Anonymous Comrade writes: "This screed just in from the SWP UK Theory Commisar... pretend they are not there?"

"Autonomism: Evading Power"

Alex Callinicos


Counterposed to reformism within the anti-capitalist movement is a position that is apparently its opposite, renouncing not only a reliance on the existing state, but the very objective of taking power from capital. This is the position taken by the autonomist wing of the movement whose most famous representatives are the Italian disobbedienti. This takes its inspiration from some of the remarks of the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. For instance, he writes, 'Perhaps, for example, the new political morality will be constructed in a new space that will not require the taking or retention of power but the counterweight and opposition that requires and obliges the power to "rule by obeying".'One might regard this strategy as a pragmatic adaptation to the plight of the Zapatistas, whose 1994 rising in Chiapas (south-eastern Mexico) was rapidly surrounded by the federal military. Its survival has therefore come to depend on using the pressure of national and international opinion to constrain the Mexican state from mounting an all-out attack on the guerrillas of Chiapas. But more favourably placed autonomist intellectuals elsewhere in the world have championed a similar politics of renunciation.



For example, Toni Negri, co-author of Empire, in a widely circulated interview after 11 September 2001, argued for a strategy of 'exodus and desertion'. Negri has long advocated such an approach. He wrote in an Italian prison in the early 1980s, summarising his own previous development, 'Power was now seen as a foreign enemy force in society, to be defended against, but which it was no use "conquering" or "taking over". Rather, it was a question of its reduction, of keeping it at a distance.'



The most fully developed version of this theory has been put forward by John Holloway, a British autonomist Marxist based in Mexico, in a book whose name sums up its content: Change the World Without Taking Power. Holloway espouses an extreme form of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, in which all the apparently objective structures of capitalist society are simply alienated expressions of human activity, based on the separation of subject and object, or as Holloway puts it, doer and done.



From this starting point Holloway draws two main conclusions. Firstly, any

attempt to understand capitalism as a set of objective structures implies the abandonment of Marx's original conception of socialism as self emancipation. Accordingly, virtually the entire subsequent Marxist tradition is dismissed as 'scientistic' and authoritarian.



Secondly, dissolving the fetishistic structures of alienated human activity is 'a movement of negation', the assertion of what Holloway calls 'anti-power'. He tends to present this as the liberation of qualities that are denied by capitalism: 'That which is oppressed and resists is not only a who but a what. It is not only particular groups of people that are oppressed (women, indigenous, peasants, factory workers, and so on), but also (and perhaps especially) particular aspects of the personality of all of us: our self confidence, our sexuality, our playfulness, our creativity.'



But what does this mean more concretely? The answer is very confused. On the one hand, Holloway says that labour seeks to flee capital: 'flight is in the first place negative, the refusal of domination, the destruction and sabotage of the instruments of domination (machinery, for instance), a running away from domination, nomadism, exodus, desertion.' This takes us back to Negri's slogans advocating running alternative forms of cooperative production within the framework of capitalist economic relations. In Argentina, for example, his and Holloway's ideas have been used to justify the idea that the small network of factories abandoned by their bosses and taken over by the workers represents the beginning of a new post-capitalist economy.



On the other hand, Holloway remembers enough Marx to know that this strategy is fatally flawed, since it leaves most productive resources still controlled by capital, which can thus dictate the basis on which cooperatives can get access to credit and markets. 'As long as the means of doing [ie the means of production] are in the hands of capital then doing will be ruptured and turned against itself. The expropriator must indeed be expropriated.'



But when it comes to spelling out how this should be achieved Holloway disappears into speculative reveries about 'the dissolution of the thing-ness of the done, its (re)integration into the social flow of doing'. This fog of metaphysics can only be dispersed if one recognises that, even if they depend on human labour for their existence and reproduction, the structures of capitalism have an objective reality that has to be analysed and understood if we do want to change the world.



This is not because analysis is an end in itself. On the contrary, the point of taking seriously capitalism's objective structures is to identify the torsions and points of weakness they involve. Holloway at several points makes the good point against Negri that capital is vulnerable because it depends on the labour that creates it. But properly pursuing this insight requires a theoretical and practical engagement with concrete forms of working class struggle and organisation. Instead Holloway declares that 'we do not struggle as working class, we struggle against being working class, against being classified', as if one can abolish capitalist relations of production by pretending they aren't there.