Date: 12 Feb 97 11:29:48 EST From: John Holloway <104164.2012-AT-compuserve.com> Subject: Strategy paper Dear Monty, It's exciting that we're both independently writing articles at the same time, addressing exactly the same question - what can we learn from the zapatista movement about how to theorise class struggle in the world today? Our approaches to answering the question are very different, but I think there is probably a lot of agreement and complementarity. I like your article a lot and find it very stimulating. I've been trying to focus on how I disagree with you, in order to advance the discussion, but I find it difficult to pin it down, perhaps because of differences in language, perhaps because there's very little disagreement. Anyway, here are a number of comments to start off with: 1) You say at the begining that "the critical and essential criterion must be whether a struggle moves the world's working people further against capitalism and toward communism". That seems right, but it has me worried. I think the first part is right, but I suspect that the second part doesn't make sense. Firstly, I don't see how we could ever tell whether a struggle moves us towards communism. More fundamentally, I think it's teleological and instrumental. By that I mean that it suggests movement towards some pre-established end, by which the movement is to be judged, whereas I think that one of the points underlined by the zapatista movement is that there is no pre-established end, that communism is not something we move towards, but something that we struggle to invent. Your criterion also suggests a means-end distinction, which you later reject: here you seem to be saying that the struggle should be judged according to its effectiveness as a means to bring about a certain end. This remains within the Leninist framework of "What is to be Done?" and suggests that Lenin asked the right question, but gave the wrong answer (or possibly what is no longer the right answer - this is the implication of Tronti's "Lenin in England", isn't it?). It seems to me that the zapatistas are saying that Lenin not only gave the wrong answer, but also asked the wrong question: that is to say, that we should not think of revolution instrumentally, as a means to an end. The struggle, as they put it, is the struggle to convert "dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity": dignity is the means, dignity the end, there is no distinction. 2) My main worry has to do with the notion of class composition and recomposition. In general, the notion of class decomposition-recomposition seems to me a very good way of thinking about the movement of the anatagonism between labour and capital, but I think that there is a great danger of reducing it to a sociological category. I think class decomposition can be understood in two ways. The way I think it is usually understood is to say that capital decomposes us into different groups, into hierarchically ordered and often competing "sectors of the working class". I think that is correct, but there is a second and, for me, more fundamental sense: capital decomposes all of us, breaks us up not just into competing groups, but decomposes us as persons, separates the personal from the political, the private from the public, the frivolous from the serious, decomposes us physically and psychologically. This latter de-composition has fundamental implications for class struggle, reflected, for example in the continuing dominance of "young-men ideology" (often, of course, old young-men) in left groups, reflected too in the whole language of the Marxist and revolutionary tradition. And, of course, capitalism in its present vicious neo-liberal phase decomposes us more than ever, injecting its crisis into our daily existence. It is if we think of decomposition in this second sense that we can see the enormous contribution of the zapatistas. The key to their ability to recompose the working class in the first sense (that is, to appeal to a wide range of "sectors") is their ability to recompose in the second sense, that is, to attack the separation of public-private, political-personal, serious-frivolous, politics-ethics, end-means. All this is summed up in their notion of dignity and their rephrasing of working class struggle as the struggle of and for dignity. This is surely the core of their resonance and is, I think absolutely crucial for how we think about the future of class struggle. And it all comes out of the fact that they are a community in revolt - that is surely also fundamental in thinking about strategies. 3) Finally, a minor point: I'm not happy with the idea of "sectors of the working class", but I'm not able to develop the point just now, apart from the fact that it seems to abstract these sectors from the overall development of the labour-capital relation. In tht sense, it seems to me that it may be just as misleading as the notion of "fractions" of the capitalist class. That's all for now. I'm aware that it doesn't do justice to your paper, but perhaps it will do for the moment. I think the perspective of the Second Encuentro is very important, as you suggest, and we should perhaps think about just how we feed into that. John Holloway P.S. On the united front strategy: this is surely a state-oriented strategy, and in that sense quite different from zapatismo? P.P.S. I forgot to make another point which seems to me quite important, both in discussing class composition in general and the zapatistas in particular. I like the discussion of class composition in terms of the vulnerability of capital, but I feel there's an important element missing: money. Money is surely central for understanding both the way in which capital decomposes labour (in all senses) and, above all, the enormous vulnerability of capital. This is illustrated by the zapatista action of 19th December 1994, the subsequent devaluation of the peso, the enormous upheaval and instability on the world markets that followed, and the very contradictory and unpredictable decomposing-recomposing impact of the current crisis in Mexico. --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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