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Counter-Power And Anti-Power
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» hazel a répondu le Sat 15 Oct, 2005 @ 1:02am |
 Coolness: 47985 | [ auto ]
Counter-Power and Anti-Power by John Holloway 1. Time is central to any consideration of power and counter power or anti-power. The traditional left is centred on waiting, on patience. The social democratic parties tell us “Wait until the next election, then we will come to power and things will be different” The Leninist parties say “wait for the revolution, then we’ll take power and life will begin”. But we cannot wait. Capitalism is destroying the world and we cannot be patient. We cannot wait for the next long wave or the next revolutionary opportunity. We cannot wait until the time is right. We must revolt now, we must live now. 2. The traditional left operates with a capitalist concept of time. In this concept, capitalism is a continuum, it has a duration, it will be there until the day of revolution comes. It is this duration, this continuum that we have to break. How? By refusing. By understanding that capitalism does not have any duration independent of us. If capitalism exists today, it is not because it was created one hundred or two hundred years ago, but because we (the workers of the world, in the broadest sense) created it today. If we do not create it tomorrow, it will not exist. Capital depends on us for its existence, from one moment to the next. Capital depends on converting our doing into alienated work, on converting our life into survival. We make capitalism. The problem of revolution is not to abolish capitalism but to stop making it. How do we stop making capitalism? How can we refuse, say ¡Ya basta!, Enough! ¡Que se vayan todos! Get rid of all of them!? Refusal is the first key to thinking about radical social change. We live in a world in which humanity is rushing like lemmings towards the cliff or our own self-destruction. How do we dig in our heels and say NO? How do we break the continuum, break history, break time itself, how do we refuse to survive and start to live, how do we infuse our lives with an intensity that breaks the greyness of capitalism? That is the first temporality of revolution, the temporality of ¡Ya basta! Enough! A temporality of impatience and intensity and revolution here-and-now, because capitalism is unbearable, because we cannot go on creating our own destruction. This is the temporality of certainty, because there can be no doubt about our NO to capitalism. It is also the temporality of innocence, of the simple, uncomplicated NO. 3. But there is also a second temporality. To give force to our refusal, we have to back it up with the construction of an alternative world. If we refuse to submit to capital, we must have some alternative way of living and this means the patient creation of other ways of organising our activity, our doing. The Zapatistas say ¡Ya Basta!, Enough!, but they also say “We walk, we do not run, because we are going very far”. The best of the piquetero groups in Argentina say “¡Que se vayan todos! Get rid of all of them!, but they also insist very much on following their own rhythms, their own times in creating an alternative sociality, an alternative way of doing things. If the first temporality is that of innocence, this is the temporality of experience. This is the temporality of building our own power, our power-to, our power to do things in a different way. Building our own power-to is a very different thing from taking power or seizing power. If we organise ourselves to take power, to try to win state power, then inevitably we put ourselves into the logic of capitalist power, we adopt capitalist forms of organisation which impose separations, separations between leaders and masses, between citizens and foreigners, between public and private. If we focus on the state and the winning of state power, then inevitably we reproduce within our own struggles the power of capital. Building our own power-to involves different forms of organisation, forms which are not symmetrical to capital’s forms, forms which do not separate and exclude. Our power, then, is not just a counter-power, it is not a mirror-image of capitalist power, but an anti-power, a power with a completely different logic - and a different temporality. The traditional temporality, the temporality of taking power, is in two steps: first wait and build the party, then there will be the revolution and suddenly everything will be different. The second temporality comes after the first one. The taking of power operates as a pivot, a breaking point in the temporality of the revolutionary process. Our temporality, the temporality of building our own anti-power is also in two steps, but the steps are exactly the opposite, and they are simultaneous. First: do not wait, refuse now, tear a hole, a fissure in the texture of capitalist domination now, today. And secondly, starting from these refusals, these fissures, and simultaneouslyt with them, build an alternative world, a different way of doing things, a different sort of social relations between people. Here it cannot be a sudden change, but a long and patient struggle in which hope lies not in the next election or in the storming of the Winter Palace but in overcoming our isolation and coming together with other projects, other refusals pushing in the same direction. This means not just living despite capitalism, but living in-against-and-beyond capitalism. It means an interstitial conception of revolution, in which a new world, a new communism, commun-ism, grows in the interstices of and in opposition to capitalism - a conception of revolution as the active disintegration of capitalism in which an alternative society is constructed in the process of disintegration. There are no rules on how to build a new world, no model we can follow. Here there are no certainties. It is inevitably a question of experimentation and invention. Behind the NO of our refusal of neo-liberal capitalism stand many YESes. The force behind these YESes is a drive towards self-determination. Self-determination can only be a social process, a global knitting together of collective processes of self-determination, a weaving together of councils or communes or assemblies. But it is not just a question of deliberations (of how we take decisions), it is also and above all a question of how we can organise our doing, our activity, in a way that goes against-and-beyond capital. And not just against-and-beyond capital, but against-and-beyond the law of value, against-and-beyond the market and the times and the disciplines which it imposes. That is the most difficult part of thinking how we can create and are creating a new commons (or common), a new commun-ism. 4. The way forward is full of difficulties and uncertainties and requires much patience. Yet we should not turn things upside down. The traditional idea of revolution tells us contain our impatience, to subordinate our impatience to the patient construction of the party. But we do not want to fall into that, for it kills the movement by boredom. We too have two temporalities: the temporality of the impatient ¡Ya basta!, revolution here and now! and the temporality of the patient construction of another world. But in the traditional concept impatience is subordinated to patience, and in our concept it should surely be the other way around: patience is there to give force to the impatience of refusal, not to subordinate it. The wisdom of experience is there not to restrain the rage of youth, but to give it strength. The movement is made up of songs of innocence and experience. Both have their place. Usually the voice of experience dominates, but perhaps it is the voice of innocence that should sing the lead. This paper was presented at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, 2005. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Mico a répondu le Sat 15 Oct, 2005 @ 4:56pm |
 Coolness: 150430 | Do you believe in this? |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» moondancer a répondu le Mon 17 Oct, 2005 @ 12:08am |
 Coolness: 92235 | this is the most un-informative, off-point, and under-researched article I have ever read. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Trey a répondu le Mon 17 Oct, 2005 @ 2:28pm |
 Coolness: 102735 | i think he (the author) wants a revolution. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» mdc a répondu le Mon 17 Oct, 2005 @ 4:18pm |
 Coolness: 148785 | or needs a job... |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» hazel a répondu le Sun 4 Dec, 2005 @ 7:17am |
| Coolness: 47985 | What this article is talking about is also often times called dual power [ en.wikipedia.org ] and it is this facet of raving that is most interesting to me. Essentially, i feel like it is saying that we don't need to wait until some point in the future (after the revolution, after decolonization, after the ndp get in charge, after quebec's secesion) to start creating the world of our dreams. Isn't that what raving is? Isn't it (in a large part) about fuck the law, the police, common sense and normativity? 100% illegal parties happen despite the consequences, and everytime this reminds me that another world is possible. It is empowering and helpful in reminding me that we ARE capable of living our lives in a way that makes sense to us, of self-determining what we can and cannot do and how we relate to each other. Me, i want to get free and to work with others to do the same. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Morphine a répondu le Mon 5 Dec, 2005 @ 10:02am |
| Coolness: 50940 | why does everyone hate capitalism? i dont get it.....
it allows us to get our shit cheaper....free markets and all that shit...plus it allows for privately owned businesses...as in: if you own arable land and you grow crops on that land, then you own your crops and you can sell them as you see fit, instead of having the govt come in and manage it for you. Capitalism is an economic theory which stresses that control of the means of producing economic goods in a society should reside in the hands of those who invest the capital for production. Private ownership and free enterprise is supposed to lead to more efficiency, lower prices, better products. whats so bad about all that? |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» cvxn a répondu le Mon 5 Dec, 2005 @ 10:42am |
| Coolness: 178615 | YES Hazel!!!! :D :D :D :D |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» elka a répondu le Tue 6 Dec, 2005 @ 4:48pm |
| Coolness: 52400 | Originally posted by MORPHINE...
why does everyone hate capitalism? i dont get it..... it allows us to get our shit cheaper....free markets and all that shit...plus it allows for privately owned businesses...as in: if you own arable land and you grow crops on that land, then you own your crops and you can sell them as you see fit, instead of having the govt come in and manage it for you. Capitalism is an economic theory which stresses that control of the means of producing economic goods in a society should reside in the hands of those who invest the capital for production. Private ownership and free enterprise is supposed to lead to more efficiency, lower prices, better products. whats so bad about all that? People whine about it, but if they were under a different system they wouldn't even have the ablity to whine without being shot execution style.. mmmm execution style |
Counter-Power And Anti-Power
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