John Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power stands alongside Hardt and Negri's Empire as one of the two key texts of contemporary autonomist Marxism. This does not mean that the two books represent identical positions. Holloway makes much more of an effort to make his ideas accessible than Hardt and Negri do (although not wholly successfully). There are also important substantive differences: Holloway offers a cogent critique of Empire (pp. 167-75), (1) to which Hardt and Negri, regrettably, have not responded in their book Multitude. Finally, the philosophical frameworks of the two books are quite different. Hardt and Negri rely on a Deleuzian vitalism that celebrates the fullness of Being. Holloway, by contrast, privileges negativity: 'Rather than to St Francis of Assisi, perhaps communists should look to Mephistopheles, the negating devil in all of us' (p. 226, note 15). Hardt and Negri are anti-humanist Marxists for whom Spinoza is the great anti-Hegel. But for Holloway, Marxism is a tributary of 'negative thought' (p. 8): it is the tradition of Lukfics and the early Frankfurt school that provides the most important theoretical thread connecting this tradition to the present. In the celebrated opening sentence of Change the World Without Taking Power--'In the beginning is not the word, but the scream' (p. 1)--we should hear the echoes of Adorno's Negative Dialectic. This gives a particular tonality to Holloway's humanism. Negativity, the scream, comes first not as an affirmation of our humanity but because of its denial (p. 25), and therefore presupposes 'a notion of humanity as negation' (p. 153). Subjectivity itself is defined in terms of negativity, as 'the conscious projection beyond that which exists, the ability to negate that which exists and to create something that that does not exist' (pp. 25-6). Indeed, the key to Holloway's negative ontology is a radical subjectivism. Rather like Fichte, he takes subjectivity as 'the starting point', but a self-differentiating subjectivity that 'can exist only in antagonism with its own objectification' so that 'it is torn apart by that objectification and the struggle against it' (pp. 37-8). Capital, as it strives to constitute itself from our labour, must accordingly be understood through the lens of this 'binary antagonism between doing and done' (p. 41), or more specifically through that of fetishism, 'the name that Marx uses to describe the rupture of doing' (p. 43). What fetishism does is to petrify the flow of negativity; to persuade us to see the world as a set of stable objects and relations. The great error of mainstream, 'scientistic' Marxism was to take capitalism on its own, fetishised terms and analyse it as a totality of structures governed by objective laws. But Holloway's refusal to take the world as 'done' takes him a long way beyond modes of production and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: we should not think of chairs and computers as objects with a durable identity, though stars, not being human products, lie beyond the limits of doing. (2) Arguably, this kind of lapse into Fichtean subjective idealism was a possibility always inherent in Hegelian Marxism from the time of Lukacs and Korsch onwards. What is interesting here is less the familiar philosophical difficulties indicated by Holloway's desire to liquefy chairs and classes into the flux of doing, than its political effects. Driving form analysis to its limit by conceiving capital purely as fetishism (or rather as fetishisation, since the struggle to conquer rebellious subje-ctivity is eternal) dehistoricises capital. Negri and the Regulation School are taken to task for their shared 'paradi-gmatic approach'; that is, for distin-guishing between historically specific phases of capitalist develop-ment. Thereby '[t]he working class refusal ... is slotted into a world of order' (p. 170). But Holloway's alternative seems to be the portrayal of a perpetual crisis in which this refusal forces capital to expand credit, in the hope of deferring confrontation and defeating labour, only to intensify the conflict in the longer term and thus to demand harsher measures such as the neoliberal wave of new enclosures (ch. …