File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/97-02-16.202, message 57


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. 



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