3.”John Holloway” and mystical anti-capitalism!!!

Reviews and Views

Volume One

Nasser Paydar

Capitalism has not imposed its existence on the inhabitants of the world only with the weapon of mass murder and the launching of floods of blood; the boundless miraculous power of capital has certainly played a very important role in producing illusions, stupidity and self-alienation. An important issue is that this same unbridled magical force of fetishization has not always entered the field with the cloak of justification, a message of compromise and an invitation to surrender; on the contrary, in many cases it has come to the working masses with the sword of criticism in hand, the helmet of war on its head and the most controversial indictments of anti-capitalism on its tongue. The history of capitalism as a whole and the 20th century from beginning to end has been a playground for parties, approaches, governments and powers that have done so and have dressed the ideology, politics and colourful prescriptions of perpetuating the system of wage slavery in the Armor of struggle and war against capital!! Capitalism has progressed very successfully on this front. The role of social democracy, camp communism, the “anti-imperialist” national left, the wide spectrum of existing left reformism and the millions of parties, organizations and groups belonging to it, in preventing the collapse of the foundations of capital’s existence has been no less than the role of its official supporters and defenders. There is no exaggeration in this. Capitalism, with all its all-encompassing power of fetishization and distortion of the realities of the existing world, has ultimately failed to crush the basis of the working masses’ war against itself. While the representatives of this same system, in the trenches of criticism, negation, and abolition of capital, have managed to largely distance the danger of a real war against wage labour by the international working class from capital. In the guise of criticism and struggle against capital, the bourgeoisie has struck such an axe at the root of the anti-wage labour movement of the working masses that it has not been able to do so on the official front of defending the system.  The most effective form of defence of capitalism is a false, reformist, and inverted critique of capital, and “John Holloway” and his “anti-capitalist movement” are also a link in the global chain of these same false critiques and struggles. The theorizing or strategizing of Holloway and his companions, compared to other reformist approaches critical of capitalism with a history, is different in that they everywhere build the basis of their argument to prove their legitimacy on the collapsed ruins of the theories and solutions of the various existing leftist currents. In the current conditions, in a period when the anti-capitalist movement of the working class is more defeated, more worn out, more confused, and more horizonless than in any other period, this poses more important and more serious dangers to the international labour movement than the dangers of other parts of leftist reformism. “Like a thief with a lamp, he will take the goods more carefully.” A kind of theft with a lamp that any kind of tracking and exposure by the existing left parties will not only fail to reveal its reformist nature but may even gain a false credibility under the banner of criticism. The harmful effects of Holloway’s misdirection’s and the false flag of his anti-capitalist struggle for the labour movement become even more serious and terrible when we consider the widespread and relatively active convergence of many forces of the spectrum of left reformism and a large part of right union reformism with this approach. The threat of Holloway’s anti-capitalist narrative to the labour movement in today’s conditions may not be comparable to what was once social democracy, once bourgeois camp socialism, and its anti-imperialist national left counterparts posed to this movement, but this threat is nevertheless very important. Let’s not forget this point that the various forms of reformist criticism of capitalism, just as they ultimately strengthen capitalism by digging up the fallacies in front of the working class, each of them also contributes to the unauthorized and misleading survival of the other. No part of left reformism is capable of dissecting the anti-capitalist theories of Holloway’s inverted theories and capitalist-cantered and ill-fated nonsense. Their criticism will be in the direction of proving the same thing that during the last hundred years has led the global labour movement to the current deadly situation. The anatomy of Holloway’s debates is a work that should be done by the approach of abolishing wage labour and as a ring of anti-wage labour criticism of the entire spectrum of left reformism. With this description, let’s see what he says and on which findings and theories do he based his prescriptions?

The Subjectivist Narrative of Capitalism

How we see capital has a fundamental impact on the kind of criticism, orientation, protest, and struggle we have to change the existing objectivity. Here, we are not discussing the spontaneous anti-capitalist struggles of the working masses against this system. The seller of labour power is anti-capitalist in his class existence because of the exploitation he undergoes, because the basis of the relation of buying and selling labour power is based on his separation from his labour and on his complete collapse from any kind of free and conscious intervention in determining the process of labour, the product of labour, and all matters related to his social and human life. This is a given, but the worker, by virtue of his spontaneous and institutional anti-capitalism, is not only incapable of a conscious class anatomy of capital or the relation of buying and selling labour power and the production of surplus value, but he also usually explores even his own institutional anti-capitalism with the head and brain of capital. By the type of view on capital, we mean a conscious dissection of the capitalist mode of production, and it is this type of view and analysis that fundamentally influences the content of criticism and struggle of any social approach involved in changing the status quo. John Holloway does not trace the anatomy of capitalism from the wage labour relation. He begins with its consequences and complications and moves the basis of his knowledge as far away as possible from the very essence of the existence of capital. Holloway does this in a straightforward and subtle way that makes it somewhat difficult for many to correctly recognize his inversions. In explaining capitalism, he says: “What is at the heart of capitalism is the transformation of our “power of agency” into “dominion” over us. We, as human beings, are creative beings. We started out with the potential for agency, with creativity. We create, we change, we act, we produce things, we create new conditions around us, we are always changing things. In order to exercise this creativity, we need access to the means of creation or the means of agency. But in capitalism, certain individuals gain control of the means of agency or the means of production, and with this control, they are able to tell us that we must use our creative power or “power of agency” to maximize the capitalist’s profit. This is the transformation of our “power of agency” into their “domination.” But this transformation begins with us and with our creativity, and it is important to remember that their “domination” ultimately requires our “power of agency.” Without our power of agency, they have no power and domination over us. This means that capitalism is a system of aggression and aggression against us, based on daily and repeated aggression. Capitalism is in fact a system that tells us every morning when we wake up, “Go and do this, go work in a factory for eight to ten hours, work in a university for these few hours and do this (specific) job…” Holloway explains the basis of capital, but in this regard, and as a necessity for explaining himself, he turns to man. The present part of our conversation is devoted to the first, but addressing the anthropological narrative of the author of Changing the World Without Power helps to better understand his understanding of capitalism. All that is said here about the fetishist power of capital in the transformation, self-alienation, freezing, and complete deprivation of human freedom and capacity for intervention is all true, but this correct explanation does not imply that we are already, institutionally and inherently free, capable, creative, transformative beings, and beyond the control of material conditions. Humans, according to Marx, have declared their distinction from animals by the beginning of the means of production. What they are depends on their production, on what they produce, and how they produce. Within a given production method, people do not only reproduce their physical existence, but also determine the type, style and content of their social life, they also exchange their thoughts, feelings, interests, abilities, creativity and range of activism. Man does not have a real existence outside of the control of these material conditions and outside of the sphere of relations arising from a given social production method. The problem of Holloway’s explanation is that it depicts this phenomenon as a result of the material conditions of production and work in the form of an entity, which seems to have all the abilities, role-playing and great creative power before and beyond the earthly and objective realities of the social relations of production. It seems that there is an objective existence basically outside the control of the influence of these facts and, for example, in the human body itself, and it is after falling under the control of capital that it falls from the virtues and creativity. Holloway emphasizes that we, humans, have a transforming, creative, and active existence in our essence, but capitalism makes these abilities and creativity tools of its domination over us. That capital does so is an explanation of the obvious, but that we, as beings based on essence, have such qualities and attributes is a subjectivist conceptualization. Societies so far in history have all been iron barriers to the growth, development, and flourishing of all human interventions and creativity. The real problem is not only that capitalism makes our present and ready abilities and creativity tools of its domination over us, but the fundamental problem is also that the foundation of the capital relationship is built on the most terrible prevention of the cultivation, maturation, and growth of these competencies and capacities in humans. It may be thought that our insistence on this issue is a kind of slipping into the abyss of words, and Holloway does not mean to give authenticity to the existence of man based on essence or descended from beyond the relations of material production. This is a misconception and stems from a kind of simplistic understanding of Holloway’s words. I only dwell on the essence of his explanation of man and his relationship to the material conditions of production because what he says in this particular context has a very organic internal connection with his account of capitalism, and this is the point we are going to explore here.

Holloway considers the foundation of capitalism to be the transformation of human agency into the domination of capital. This act means the transformation of agency and the capacity for human influence into the domination and authority of capital, or the transformation of man into a being alienated from himself and the transformation of the inseparable and coercive phenomenon of capital, but the capitalist mode of production is not born from this. Human self-alienation is not the creator of the capital relation; it is the consequential process of its reproduction. Not only capitalist production, but commodity production in general is the foundation for replacing relations between humans with relations between commodities, the role of the commodity as a fetish, the idolization of the product of human labour, the widespread servitude of man to the product of his own labour, his overthrow of the basis of free human existence and his all-encompassing subjugation, servitude and slavery to the creations of his own hands. The catastrophe that occurs in capitalist production with the commodification of all labour power merges and dissolves human life within itself. The important and key point is the same as we said: human self-alienation is not the origin and creator of capitalist production relations. On the contrary, it is the second that is the canter of birth, the basis for development, and the cradle of prosperity of the first. Let’s break down the issue further.

The foundation of capitalism is not the process of transforming activism into fetishism in the Hegelian narrative referred to by Holloway, but only wage labour. The power of human activism is absorbed into the power of capital’s domination because his labour power is exchanged with capital, consumed by capital, in this regard, everything he does becomes the capital of the capitalist class and the power of this class. The relation of wage labour or the purchase and sale of labour power is, firstly, a steel barrier to any kind of development of the capacity for activism, intervention, and influence of man, and secondly, the nuclei susceptible to the growth of this capacity and ability are made the leaven of profit and the power of capital. A man who sells his labour power loses all his capacity for activism, creative power, and beyond these, the basis of his freedom, authority, and ability to intervene in nature and the universe. He is completely separated from his work; his sold labour power is no longer absolutely his. This labour force is used to create all capital, wealth, subsistence needs, scientific and research facilities, means of production and exchange, all the necessities of changing nature and the world, and in a word, in the production and reproduction of existing existence. However, as a human being who sells this force, he is absolutely prohibited, excluded, and deprived of any kind of influence, intervention, decision-making, and expression of free human life. The fall of the seller of labour power from prestige, rights, and human status is by no means limited here. All that we have said, the entire world that he and his associates have created and all that is the result of the work, exploitation, and production of his class, comes to dominate the fabric of his life as a godlike, independent, and absolute power. The sale of labour power is the foundation of the origin, development, rebellion, and universality of this disaster. Everything begins there, a point that Holloway sees upside down. He takes root and branch and replaces them together.

Capital is a social relationship. The relationship of buying and selling labour power is a relationship from which the capitalist system with all its details, components, and social articulations, political institutions, the state, legal, cultural, and ideological superstructures, moral standards, civilization, tradition, values, and standards of human life grow, grow, and take shape. In the continuation of their development and expansion of their domination, they transform the existing world into a world of dense and intertwined domination of capital over all aspects of the lives of the inhabitants of the planet without any opening for free human breathing. The wage labour relationship transforms the labour process into an independent entity in relation to the worker and dominates him, capitalizes the product of his labour, and capital becomes an overwhelming, ruling, commanding, capable, and absolute power beyond the will of the producers, the undisputed determinant of the fate of humanity. Capital determines and defines the criterion of right, the standard of civilization, the foundations of culture, the principles of morality, the content of thoughts, the foundation of beliefs, the way of running society, the political order, the structure of governance, and everything else based on the principles of its own reproduction, self-expansion, and survival. Capital has the first and last word, declares its own interests of valorisation and the conditions of reproduction to be the interests of the social life of everyone and all of humanity, and produces and reproduces law, contract, state, culture, morality, civilization, politics, order, tradition, creed, ideology, and thoughts that transcend the preconditions of its own life, survival, and sovereignty, and dominates the fate of humanity in the era. This whole process, with its vast and infinitely complex world, emerges from the core of the relation of buying and selling labour power. The root of all these interactions lies here in the existence of wage labour and in the depths of the capital relation. To replace this relation with the process of its genesis and its product is to slide into the abyss of a very different dissection of capitalism. The first result of which is misleading reformist prescriptions for the reform of this system. Holloway and his companions do just that. A topic that I will address a little further on in this brief article and explain how.

The author of the book “Changing the World Without Power”, continuing what we have already quoted, goes to Marx and tries to pin all his subjectivist distortions and analyses of the capitalist mode of production on him and his book Capital. In this regard, he adds:

“Marx says something very important at the beginning of Capital, at the beginning of the second part of the first chapter of Capital. He says that the guide and the axis for understanding political economy is the dual character of labour. What he means is that the central point for understanding capitalism is the contradiction between abstract labour and concrete labour or useful labour. Although Marx says that this is the central point and although he says this at the beginning of Capital, this is something that has been completely ignored in the Marxist tradition. If we start here from the contradiction between what Marx calls “abstract labour” on the one hand and useful labour or “concrete labour” on the other, then we have to think about what it means. Marx talks essentially about this in his early writings in the “Manuscripts” of 1844. He talks about the difference between “self-alienating labour” and “self-creative activity,” the creative activity of human life that is fundamental to the distinction between humans and animals. I think Marx’s work is really an attempt to understand capitalism and to understand the possibilities of revolution based on the contrast between the creative activity of life or what he later called useful labour or “concrete labour” on the one hand and “abstract labour” or “self-alienating labour” on the other, and changing the world is really about the contrast between “creative or constructive action” on the one hand and wage labour or capitalist wage labour on the other….”

In the introduction to this discussion, I emphasized, and here I emphasize once again, that Holloway, in his presentation of his theories, points out very decisive and important points. Points whose understanding is absolutely fundamental and key for the class struggle of the working masses. The serious problem is that he turns these same key issues upside down and, in this work, does not hesitate to interpret even any statement, including the statement of a human being like Marx, at will. It is absolutely true that Marx attached great importance to understanding the dual nature of labour in understanding political economy. It is also deeply true that recognizing the aforementioned duality is of special and decisive importance in understanding capitalism. All of this is self-evident, but firstly. Marx here discusses the commodity and the dual nature of labour inherent in the commodity and has not yet entered into a specific examination of the process of capitalist labour, the commodification of labour power, and a society based on the purchase and sale of labour power. Secondly. In this conversation, he has not emphasized the contradiction between abstract and concrete labour as a key link in the definition or anatomy of capitalism. This contradiction expresses the dual nature of labour that exists in commodities. Thirdly, what is truly characteristic of capitalism is the commodification of labour power and the relationship within which this power is bought and sold. Fourthly. And finally, when we talk about the duality or contradiction between abstract and concrete labour in capitalist society, we must naturally consider this contradiction and all its consequences and complications, including the replacement of human relations with relations between things, the fetishization of the commodity or product of human labour, the process of separation of human existence from the labour process, and all other issues in this specific society and this historically specific mode of production. A society that is based on wage labour and does not have a real existence in the absence of this relationship. The dual nature of labour is not a property that emerged with the emergence of capitalist production. Before the development and development of capitalism, there was also a commodity and the labour latent in the commodity and the contradiction between concrete and abstract labour within the commodity. It is only with the beginning of the relationship of buying and selling labour that the period of primitive accumulation of capital begins, and it is in proportion to the development of this relationship that the capitalist mode of production grows, develops, dominates all previous forms of production, and dissolves the remnants of previous forms of production within itself.

Holloway gradually completes his deeply Hegelian and anti-materialist understanding of capitalism, and at each step adds to the consistency and density of this understanding. He takes the work to a point where he neither sees the relation of surplus value production as the basis of the existence of this system, nor refers the process of reproduction and self-expansion of capital to the aforementioned relation, nor leaves any room for the intervention of Marx’s revolutionary materialism in explaining the capitalist mode of production!! He writes very clearly that: “The foundation of present society is laid in a contradiction. The contradiction that arises from the organization of action, that is, the characteristic nature of human beings, in capitalist society action becomes its opposite and alienated from itself.” Here Holloway generously twists the entire scroll of material understanding of history completely. First, it makes man a being who most resembles the Adam of the heavenly religions, or the Adam of Rumi and the companions of mysticism, and finally, at best, the man of the Hegelian system. A man who is in his essence a ray of the light of truth, but who is trapped in the world of dust by misfortune. His existence is a mixture of duality between divine good and earthly evil, and all his actions and deeds are the crystallization of this duality and conflict. Holloway then approaches capitalism with this understanding of man and, with the help of the little things and the big things he has arranged so far, he very easily groups the capitalist system together as the same lower world that destroys the divine active man. The system of wage slavery is surgically removed from its material foundation, namely the wage labour relationship, with the sharp blade of “mystical” anti-capitalism!! This system is assembled on the rail of the contradiction between action and anti-action and is transferred to a point beyond the reach of the anti-wage labour struggle of the working class. Let us conclude this part of the discussion. Holloway insists on anatomizing the system of wage slavery with characteristics such as the transformation of human agency into fetishism, the contradiction between abstract and concrete labour. In his analysis of capitalism, he does not refer to the real foundation of this system, namely wage labour or the relationship of buying and selling labour power. What are the forced consequences of labour inherent in the commodity in general, including the commodity as the cell of capitalist society, or what is the natural and forced course of the process of capital reproduction, is considered as the foundation of the existence of the capitalist mode of production. With this work, Holloway lays the first brick in the architecture of understanding the system of wage slavery, and for this reason, in explaining all the issues related to social and legal superstructures and the state, and most importantly, the social existence of the working class and the struggle of this class in capitalist society, he suffers from misguided thinking and falls hard into reformism.

Mystical description of the worker and the working class

The working class for Holloway and the “anti-capitalist movement”!! It is a fundamentally indefinable phenomenon. To be more precise, there is no such thing as a class at all, and more importantly, there is no such thing as a class!! He strongly believes that Marx never agreed to any definition of the working class!! Any definition implies the immortalization of work and the worker, the construction of identity, and the negation of any kind of activism, change, anti-domination, and de-domination!! For this reason, one should seriously avoid trying to define a phenomenon called the working class or accepting the existence of such a thing.

“The working class in this approach (meaning any approach that defines the working class) – however it is defined – is defined based on the relationship of dependence on capital. It is because of its dependence on capital that the working class is defined as a class as a wage-earning worker or producer of surplus value, and because of this assumption the working class is already dependent on a world that simply adds more locks to its dependence. If we define the working class, we have given it an identity as a special group of people. Therefore, from the point of view of socialists, the working class is treated as a positive concept and its class identity as something to be cherished. So that the consolidation of such an identity is determined as part of the class struggle against capital. Of course, the question arises as to what happens to other people who are not included in the definition of the working class or the capitalist class. This problem is dealt with by supplementary arguments based on the definition of other groups, identifying them with the new petty bourgeoisie, the wage earner or the middle class, and by means of other categories, making this process of definition or classification the basis for endless discussions about class and supra-class movements, other forms of struggle and alliances between the working class and other groups…”

Holloway uses a distorted interpretation of Marx’s description of the role of the proletariat in the class struggle as the mechanism for his discussion of the determination and absence of this class in capitalist society. Marx’s point was that the mass of wage slaves of capital constitutes a class with radical chains, “a class in civil society that is not of civil society, a social class that is the dissolution of all social classes, a class that has a universal character because of its common suffering and does not demand any special rights, because it is not a particular injustice that is committed against it, but a general injustice…” In these phrases, Marx describes and describes the dialectic of the existence of the proletariat in existing society. Everything he writes is used to define and explain the position of this class. He does not say that a class that both exists and does not exist!! He speaks of a class that exists and the entire burden of the capitalist world is on its shoulders, a class whose liberation from the evil of being a class depends on the dissolution of classes, a class whose breaking of the chains of exploitation depends on the elimination of every form of exploitation in the world, a class that cannot free itself unless it destroys the material foundations of every form of deprivation of human freedom. Marx deals with the anatomy of the position and role of the working class, and Holloway understands from this descriptive description that as if there is no real existence of such a thing as the working class, and as if the definition of the social existence of this working class is in line with the immortalization of its being a worker! And as if the root of all problems lies in this definition and non-definition!!

Denying the existence of classes in any class society or doubting the existence of the two classes of capitalists and workers as the basic classes of existing society is naturally a strange and astonishing thing, but a proper acquaintance with the principles of Holloway’s analysis can reduce the burden of this astonishment. When the foundation of capitalism is not based on wage labour, when the flow beyond the relationship of surplus value production, that is, the process of transforming human activity into the domination of capital, takes the place of the material foundation of capitalism or the relationship of buying and selling labour power, the way is paved for the denial of the existence of the working class. The author of the book “Changing the World Without Power” devotes, if not all the lines, at least one line in some of his writings to denial, negation, cry of negation and struggle and jihad of negation, including the denial of the existence of being a worker. Later, we will see that he summarizes the entire beginning and end of the class struggle in this denial, which in the real world is nothing other than the struggle to perpetuate capitalism. With all this, it is worth pondering that he apparently does not need such denial and negation. For the simple reason that he has already emphasized the existence of the working class in the theoretical world, and on this basis, it is not a class that wants to deny its existence as a class through activism and the development and consolidation of its creative foundations!! With all this, it remains to be seen, and it is important to see where and on what foundation he bases his argument for denying the objectivity of the definition of the working class? Holloway speaks of the activist instead of the worker and then generalizes the characteristic of activism to everyone, he very easily puts the plural pronoun “we” instead of the working class. A group of people who are both active and counter-active, who are workers on the one hand and not workers on the other, who both prove and deny their being workers, spend part of their lives proving their being workers and strengthening the power of capital, and another part is dedicated to denying their being workers and strengthening creativity. “… We participate in class struggle on both sides, to the extent that we produce wealth, we care about money, and to the extent that we participate in the separation between subject and object through our actions, our thoughts and our language (our definition of the working class), we also classify ourselves. At the same time, we fight against classification in terms of our humanity. We exist in front of and beyond capital, and in ourselves against and beyond ourselves. Humanity as it exists is fragmented and rebellious. Class conflict separates everyone…”

Holloway criticizes the definition of the working class, only because he does not accept the existence of classes in the present society, in his worldview, the consensus of the opposites is observed by drawing attention to the existential reality of opposites. Instead of the worker, he meets a certain psychic man whose existence is a model of the existence of all human beings without any colour of specific class affiliation. All are workers and not workers, all reproduce capitalism and all are engaged in the work of negating the sovereignty and domination of capitalism!! Any kind of dissatisfaction and any form of complaint about the current conditions of the world is a clear manifestation of human activism against capital and as such all human beings carry with them in some way, at some level and to some extent the capacity to oppose the domination of capital!! Every expression of the capitalist’s weak and capitalist discontent against the excessive production of greenhouse gases is a cry of protest against capital, and this same amount of discontent and protest is a powerful bulldozer that can simultaneously demolish the iron wall of class between him and the vast mass of wage slaves cursed and abolished by capital. The exploiter and the exploited, wearing the white shirt of unity, the winning weapon of activism in their hands, shoulder to shoulder, replace the domination of capital with their own power of activism!!! Holloway says that if we define the worker and the working class, we will be faced with the problem of determining the class belonging of individuals, and this is very dangerous.

“The approach to defining class raises all sorts of problems. The first is the problem of ‘belonging’. Do we who work in academia belong to the working class? Did Marx and Lenin belong to the working class? Are the Giapas rebels’ part of the working class? Are feminists working class? Are those active in the gay movement part of the working class? What about the police? In each of these cases there is a concept of the working class that is pre-defined and that determines who belongs to the working class and who does not. One consequence of this definition of class is that we define their struggles in terms of this definition…”

The important point that Holloway fails to understand is that the debate is not fundamentally about defining or not defining the working class. He starts the issue from the worst place, from the world of mystical beliefs. Material phenomena independent of our minds and senses have a real existence. A phenomenon called the working class exists in the present period of history, regardless of whether it is defined or not, as long as capitalism exists. Our defining or not does not make any change in the reality of the existence of this class. When the relationship of buying and selling labour power determines the foundation of the existence of society and the present world, it is clear that the vast majority of the inhabitants of this world are forced to sell their labour power in order to make a living through this. They have not chosen to be workers. The existing society and the historically determined mode of material production that determines the foundation of its existence have imposed on them the sale of labour power and, consequently, the status of workers. As long as this society exists, they are workers, and as long as they are workers, they reproduce the system of wage slavery with their work. Their participation in the reproduction of the relationship of buying and selling labour power and the entire capitalist society is not a sign of creativity and domination, or a reluctance to activism or a desire to increase the domination of capital over themselves. Their lives are forced to be dominated by this system. Just as the struggle against capitalist exploitation and its world of lawlessness without any borders and limits is also an inevitable and forced matter of their lives. These are this huge mass of billions of wage slaves, all workers. Their widespread, continuous, and diverse participation in this struggle does not at all negate their character as workers, and as long as capitalism exists, this character as workers will remain strong, with all its harshness, enslavement, exploitation, and all its miseries. The working class is the working class both when the labour power purchased and consumed by capital reproduces the capitalist system, and in all the twists and turns and ups and downs of the struggle it waged against capitalism. It is saved from being a worker only when the foundation of capitalism has been destroyed. The worker’s wage labour for capital and his struggle against capitalism is a sum of opposites, but the sum of these opposites in the worker’s existence in no way negates his class existence as a seller of labour power. In this way, and in view of all the points we have said, no serious person claiming a desire to participate in the class struggle can base his discussion about the worker on the correctness or otherwise of the definition of the working class. Holloway may agree or disagree with the definition, but capitalism in its real world has made the largest population on earth into workers. The working class does not deny its status as a worker simply by being active and creative. It must launch a massive movement against wage labour and overthrow capitalism. Only then will it be able to escape its status as a worker.

The author of “Changing the World Without Power” claims, by falling into the abyss of a kind of mystical idealism, that accepting the existence of the working class, blocking the way for the anti-capitalist struggle, implies accepting the permanent existence of the existing objectivity and considering the existence of the working class to be eternal!! “If the theoretical criterion is a criterion based on an identity-giving world, that is, a world that exists, then it is no longer possible to have a vision that goes beyond this world…”!!! According to Holloway, thoughts, beliefs, and strategies are not created by material conditions and methods of production, on the contrary, they are mental formations that increase the material world. The material existence of humans does not create their consciousness, but rather the way they look, think, and imagine that creates their material existence. . Capitalism becomes changeable if we do not define it and do not acknowledge the reality of its existence!!! The opposite is also true; this system will become unchangeable if we define it!!! The existence and non-existence of the working class is also subject to the same rule. In all these cases, if we set aside definitions independent of their correctness or incorrectness and class content, if we do not attribute an identity to phenomena and believe in changeability, then the nature of changeability opens the way into the existing objectivity, and the process of change is realized. Both capitalism and the working class are based on our beliefs and mentalities that become changeable or unchangeable. In any case, it is the mind that creates matter, and the changes or stagnation and solidification of matter are everywhere a function of our active and conscious mind!!! It is also noteworthy that Holloway directly attributes all this rebellious, extreme metaphysics to Marx, and in his alignment of the existing political forces in the world, he places himself in the same row with Marx and all others in the opposite row!

Holloway does all this to write down the existence of the working class and the nature of the class conflict and struggle of the world’s workers with wage labour, to consider any criticism of capitalism of any kind, with any goal, and towards any horizon as a radical criticism of capital and capitalism, to deny the real, rough and raised boundaries between classes in the society of wage slavery from the bottom up, and the result of all this is to consider workers and capitalists of the same kind.

Replacing Class Struggle with a Right-Left Mixture of Reformism

Holloway’s understanding of capitalism and classes leaves no room for class struggle. The goal of the struggle is to criticize the fetish, and since this fetish has been surgically removed from its foundation, criticism of it is also devoid of any anti-wage labour burden. Words are lined up with a world of controversy, but they do not carry any material or class exchange with them anywhere. The critique of fetishism ultimately anchors itself on the shore of the spiritual path of the followers of the path and mysticism, and wage labour remains immune to the reach of any war and conflict. All the “broken souls” of the world, each of whom has pain and each of whom complains about a problem, gather together like “soulless people” of the identity less wilderness that is simultaneously everything and everything is not, to shout and, by shouting the fetish, deny the existing world and prove themselves, their activism, creativity, and transformation. “… However, the struggle does not begin after the establishment of dependence and subjection, it does not begin after the emergence of fetishized forms of social relations but is a struggle over the subjection of social action and the fetishization of social relations. Class struggle does not occur within the framework of existing forms of social relations, but the formation of these forms is the result of class struggle itself. Every social action is a constant contradiction between the binding of social action to the deformed fetishized forms that define capitalist forms and the attempt to live against them and beyond them. Accordingly, non-class forms of struggle cannot be considered. Thus, class struggle is a constant everyday contradiction (whether perceived or not) between alienation and the negation of alienation, between definition and anti-definition, between fetishization and anti-fetishization. We do not fight as the working class, we fight against being the working class, against being classified. Our struggle is not a struggle for work; it is a struggle against work. What unites our struggle is the unity of the process of classification (the unity for the accumulation of capital), not our unity as members of a common class. Thus, for example, it is in the validity of the Zapatistas’ struggle against classification in the capitalist system that their class struggle becomes important, and not whether the indigenous inhabitants of the Lacandón forest are members of the working class or not …”

If we want to take Holloway’s words out of the world of cryptic and express them in the language of real people, the summary can be that humans are inherently combative beings and probably very warlike, restless and conflictual!! Basically, they have entered history with this trait and have definitely inherited this virtue from the first man! Long before the birth of fetish forms of social relations, before the process of self-alienation began, before the mode of production was formed at all, and long before classes emerged in the world, there was class struggle. All this is easy, it was just the class struggle that created the mode of production, social relations, fetishism, and all the good and evil of this damned world!! Holloway has enough evidence to prove his claim!! He explains that firstly. Every social act of a human being is a constant contradiction between being bound to abnormal fetish forms on the one hand and trying to live beyond these forms on the other. Secondly. Class struggle, whether understood or not, is nothing other than this incessant contradiction between self-alienation and the negation of self-alienation, between definition and anti-definition, between fetishization and anti-fetishization. A trait that, according to Holloway, is present in everyone, has accompanied humans in all periods, and it is essentially this trait, this contradiction or this spontaneous inner disintegration of the human species that has created classes, class struggle, history, and everything.

“…The class struggle is a conflict that encompasses the whole of human existence, we all exist within that conflict. Just as this conflict is within all of us. It is a bipolar contradiction that we cannot escape. We do not “belong” to this or that class. Rather, the class conflict is within us and separates us from each other. This conflict (class division) encompasses us all. However, this inclusion takes place in distinctly different ways. Some, a very small minority, directly participate in the appropriation and exploitation of the labour of others and benefit from it. Others, the vast majority of us, are directly or indirectly the objects of that appropriation and exploitation. Thus, the bipolar nature of the conflict is reflected in the duality of these two classes, but this conflict precedes the classes and is not their result; classes come into being through this conflict…”

We see that the root of all the corruption, crime and evil, exploitation, self-alienation, fetishization, domination, subordination and all the disasters of the world, all lie in the depths of this human being. A being who is at the same time dual and soul-splitting, does not only carry the above traits with him, he also hides the opposite side of all these states in the depths of his being. Sometimes he is this and sometimes he is that. No human being is able to escape this inner conflict and contradiction. There is no class at all, and these people do not belong to anything called class, their inherent bipolar nature is what ultimately makes society and the world bipolar in the course of its expansion, maturity and rise. The small minority who has developed, developed and strengthened the pole of evil and exploitation, fetishization and self-alienation exploit the work of others and the vast majority who have not done this become the hot exploited mass cursed by the earth and time! The bipolar nature is the internal conflict of people that creates two classes. The conflict precedes the classes, and the latter is the product of the former!! Holloway roams everywhere in his world of mysticism and theological conduct. More than anyone else, he focuses on the fetishism and self-alienation of man, sums up everything in fetishism and the importance of criticizing fetishism, but the reality is that he himself is captured by fetishism and freezing with all the fibres of his being. He has tied himself up in a very dark and intricate network of mystical, extraterrestrial fantasies that are disconnected from the radical materialist narrative and practice of history, and in this regard, he has dug a hole in which he is unable to see the material world, the process of the emergence and evolution of human societies, the modes of production, classes, and class struggle within these societies.

The Marx narrative of history is the telling of the fact that humans, by expanding the scope of their activity, in the form of a world-historical effort, step by step and with each step more than the previous one, have been enslaved by a force alien to them, which is at the same time the creature of their work and the product of their production. A force that has historically become more and more godlike and has dominated and dominated us in our era in the form of the mindless octopus of capitalism. This narrative is based on the dissection of the real process of production and begins with the material production of life, follows the superstructures, relations, interactions, consciousness, ideology, law, state and the whole of civil society from here, sees the material basis of history here and explores the emergence of classes and class struggle from within this process. This materialist, practical and revolutionary explanation, when it comes to the class struggle in capitalism, presents a very clear, explicit, radical picture with a very clear and bright horizon before all the workers of the world. In this perspective, not every sigh, groan, or cry of any individual is an anti-capitalist struggle, not every criticism carries an anti-capitalist burden, just as the most blunt, sharp, and well-armed criticisms of the likes of Holloway are not fooled, and they are not given any anti-capitalist credibility or respect. Here is an anti-capitalist movement and approach that at any level, to any extent and with any content, even in the lowest demands and expectations, is in any case an attack on capital, the exercise of the united class power of workers against capitalism, a step in consolidating, strengthening and organizing the power of the collective struggle of workers against the capitalist class, around specific demands corresponding to the disruption of the process of capital reproduction, creating the basis for a more conscious, horizon-oriented and united struggle against the system of wage slavery and towards the clear prospect of abolishing wage labour. Every protest against the crimes and atrocities of this or that capitalist state is not necessarily a statement against capital. The union movement, with all its comprehensiveness, history, awe, power and influence, is not only not anti-capitalist, but exactly the opposite has been a strengthening of the system of wage slavery and the graveyard of every anti-wage labour movement of the working class. The anti-capitalist movement is a movement that encompasses all areas of human social life. The struggle against gender discrimination, against child labour, environmental pollution, dictatorship, oppression, and oppression, the protest against any injustice, the anti-war movement, and the rallying against any kind of invasion of the capitalist system on the livelihood, freedom, and social rights of humans, can all be anti-capitalist, just as they can be devoid of any anti-capitalist, reformist burden, and ultimately serve to perpetuate wage slavery and oppose any degree of strengthening and strengthening of the anti-wage labour movement of the working masses of the world. “Every promotion is not the moon” and every criticism and protest or argument against this or that performance of capitalists and their government is not necessarily an anti-capitalist struggle. The working masses who, under the thunderbolt of the capital’s rabid dictatorship, marshal their collective power to impose the lowest wage increase on the capitalists, in the conditions of banning any kind of strike and protest, are exactly fighting in the anti-capitalist trench. He rebels against the law of capital, revolts against the severity of capital exploitation, calls the army and the police and all the forces of capital repression to war, he does all these things with the unity and force of class cohesion, he imposes his class will on the system of wage slavery and the government of this system. This struggle is undoubtedly anti-capitalist, even if the result is an increase in minimum wages. Even if they basically fail and the product of all the wars ends up falling into the dungeon and going to the gallows. The opposite applies to union reformism. Here, even though the protest and struggle of some workers have provided them with important welfare facilities, it is devoid of any anti-capitalist content from top to bottom. Strikes, protests, contracts and any kind of confrontation with capitalists take place within the framework of accepting the principle of the perpetuity of the wage slavery system and adhering to the necessary requirements and conditions of capital reproduction and the capitalist production method. Whatever workers earn depends on their loyalty and obedience to capital. More importantly, and indeed more disastrously, the union movement is the sharp butcher knife of the unity and solidarity of the world working class. Union struggles, even at the peak of their rise and when they connect the curve of their achievements to the galaxy, only reduce a penny from the mountain of exploitation of a small group of workers by giving the capitalist system the opportunity to burn billions of other workers of the world deeper and more deadly in the deadly flames of intensified exploitation. The union movement is a weapon in the hands of international capital and the great poles of world capital to shroud and bury the anti-wage labour uprisings of the working masses in the cemetery of accepting the immortality of wage labour. Union reformism bases its existence on the inherently false, inverted, and fabricated sharing of interests of workers with capitalists, the possibility of life, well-being, freedom, and social and legal demands of the working masses under the rule of capital, linking any improvement in the livelihood of workers to the increase in the profits of capital, and in this regard, the widespread and universal sacrifice of the international working class on the threshold of the survival of capitalism. This movement is in every way capitalist, anti-socialist, anti-process of the real liberation and emancipation of the working masses. It is a movement that makes the world of illusions and fetishizations produced by capital its tool of existence, and in this way waters the tree of the survival of wage slavery with the blood of the anti-capitalist movement of the global working class. Whatever achievements this movement may have and whatever increase in rights, welfare and facilities it brings to the workers, it is fundamentally capitalist and serves to strengthen the foundations of the power of capital. Holloway does not accept any of these facts of the existing world and the class struggle. He is fascinated by the cry and considers every cry from the mouth of anyone and any group to be the same as the anti-capitalist struggle. It is indifferent to him whether the Cryer is a worker who has been wiped out of existence under the pressure of capital exploitation or a capitalist whose share in the mountain of surplus value produced by the workers of the world has become a few riyals less than the share of his competitors.

“.. There is no reason to limit the cry to a small group of people. Nevertheless, this cry is a cry of negation. The more severe the inhibition and repression, the more eloquent the cry. The ever-changing form of the cry makes any attempt to define it fruitless…”

Nowhere has any approach to protesting the basis of wage labour said this and made such a baseless claim that the anti-capitalist movement consists of a small group of people. Everywhere, the discussion is about its vastness and universality, and that the vast majority of the world’s population should join it. Everywhere, there is talk of a population of several billion. Nowhere has the discussion been about the smallness and inadequacy of the plurality of members of this movement. What is clear in this context is the basis of the difference, not smallness or largeness, but the class and social content of the struggle, the class fighting, the real perspective of the struggle, the current demands of the movement, the strategies for realizing the demands and goals, the main sources of struggles, uprisings and revolutions. Capitalism is a hell that burns with the bones, flesh and skin of the workers, but the smoke of its flames sometimes reaches even the eyes of the cruel owners of this hell. The warmongering and worker-killing capitalist who, under certain conditions, has lost the competitive market to the benefit of his competitors is also dissatisfied. He is also the bearer of the cry and is probably very ready to build a protest ship to dig a channel of surplus values ​​into the sphere of reproduction of his capitals and to turn the storm of protests of the rebellious anti-capitalist working masses into the fuel for his ship of power, as cunningly as possible. Everyone is dissatisfied with the current course of events in the world. Even the most ferocious representatives of the wage slavery system are not happy with what is happening before their eyes. First, the wave of struggle of millions of workers in their direct sphere of power and then of billions of workers worldwide disturbs their sleep moment by moment, paints a nightmare of the death of capitalism before them and rings the death knell of this system in their deaf ears. They are not satisfied with this situation and constantly talk about the need for change to overcome the problems of capital. Obama also calls himself a champion of change and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also shouts that he is the most in favour of change. The conversation is not about dissatisfaction, the desire for change and creative effort. All the talk is about the struggle against wage labour and for the permanent abolition of wage labour. It remains to be seen where the discontent, protests, cries, creativity and the search for change are placed in this process. We need to see who, which class, and which social force is shouting, what is it shouting against, and in this regard, what is it going to remove from the path of human life, how does it want to remove it, what are its solutions, with what horizon is it rushing forward, and what does it want to replace with what?

Holloway sees any kind of talk about any of these issues as falling into the abyss of definition, fetishization, subjugation of social action, and the like. He believes in the cry, whoever the Cryer may be, the cry against whatever he may want. He sees all the protest movements in the world as anti-capitalist and in the direction of overthrowing capitalism. “… The cry of negation is primarily a negation. It is a cry of refusal and negation of dependence. It is a cry of disobedience and a manifestation of non-dependence. Disobedience is a major part of everyday experience, from the disobedience of children to the swearing and cursing of the alarm clock that wakes us up and sends us to work, to all kinds of evasion, disruption, and subversion, to open rebellion, like the open and organized cry of the Zapatistas who said, “Enough is enough.” Even in the most disciplined and dependent societies, defiance and disobedience never completely disappear, they are always present as a culture of hidden resistance…” Perhaps Holloway and his supporters claim that what they mean by the cry and protest is actions that are truly against capitalism, and that the criticisms and arguments of the system’s defenders, the owners of capital, and their ilk are not included in the category of rebellion and protest against capital. In response to such a claim, my point is that the problem lies not in the formulations, nor in the fabric of intentions, but in the actual and practical application of strategies. In the framework of Holloway’s vision, perceptions, analyses, and solutions, there is no place for departure from the mode of production, nor is capitalism explored as a mode of production, nor do classes in general and in present-day society have a real existence, nor is the anti-capitalist struggle specific to the working class. None of these phenomena and realities are acceptable; on the contrary, there is talk everywhere of de-identification, avoidance of the material explanation of historical dynamics, rejection of the belief in the existence of the proletariat, equating any kind of reformist belching with the struggle against capitalism and communism, focusing all the talk on the word “we” instead of the working class, and a very explicit and deeply shameless mockery of the class role played by the working masses of the world. He says: “… What is the theory of insurrection? What is the essence of hope? Some say, “the working class”, “We can see it [the working class], study it, organize it, that is the essence of hope, that is where we can begin the political work”. Our answer is: “Call it the working class, but we cannot see it, study it and organize it, because the working class as a revolutionary class does not exist. It has no identity”…” Holloway, throughout all his arguments, substitutes anti-socialist and bourgeois supra-class reformism for the anti-capitalist struggle of the working class.

One of the striking aspects of the author’s theorizing of “The Revolutionary, Critical Subject” is that everywhere he hides his baseless mixture of the right and the reformist left behind the rubble of the distortions of past and present leftist reformism. The custom of some sections of the left over the last hundred years has been to link the root of all the injustices, oppression, and disasters that afflict humanity in the present to the lack of industrial growth, the lack of democracy, the low level of civilization and civil organization of society, the insufficient development of capitalism, and other very unfounded factors of this kind. At the same time, and beyond these deeply bourgeois analyses, the left has also sought a way to eliminate all these injustices, oppressions, and crimes in organizing the democratic movement, fighting against dictatorship, carrying out a democratic revolution, and the like. Different sections of the world’s left have been spinning in the maze of these theorizing since the beginning of the last century. They have surgically removed the root of injustices, oppression, discrimination, and intensified exploitation from the capitalist system. Everywhere, they have removed capital from the reach of the workers’ struggle. They have divided the workers’ movement into a thousand factions with the sharp knife of democracy and have lined up each faction as obedient infantry in the army of oppositional reformists from within the bourgeoisie. Left reformism has thus played its part in the suppression of the anti-wage labour movement of the world working class. John Holloway has studied the work of the left well, but not for the sake of a Marxist and anti-wage labour critique, but on the contrary, only because he has used its crumbling ruins as the cement and mortar for his mystical right-left reformism. He does not speak of democracy and does not see the root of all human suffering as the insufficient growth of industry and accumulation of capital or the lack of civil development and the failure to establish the foundations of democracy. The author of “The Critical Revolutionary Subject” incidentally links everything to capitalism and also speaks very consistently of anti-capitalism. He distances himself from left reformism in this regard, but only in order to make his distancing a departure from more venomous and misleading attacks on the anti-wage labour movement of the working class. The present world is a capitalist world. Whatever exploitation, intensification of exploitation, sexual, ethnic and racial discrimination, libertarianism, deprivation of basic human rights, crimes against children and women, hunger, poverty and deprivation exist in this world, all of them originate from the depths of the capital relationship. To fight against each of them, one must undoubtedly fight directly against capitalism and turn each of these areas of struggle into a crushing bulwark against wage labour. This is the most obvious truth, but the more fundamental point is that all of these forms and areas of struggle can be both anti-capitalist and not anti-capitalist. The boundary between communism and reformism, between what the parties of the bourgeois socialist spectrum and their heirs have historically done and what the anti-wage labour movement should do, the boundary between Holloway and his mystical anti-capitalism and the communism of the abolition of wage labour, is precisely defined here. For the existing parties of the left, the movement to eliminate gender discrimination is a democratic, supra-class movement, loyal to a form of capitalist rule, based on the unity and interconnection of the exploiter and the exploited, which is supposed to achieve equality between women and men within the framework of the domination of the wage slavery system!! For Holloway, this movement is part of the process of replacing fetishism with the power of human agency in general and regardless of class affiliations within a mystical and metaphysical narrative of the concepts of self-alienation and human creative agency!! But for communism, the abolition of wage labour has a profoundly different subject matter, content, and location. Here, the struggle against gender discrimination is an integral part of the continuous and global front of the international working class’s struggle against capital. Every step of this struggle is an attack on the labour process of capital, a disruption in the process of capital’s valorisation, a crushing blow to the foundations of capital’s power and rule and entails anti-capitalist changes in favour of improving the living conditions of women and securing as many of their social and human rights as possible.

In the darkness of the horror and terror of capitalist rule, the anti-wage labour movement links the determination of the level of wages of all workers to the amount of the product of the social labour of the working masses and calls for the widest possible allocation of this product to social welfare, livelihood opportunities, education, treatment, health, and further physical and mental advancement of all human beings. In this way, the anti-wage labour movement targets the entire oppressive dependence of women on the framework of family ties and, in other words, the economic foundations of gender discrimination, and places the cost of eliminating this discrimination on the lifeblood of capitalism, on the process of fractional production of surplus value. In this regard, the anti-wage labour approach calls for the elimination of any state interference at any level and in any sphere of individuals’ private lives, insists on the prohibition of domestic work, and declares this type of work, as long as it exists, as wage labour, the criterion for receiving full and unconditional wages for every employed worker. This approach everywhere points its finger at the economic roots and foundations of gender inequality in the dominance of the ruling social system and targets these very foundations and roots. The direct product of this type of view and approach to eliminating gender discrimination is very clear and differs from the mystical nirvana weaving of Holloway and all that left reformism and all forms of bourgeois socialism have been stirring up. First of all, it is capitalism that is attacked everywhere, in all the ups and downs and ups of the struggle, by anti-wage labour rallies. Second, everywhere the cost of eliminating discrimination is borne by the process of capital reproduction, and the deeper disruption of this process follows. Third, the demagoguery and misleading supra-class unity between working and capitalist women will be struck by the hammer of a conscious class orientation; fourth, the movement to eliminate discrimination will become an internal and crushing stronghold within the labour movement; fifth, the phenomenon of women’s rights and the struggle against women’s disenfranchisement will be more and more closely linked to its human, anti-wage labour and socialist content, and distance itself from false and inverted bourgeois interpretations. Sixth, and finally, the achievements of every level and every step of such a struggle will be a much freer, more conscious, stronger, more independent, and more creative presence of women in the field of struggle for fundamental changes in the world and the permanent abolition of capitalism.

The anti-wage labour approach in all other areas of human social life and the struggle against injustice, deprivation, oppression, deprivation of freedom, fetishism and the reduction of livelihood and welfare facilities and free human development also proceed with exactly the same view and on the same track. In relation to the issue of children, it attacks all forms of crime that the wage slavery system has imposed on them right from their real roots in relation to the production of surplus value, and the cost of ensuring the most prosperous level of livelihood, free life and the process of their transcendent human development is everywhere met by disrupting the dynamics of capital appreciation. In the case of the environment, any degree of pollution removal and improvement of the world’s health condition refers to the realization of fundamental changes with anti-wage labour content in the planning of labour and capitalist production, in terms of what should and should not be produced and how much should or should not be produced.

The anti-capitalist movement with the goal of abolishing wage labour determines its demands with this approach, deduces its solutions from within this process, makes the struggle moment by moment a process of awareness, nobility, and mastery of the knowledge of the working masses of the world over the fabric of capital’s existence, organizes a conscious, visionary, and powerful movement against capital in all spheres of human life, against all manifestations of capital’s life. The opposite of all this applies to the reformism of the international left from ancient times to the present day and the anti-capitalist science and scoundrels of the likes of Holloway. Holloway considers every protest of every anti-worker and anti-communist nationalist, every bourgeois feminist belch of every female capitalist, every clamour for the elimination of environmental pollution, and in short, every clamour for any degree of manipulation of capitalism as the same anti-capitalist struggle. He leaves no boundary between reformism and communism and makes no difference between the conscious anti-wage labour movement of the workers of the world and the reformist groans and groans of the capitalists. He is stirring up the most harmful dust in the space of the international working-class struggle. What he is prescribing is a prescription for the disarmament of the workers’ movement and has nothing to do with the struggle against wage slavery.

Changing the World Without Power, Quiet Reform Instead of Militant

In this part of his comments, John Holloway is precisely trying to present the foundation of a completely reformist alternative to the common alternatives of the left. He follows this in all his theories, horizons and solutions, and he uses this way of posing issues as a tool for penetrating his words into thoughts. The left has historically cantered around the struggle against the state and the anti-reformist regime of the upper classes, armed or peaceful, and has everywhere made this type of war and struggle an alternative to the anti-wage labour movement of the working masses of the world. This approach has followed certain foundations, expectations and horizons in the history of the left. Nationalist anti-imperialist, popular democracy and the horizon of state capitalism under the name of socialism have been the three sources and three continuous components of the social life of the left. The current left parties, as the dying remnants of their predecessors, continue their political life with the same skeleton but with some emergency manipulations and ineffective remedies. The overthrow of democracy and the attempt to turn the labour movement of countries into a guarantee of their power and ultimately the establishment of state capitalism is what they all pursue. Holloway seems to have touched on the very obvious historical bankruptcy and bankruptcy of this leftist approach. He says: “… The state-cantered argument can be seen as a self-centred conception of the development of struggle. [In this sense] struggle is understood as something in which there is a central and pivotal issue, namely the conquest of state power. At first, we concentrate all our efforts on the conquest of the state, we organize ourselves, and then, when we have achieved this, we can think of other forms of organization. We can think of revolutionizing society. We move first in one direction in order to be able to take steps in the other. The problem is that it is difficult or impossible to end the dynamism that is achieved in the first phase in the next phase. The other conception focuses directly on the kind of society that we want to create without going through the state. There is no axis. The organization [itself] is directly a sign, [itself] is directly linked to the social relations that we want to create. Where the first conception sees the fundamental transformation of society after the conquest of power, the second inference insists that the fundamental transformation of society must begin now. The revolution must begin not when the time is right, but here and now. This signification, this revolution here and now, dominates the whole tendency towards self-government. Self-government cannot exist in capitalist society. What can exist and does exist is the tendency towards social self-government. The movement against the decision of the alien, against the decision made by others, such a movement is inevitably empirical…”

The author of “Changing the World Without Power” very wrongly bases his criticism on the left regarding the issue of capturing political power on two unrealistic axes. First, it relies on the wrong narrative of the left about the government, and secondly, it sees the forms of work of the left forces in their disregard for the problems on the way to the process of changing the capitalist society. There is no doubt that the left considers both issues mentioned by Holloway from a non-Marxist and bourgeois perspective. But the important problem is that the problem of the left’s work in the field of capturing political power does not come from a misunderstanding of the issues that Holloway says, but from other deep-rooted class prejudices. I said earlier that the existing left, despite all the developments it has gone through in the last few decades, is still a remnant of an approach that emerged in a period of history in the framework of the anti-imperialist coalition of countries and the camp of state capitalism under the false flag of socialism. The desire for democracy corresponding to the industrial development of the capitalist societies and the prospect of establishing state capitalism with the same name of socialism and communism has been the foundation of the working forces of this approach, and the escape of all sides of this left from the struggle against wage labour is rooted in this skeleton and class foundations of view and strategy. The left does not have the problem of lack of literacy from the anti-capitalist struggle; the historically metabolised class practice of its forces has been formed and flourished in detachment from such a struggle. Knowing him is not knowing against wage labour. John Holloway, under the pressure of his subjectivist account of capitalism, the denial of the existence of classes, the mystical view of the process of world change and all other inversions, is unable to understand the fundamental difference between the anti-regime anti-wage labour on the one hand and the overthrow of the class-seeking democracy. He criticizes the militant reformism of the left forces from the platform of his pacifist reformism, and in this regard, he puts the change of the world without gaining power instead of the anti-democratic regime of the left.

For the anti-wage labour movement, the struggle against the capital state is an inseparable part of the struggle against the foundation of capitalism and exploitation, and the injustices and crimes stemming from the existence of this system. In the perspective of this approach, the state is not just a handful of repressive forces, lawless courts, and prisons. It is not limited to parliament, cabinet, ministries, and a handful of legislative, executive, or decision-making institutions, and the like. The state is an integral part of the capital relationship, and capital, as a social relationship, carries the state with it in all aspects and levels and ups and downs of its own reproduction. Wherever you put your hand in this process, the state is in front of the working class and against the labour movement. The planning of the political order, the productive order, the civil order, the educational, cultural, and social order, and everything capital does, is carried out with the tools of the state and the intervention of its continuous institutions. Separating the struggle to overthrow the capitalist state from the struggle against the entire system of wage slavery means only one thing. To replace the state of capital and to keep the capitalist mode of production and social relations firmly in place and to protect them. The opposite could also be true, meaning that we remove the destruction of the state power of capital from the agenda of the anti-wage struggle of the workers of the world, and in that case all that would be done would be to replace the peaceful reformism of the capitalist system with militant reformism outside the orbit of the anti-wage struggle of the working class, and this is what Holloway and his mystical “anti-capitalist” movement are doing. He adds, continuing what we quoted from him above: “… Of course, three things are clear:

A: The pull towards self-government is necessarily a pull against letting others decide for us. [This pull] is therefore a movement against representative democracy and towards a kind of direct democracy.

B: The pull towards self-government is inevitably incompatible with the kind of government that decides for us and thus excludes us,

C: The pull towards self-government is meaningless if self-government does not become the main goal of our activity. [This pull] therefore inevitably aims at the capitalist organization of labour…”

Holloway has formulated all his expectations, understandings and perceptions about the change of capitalist society and its alternative in the above few sentences. Let us not let others decide for us and replace parliamentary democracy with direct democracy. Let us set the horizon of self-interest before ourselves and take the path of civil disobedience against the existing state order. Doing these things will entail making the organization of capitalism the object of our protest and struggle. Holloway’s socialism and anti-capitalist movement, which is at the same time a supra-class, “speciesism” movement consisting of all earthly human beings!!, is nailed to these scaffoldings and becomes unnecessary for any kind of effort to break and overthrow the state machine of capital. All the concepts here, from self-government to the content of its contradiction with the current state structure to its direction against the organization of capitalism, are Martian, hollow concepts with a naked theme of the relationship of buying and selling labour power. If a group of workers get together and form a consumer or even production cooperative and take on the various affairs of this cooperative themselves, they will not make any dent in the relationship of surplus value production and the lifeblood of capital. Going further, suppose that several thousand workers working in a factory expel the capitalist owner of the company and take control of everything themselves, they will still not have brought about any change in the capitalist mode of production and the relationship of production for profit. Let us go a mile ahead. Let us not step to a place where all the factories, farms, shops, and so-called “service” institutions, in a word, all the centres of work and production of a country are run by the workers themselves, and even in this case there will not necessarily be any glimmer of a change in capitalist relations, the disappearance of wage labour, and perhaps no disruption in the process of reproducing the capitalist mode of production. The self-government that Hallway intends is not the anti-capitalist and socialist self-government of the workers, but quite the opposite, the assumption of the profoundly capitalist planning and management of these centres by the workers themselves. These self-governments do not eliminate the relationship of buying and selling labour power, they leave the production of surplus value intact, they maintain the productive order of capital, and they allow the entire system of wage slavery to continue to exist with a formal arrangement. The workers themselves do not become self-governing by taking upon themselves the manner in which the order of capital and the order of their exploitation by social capital impose themselves. Every step of the struggle and effort of the working masses for self-determination has validity, value, and labour and anti-wage labour content only when it practically and concretely strikes an axe at the root of the surplus value production relationship.

In the history of the class struggle of the capitalist era, numerous self-governing councils with the broad participation of workers have emerged in different countries in different periods and under different historical conditions, which had nothing to do with the anti-capitalist self-government of the working masses. What existed in Yugoslavia during Tito’s time, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia, the old Peronist councils of Argentina and the like were of this kind. As for the current workers’ self-governments within the councils of Argentina, the matter is certainly different, but it must be stated with all emphasis that none of the 170 companies expropriated by workers in this country over the past few years, including councils of the type of Bruckmann, Zenon and Beavon, have witnessed any kind of change or transformation in wage labour relations, could not have been in their current approach, and basically did not have such a horizon in front of them. The self-governing workers’ councils created by the working masses in these years have continued to exist, without any more or less, as circles of the process of reproducing social capital. Whether their number increases by hundreds makes no difference to the essence of the matter, the debate is about the approach and perspective that the labour movement adopts and sets before itself. The Bruckmann, Zenon, Beavon and similar councils can have the greatest and most effective role in the practice of the class struggle of the working masses, but only if they play a role as links, components and minutes in the chain of nationwide anti-wage labour organizing of the working class and proceed in this direction and with this theme and approach.

There is a huge difference between an anti-capitalist and socialist workers’ self-government and the process of organizing workers to fight against wage slavery. The former cannot be established under the domination of the relationship of buying and selling labour power and the rule of capitalist relations, and if it declares its existence with such a claim, it is merely a means of ruining and misleading the labour movement in favour of the survival of capital, but the latter is a circle of the life of the anti-capitalist movement of the working class which, in its development, completion, and universalization, paves the way for the united power of the working masses against capital, and consolidates this power step by step. It applies it against capital in all areas of social life, rushes forward towards the establishment of a national anti-wage labour council organization of all workers, and in this direction smashes the capitalist state machine. The state overthrows the bourgeoisie, blocks the way for the establishment of any kind of state over society and the working masses, and makes the formation of such a state impossible, and finally replaces the political power of capital with the organization of a national council for the planning of work and production of all workers. Holloway does not accept this process, for the very obvious reason that he does not fundamentally see capitalism as a wage labour relationship, and he considers the existence of classes to be an acceptance of the class nature of society!! He does not believe in the existence of a class called the worker and does not consider ending the system of wage slavery as the work of such a class. Instead of all this, immersed in his mystical dreams, he illuminates the contradiction between activism and fetishism, calls on the children of mankind to reform against fetishism and to establish activism, considers every cry from the throat of every human being as a revolt against fetishism and against the domination of capitalism. His self-management is the planning of the production of surplus value and the reproduction of capitalism by cooperative institutions. Here everything is upside down and what is most upside down is that the worst and most misleading forms of deviance and fetishization are supposed to be the weapons in the hands of the people of the world to fight against fetishism and ensure human activism!!!

The movement for the abolition of wage labour ruthlessly criticizes the left’s anti-democratic, supra-class regime that serves the establishment of state capitalism under the name of socialism, but only in order to replace it with a radical and practically anti-wage labour regime. In this movement, every degree of workers’ self-organization is a step in preparing them to exercise organized, conscious, and far-sighted power against the system of wage slavery. The seizure of factories and their management by workers, the removal of every canter of work and production from the clutches of capital owners or the capitalist state, the establishment of workers’ council power wherever and to whatever extent possible, are mechanisms and vessels for an independent class alignment against capital. The workers must do all this in order to organize themselves from within this process as a conscious class united against the basis of wage slavery and ready to dismantle the capitalist system, so that at every step of the struggle, they can exercise this power against capital with insight and wisdom at every level they are ready to, so that they can disrupt the work process and the process of capital’s valorisation and reproduction more and more, so that capitalism and its institutions of power can be weakened and destroyed more and more. In this direction, the anti-wage labour movement, from within this preparation and struggle, by branching out and taking root in all spheres of social life, links the struggle against the capitalist state with the struggle against wage labour, confronts the entire system, including the capital state, with each step more powerfully, more organized and more conscious, and finally, at a certain phase of the balance of class forces, smashes the capital state machine and establishes in its place the organization of the All-Union Council for the Planning of Work and Production of the Working Masses. The anti-wage labour approach does not see any step or level of seizing work centres and exercising council power over these centres as containing any degree of change in the crude reality of the relationship of buying and selling labour power as long as the relationship of surplus value production dominates society, because any perception of this form of changing the relations of wage slavery is merely demagoguery, inversion, and the induction of capitalism instead of socialism into the lives, movements, and thoughts of workers.

In Bruckmann, Zenon and Bau Vonne, workers’ self-government is a reality. The workers who are members of these self-governments have taken solid and very valuable steps in the development of the anti-capitalist struggle. Through the exercise of their organized power, they have been able to prevent the fall into the abyss of unemployment and the catastrophe of hunger and death caused by the predatory invasion of capital. They have been able to implement the law of equal wages among themselves, raise their wages higher and higher. They have been able to implement the principle of council decision-making and the division of labour based on collective agreement among themselves. The workers of Zenon, Bruckmann and Bauvonne, or similar self-governments, have done all these things, but the entire planning of work and the production and exchange of the product of their labour is still comprehensively and without any reduction or reduction a link in the process of valorisation and circulation of Argentine social capital and all world capital.

Workers receive wages, sell their labour power, are wage slaves of capital. The greatest part of the product of their production and labour, plus the value of capital, is transformed into the capital of capitalists. Active self-government against the domination of the proletariat is devoid of any anti-wage labour burden, and its creation or even establishment throughout the world not only does not harm the basis of wage labour but makes it much stronger and more permanent. The points we have made about the Argentine workers’ councils do not in any way diminish the anti-capitalist importance of the struggle of the workers who are members of these councils. Everything they have done can be steps towards strengthening the bulwarks of aggression against capital and can make the front of the war against wage slavery stronger. This depends on the fact that the movement for the occupation of factories by them does not confine itself to the level of the achievements of the day, to the mere temporary overcoming of the problem of unemployment or hunger, does not consider this action as a tactic to solve the problems of a few hundred Argentine workers, but sees itself as an organic part of the labor movement of society and the world, links itself to all forms of anti-capitalist struggles of the workers of the world, establishes relations with everywhere, pursues the attack against the capitalist system on a nationwide scale and in the comprehensive realm of the class struggle, and, in short, advances as a bulwark of the broad international front of the struggle to destroy the system of wage slavery.

The Argentine workers’ councils have certainly taken important steps forward in that they have taken factories out of the hands of capitalists, exercised power against capital, and organized this power in the form of councils. However, these councils have nothing to do with self-governing workers’ councils that are detached from wage labour relations and the domination of capital. Because Holloway does not consider capitalism to be a system based on wage labour and because he does not see all the threads and levels of organization in the present world as the process of the development of wage labour, he considers every self-governing cooperative of a group of people to be a clear crystallization of human activism against the fetishism, domination, and relations of capitalism. His approach to rejecting and denying the necessity of the violent overthrow of the capitalist state also stems precisely from this. Holloway’s idea is that the cooperativities of work and production centres and the management of these cooperatives by self-governing human groups is not something that requires the seizure of power and the use of force. Some of Holloway’s critics have focused their sharp criticism of the theory of “changing the world without power” on the author’s neglect of the machinery of capital’s oppression. This criticism is correct, but it reflects only a very small part of Holloway’s world of transformations. He does not simply ignore the power of capital’s oppression, he analyses the entire system of wage slavery in reverse, he denies the anti-wage labour movement, the anti-wage labour alternative does not accept the existing objectivity, and he substitutes peaceful reformism for the communism of the abolition of wage labour. In response to those who have focused their criticism on his theory of ignoring the machinery of state oppression and denying the conquest of political power, Holloway clarifies that he sees oppression and accepts confronting it, but he seeks the solution in finding other ways. He says:

“… The only thing that is possible is to try to find other ways to dissuade the state from using violence. One of these ways could be to use armed resistance to some extent, as in the case of the Zapatistas, but in this we must certainly rely above all on the power of the collective integration of the rebellion. The second issue is to see if we can develop alternative activities, alternative productive activities within the framework of capitalism, to what extent we can create an alternative social network other than the one that currently exists between activities, for example, the factories that were reopened by workers in Argentina, and these possibilities clearly depend on the scope of the movement… The third issue is the organization of social self-government. How do we organize a system of direct democracy at a level that extends beyond the local level in a complex society? The classic answer is the idea of ​​councils, linked to the council of councils. The councils send their representatives to this council. These representatives can be called upon. This answer seems basically correct, but it is clear that even in small groups the practice of democracy is always problematic, so that the only way to understand direct democracy is through a process of experience and self-education. Can we change the world without conquering power? The only way to understand this is to do it…”

We see that Holloway’s real problem with regard to world change is not simply the denial of the necessity of overthrowing the capitalist state and seizing political power. He can, as he says, consider movements like the Zapatista movement necessary and believe in them, as he really does. The real problem is that the entire process of change he claims is not a change in the relations of wage slavery and the production of surplus value. He sees the current autonomous councils of Argentine workers as networks free from the rule of the law of value, and alternative socialist models of existing society. He calls for reforming the capitalist system and democratizing it as much as possible to the level of direct democracies!! Under the pressure of his subjectivist explanation of capitalism and his highly mystical understanding of world change, Holloway not only does not come anywhere close to the world of the anti-wage labour campaign, but he is also too dreamy and dreamy about the flexibility capacity of capitalism. He expands the scope of these ideas to the point that he considers launching anti-globalization, anti-war, peace, and environmental pollution slogans, creating self-managed cooperatives, and raising various forms of slogans without consciously organizing the world’s workers’ struggles in a soviet manner and against wage labour, and without directing these struggles toward the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a nationwide socialist soviet organization of labour and production, sufficient to fundamentally change this world.

November 2009

Sources:

– The Revolutionary Subject, Holloway’s Criticism

– John Holloway’s Another Kind of Politics (Interview with Free Elders)

– Can the World Be Changed Without Taking Power (Debate Holloway and Alex Callinicus)