John Holloway, ROAR Magazine
An honor, a joy to be
here. I feel I want to dance, but I won’t do it, I’ll focus instead on what we
were asked to do. I shall talk about critical thought and explain how to kill
the hydra of capitalism. That’s what it’s about: we talk of the hydra not to
frighten ourselves, but to think about how to defeat it. The myth of the hydra
had a happy end and we too must reach a happy end.
By critical thought I
understand not thought of catastrophe but the thought that seeks hope in a
world where it seems that it no longer exists. Critical thought is the thought
that opens that which is closed, that shakes that which is fixed. Critical
thought is the attempt to understand the storm and more than that: it is
understanding that at the center of the storm is something that opens paths
towards other worlds.
The storm is coming, or
rather it is already here. It is already here and it is very probable that it
will get worse. We have a name for this storm that is already here: Ayotzinapa.
Ayotzinapa as horror, and as symbol of so many other horrors. Ayotzinapa as the
concentrated expression of the Fourth World War.
Where does the storm come
from? Not from the politicians — they do no more than implement the storm. Not
from imperialism: it is not the product of states, not even of the most
powerful states. The storm arises from the form in which society is organized.
It is the expression of the desperation, the fragility, the weakness of a form of
social organization that has passed its sell-by date, it is an expression of
the crisis of capital.
Capital is in itself a
constant aggression. It is an aggression that tells us every day “you have to
shape what you do in a certain way, the only activity that has validity in this
society is activity that contributes to the expansion of capitalist profit.”
The aggression that is
capital has a dynamic. In order to survive, capital has to subordinate our
activity more intensely to the logic of profit each day: “today you have to
work harder than yesterday, today you have to bow lower than yesterday.”
With that, we can already
see the weakness of capital. It depends on us, on our being willing or able to
accept what it imposes on us. If we say “sorry, but I am going to tend my
garden today,” or “today I am going to play with my children,” or “today I am
going to dedicate my time to something that has meaning for me,” or simply “no,
we will not bow,” then capital cannot extract the profit it requires, the rate
of profit falls and capital is in crisis. In other words, we are the crisis of
capital: our lack of subordination, our dignity, our humanity. We, as crisis of
capital, as subjects with dignity and not as victims, we are the hope that is
sought by critical thought. We are the crisis of capital and proud of it, we
are proud to be the crisis of the system that is killing us.
Capital gets desperate in
this situation. It searches for all possible ways of imposing the subordination
that it requires: authoritarianism, violence, labor reform, educational reform.
It also introduces a game, a fiction: if we cannot extract the profit we need,
then we shall pretend that it exists, we shall create a monetary representation
for value that has not been produced, we are going to expand debt in order to
survive and also try to use it to impose the discipline that is necessary. This
expansion of debt is at the same time the expansion of finance capital,
expression of the violent weakness of capital as a social relation.
But this fiction
increases the instability of capital and in any case does not succeed in
imposing the necessary discipline. The dangers for capital of this fictitious
expansion become clear with the financial collapse of 2008, when it becomes
clearer than ever that the only way out for capital is more authoritarianism:
the whole negotiation around the Greek debt tells us that there is no
possibility of a gentler capitalism, that the only path forward for capital is
the path of austerity, of violence. The storm that is here, the storm that is
coming.
We are the crisis of
capital, we who say No, we who say Enough of capitalism!, we who say that it is
time to stop creating capital, time to create another way of living.
Capital depends on us,
because if we do not create profit (surplus value) directly or indirectly, then
capital cannot exist. We create capital and if capital is in crisis, it is
because we are not creating the profit necessary for capital’s existence: that
is why they are attacking us with such violence.
In this situation there
are really two options of struggle. We can say “Yes, all right, we shall carry
on producing capital, we shall continue to promote the accumulation of capital,
but we need better living conditions for everybody.” This is the option of the
left parties and governments: of Syriza, of Podemos, of the governments in
Venezuela and Bolivia. The problem is that, although they can improve living
conditions in some respects, the very desperation of capital means that there
is very little possibility of a gentler capitalism.
The other possibility is
to say “Goodbye, capital, time for you to go, we are going to create other ways
of living, other ways of relating to one another, both among humans and between
humans and other forms of life, ways of living that are not determined by money
and the pursuit of profit, but by our own collective decisions.”
Here in this seminar we
are at the very center of this second option. This is the meeting point between
Zapatistas and Kurds and thousands of other movements that reject capitalism
and are trying to construct something different. All of us are saying “Right,
capital, your time is past, now get out, we are building something else.” We
express it in many different ways: we are creating cracks in the wall of
capital and trying to promote their confluence, we are building the common, we
are communizing, we are the movement of doing against labour, we are the
movement of use value against value, of dignity against a world based on
humiliation. It does not matter very much how we express it, the important
thing is that we are creating here and now a world of many worlds.
But do we have strength
enough? Do we have enough strength to say that we are not interested in
capitalist investment, that we are not interested in capitalist employment? Do
we have the strength to reject totally our present dependence on capital to
survive? Do we have the strength to say a final goodbye to capital?
Possibly we do not have
sufficient strength yet. Many of us who are here have our salaries or our
grants that come from the accumulation of capital and, if we do not, then we
shall have to go back next week to look for a capitalist job. Our rejection of
capital is a schizophrenic rejection: we want to say a sharp goodbye to it, and
we are not able to, or find it very difficult. There is no purity in this
struggle. The struggle to stop creating capital is also a struggle against our
dependence on capital. That is, it is a struggle to emancipate our creative
capacities, our force to produce, our productive forces.
That’s what we’re at,
that is why we’ve come here. It is a question of organizing ourselves, of
course, but not of creating an Organization with a capital O, but of organizing
ourselves in many ways to live now the worlds we want to create.
In the morning the
comandantes asked us for provocative concepts. I suppose my talk can be
summarized in three theoretical provocations:
- Critical thought is not the thought that speaks of catastrophe but the thought that looks for hope inside the catastrophe.
- We are the crisis of capital and proud of it. All thought about the storm starts from there.
- The only way of defeating the Hydra is by ceasing to create capital and dedicating ourselves to the creation of other worlds based not on money and profit but on dignity and self-determination.
