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 psursuit 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.

I see your protagonist-passengers in a different light. For me they are not just organising to improve the quality of their seat on the train, they are banging on the windows and screaming to get off, or perhaps all running in the wrong direction in the hope that they can force the train into reverse.
You speak, for example, of the Exodus collective in Luton, who start organising free raves in the Marsh Farm estate and then gradually become drawn into the arduous process of applying for and administering a £50 million New Deal for Communities grant for the improvement of the estate. This led to real improvements, as you say, but I cannot help feeling that in the raves there is something more than an attempt to improve life within capitalism.

In the rave there is a scream of refusal, a breaking of windows, a walking in the wrong direction, a creation of social relations on a basis other than money. This is what I call a ‘crack’ in capitalist social relations: a conscious or not-so-conscious misfitting, a refusal-and-creation, a refusal to go with the capitalist flow and an attempt to establish life on a different basis here-and-now.

In the rave there is a contradiction between fitting and misfitting: a tension between ‘let’s get the kids off the streets and give them a good night out’ and ‘let’s explode against a world in which the reality principle is identical to money’. How do we relate to this tension? Which side do we take?
It is very clear from your various accounts that the state in all cases is a (sometimes more, sometimes less responsive) process of taking these situations and making them fit in to the prevailing system. It is not just a question of granting concessions, but of drawing the people into the process of decision-making. Those who were previously excluded are brought in, included. The state is democratised, the state is reclaimed by the people. Those who were previously the objects of policy become its subjects.
Yet the subjects who result from the processes you describe are very limited in their subjectivity. They become (at best) subjects of policy, but not subjects of social determination. The policies that they are allowed to influence are located within an unquestioned and unquestionable context of capitalism, of private property and profit and all that flows from that.
You might say that this could be seen as a first step towards a fully emancipated subjectivity, a real shaping of society from below. This might be so if such advances in democratisation were seen as part of a movement in-against-and-beyond capitalism, in which the issue of rupture remained central. But in your accounts there is no hint that this might be so.
At the end of the book I am left with the feeling of being entrapped: certainly things can be made better, but nobody in your book seems to think that another world might be possible, a world without government grants and bureaucrats, without money and profit, without capital.

My argument is just the opposite. I think there is a profound and growing rage against the rule of money. This can be seen in the student movement of recent months, the refusal to accept that education should be completely determined by money. But the rage is not just expressed on the streets but in the million ways in which people repudiate the shaping of every aspect of their lives by money and try to create or strengthen other ways of doing things, other ways of being with people, other ways of thinking.
These revolts, these refusal-and-creations, are so many cracks in the logic of capitalist cohesion, so many ruptures in the rule of money, so many explosions against a world of destruction. That is the exciting side of the raves on the estate: not that they can be the starting point for a better fitting into the structures of capitalism, but rather their potential as an explosion of misfitting.

To fit in to a society of death is to die ourselves. Let us misfit and grow in our misfittings and let our misfittings flow together. That is surely the only way in which we can pose the question of breaking this world and creating another one.

Rage now, rage against the rule of money!

John

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.

Turning this latent tension into a revolt and a revolt which over-flows throughout society is, you argue, the impetus shared by contemporary anti-capitalist struggles. As you declare, ‘the future of the world depends on splitting open the unitary character of labour.’ I agree strongly with your argument, perhaps because it reaffirms and takes forward the breaks that we made in 1968 with both the paternalism and the commercialism of the post-war order.

But while one theme of 1968 was the revolt against alienated labour; another, also taken further in today’s struggles, was the revolt against one-dimensional, electoralist citizenship. I was inspired by your development of Marx’s analysis of the dual nature of labour to apply the method to analysing the dual nature of citizenship. This leads to identifying cracks in state institutions that, contrary to what you seem to be arguing, we can and must open up in the process of breaking capitalism.

So here goes: you are right in your analysis of the dominant character of state institutions and their relationship to society: how they separate and fragment economics from politics, community provision from the community, citizens from each other and from their social context.

If however, we carry out an analysis of the dual nature of citizenship, we see that your description captures only one, albeit the dominant, dimension of citizenship. Such an analysis would lead us to contrast the atomised, abstract nature of citizenship underpinning parliamentarist institutions with the potential of citizens as social subjects.

The latter dimension is illustrated historically by the original struggles for the franchise, by situated subjects, that is propertyless male workers and women fighting for the suffrage to be universal. A contemporary example would be the way that, across the world, people are struggling for the promise of political equality to be realised through opening up narrowly electoral institutions and subjecting public power to direct forms of participation in the political decisions previously the secret domain of deals between the political elite and private business. (This has been the impetus behind many experiments in participatory democracy, especially in Latin America.)

We could talk here about subject citizenship or socialised citizenship versus atomistic citizenship. A very recent example of such socialised citizenship would be the movements, including parts of the trade unions, resisting privatisation across the world, often with alternative proposals for how services should be organised to respond to the diversity of social need.
Here are citizens organised as subjects, opening the crack between the state’s stewardship of public money and capital’s need for new markets and new sources of profit. In many such movements, the assertion of subject or socialised citizenship is fused with the revolt against abstract labour.
How else to understand what is happening when workers link up with communities to defend and improve the public services they deliver against marketisation?
The ways in which these struggles, and also new networks of the digital commons, are often organised leads me to a further area of disagreement. It concerns your dismissal of institutions per se – your apparent unwillingness to consider the possibility and reality of different kinds of institutions.
I’d like to believe, like you, in the flow, the dance, the moving of movements, but I’ve come to believe that flows need foundations and conditions of a more enduring kind. The flow of citizens’ movements against privatisation of public goods, for example, needed the ‘backbone’, as one Uruguayan activist in the movement for public water put it, of the trade union confederation born two decades earlier in the struggle against the dictatorship. Similarly, the flow of relationships in the open software movement is conditional on the institutional framework provided by the GNU General Public License.

I’ll end with a thought that underlies my insistence here on the institutional dimension. It is surely important to distinguish between two levels of social being: enduring social structures on the one hand and social interaction and relationships between individuals on the other.

Whereas the traditional left tended to think only in terms of structures, treating human beings as the carriers or products of social structures, not valuing or even recognising our capacity to act as knowing subjects and alter the structures of which we are part, I feel that you veer in the other direction, presuming only relationships and not taking account of the ways in which structures both pre-exist individuals and depend on them/us for their reproduction.

You have an infectious sense of how we make our own history – since it is ‘we who create this society,’ you rightly insist, ‘we can stop doing it and do something else’. But you don’t take account of the fact that we make history ‘not in conditions of our own making’, as the old man said.

Hilary

John Holloway

Dear Hilary,

Many thanks for your letter, which goes directly to two central points: the state and institutions in general. First the state. There is, as you say, a basic agreement that state institutions in general ‘separate and fragment, economics from politics, community provision from the community, citizens from each other and from their social context.’

And then you say: ‘If however, we carry out an analysis of the dual nature of citizenship, as Marx did on the dual nature of labour, we see that your description captures only one, albeit the dominant, dimension of citizenship. Such an analysis would lead us to contrast the atomised, abstract nature of citizenship underpinning parliamentarist institutions with the potential of citizens as social subjects.’ Here I both agree and disagree.

The state in general is a form of organisation developed over the centuries to exclude, divide and fragment, and to reformulate social discontent in such a way as to reconcile it with the reproduction of capitalism. Within this general framework, there are certainly many who walk in the wrong direction, breaking through these inherited forms, creating different forms of organising and behaving. Many of us who are teachers in state institutions, for example, try to do that: we struggle in-against-and-beyond the state trying open a world beyond capitalism. For me, this is part of the movement of doing against abstract, alienated labour. In your terms, this is the movement of socialised against atomised citizenship: my only problem with this formulation is that the word ‘citizenship’ binds the strugle to the state, which is the form of social relations that we are trying to break – we need to go beyond the state and therefore beyond citizenship.

The constant struggle in-against-and-beyond the state is central to all our lives (even if we are not employed by the state, we come into constant contact with it). In this I see the state as a tremendous sucking: it constantly sucks us back into conformity with a society ruled by money. Or perhaps as a giant fishing net that hauls in our discontents and then subordinates them to the logic of capital: by the language used, the form-filling, the million ways it offers us money if only we formulate what we want in a certain way, and by the cuts in expenditure.

The cuts are not directed against the state but are fundamental to the way that the state works: it hauls us in by promising us resources and then says ‘sorry, the economic situation means that we cannot give you what we promised’, and then we try to defend ourselves, but of course defence, if it is no more than that, means placing ourselves squarely within the logic of the state. The state is this movement of expansion-and-contraction: to defend the state against the cuts makes no sense at all. To fight for doing (or humanity, or communism) from wherever we are, in-against-and-beyond the state, is the anti-capitalist struggle of everyday life.

In this I distinguish between a situational contact with the state, where we try to go beyond the state because we are already in it, as employees or recipients of grants or benefits, and a sought contact with the state, where we try to enter it (as elected representatives, say) and turn it in our direction.
In the first case, the struggle in-against-and-beyond the state is inevitable, that is where we live. In the second case, I feel that the sucking force of the state is so strong that we will not be able to go far in that direction without abandoning our anti-capitalist perspective. It may make sense as a hit-and-run operation, an attempt to achieve something quickly and get out again, but not as a long-term venture, in which case it soon becomes a career option and any anti‑capitalist perspective is suppressed. In all this, it is important to think of our movement as a movement of rupture against capitalism and not just as a movement for democracy.

Briefly on the second point, the question of institutions. You say that you too like movement, flowing, dance but that in practice we need an institutional backbone. Perhaps, rather, we are now cripples who need institutional crutches, but learning to walk properly is a throwing off of our crutches.
Our moving is an anti-institutional moving. Possibly we need to create institutions (or habits) along the way, but if we do not subvert those institutions in the moment of creating them, they are likely to turn into their opposite. The flow of rebellion is a moving one no one controls: if we try to establish rules to direct it, we are likely to find that the movement itself breaks those rules.

John

Hilary Wainwright

Dear John,

Thanks for pushing me further on the relation between struggling against what I would call ‘alienated politics’ – the state, including elected, institutions – and the struggle against alienated labour.

We both agree that the struggle in-against-and-beyond the state is about trying open a world beyond capitalism. Our disagreements are about to what extent the sucking or alienating character of state institutions can be resisted and state institutions used, warily, in the struggle for a world beyond capitalism.

First, I’d make a general point about citizenship, the state and politics. Citizenship is about rights in a shared community – initially a city, then a nation-state, now possibly international institutions. If – and just now it looks like a pretty big ‘if’ – there is the possibility of a world without states, and ‘the state withers away’ – that surely is not the end of politics? Of collective decision-making about resources, priorities, rules, laws, standards, and so on that inevitably involves relations of power? It would be the end of the state as a separate, dominating power, but there would still be politics and therefore citizenship of some kind.

In the forms of organisation and – I insist – self‑determined institutions that we create to resist alienation in all its forms, aren’t we aiming to pre-figure in our own organisations a different kind of citizenship? A citizenship where when we elect people (and we will needs forms of both representation and delegations) who don’t then turn that very power we lent them back against us – who won’t, in other words, present politics as an alienated form.
In talking of the organisations that we create now, I’d like to bring in the issue of autonomy and kind of institutions we create to achieve that autonomy. Autonomous organisations – from the state and from capital – are a condition for the possibility of struggling to control and go beyond the state.
Marx illustrated this in his analysis of the struggle for the eight-hour day in late 19th century Britain. He showed how workers’ organisational capacity – driven by their shared interest, cohesion, numbers, the dependence of the ruling class on their votes and their labour – enabled them to develop an autonomous source of political power in both the workplaces and the wider society. This power was used to divide employers and political parties and win legislation that reduced hours of alienated labour.

This was a legislative gain: a gain in and against and potentially beyond the state, not only in terms of improving the lives of working people, but, more important for our argument, for enhancing their autonomous political capacity – giving them more time to communicate, debate, read, think and organise.

This brings me to the struggles that have been taking place on Marsh Farm estate: from the raves struggling with the police, the breweries and the council to provide an alternative to the commercial rip-offs of Luton town centre, through the occupied empty hospice as an autonomous housing action zone, to ‘occupying the rhetoric’ of New Labour’s New Deal for Communities to ensure resident control of public money allocated to the ‘regeneration’ of the estate. In this latter struggle they sought to engage with the state on their own terms.

After 18 years of being in-against-and-beyond the state, the community activists of Marsh Farm don’t see themselves as ‘sucked in’, as you imply. On the contrary, they see themselves as, in their own words, ‘reclaiming public resources from these top‑down bandits, putting them to use to replace the capitalist structures which dominate our community with far more effective and socially useful ones’. A key condition of this has been constantly developing an autonomous organisation, vigilantly resisting all pressures to ‘mimic the oppressor’, in the words of Paulo Freire, someone the community cite as a guide. Like you, they insist on ‘learning by doing’. You should meet them!

What you’d see is that crucial to their modest transformative power, as with the historic case of the workers fighting for the eight-hour day, has been the link between the bargaining power of the franchise, the minimally democratic element in the state and the autonomous organisation, values and perspectives of people struggling for social justice in their workplaces and communities.

One of the reasons why the traditional social democratic approach to socialism – gaining state power and then controlling capital – always fails is because in the end social democratic governments, when it comes to the production of wealth, have always depended on capital. And a crucial reason for this is that they never recognise their own allies – working people – as knowing, self-determining subjects with the capacity to be producers and organise a different kind of economy.

This view, embedded in the institutions of social democratic parties and trade unions as they are presently organised, places working class people as simply voters, sources of support, wage earners. The idea that they should share power or link with people or organisations outside of parliament is therefore precluded; they, the politicians, are the engineers of change, and everyone else is excluded from the process.

We can’t stand by and leave political institutions to those who want to be free of the pressures of the power of self‑determining citizens. We need to occupy those institutions where we can while at the same time organising to transform them.

Hilary

Capital is a relation of domination. The crisis of capital is a crisis of domination. The dominators are not able to dominate efficiently. And then we go into the streets and tell them that it is their fault! What are we saying, that they should dominate us more effectively?

It is better to take the simpler explanation and say that if the relation of domination is in crisis, it is because the dominated are not prostrating themselves sufficiently. The inadequacy of our subordination is the cause of the crisis.

Faster, faster, faster

This is Marx’s argument in his analysis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in Capital. The law of value is the rule of faster, faster, faster. The value of a commodity is determined by the labour time socially necessary to produce it, and this is constantly being reduced. To produce value, workers must work faster and faster, or else (or additionally) the same effect can be achieved by the introduction of machinery. If machinery is introduced, workers must in any case work faster and faster to offset the costs of the machinery.

In other words, if the rate of exploitation remains constant, the rate of profit will tend to fall as the organic composition of capital rises, corresponding to the rise in the relative importance of machinery in the process of production. The only way for capital to avoid the fall in the rate of profit is by constantly increasing exploitation.

Exploitation cannot be regarded as something static. There is a constant drive to go faster, a constant transformation of what capitalist labour means. This means not only the intensification of labour in the factories but the ever-increasing subordination of all aspects of life to the logic of capital.

The very existence of capital is a constant turning of the screw. Crisis is quite simply the manifestation of the fact that the screw is not being tightened fast enough. Somewhere it is meeting resistance: resistance on the streets perhaps, organised resistance perhaps, but not necessarily – it may just be the resistance of parents who want to play with their children, lovers who want to spend an extra hour in bed, students who think they can take time to criticise, humans who still dream of being human. We are the crisis of capital, we who do not bow low enough.

In this situation there are really only two solutions. The first is to say sorry, apologise for our lack of subordination and call for more employment: ‘More jobs, please exploit us more and we shall work much harder and faster, we shall subordinate every aspect of our lives to capital, we shall forget all this childish nonsense about playing and loving and thinking.’ This is the logic of abstract labour, the ineffective logic of the struggle of and by labour against capital.

The problem with this solution is that not only do we lose our humanity but we reproduce the system that is destroying us. If we are successful in helping capital to overcome its crisis, the ‘faster-faster-faster’ will continue, the subordination of all life, human and non-human, to the requirements of value production will be intensified. And then there will be the next crisis and so on until all humanity (and probably a lot of plant and animal life) is extinguished.

Refusal to bow

The alternative is to abandon the struggle of labour and declare openly that the struggle against capital is inevitably a struggle against labour, against the abstract labour that creates capital, against the faster-faster-faster of value production. In this case, we do not apologise, but rather take pride in our lack of subordination, in our refusal to bow to the capitalist logic of destruction. We are proud to be the crisis of the system that is killing us.

The latter option is more difficult. In capitalism, material survival depends on subordinating ourselves to the logic of capital. If we do not do that, how are we going to live? Without a material foundation, autonomy from capital is very difficult. It seems a logical impossibility, and yet this is the impossibility in which we live, the impossibility with which we constantly grapple.

Every day we try to reconcile our opposition to capital with the need to survive. Some of us do it in a relatively comfortable way, by finding employment (in the universities, for example) that allows us to create spaces in which we can fight against capital while receiving a salary at the same time. Others play for higher stakes, foregoing (by choice or necessity) any form of employment and devoting all their energies to activities that go against and beyond the logic of capital, surviving as best they can, by squatting or by occupying land and cultivating it, or by selling anti-capitalist books, by creating alternative structures of material support, or whatever.

In one way or another, but always in a contradictory manner, we try to create cracks in capitalist domination, spaces or moments in which we live out our dream of being human, spaces or moments in which we say to capital, ‘No, here you do not rule: here we shall act and live according to our own decisions, according to what we consider necessary or desirable.’

There is nothing unusual about that. We nearly all do it: not just lefties, not just readers of Red Pepper, but anyone who devotes energy to creating social relations on a different basis, on the basis of love, friendship, solidarity, collaboration, fun. That is our humanity, that is our sanity (or our madness). We all do it all the time, and yet we are always on the brink of failure, on the edge of collapse.

That is in the nature of the struggle: we run counter to the flow of capital. We are never far from despair, but that is where hope lives: next door to despair. This is a world without answers, a world of asking-we-walk, a world of experiment.

Crisis confronts us with these two options. Either we take the highway of subordination to the logic of capital, in the clear knowledge now that this leads directly to the self-annihilation of humanity; or else we take the hazardous paths of inventing different worlds, here and now and through the cracks we create in capitalist domination. And as we invent new worlds, we sing loud and clear that we are the crisis of capital, we are the crisis of the race towards human destruction, and proud of it.

The idea of creating cracks in the domination of capital is developed in John Holloway’s new book, Crack Capitalism, published by Pluto Press

2. In this discussion, we start from where we are, from a confused movement, a cacophony of rebellions, loosely united in this Social Forum. The question is how we should continue. Should we organise as a party? Should we focus our struggles on the state and in winning influence within the state or conquering state power? Or should we turn our back on the state in so far as we can and get on with constructing an alternative? I want to argue that we should turn our back on the state in so far as possible.

3. This is a question of how we organise and where we think we are going. The state is a form of organisation, a way of doing things. The state is an organisation separate from the rest of society. The people who work in the state (the politicians and the functionaries or civil servants) work on behalf of society, for the benefit of society, as they see it. Some are better than others (I have no doubt that Bertinotti is better than Berlusconi), but all work on our behalf, in our name. In other words, they exclude us. The state, as an organisational form, is a way of excluding us, of negating the possibility of self-determination. Once we are excluded, we have no real control over what they do. Representative democracy reinforces and legitimates our exclusion, it does not give us control over what the state does. Many of the worst atrocities are justified in the name of democracy.

If we focus our struggles on the state, we have to understand that the state pulls us in a certain direction. Above all, it seeks to impose upon us a separation of our struggles from society, to convert our struggle into a struggle on behalf of, in the name of. It separates leaders from the masses, the representatives from the represented, it draws us into a different way of talking, a different way of thinking. It pulls us into a process of reconciliation with reality, and that reality is the reality of capitalism, a form of social organisation that is based on exploitation and injustice, on killing and destruction. There is one key concept in the history of the state-centred left, and that concept is betrayal. Time and time again, the leaders have betrayed the movement, and not necessarily because they are bad people, but just because the state as a form of organisation separates the leaders from the movement and draws them into a process of reconciliation with capital. Betrayal is already given in the state as an organisational form.

Can we resist this? Yes, of course we can, and it is something that happens all the time. We can refuse to let the state identify leaders or permanent representatives of the movement, we can refuse to let delegates negotiate in secret with the representatives of the state. But this means understanding that our forms of organisation are very different from those of the state, that there is no symmetry between them. The state is an organisation on behalf of, what we want is the organisation of self-determination, a form of organisation that allows us to articulate what we want, what we decide, what we consider necessary or desirable – a council or communal organisation, a commun-ism. There are no models for how we should organise our drive towards self-determination. It is always a matter of invention and experimentation. What is clear is that the state as a form of organisation pushes in the opposite direction, against self-determination. The two forms of organisation are incompatible.

When I say “state”, I include parties or any organisation that has the state as its main focus. The party, as a form of organisation, reproduces the state form: it excludes, it creates distinctions between leaders and masses, representatives and represented; in order to win state power, it adopts the agenda and the temporalities of the state. In other words, it goes against the drive towards social self-determination which I think is the core of our struggle. Note that I am saying to Fausto and to Daniel and to Hilary “I don’t think the party is the right way to organise”. I am not saying “I don’t like you” or “I will not cooperate with you”, nor am I saying that struggles that take another route (such as the case of Venezuela) are therefore to be condemned. I am simply saying that in thinking of the way forward, party organisation or focussing on state power is the wrong way to go, because it implies a form of organisation that excludes and imposes hierarchies, that weakens and bureaucratises the anarchic effervescence of the drive towards self-determination that is the core of the current movement against neo-liberal capitalism.

4. What does it mean to turn our back on the state? In some cases, it means ignoring the state completely, not making any demands on the state, just getting on with the construction of our own alternatives. The most obvious example of that at the moment would be the Zapatistas’ shift in direction last year, their creation of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the creation of their own regional administration in a way that seeks to avoid the separation of administration and society typical of the state.

In other cases, it is difficult to turn our back on the state completely, because we need its resources in order to live – as teachers, as students, as unemployed, whatever. It is very difficult for most of us to avoid all contact with the state. In that case, what is important is to understand that the state is a form of organisation that pulls us in certain directions, that pulls us towards a reconciliation with capitalism, and to think how we can shape our contact with the state, how we can move against-and-beyond the state as a form of doing things, refusing to accept the creation of hierarchies, the fragmentation of our struggles that contact with the state implies, refusing to accept the language and the logic and perhaps above all the temporality of the state, the times and rhythms that the state tries to impose on us. How do we engage with the state without slotting in to its logic, without reproducing its logic inside our own movement? This is always a difficult issue in practice, in which it is very easy to get drawn into the logic of achieving particular concrete aims and forget the impact on the dynamic of the movement as a whole. I do not think it is a question of reclaiming the state, although I have a lot of respect for many of the struggles that are covered in Hilary’s book, but I think the idea of reclaiming the state is wrong: the state is an alien form of organisation – it is not, and cannot be, ours.

5. In all this the question of time and how we think about time is crucial. On the one hand the state imposes its temporality on us all the time, with its rhythm of elections and its changes of regime which change little or nothing: “Wait till the next election and then you can change things; if you want to do something now, then prepare for the next election, build the party”. On the other hand, the Leninist revolutionary tradition also tells us to wait: “Wait for the next revolutionary occasion or the next downturn of the long wave, wait until we take power and then we shall change society; in the meantime, build the party”.

But we know that we cannot wait. Capitalism is destroying the world and destroying us at such a rate that we cannot wait. We cannot wait for the election and we cannot wait for the revolution, we cannot wait until we win state power in one way or another, we have to try and break the destructive dynamic now. We have to refuse. Capitalism does not exist because the evil ones, the Bushes and Blairs and Berlusconis, create it. Capitalism does not exist because it was created a hundred or two hundred years ago. Capitalism exists today only because we created it today. If we do not create capitalism tomorrow, then it will not exist tomorrow. Capitalism exists because we make it, and we have to stop making it, to refuse. This means breaking time, breaking continuity, understanding that something does not exist today just because it existed yesterday: it exists only if we make it.

In thinking about alternatives to the state, I think refusal has to be the pivot, the key. But it is not enough. To maintain our refusal to make capitalism, we have to have an alternative way of surviving. The refusal has to be accompanied by the creation of a different world, the creation of a new commons, the creation of a different way of doing things. Behind the absolute here-and-now of refusal there has to be another temporality, a patient construction of a different world. There is no model for this. The only model is the multiplicity of experiences and inventions of the movement of resistance against capitalism. This multiplicity, this cacophony of struggles and experiences should be respected, not channelled into a party, not focussed on the winning of state power. The problem is not to take power, but to construct our own power, our own power to do things differently, our own power to create a different world.