To change the world we need revolutionary democracy

Abstract

John Holloway's book is a remarkable essay, thought-provoking and truly radical in the original sense of the word, of 'going to the root of the problem'. Whatever its problems and weaknesses, it brings to the fore, in an impressive way, the critical and subversive power of negativity. Its aim is ambitious and topical: 'sharpening the Marxist critique of capitalism'. The key philosophical chapters of the book deal with fetishism and fetishisation. Creatively drawing on Marx, Lukacs and Adorno, Holloway defines fetishism as the separation of doing from done, and the breaking of the collective flow of doing. This is a very insightful viewpoint; but Holloway seems to identify all forms of objectivity with fetishism. For instance, he complains that, in capitalism, 'the object constituted acquires a durable identity'. Well, would a good chair produced in socialism not become 'an object with a durable identity'? His refusal to distinguish between alienation and objectivation (cf. note 22 of ch. 4) (1)--a mistake the young Lukacs did not make, in spite of his late self-criticism of 1967--leads to a denial of the objective materiality of human products. Another powerful argument is his criticism of 'scientific Marxism', i.e. those theories which attempt to enlist certainty on the side of socialism, and which claim to explain and predict historical change according to 'scientific laws'. This section is one of the most important of the book, and a significant contribution to a critical Marxist approach to politics. Among the 'scientific Marxists', Holloway includes Kautsky, Lenin's 'What is to be done?' (1902), and Rosa Luxemburg's 'Reform or Revolution?' (1899). However, he seems to ignore the latter's pamphlet on 'The Crisis of Social Democracy' (1915), which represents a radical methodological break with the doctrine of scientific certainty, thanks to a decisive new formulation: the historical alternative between 'socialism or barbarism'. This essay is a real turning point in the history of Marxism, precisely because it introduces the 'principle of uncertainty' into socialist politics. Now I come to the main bone of contention, which gives the book its title: changing the world without taking power. Holloway suggests, at first, that all attempts at revolutionary change so far have failed because they were based on the paradigm of change through winning state power. However, as he acknowledges in note 8 of p. 217, historical evidence is not enough, since all attempts to change the world without seizing power have also failed, so far. He attempts, therefore, to ground his claim on the distinction, introduced in chapter 3 but which pervades the whole book, between 'power-to'--the capacity to do things--and 'power-over'--the ability to command others to do what one wishes them to do. Revolutions, according to Holloway, should promote the first and uproot the second. I must confess that I am not persuaded by this distinction. I think that there can be no form of collective life and action of human beings without some form of 'power-over'. Let me try to explain my objections. They have to do with the idea of democracy: a concept that hardly appears in the book, or which is dismissed as a 'state-defined process of electoral influenced decision making' (p. 97). I have to disagree. I believe that democracy should be a central aspect in all processes of social and political decision-making, and particularly in a revolutionary process--an argument presented by Rosa Luxemburg in her (fraternal) critique of the Bolsheviks ('The Russian Revolution', 1918). Democracy means that the majority has power over the minority. Not absolute power: it has limits, and it has to respect the dignity of the other. But still, it has power-over. This applies to all kinds of human communities, including the Zapatista villages. For instance: in 1994, after twelve days' fighting, the Zapatistas decided to stop shooting and to negotiate a truce. …