Crack capitalism or reclaim the state: John Holloway & Hilary Wainwright debate democracy and capitalism
‘Neoliberalism is like the train conductor who gets shot in an old Western and dies with his hand on the accelerator. He’s dead but speeding the passengers inexorably towards total disaster.’ But it is not just neoliberalism: it is capitalism that is the problem, a system in which the social connections are established through money and the driving force is the pursuit of more money, profit. How do we stop the train and get off? How do we break the dynamic of capitalist development that is rushing us towards the abyss?
Dear Hilary,
Capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity. This is so simple, so obvious that it hardly seems worth repeating – and yet it is important to say it over and over again: capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity. The way in which our social relations are organised (the way in which human activities are connected) produces a dynamic that nobody controls and which creates injustice, violence and human degradation and now threatens to destroy human life altogether.
In your book you quote Walden Bello as saying: ‘Neoliberalism is like the train conductor who gets shot in an old Western and dies with his hand on the accelerator. He’s dead but speeding the passengers inexorably towards total disaster.’ But it is not just neoliberalism: it is capitalism that is the problem, a system in which the social connections are established through money and the driving force is the pursuit of more money, profit. How do we stop the train and get off? How do we break the dynamic of capitalist development that is rushing us towards the abyss? That is the problem. That is the question for all anti-capitalists, communists, socialists, anarchists, people, whatever we want to call ourselves.
Your book is about democracy – an excellent, exciting, enjoyable book about democracy. But democracy is not the main issue. As long as capitalism exists, the dead train driver’s hand remains on the accelerator and democracy is effectively reduced to ensuring a more equable distribution of seats within the carriage. This is not unimportant: it may well bring about real improvements in the living conditions of the passengers (as the various examples that you discuss undoubtedly did), but it diverts attention from the fact that the dead driver’s hand continues to rush us towards disaster, and continues to generate injustice and destruction all along the way. In order to remove the driver’s hand, we need to challenge capitalism, the current organisation of human activity – but in your discussion of democracy there is virtually no mention of capitalism...
Hilary Wainwright replies...
Dear John,
Thanks for your challenges! First I want to share some thoughts stimulated by your book Crack Capitalism. One reason I found it so exciting was because we seem to share a common starting point – where we differ is over challenges thrown up by practice. I share your sense of the dangers we face, of walls closing in. At the same time, like you, I can see cracks opening up and being pushed wider. I agree too that to open and spread the cracks we need to find ways of gathering our combined strengths that don’t presume or aspire to a single unifying centre or totalising vision but instead value the multiplicity of different struggles and initiatives for change. I will put my disagreements in ways that build on the foundations of our agreement. Running through the book is a fundamental question: is there a way of understanding global capitalism and the millions of revolts against its daily indignities that conceptualises a shared predicament and helps us to converge or connect to create another world?
To answer this question you rightly to go back to Marx’s central thesis that labour, under capitalism, has a dual nature. On the one hand, labour is abstract labour, involved in producing commodities for the market, objectified as value, expressed in the exchange of commodities for money, from which capital extracts profit. On the other hand, is the dimension of labour which you call ‘doing’, the labour involved in the production of use value, concrete and particular, social and individual. Under capitalism, the two forms of labour are, as you stress, in constant tension with each other: creative, purposeful activity is subordinated to labour disciplined to the maximisation of profits; potentially self-determining activity versus alienated labour...
