The Invisibility of Struggle
Robert Allen/An Talamh Glas Collective - 23.05.2002 16:46
The only power is no power. Feature review of John Holloway´s Change the World without taking Power, Pluto Press and John Zerzan´s Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilisation, Feral House + Q and A with Holloway.
THE INVISIBILITY OF STRUGGLE
THERE is no economic crisis, no crisis of capital, no crisis of parliamentary politics ? and if there is a problem, our bureaucrats, politicians, statespeople, scientists and technocrats will fix it. There is nothing to worry about. So rest easy. The bombers have gone to kill the nasty babies to make the world safe for our children to grow up in. And democracy will ensure that fascism and totalitarianism never return to our societies.
This is now a refrain of the world we live in, a world where one billion people (one in six of the global population) do not know where their next meal is coming from, where poverty affects one in three of the global population, where homelessness, alienation, unemployment, illiteracy, ill-health, crime, racism, sectarianism and death are daily companions ? and where one in six are over-nourished, 300,000 alone dying every year from obesity in the USA.
It is a world where, in 50 years, the global population has doubled, the global economy has nearly quintupled, demand for grain has tripled, seafood consumption has more than quadrupled, water use has tripled, demand for beef and mutton has tripled, firewood demand has tripled, demand for lumber has doubled, paper use has increased six-fold, and fossil fuel use has nearly quadrupled.
It is a world where the killing, buying and selling of wildlife (animals, plants and their derivatives) is worth $100 billion, where the felling of trees is worth $40 billion, and where fisheries are worth $12 billion.
It is a world where synthetic chemicals are threatening the fertility, intelligence and survival of humanity by mimicking the hormones that regulate our development. This hormonal damage, many scientists insist, is the cause of the 50% drop in the human male sperm count since 1940, the two-fold increase in breast cancer among women since 1960, the three-fold increase in testicular cancer and two-fold increase in prostate cancer since the 1940s, the phenomenal rise in endometriosis (a disease virtually unknown outside the 20th century ? which now affects five million American women) and the increasing number of children born with abnormalities.
It is a world where, in 1998, drought devastated 54 countries while 45 countries suffered from floods ? natural disasters which are increasing year by year.
It is a world where it has become a crime to protest about the dehumanisation of society, where it has become a joke to claim that another world is possible and where the voices of millions of people have no resonance. In Argentina, Spain, India, Italy, USA, France, Australia, Indonesia, Greece and South Korea millions of people have taken to the streets to voice their dissent ? and it seems we don´t know who they are or what they want.
Journalists and politicians tell us they are anarchists and communists and hippies, members of the anti-globalisation movement, wasters who dream of utopias of the mind.
What is this anti-globalisation movement, you ask. It is a movement, some argue, that grew out of the eco-defence and Do It Yourself movements, which itself grew out of the failure of the environmental, peace and social justice movements. Others will tell you that the ´No Global´ movement has grown out of the failure of communism, Marxism, socialism and trade unionism, of the failure of class struggle. Others will say it was a natural progression from the diverse and disparate anti-imperialist movements in the struggle for self-determination in the denuded jungles of central and south America and in the delta regions of India´s urban slums.
It would be fairer to say that these protests represent a movement of diverse ideologies. It´s certainly not a movement of any particular group of people. The reality, anyone who takes the time to seek out its roots will find, is that this movement grew from all our struggles and by its very definition is a global struggle against power and labour.
When the People´s Global Action collective was founded in 1998, the term anti-globalisation was hardly known. It did not describe or define the people who actively oppose capitalism and the globalisation of labour and power. No affirmation was given to their struggles.
And while the French pour onto the streets in their millions to protest against a political system that can place a fascist leader on the throne of power or the Argentinean people can overthrow successive governments because the leaders have abused their power, the voices that we hear are not those of the people, they are the voices of the bourgeois intelligentsia who proclaim themselves the leaders of a disparate movement that has no leaders. So it is no wonder the anti-globalisation movement has a bad name.
It is being badly called by people who do not understand the impetuousness behind the protests, demonstrations, occupations, vigils and insubordinate actions, people who tell us it is a movement without a plan or a strategy, people who are looking after their own selfish interests.
The reality is that this is not an anti-globalisation movement at all, it is, in the words of John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power, a "movement against invisibility" ? a movement that we are all part of because we are all involved in many different struggles "visible in so far as they are considered to impinge upon power politics".
According to Holloway "all rebellious movements are movements against invisibility" and this is a struggle of non-identity, of the invisible, "of those without voice and without face". At a simple level it is about our own dignity and the "refusal to accept humiliation, oppression, exploitation, dehumanisation".
This is what we appear to do everyday, whether we are bosses or workers or idle. "It is hard to believe that anyone is so at home with the world that they do not feel revulsion at the hunger, violence and inequality that surrounds them," writes Holloway. "It is much more likely that the revulsion or dissonance is consciously or unconsciously suppressed either in the interests of a quiet life or, much more simply, because pretending not to see or feel the horrors of the world carries direct material benefits."
Living, as we all do, in capitalist society means "that our existence is torn by the antagonism between subordination and insubordination" yet we are told that only the youth, the dispossessed and the violent are actively challenging the power of capital and the power of the state.
Holloway, a 54 year old, Dublin-born, lecturer in sociology at Puebla University in Mexico, equates our dignity with our challenges against power, which he describes as anti-power and argues that it is this basic human emotion which is driving the protests so glibly dismissed by those who would put labels on every protest movement that comes along.
"Anti-power does not exist only in the overt, visible struggles of those who are insubordinate. It exists also ... in the everyday frustrations of all of us, the everyday struggle to maintain our dignity in the face of power, the everyday struggle to retain or regain control over our lives. Anti-power is in the dignity of everyday existence. Anti-power is in the relationships we form all the time, relations of love, friendship, comradeship, community, co-operation. Obviously such relations are traversed by power because of the nature of the society in which we live, yet the element of love, friendship, comradeship lies in the constant struggle which we wage against power, to establish those relations on a basis of mutual recognition, the mutual recognition of one another´s dignity," he writes.
"Dignity (anti-power) exists wherever humans live. In all that live everyday, illness, the educational system, sex, children, friendship, poverty, whatever, there is a struggle to do things with dignity, to do things right. Of course our ideas of what is right are permeated by power, but the permeation is contradictory."
This can be seen as the negativity that exists in our lives, in our societies, in the world ? and it would appear we are powerless and cannot change it. Holloway argues that it is the very horror of the world that obliges us to learn to hope ? and to find ways in which we can change the world without taking power.
Surprisingly, for it must be a surprise because journalists and politicians keep asking what are the alternatives, that is beginning to happen. People are beginning to realise they can live without power, without a state, without parliamentary democracy, without capital and without having to work to earn money to barely exist. If you do not know this it is because you have been reading a media that prefers to filter the reality of the world through the spectacles of power.
Capitalism is not a new invention, it has been around a long time and it has its roots in the feudal systems that allowed the powerful to gain control of land. Jean Jacques Rousseau said, "From the moment one man needed the help of another, as soon as they observed that it was useful for a single person to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary; and vast forests were changed into smiling fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops."
This is a poetical view of the beginnings of our misery yet thousands of years later the twin pillars of power and money still tower over all of our societies and over our lives. In the modern world this misery is defined by the laws that allows those who can exploit both labour and natural resources to control society. This is what is being challenged and far from being a utopia that is an impossible dream people are screaming ya basta ? enough is enough.
Immediately a brave new world is being drawn. Most of us do not see this new world because it does not figure in the images, stories, songs and artistry of our immediate environment. We will not find it on tv, film, newspaper, magazine, book or CD, because the people who are creating this new world are doing it away from the glare of a media that is blind to the reality around it. We do not live in a world of warp-drive spaceships but we do live in a world where disaffected teenagers mow down their schoolmates. We do not live in a world which shows the bloody aftermath of a smart bomb strike but we do live in a world that shows a Hollywood hero escape unscathed from a cartoon-like hail of hi-tech bullets.
The reality of the new world is boring by comparison yet it is much tougher and much harder to endure than any fictional or contrived media fest. All over the world capitalism and exploitation are being turned upside down by imaginative communities who are building new futures through mutual aid, co-operation, sharing, self-respect and dignity.
To glibly dismiss this diverse movement as youthful adventurism engaged in summit-hopping protests and the squatting of empty, deserted and condemned property is to look for the soundbite that can dismiss the dreams and hopes of millions of people.
Neither is it about anarchism or communism or nationalism or republicanism or socialism or any other ism, it is about creating a libertarian society that is autonomous, communal and egalitarian.
In the words of songwriter Jim Page, "I don?t want to save the world, I want to change it," and that is what is happening all over the planet. These changes involve affinity groups, autonomous worker´s co-ops, voluntary co-ops, community assemblies, workers assemblies, communal eco-villages, barter schemes, local currencies, land reclamation, reforestation, alternative energy schemes, bioregional production and trade, forest and woodland gardening and daily autonomous activity free from the constraints of authoritarianism, autocracy, bureaucracy, domination and hierarchy.
And the answer to the question: What do you want? the answer is simply the establishment of free societies based on the co-operative organisation of production (food, medicine, clothes, tools, energy, utilities ? all the necessities needed to live life), education, health and leisure by autonomous associations or affinity groups working at a bioregional (or local) level.
While all the attention is centered on protests and on the lifestyles of the people involved in these movements, the focus is being diverted away from the debate and development of the brave new world people desire. The issue is centered on the questions of ´Land and Liberty,´ both of which are denied to the majority of people.
John Holloway has studied the Zapatista revolution of the Chiapas region in Mexico and is well placed to show that far from being terrorists, these indigenous peoples have proved that self-organisation is not a hippy dream and that autonomous assemblies do not need advanced capitalism and bureaucratic democracy. The secret to their success is the way they use their imaginations. In much the same way that it was language and our ability to imagine that created civilisation and the kind of societies which now alienate most people, the Zapatistas changed the symbols that defined their lives. "The Zapatistas have tried to move away from what they see as the tired language of revolution and to develop a new language of revolt," says Holloway. "It is not just a question of inventing a new language, because the old concepts (surplus value, exploitation, capital and so on) tell us a lot about what it is that we are revolting against and what are the possibilities of change. It is very important not to lose those concepts, but they must be re-thought and re-phrased all the time. The role of imagination, storytelling and so on is very important: not so much as a way of getting a serious message across in popular form, but above all because the language of revolt is basically different from the language of domination. Domination is serious and boring, revolt has to be fun."
Symbolism plays a huge part in how we see our societies. When Roberto Benigni wrote his Oscar winning film La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful) he literally inverted the horrors of the holocaust to create a story of love and joy for life. He took very seriously the words of the title song: smile without a reason why; love as if you were a child; smile no matter what they tell you, don´t listen to a word they tell you ´cause life is beautiful that way. The Nazis played classical music to drown out the screams of their victims. Benigni turned this into a symbolic retort by broadcasting Hoffenbach´s Barcarolle in a gesture designed to engender hope. Does this mean that Roberto Benigni is a paid-up member of the anti-globalisation crew?
John Zerzan, the Eugene-based anarchist whose writings are said to have inspired the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, would probably say he isn´t because he uses symbolic culture, one of the harbingers of civilisation, which many in the anti-globalisation movement apparently want to destroy. If Benigni felt a need to debate such an argument he might counter using Zerzan´s own words: "The magnitude of symbolization testifies to how much has been repressed; buried, but possibly still recoverable."
Such a debate is only relevant to those who understand exactly what it is we have lost, what millions of people in struggle are trying to recover, using their imaginations, and why their desires appear so difficult to understand.
Zerzan argues that "culture and technology exist because of language," which in turn "is critical for the formation of the roles of work and exchange accompanying the division of labour". Guided by symbolisation our thinking "realises itself in culture and nature". Religion and art are manifest in the "common symbolic grammar needed by the new social order and its fissures and anxieties".
"Today," he says, "it is fashionable, if not mandatory, to maintain that culture always was and always will be. Even though it is demonstrably the case that there was an extremely long non-symbolic human era, perhaps one hundred times as long as that of civilisation, and that culture has gained only at the expense of nature, one has it from all sides that the symbolic - like alienation - is eternal. Thus questions of origins and destinations are meaningless. Nothing can be traced further than the semiotic."
This, more than any debate about what media and politicians believe the anti-globalisation movement wants, is at the heart of the matter. While the media struggle to find the buzz words and sound bites to dismiss the aspirations of millions of people, a debate is going within the movement about how to replicate the success of the Zapatistas and more crucially how to communicate with each other. In Europe a "social consulta" has emerged out of the People´s Global Action in an attempt to improve communication and resolve these issues at the second European PGA conference in Leiden in August.
In an open letter aimed at PGA participants the French Sans-Titre (untitled) informal network question how reflection, analysis and theoretical assessment should commence within a movement that uses email to communicate. "As far as we are concerned, the consulta, as presently devised, does not constitute sufficient response to this problem," they say. "In fact, the consulta seems revelatory of a certain tendency to mythologize the Zapatista model and apply it, in a highly questionable manner, to an utterly different context.
"A social consulta in Europe cannot mean the same thing as a social consulta in the Chiapas. Each country possesses its own peculiar history, culture and society, and its own opposition movement, with significant variations in structure, in strengths and weaknesses. How can a single instrument, such as the consulta, account for these real differences? We believe that meaningful exchange, on such a vast scale, necessitates the use of a variety of tools. We believe that real-time meetings need to be organized without deadlines."
Sans-Titre are not alone in their concern about real-time communication and the need to share experiences, ideas and how to communicate with people who want to get involved but are not sure, because of the demands of society, how to, and how to communicate with academics, bureaucrats, journalists and other members of the intelligentsia.
Holloway insists that "all struggles are struggles against invisibility and inaudibility" and the task facing the movement is to find ways of developing "new forms of communicating and expressing our thoughts. But these will only really come to life if seen as part of a wider struggle". At the moment that is the problem facing a movement that sometimes does more talking than listening. The Zapatista model may not suit everyone but there is much to learn from their methods. "The Zapatistas say that they stopped being an orthodox left group and became what they are today when they stopped making speeches and learned to listen," says Holloway. "In other words, the issue is not how the intelligentsia can educate the "masses" (whoever they are), but how the "masses" can educate the intelligentsia." Holloway wonders if this is "an impossible task?"
Despite the denial that exists among autocrats, bureaucrats, industrialists, journalists, politicians, scientists and statespeople, the cry "another world is possible" is turning into a deafening scream. It was loud and clear at the Barcelona EU summit when half a million autonomous people cried enough is enough. You probably didn´t hear their demands so here they are:
"We want a Europe that puts dignity, freedom and equality of the people of the world population before any other goal.
"We want the abolition of all armies, and solidarity and living together as criteria for relations between peoples.
"We want the free circulation of people for everyone, and that all forms of discrimination stop, due to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, economic level and any other reason.
"We want production, trade and consumption that are ecologically and environmentally balanced.
"We want to prioritise the production of necessary goods, tied to the improvement in the quality of life and eliminate the speculative transportation of products from one end of the planet to the other.
"We want media that are not linked to the political and economic interests of a privileged minority and that are managed in a democratic manner by the citizenry.
"We want to stop the exploitation of people by an elite of owners of the means of production.
"We want a real democracy in which the decisions are taken by those affected.
And much more...."
Holloway articulates this scream as a "refusal to accept ... the inevitability of increasing inequality, misery, exploitation and violence". This is a scream "of horror and hope" which he describes as a two-dimensional reality. "The challenge is rather to unite pessimism and optimism, horror and hope, in a theoretical understanding of the two-dimensionality of the world," he says. "Optimism not just of the spirit but of the intellect is the aim. It is the very horror of the world that obliges us to learn to hope."
Zerzan is less hopeful in his analysis. His book Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilisation is not for the squeamish, but he is aware that change is coming. "Representation in the political sector is met with skepticism and apathy similar to that evinced by representation in general," he says. "Has there ever been so much incessant yammer about democracy, and less real interest in it?"
This is the question being asked by millions. The only power is no power, and John Holloway and John Zerzan are not the only people to have realised this. The real question is: What happens next?
Change the World without taking Power by John Holloway, Pluto Press, www.plutobooks.com
Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilisation by John Zerzan, Feral House, www.feralhouse.com
John Holloway, author of Change the World without taking Power and co-editor (with Eloína Peláez) of Zapatista: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (both Pluto), talks to BLUE.
BLUE: What is your background?
JH: I was born in Dublin, but my family migrated to the midlands of England when I was twelve. I taught in the Politics Department of Edinburgh University for a long time and then decided to make a move to Mexico about eleven years ago, where I work in the area of sociology in a research institute in the Universidad AutÛnoma de Puebla.
BLUE: Where do you live?
I live in Puebla, a city about 120 kilometers from Mexico City.
BLUE: How did you get involved in this kind of research?
JH: I started working on Marxist theory and particularly the Marxist theory of the state a long time ago. That led me to the conclusion that it´s necessary to see the state not as a thing or an instrument, but as a form of social relations or a process of forming social relations. This means that struggles against capital or against the capitalist state must take a quite different form, must aim at forming social relations in a quite different way. In other words, social change can not come about by taking state power but only by developing a quite different concept of power. This tied in very much with the experience of the Zapatista movement since 1994, and this led me to want to develop my ideas about these issues.
BLUE: What are your influences?
JH: Since coming to Mexico (or rather since January 1, 1994), I have been very much influenced by the Zapatista uprising. In terms of theory, Marx, Ernst Bloch and T.W. Adorno have influenced me a lot. Also I see what I do as developing very much out of the approach which a number of us in Edinburgh (Richard Gunn, Werner Bonefeld and others) developed over a number of years and which we call "Open Marxism" - there are three books with that title and also the journal "Common Sense".
BLUE: Can you describe Change the World´s primary message?
JH: The horrors of capitalism today mean that we must think of revolution or radical social change. But the old idea of making revolution through taking state power was a disaster. So it is necessary to liberate the idea of revolution from its association with the state, to think of changing the world without taking power. But this seems ridiculous and impossible. It is precisely because we do not have any easy answers that we must think about what this means. The book does not give any recipes, but tries to take the argument forward.
BLUE: Who is it aimed at?
JH: Anybody who feels shocked (at least occasionally) by the horrors of capitalism and is willing to admit that they don´t know the answers.
BLUE: Do you think it will influence the way people think about their lives?
JH: Oh yes, of course, it should change their lives completely. An important aspect of the argument of the book is that power-over is the transformation of doing into being, that our struggle (the struggle of power-to) is the struggle of doing against being, in other words that our struggle is necessarily anti-identitarian. Trying to think like this has lots of implications for the way we think about our lives.
BLUE: How important is language? We ask this because the lexicon of words used by people actively involved in struggle is changing, away from the words used by Marxists, etc and by politicians and the corporate media.
JH: I think language is very important indeed. This is a very important aspect of the Zapatista revolt. The Zapatistas have tried to move away from what they see as the tired language of revolution and to develop a new language of revolt, and I think they´ve been very successful at it. The meaning of words does not stand still. Words which excited people thirty years ago now seem stale.
But it is more complicated than that. It is not just a question of inventing a new language, because the old concepts (surplus value, exploitation, capital and so on) tell us a lot about what it is that we are revolting against and what are the possibilities of change. It is very important not to lose those concepts, but they must be re-thought and re-phrased all the time. I suppose that is partly what the book is about.
BLUE: What is the role of imagination, of storytelling, of song and ballad?
JH: Obviously you´re thinking of the Zapatistas again. Yes, I think the role of imagination, storytelling and so on is very important: not so much as a way of getting a serious message across in popular form, but above all because the language of revolt is basically different from the language of domination. Domination is serious and boring, revolt has to be fun.
BLUE: We must go beyond the relationship each of us has with power if we are to change the world, but one of the obstacles many people are struggling with is removing hierarchy, domination and specialism from society. For example much of radical thought is dominated by the bourgeois intelligentsia. They control the means of production and access so the voices of the disempowered cannot be heard. In the western world these people can also be found in government, academica, media and in NGOs, they control access to funds and actively prevent anyone else from getting access to funds that would set in motion projects designed to empower and educate. What is disturbing here is that many of these people claim to want to change the world, when it is clear they are careerists trying to build or to keep their careers. As an academic how can you see this changing?
JH: Yes, academics are people who have shown themselves successful at operating within a certain framework of thought. But this framework of thought is not neutral: it reproduces the same separation of subject and object which is the basis of capitalist power. For the academic who wants to change the world, it is a question of trying to break out of this framework, but this, of course, appears irrational or irrelevant to other academics, so all the career pressures are against doing it. This does not mean that there is no space at all, or that all academics should give up their jobs (and do what?), rather it means that for an academic (as for anyone else), struggle is always struggle in-and-against being an academic. Or, more generally, for anyone, struggle is always struggle against-in-and-beyond our own identity. How to ensure that the voice of those without voice is heard, that the face of those without face is seen? All struggles are struggles against invisibility and inaudibility. Partly it´s a question of fantasy and imagination: the Zapatistas cover their faces so that people will see them. Partly it´s a question of just working away in the way that you in Bluegreenearth and many others are working: to develop new forms of communicating and expressing our thoughts. But these will only really come to life if seen as part of a wider struggle.
BLUE: We are starting to see a rejection of party politics and parliamentary democracy but, as in France, it appears this is leaving a vacuum which now saw those with the vote having to choose between a man many despise (Chirac) and a man many abhor (Le Pen). What do you think is the short term answer to this because reform of the political process is not on the power agenda and many of those who want a change in the way decisions are being made in their names are unsure what kind of alternatives need to be built?
JH: The success of Le Pen in France certainly show the dangers inherent in the widespread rejection of party politics. But I think that rejection is in general very healthy and very important. It is a way of saying that the sort of society we want cannot be achieved through the state and the political parties (which in reality are nothing more than extensions of the state). People are developing other forms of activity which aim to change things without going through the state. Certainly at election time, or in the eyes of bourgeois politics, this appears to leave a vacuum, but I think that if you look at the upsurge in protest all over the world in the last few years and at the sort of initiatives that people are developing (often in very experimental or contradictory ways), then you see that the apparent vacuum is actually very full.
BLUE: You say there are three ways out of the dilemma (p74). Given your experience and your knowledge of the way the world is changing, which do you favour?
JH: The dilemma in question is that the more horrific capitalism gets (and certainly since September 11 last year), the more urgent radical change becomes and yet the more impossible it seems to be. I suggested that there are three ways out: to give up all hope of radical change and just focus on living with as much dignity as we can (which is a limited solution, but only very limited and very contradictory, because dignity is not an individual issue, but means fighting against the whole social system which is based on the denial of human dignity): to shut our eyes to what is happening and go on intoning the old dogmas of revolution-by-taking-power, which seems to me hopeless; or thirdly, to go as far as we can down the apparently impossible road of changing the world without taking power, knowing that this road has to be invented in the process of walking on it. I think that this last is the only option, and the book is an attempt to do that.
BLUE: Nationalism. Before WWI an internationalist movement appeared to be threatening capitalism and then we had a war in which many died for a flag. Capital was saved, and saved again as a result of WWII. Now almost a century later we have an internationalist (global) movement that is not nationalist, doesn´t want to fight for a flag, sees unity in diversity and wants to share cultural experiences. Will there be another war?
JH: There is war all the time, of course. Many of these wars are high-technology wars (for the more powerful states) that are not so dependent on stirring up nationalist fervour, at least in those states. Especially since Vietnam, there is a drive to conduct wars in such a way that they do not depend on the active consent of the people. While there is no doubt that there is an important trend towards nationalism in many (most) countries, I think that we have to make a distinction between the "internationalist" movement of earlier years and the new global forms of class struggle, which are not inter-national in any sense and which will not easily be diverted into nationalist positions. I suppose my answer is that inter-nationalism (which supposes cooperation between national struggles) is complementary to nationalism, while the current wave of struggle, at its best, is not international but anti-national.
BLUE: Can we ask you to elaborate on this question of educating the masses particularly at the level of bourgeois intelligentsia by people?
JH: The masses don´t exist, do they? I´ve never met a mass. This seems to me one of the most questionable categories of the left tradition. The Zapatistas say that they stopped being an orthodox left group and became what they are today when they stopped making speeches and learned to listen. In other words, the issue is not how the intelligentsia can educate the "masses" (whoever they are), but how the "masses" can educate the intelligentsia. An impossible task?
BLUE: And in the same vein the question of co-option (or the hijacking) of the movement´s ideals?
JH: All movements are contradictory, even (or especially) the ones that claim to be purest. I think these dangers have to be analysed in terms of contradictions rather than in terms of "co-option", which is too close to conspiracy theory.
BLUE: There is great difference between the fetishism of Marx´s time and the consumerism of the modern era because the latter dominates all our lives to such an extent most people believe they cannot live without their fetishes. How can the dependence on fetishist commodities be reduced?
JH: I think it´s important to make a distinction between fetishism and consumerism. Fetishism (now as in Marx´s time) refers to the way in which social relations (relations between people) take the form of relations between things, and therefore to the way in which things (which we do not recognise as the product of our our own doing) come to dominate us. Consumerism is an aspect of that, but one aspect of consumerism is also just people´s desire to participate in the richness of human production. The critique of fetishism or of the commodity is not an argument in favour of austerity or poverty. How can fetishism be destroyed? By anti-fetishising struggle, by the struggle to establish relations between people on a different basis, by the realisation that the establishment of different sorts of social relations is an important element of any social struggle. But fetishism will remain as long as capitalism remains. Not for long, we hope.
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