence, experimenting with the body’s vulnerability, all of this is essential. The very logic of networks stresses the commonality of how impossible it is to live under the conditions imposed by this expropriating capitalism. This encounter is the quintessential political moment of our times.

To me, this dimension that deals with the vulnerability of the body, this exposition, has transformed voluntary activism into something more alive, less predetermined. The body becomes visible; it interacts and creates convivial, caring spaces while simultaneously politicizing what is private. My current thesis identifies a feministization of connected multitudes, a kind of free appropriation of feminism, a feminism that becomes inevitable. No emancipatory movement can ignore the widely varied approaches to women’s struggles and feminist struggles over the course of time. All of this happens through the body.

Internet feminista y redes libres – Liliana Zaragoza Cano (Lili_Anaz)

Bodies in the street and communication through networks; I can’t think of these as separate. We are a type of cyborg: we carry our own technological extensions. When I think about politics, technology becomes part of collective action. It’s not something additional, or different. If you pay attention, the most important cyberspace and network actions have always taken place within a context of street mobilization. Acting is communicating and vice versa. Everything happens in the on-life dimension. Our brains are the ultimate platform. There is nothing non-physical. The idea that networks are beyond physicality is just dead wrong, and I have put my mind to opposing it.

This text was transcribed from an interview during Guiomar’s book launch. It took place on September 19, 2017 in UAM-Xochimilco. The original Spanish interview was transcribed by Gerardo Juárez and edited by Amador Fernández-Savater.

^[1] Pensée unique, a term coined by French journalist Jean-François Kahn refers to hegemonic ideological conformism. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[2] Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the world’s highest ranking University in R&D. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[3] “Hagámoslo juntas” in the original. Spanish is gendered, “juntas” is the female form of “together”. Female (as opposed to the “default” male) grammatical forms have become more commonly used after the 15M movements, such that people of any gender identity more frequently choose to use the female form to describe mixed gender groups.

Republished from Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

Lead image from It’s Going Down

Original article published at eldiario.es

The post No Future: From Punk to Zapatismo and Connected Multitudes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from Guerrilla Translation. Amador Fernández-Savater, interviews John Holloway. The original Spanish text was translated by Richard Mac Duinnsleibhe and edited by Arianne Sved.

In 2002, John Holloway published a landmark book: Change the world without taking power. Inspired by the ‘¡Ya basta!’ [Enough is enough!] of the Zapatistas, by the movement that emerged in Argentina in 2001/2002 and by the anti-globalisation movement, Holloway sets out a hypothesis: it is not the idea of revolution or transformation of the world that has been refuted as a result of the disaster of authoritarian communism, but rather the idea of revolution as the taking of power, and of the party as the political tool par excellence.

He discerns another concept of social change is at work in these movements, and generally in every practice—however visible or invisible it may be—where a logic different from that of profit is followed: the logic of cracking capitalism. That is, to create, within the very society that is being rejected, spaces, moments, or areas of activity in which a different world is prefigured. Rebellions in motion. From this perspective, the idea of organisation is no longer equivalent to that of the party, but rather entails the question of how the different cracks that unravel the fabric of capitalism can recognise each other and connect.

But after Argentina’s “que se vayan todos” [let them all go away] came the Kirchner government, and after Spain’s “no nos representan” [they don’t represent us] appeared Podemos. We met with John Holloway in the city of Puebla, Mexico, to ask him if, after everything that has happened in the past decade, from the progressive governments of Latin America to Podemos and Syriza in Europe, along with the problems for self-organised practices to exist and multiply, he still thinks that it is possible to “change the world without taking power”.

Firstly, John, we would like to ask you where the hegemonic idea of revolution in the 20th century comes from, what it is based on. That is, the idea of social change through the taking of power.

John Holloway. I think the central element is labour, understood as wage labour. In other words, alienated or abstract labour. Wage labour has been, and still is, the bedrock of the trade union movement, of the social democratic parties that were its political wing, and also of the communist movements. This concept defined the revolutionary theory of the labour movement: the struggle of wage labour against capital. But its struggle was limited because wage labour is the complement of capital, not its negation.

I don’t understand the relation between this idea of labour and that of revolution through the taking of state power.

John Holloway: One way of understanding the connection would be as follows: if you start off from the definition of labour as wage or alienated labour, you start off from the idea of the workers as victims and objects of the system of domination. And a movement that struggles to improve the living standards of workers (considered as victims and objects) immediately refers to the State. Why? Because the State, due to its very separation from society, is the ideal institution if one seeks to achieve benefits for people. This is the traditional thinking of the labour movement and that of the left governments that currently exist in Latin America.

But this tradition isn’t the only approach to a politics of emancipation…

John Holloway. Of course not. In the last twenty or thirty years we find a great many movements that claim something else: it is possible to emancipate human activity from alienated labour by opening up cracks where one is able to do things differently, to do something that seems useful, necessary, and worthwhile to us; an activity that is not subordinated to the logic of profit.

These cracks can be spatial (places where other social relations are generated), temporal (“Here, in this event, for the time that we are together, we are going to do things differently. We are going to open windows onto another world.”), or related to particular activities or resources (for example, cooperatives or activities that pursue a non-market logic with regard to water, software, education, etc.). The world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks.

The rejection of alienated and alienating labour entails, at the same time, a critique of the institutional and organisational structures, and the mindset that springs from it. This is how we can explain the rejection of trade unions, parties, and the State that we observe in so many contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to the Greek or Spanish indignados.

But it isn’t a question of the opposition between an old and a new politics, I think. Because what we see in the movements born of the economic crisis is that those two things come to the fore at the same time: cracks such as protests in city squares, and new parties such as Syriza or Podemos.

John Holloway. I think it’s a reflection of the fact that our experience under capitalism is contradictory. We are victims and yet we are not. We seek to improve our living standards as workers, and also to go beyond that, to live differently. In one respect we are, in effect, people who have to sell their labour power in order to survive. But in another, each one of us has dreams, behaviours and projects that don’t fit into the capitalist definition of labour.

The difficulty, then as now, lies in envisioning the relation between those two types of movements. How can that relation avoid reproducing the old sectarianism? How can it be a fruitful relation without denying the fundamental differences between the two perspectives?

Argentina in 2001 and 2002, the indignados in Greece and Spain more recently. At a certain point, bottom-up movements stall, they enter a crisis or an impasse, or they vanish. Would you say that the politics of cracks has intrinsic limits in terms of enduring and expanding?

John Holloway. I wouldn’t call them limits, but rather problems. Ten years ago, when I published Change the World without Taking Power, the achievements and the power of movements from below were more apparent, whereas now we are more conscious of the problems. The movements you mention are enormously important beacons of hope, but capital continues to exist and it’s getting worse and worse; it progressively entails more misery and destruction. We cannot confine ourselves to singing the praises of movements. That’s not enough.

Could one response then be the option that focuses on the State?

John Holloway

John Holloway. It’s understandable why people want to go in that direction, very understandable. These have been years of ferocious struggles, but capital’s aggression remains unchanged. I sincerely hope that Podemos and Syriza do win the elections, because that would change the current kaleidoscope of social struggles. But I maintain all of my objections with regard to the state option. Any government of this kind entails channelling aspirations and struggles into institutional conduits that, by necessity, force one to seek a conciliation between the anger that these movements express and the reproduction of capital. Because the existence of any government involves promoting the reproduction of capital (by attracting foreign investment, or through some other means), there is no way around it. This inevitably means taking part in the aggression that is capital. It’s what has already happened in Bolivia and Venezuela, and it will also be the problem in Greece or Spain.

Could it be a matter of complementing the movements from below with a movement oriented towards government institutions?

John Holloway: That’s the obvious answer that keeps coming up. But the problem with obvious answers is that they suppress contradictions. Things can’t be reconciled so easily. From above, it may be possible to improve people’s living conditions, but I don’t think one can break with capitalism and generate a different reality. And I sincerely believe that we’re in a situation where there are no long-term solutions for the whole of humanity within capitalism.

I’m not discrediting the state option because I myself don’t have an answer to offer, but I don’t think it’s the solution.

Where are you looking for the answer?

John Holloway. Whilst not considering parties of the left as enemies, since for me this is certainly not the case, I would say that the answer has to be thought of in terms of deepening the cracks.

If we’re not going to accept the annihilation of humanity, which, to me, seems to be on capitalism’s agenda as a real possibility, then the only alternative is to think that our movements are the birth of another world. We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognising them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking the confluence or, preferably, the commoning of the cracks.

If we think in terms of State and elections, we are straying away from that, because Podemos or Syriza can improve things, but they cannot create another world outside the logic of capital. And that’s what this is all about, I think.

Finally, John, how do you see the relation between the two perspectives we’ve been talking about?

Amador Fernández-Savater

John Holloway. We need to keep a constant and respectful debate going without suppressing the differences and the contradictions. I think the basis for a dialogue could be this: no one has the solution.

For the moment, we have to recognise that we’re not strong enough to abolish capitalism. By strong, I am referring here to building ways of living that don’t depend on wage labour. To be able to say “I don’t really care whether I have a job or not, because if I don’t have one, I can dedicate my life to other things that interest me and that give me enough sustenance to live decently.” That’s not the case right now. Perhaps we have to build that before we can say “go to hell, capital.”

In that sense, let’s bear in mind that a precondition for the French Revolution was that, at a certain point. the social network of bourgeois relations no longer needed the aristocracy in order to exist. Likewise, we must work to reach a point where we can say “we don’t care if global capital isn’t investing in Spain, because we’ve built a mutual support network that’s strong enough to enable us to live with dignity.”

Right now the rage against banks is spreading throughout the world. However, I don’t think banks are the problem, but rather the existence of money as a social relation. How should we think about rage against money? I believe this necessarily entails building non monetised, non commodified social relations.

And there are a great many people dedicated to this effort, whether out of desire, conviction or necessity, even though they may not appear in the newspapers. They’re building other forms of community, of sociality, of thinking about technology and human capabilities in order to create a new life.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Illustrations by ANDRECO

Original article published at eldiario.es

This Translation has also been republished in:

Reflections on a Revolution

Cunning Hired Knaves

The post Cracking Capitalism vs. The State Option appeared first on P2P Foundation.

John Holloway, a sociology professor in Mexico, recently gave an interview with Roar magazine suggesting how to introduce a new social and economic logic in the face of the mighty machine of neoliberal capitalism.  Holloway’s idea, recapitulating themes from his previous book and 2002 thesis, is to build “cracks” in the system in which people can relate to each other and meet their needs in non-market ways:  “We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognizing them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking confluence, or preferably, the commoning of cracks.”

This strategic approach has immediate appeal to commoners, it seems to me — even though some engagement with state power is surely necessary at some point.  Below, Holloway’s interview with by Amador Fernández-Savater. It was translated by Richard Mac Duinnsleibhe and edited by Arianne Sved of Guerrilla Translation.

In 2002, John Holloway published a landmark book: Change the World Without Taking Power. Inspired by the ‘¡Ya basta!’ of the Zapatistas, by the movement that emerged in Argentina in 2001/’02, and by the anti-globalization movement, Holloway sets out a hypothesis: it is not the idea of revolution or transformation of the world that has been refuted as a result of the disaster of authoritarian communism, but rather the idea of revolution as the taking of power, and of the party as the political tool par excellence.

Holloway discerns another concept of social change at work in these movements, and generally in every practice—however visible or invisible it may be—where a logic different from that of profit is followed: the logic of cracking capitalism. That is, to create, within the very society that is being rejected, spaces, moments, or areas of activity in which a different world is prefigured. Rebellions in motion. From this perspective, the idea of organization is no longer equivalent to that of the party, but rather entails the question of how the different cracks that unravel the fabric of capitalism can recognize each other and connect.

But after Argentina’s “que se vayan todos” came the Kirchner government, and after Spain’s “no nos representan” appeared Podemos. We met with John Holloway in the city of Puebla, Mexico, to ask him if, after everything that has happened in the past decade, from the progressive governments of Latin America to Podemos and Syriza in Europe, along with the problems for self-organized practices to exist and multiply, he still thinks that it is possible to “change the world without taking power.”

:::::::::::::::::::::::

Firstly, John, we would like to ask you where the hegemonic idea of revolution in the 20th century comes from, what it is based on. That is, the idea of social change through the taking of power.

I think the central element is labor, understood as wage labor. In other words, alienated or abstract labor. Wage labor has been, and still is, the bedrock of the trade union movement, of the social democratic parties that were its political wing, and also of the communist movements. This concept defined the revolutionary theory of the labor movement: the struggle of wage labor against capital. But its struggle was limited because wage labor is the complement of capital, not its negation.

I don’t understand the relation between this idea of labor and that of revolution through the taking of state power.

One way of understanding the connection would be as follows: if you start off from the definition of labor as wage or alienated labor, you start off from the idea of the workers as victims and objects of the system of domination. And a movement that struggles to improve the living standards of workers (considered as victims and objects) immediately refers to the state. Why? Because the state, due to its very separation from society, is the ideal institution if one seeks to achieve benefits for people. This is the traditional thinking of the labor movement and that of the left governments that currently exist in Latin America.

But this tradition isn’t the only approach to a politics of emancipation…

Of course not. In the last twenty or thirty years we find a great many movements that claim something else: it is possible to emancipate human activity from alienated labor by opening up cracks where one is able to do things differently, to do something that seems useful, necessary, and worthwhile to us; an activity that is not subordinated to the logic of profit.

These cracks can be spatial (places where other social relations are generated), temporal (“Here, in this event, for the time that we are together, we are going to do things differently. We are going to open windows onto another world.”), or related to particular activities or resources (for example, cooperatives or activities that pursue a non-market logic with regard to water, software, education, etc.). The world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks.

The rejection of alienated and alienating labor entails, at the same time, a critique of the institutional and organizational structures, and the mindset that springs from it. This is how we can explain the rejection of trade unions, parties, and the state that we observe in so many contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to the Greek or Spanish indignados.

But it isn’t a question of the opposition between an old and a new politics, I think. Because what we see in the movements born of the economic crisis is that those two things come to the fore at the same time: cracks such as protests in city squares, and new parties such as Syriza or Podemos.

I think it’s a reflection of the fact that our experience under capitalism is contradictory. We are victims and yet we are not. We seek to improve our living standards as workers, and also to go beyond that, to live differently. In one respect we are, in effect, people who have to sell their labor power in order to survive. But in another, each one of us has dreams, behaviors and projects that don’t fit into the capitalist definition of labor.

The difficulty, then as now, lies in envisioning the relation between those two types of movements. How can that relation avoid reproducing the old sectarianism? How can it be a fruitful relation without denying the fundamental differences between the two perspectives?

Argentina in 2001 and 2002, the indignados in Greece and Spain more recently. At a certain point, bottom-up movements stall, they enter a crisis or an impasse, or they vanish. Would you say that the politics of cracks has intrinsic limits in terms of enduring and expanding?

I wouldn’t call them limits, but rather problems. Ten years ago, when I published Change the World without Taking Power, the achievements and the power of movements from below were more apparent, whereas now we are more conscious of the problems. The movements you mention are enormously important beacons of hope, but capital continues to exist and it’s getting worse and worse; it progressively entails more misery and destruction. We cannot confine ourselves to singing the praises of movements. That’s not enough.

Could one response then be the option that focuses on the state?

It’s understandable why people want to go in that direction, very understandable. These have been years of ferocious struggles, but capital’s aggression remains unchanged. I sincerely hope that Podemos and Syriza do win the elections, because that would change the current kaleidoscope of social struggles. But I maintain all of my objections with regard to the state option.

Any government of this kind entails channeling aspirations and struggles into institutional conduits that, by necessity, force one to seek a conciliation between the anger that these movements express and the reproduction of capital. Because the existence of any government involves promoting the reproduction of capital (by attracting foreign investment, or through some other means), there is no way around it. This inevitably means taking part in the aggression that is capital. It’s what has already happened in Bolivia and Venezuela, and it will also be the problem in Greece or Spain.

Could it be a matter of complementing the movements from below with a movement oriented towards government institutions?

That’s the obvious answer that keeps coming up. But the problem with obvious answers is that they suppress contradictions. Things can’t be reconciled so easily. From above, it may be possible to improve people’s living conditions, but I don’t think one can break with capitalism and generate a different reality. And I sincerely believe that we’re in a situation where there are no long-term solutions for the whole of humanity within capitalism.

I’m not discrediting the state option because I myself don’t have an answer to offer, but I don’t think it’s the solution.

Where are you looking for the answer?

Whilst not considering parties of the left as enemies, since for me this is certainly not the case, I would say that the answer has to be thought of in terms of deepening the cracks.

If we’re not going to accept the annihilation of humanity, which, to me, seems to be on capitalism’s agenda as a real possibility, then the only alternative is to think that our movements are the birth of another world. We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognizing them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking the confluence or, preferably, the commoning of the cracks.

If we think in terms of state and elections, we are straying away from that, because Podemos or Syriza can improve things, but they cannot create another world outside the logic of capital. And that’s what this is all about, I think.

Finally, John, how do you see the relation between the two perspectives we’ve been talking about?

We need to keep a constant and respectful debate going without suppressing the differences and the contradictions. I think the basis for a dialogue could be this: no one has the solution.

For the moment, we have to recognize that we’re not strong enough to abolish capitalism. By strong, I am referring here to building ways of living that don’t depend on wage labor. To be able to say “I don’t really care whether I have a job or not, because if I don’t have one, I can dedicate my life to other things that interest me and that give me enough sustenance to live decently.” That’s not the case right now. Perhaps we have to build that before we can say “go to hell, capital.”

In that sense, let’s bear in mind that a precondition for the French Revolution was that, at a certain point, the social network of bourgeois relations no longer needed the aristocracy in order to exist. Likewise, we must work to reach a point where we can say “we don’t care if global capital isn’t investing in Spain, because we’ve built a mutual support network that’s strong enough to enable us to live with dignity.”

Right now the rage against banks is spreading throughout the world. However, I don’t think banks are the problem, but rather the existence of money as a social relation. How should we think about rage against money? I believe this necessarily entails building non-monetized, non-commodified social relations.

And there are a great many people dedicated to this effort, whether out of desire, conviction or necessity, even though they may not appear in the newspapers. They’re building other forms of community, of sociality, of thinking about technology and human capabilities in order to create a new life.

John Holloway is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Autonomous University of Puebla in Mexico. His latest book is Crack Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2010).

Originally posted at bollier.org

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