The Two Temporalities of Counter-Power and Anti-Power

John Holloway

1.

Time is central to any consideration of power and counter power or
anti-power. The traditional left is centred on waiting, on patience. The
social democratic parties tell us “Wait until the next election, then we
will come to power and things will be different” The Leninist parties say
“wait for the revolution, then we’ll take power and life will begin”. But we
cannot wait. Capitalism is destroying the world and we cannot be patient. We
cannot wait for the next long wave or the next revolutionary opportunity. We
cannot wait until the time is right. We must revolt now, we must live now.2.
The traditional left operates with a capitalist concept of time. In this
concept, capitalism is a continuum, it has a duration, it will be there
until the day of revolution comes. It is this duration, this continuum that
we have to break. How? By refusing. By understanding that capitalism does
not have any duration independent of us. If capitalism exists today, it is
not because it was created one hundred or two hundred years ago, but because
we (the workers of the world, in the broadest sense) created it today. If we
do not create it tomorrow, it will not exist. Capital depends on us for its
existence, from one moment to the next. Capital depends on converting our
doing into alienated work, on converting our life into survival. We make
capitalism. The problem of revolution is not to abolish capitalism but to
stop making it.

How do we stop making capitalism? How can we refuse, say ¡Ya basta!, Enough!
¡Que se vayan todos! Get rid of all of them!? Refusal is the first key to
thinking about radical social change. We live in a world in which humanity
is rushing like lemmings towards the cliff or our own self-destruction. How
do we dig in our heels and say NO? How do we break the continuum, break
history, break time itself, how do we refuse to survive and start to live,
how do we infuse our lives with an intensity that breaks the greyness of
capitalism? That is the first temporality of revolution, the temporality of
¡Ya basta! Enough! A temporality of impatience and intensity and revolution
here-and-now, because capitalism is unbearable, because we cannot go on
creating our own destruction. This is the temporality of certainty, because
there can be no doubt about our NO to capitalism. It is also the temporality
of innocence, of the simple, uncomplicated NO.

3.
But there is also a second temporality. To give force to our refusal, we
have to back it up with the construction of an alternative world. If we
refuse to submit to capital, we must have some alternative way of living and
this means the patient creation of other ways of organising our activity,
our doing. The Zapatistas say ¡Ya Basta!, Enough!, but they also say “We
walk, we do not run, because we are going very far”. The best of the
piquetero groups in Argentina say “¡Que se vayan todos! Get rid of all of
them!, but they also insist very much on following their own rhythms, their
own times in creating an alternative sociality, an alternative way of doing
things. If the first temporality is that of innocence, this is the
temporality of experience.

This is the temporality of building our own power, our power-to, our power
to do things in a different way. Building our own power-to is a very
different thing from taking power or seizing power. If we organise ourselves
to take power, to try to win state power, then inevitably we put ourselves
into the logic of capitalist power, we adopt capitalist forms of
organisation which impose separations, separations between leaders and
masses, between citizens and foreigners, between public and private. If we
focus on the state and the winning of state power, then inevitably we
reproduce within our own struggles the power of capital. Building our own
power-to involves different forms of organisation, forms which are not
symmetrical to capital’s forms, forms which do not separate and exclude. Our
power, then, is not just a counter-power, it is not a mirror-image of
capitalist power, but an anti-power, a power with a completely different
logic — and a different temporality.

The traditional temporality, the temporality of taking power, is in two
steps: first wait and build the party, then there will be the revolution and
suddenly everything will be different. The second temporality comes after
the first one. The taking of power operates as a pivot, a breaking point in
the temporality of the revolutionary process. Our temporality, the
temporality of building our own anti-power is also in two steps, but the
steps are exactly the opposite, and they are simultaneous. First: do not
wait, refuse now, tear a hole, a fissure in the texture of capitalist
domination now, today. And secondly, starting from these refusals, these
fissures, and simultaneously with them, build an alternative world, a
different way of doing things, a different sort of social relations between
people. Here it cannot be a sudden change, but a long and patient struggle
in which hope lies not in the next election or in the storming of the Winter
Palace but in overcoming our isolation and coming together with other
projects, other refusals pushing in the same direction. This means not just
living despite capitalism, but living in-against-and-beyond capitalism. It
means an interstitial conception of revolution, in which a new world, a new
communism, commun-ism, grows in the interstices of and in opposition to
capitalism — a conception of revolution as the active disintegration of
capitalism in which an alternative society is constructed in the process of
disintegration.

There are no rules on how to build a new world, no model we can follow.
Here there are no certainties. It is inevitably a question of
experimentation and invention. Behind the NO of our refusal of neo-liberal
capitalism stand many YESes. The force behind these YESes is a drive towards
self-determination. Self-determination can only be a social process, a
global knitting together of collective processes of self-determination, a
weaving together of councils or communes or assemblies. But it is not just a
question of deliberations (of how we take decisions), it is also and above
all a question of how we can organise our doing, our activity, in a way that
goes against-and-beyond capital. And not just against-and-beyond capital,
but against-and-beyond the law of value, against-and-beyond the market and
the times and the disciplines which it imposes. That is the most difficult
part of thinking how we can create and are creating a new commons (or
common), a new commun-ism.

4.
The way forward is full of difficulties and uncertainties and requires
much patience. Yet we should not turn things upside down. The traditional
idea of revolution tells us contain our impatience, to subordinate our
impatience to the patient construction of the party. But we do not want to
fall into that, for it kills the movement by boredom. We too have two
temporalities: the temporality of the impatient ¡Ya basta!, revolution here
and now! and the temporality of the patient construction of another world.
But in the traditional concept impatience is subordinated to patience, and
in our concept it should surely be the other way around: patience is there
to give force to the impatience of refusal, not to subordinate it. The
wisdom of experience is there not to restrain the rage of youth, but to give
it strength.

The movement is made up of songs of innocence and experience. Both have
their place. Usually the voice of experience dominates, but perhaps it is
the voice of innocence that should sing the lead.

[This paper was presented at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, 2005.]