John Holloway’s Hope in Hopeless Times – Jeff Shantz

If you were active in alternative globalization movements in the first years of this century you may be quite familiar with John Holloway’s writings. Holloway’s book Change the World Without Taking Power was widely discussed in movements at the time. Drawing on the militant example of the Zapatistas and influenced by the decentralized alternative globalization movements and their “diversity of tactics” and spokescouncil forms of direct democracy in mass actions, Holloway offered a theoretical voice through which Marxist economic analysis was articulated with anarchist political and organizational principles.

Fast forward a couple of decades and the hopefulness of pre-911 alternative globalization politics has long evaporated. We are by now well into a period marked by neoliberal securitization and repression, resurgent fascism, and imperialism. It is to the prospects of hope, if there are any, in these apparently hopeless times that Holloway devotes his new work, appropriately titled, Hope in Hopeless Times.

Notably, Holloway is not discussing a vague or generalized hope either. His concern is focused on hope for revolution against capital and its states. But he remains insistent that we must question what revolution means and work toward developing new forms of revolutionary practice—based in contemporary social and ecological conditions and not yearning nostalgically for past forms or reproducing mistakes we should have learned from long ago. The revolutions of the Twentieth Century were disasters—terrible in terms of the societies they actually produced. But, at the same time, they were good in the striving for change.

Holloway has pursued probing questions about revolution in each of the books in this now trilogy. In his first book, Change the World Without Taking Power, he argued that revolution we seek is not through the state. State power reproduces the logic of capital. In his second book, Crack Capitalism, he suggests how to think and create revolution beyond the state. We always do try to create spaces that go beyond or outside the logic of capital. Examples abound for Holloway, on multiple scales—the Zapatistas, Rojava, mutual aid, community gardens in cities.

There are all sorts of ways that people try and do break the logics of capital, even if only temporarily or on an intimate scale (which is where revolutionary sparks fly anyway). They create cracks in the texture of capitalist domination. For Holloway, the multiplication, expansion, confluence, of these cracks is where we can find revolution—as he explore sin depth in Crack Capitalism (2010).

In this third book in the trilogy, Hope in Hopeless Times (2022) Holloway grapples with the reality that capitalism is still here. So, how do we think about its fragility? Is revolution like a unicorn—a beautiful idea we now have to realize does not exist? Holloway answers, “No, revolution is still possible.” We are now living under a dynamic of terror. We cannot fall into the trap of critique. We have to keep focused on breaking it. Holloway’s project has long been rethinking revolution. Revolution is not taking state power, not forming a party.

Revolution is pulling the emergency break, not going along with development. How do we break the dynamic of capital? Categories of domination are also categories of struggle. People resist. They try to find ways around it all the time.

The history of anti-capitalist movements shows two main tendencies. Party traditions are one. But also councilist traditions (not solely council communism). This stream is about talking together, working out answers together. The Zapatistas famously said we go forward by asking, not by telling. We make many worlds—our richness and capacity are diverse and varied.

The world now is more frightening than it was only 10 years ago. But we cannot be seduced by false hope. We do fear and that aids capital (fear of poverty, etc.). But capital also fears—especially the fear that we will not work for them. So how do we disrupt that state while working on the cracks? Holloway starts with three frames:

1. We create anti-state movements. Try to stop the state. Anti-mining movements for example.
2. Post-state politics. Anti-capitalist reforms?
3. Some concept of a tipping point. The point where anti-capitalism is no longer taboo.

For his current work Rojava is extremely important. It is larger in scale in a more urban context than the Zapatistas. A non-state system. Libertarian confederalism based on assemblies. They are open about their problems and contradictions. Discipline and self-critique are important. Both Rojava and the Zapatistas have had extraordinary echoes—serving as inspiration for movements globally.

Central conflict in the world is between life and money. Holloway poses this as a struggle between wealth (for capital) and richness (for the exploited and oppressed). We seek a richness in our lives, not measured by money. And the richness of our responses to life under capitalism provide means of sustenance in the here and now of every day life, but also bases for alternatives.

Holloway finds inspiration, and yes hope, in affinity groups, local alternative economic formations, protests, cooperatives and cooperative networks. Wanting not to sell ourselves to the logic of money is extremely widespread. We often do not see it.

How can we have hope when capitalism is still here and in even intensified forms. War, the far Right and fascism, ecological extinction all pose existential threats today.

We need a material basis for hope. But Holloway argues we should not lose sight of the fragility of capital. The main fragility for capital is…us—our resistance to ever increasing levels of control and exploitation. It is our alienated potential that re/produces capitalism. Especially our alienated labor. So capital struggles to control us. And we struggle to break free.

Interestingly, unlike some writers who choose to focus on love or empathy, Holloway returns anger to the center of analysis. How do we start from people’s anger? Capital fears the conversion of the working class into an unpredictable force, what Holloway terms the rabble, in a language that is more anarchistic than Marxist. Current conditions of exploitation and oppression create transformative rage, great flows of anger.

The world we want to create already exists in the present society is a force of hope, dreams, struggle. This breaks the traditional revolutionary grammar that capitalism is awful, so we need to build a party and build a different world. Instead, we have a present existence of a world that does not yet fully exist. Friendships, comradeship, love, movements. The world that does not yet exist.

Think of revolution in terms of the present strength of the not yet. That which says, “No, we want to create something else.” These forces are often invisible until they emerge. We often do not have adequate concepts for them. At the center is rebellion and resistance but also hidden and latent effects.

How do our struggles reproduce themselves in capital and contribute to its fragility? That is happening now. We produce ourselves in the world of capital and money. Fear is always there for capital—especially the fear that people will not work (fear of disobedience, rebellion, resistance). Attempts by capital to replace workers to address this fear. One is AI. Capital gets rid of workers as a way of imposing its system—not only to speed up production. But, how do they exploit the fewer workers that remain to produce suitable profits? They face a lack of adequate surplus value production.

If anything, this is the frustrating gap in Holloway’s vision. While recognizing the centrality of struggles over money and work time, the working class as workers, at work falls out. Bases for hope in new class struggle strategies and tactics, community and green syndicalism, wildcat strikes, Indigenous and worker land back solidarity, anti-imperialist labor networks (like Labor for Palestine) are missing. Holloway’s turn to “the rabble” is a needed return to proletarian analysis (in the original sense of the term) especially a s more and more workers become unemployed, homeless, displaced. But workplace organizing is still crucial.

Holloway’s writing style is a sign of hope itself. If you have ever heard him speak or chatted with him as I have, you will experience that same hopefulness. Holloway is a spirited person and a spirited writer. His hopefulness is infectious. But his hopefulness does not mean he is hopelessly optimistic. He is fully aware that we might well lose (or continue losing depending on your point of view). The stakes are high, and maybe could not be higher given the real possibility of ecological collapse.

And this is, to use his language, the richness of this new book. Holloway offers reasons for hope, rooted in the very real materiality of contemporary conditions of struggle. We do fight and we can win. But we must act seriously to build the new world in the shell of the old, to use the old Wobbly phrase. Hope is needed, but it is not enough.

Still, this is a lively and engaging work. Whatever its limits it provokes necessary and pressing debate. It is, in the end, a work of richness.