Crack Capitalism, Holloway's latest

[Random]

Anyone read this or planning to do so? He's an autonomist marxist type, of the anarchically inclined persuasion. His previous book, Change the World Without Taking Power was well received, including by the SWP, who made him into one of their main targets to argue against and conflate into an 'autonomist' movement including all sorts of anticapitalist writers.

Now not very many anarchoes actually read his stuff, but it could be intersting, and I expect a few here might end up reading his latest. So any good? Am always hopeful that some anarcholefty will actually manage to write something of use.

here's the blurb I just got.

How do we create a different world? Crack capitalism: create cracks, moments or spaces of rebellion in which we assert a different type of doing. That is what we are doing already, every day, everywhere.

John Holloway’s acclaimed book, Change the World Without Taking Power, sparked a world-wide debate about the most effective methods of going beyond capitalism. Now Holloway takes the debate farther, arguing that hope lies in the fact that capitalism is already badly cracked, full of ruptures in the logic of social cohesion. Can these cracks really break the system? Holloway suggests that the force of the cracks lies in their common drive against capitalist labour and towards a different type of activity, doing what we consider necessary or desirable. The question of revolution is not how to destroy capitalism, but how to stop creating it and do something sensible instead.

Clearly presented in the form of 33 theses, Crack Capitalism will reignite the debate among the millions of us who long to find a way of breaking capitalism now.

 

[revol68]

there is nothing new in this, though he is quite a nice clear writer (sometimes to a fault).

 

[danny la rouge]

Anyone read this or planning to do so?

I'm planning to.

Was that the kind of rip-roaring post you were after?

 

[butchersapron]

To honest, it just seems like a further abstraction of his previous metaphor of 'the scream' turend into 'the crack' - from the contents here it appears he's falling prey to the same things that Bologna accused Negri of, spinning abstractions that feed each other, driving him away from material conditions:

A discourse which grows upon itself carries the mortal danger of verifying itself always and only through the successive passages of its own formal logic

That said, he's always an interesting read so i'll be giving this a proper go before saying any more than that.

 

[the button]

£17.99 for 272 pages (£13.49 from Amazon). Fucking Pluto Press.

 

[butchersapron]

Newer Pluto Press books have a habit of turning up as pdfs somehow...almost like someone is deliberately leaking them

They used to turn up on the now sadly gone a.aaaarg site - along with verso stuff.

 

[butchersapron]

Check also here

 

[the button]

Check also here

Cheers, butchers, that an amazing site. (Although it is a little annoying that I paid top whack for a lot of the stuff on there ).

 

[kyser_soze]

heheh...love the URL for that site...

 

[eoin_k]

I was underwhelmed by Holloway at last years bookfair at Queen Mary's.

 

[maximilian ping]

this thread should be about young entrepreneur drug dealers, not boring crap marxism crap

 

[kyser_soze]

Monbiot would probably disagree with this book...

 

[articul8]

Cheers, butchers, that an amazing site. (Although it is a little annoying that I paid top whack for a lot of the stuff on there ).

Great that it's available - but printing off whole books is a bit frustrating - fine if they are a collection of essays and you just want the one, but hard to keep once you've read them - they all end up being piles of paper.

When did a.aaaarg go down? The c*nt that threatened to sue them should have his head introduced to a large slab of concrete.

 

[kyser_soze]

That's why you need an iPad, artic...

 

[the button]

Monbiot would probably disagree with this book...

Yeah, he's a cunt though.

 

[articul8]

an i-fad? no chance

 

[butchersapron]

Great that it's available - but printing off whole books is a bit frustrating - fine if they are a collection of essays and you just want the one, but hard to keep once you've read them - they all end up being piles of paper.

When did a.aaaarg go down? The c*nt that threatened to sue them should have his head introduced to a large slab of concrete.

Couple of weeks back, the stuff will be back somewhere else soon enough i expect.

I read most of those things on my ipod touch - took me awhile to get used to it but it's dead easy now. I did the whole 800 pages of that Historical materialism survey of contemporary marxism on it last week.

 

[articul8]

plug - there is an extract from Holloway in the latest Red Pepper - not available online (yet) - but a comparative snip at £3.95

 

[articul8]

Couple of weeks back, the stuff will be back somewhere else soon enough i expect.

I read most of those things on my ipod touch - took me awhile to get used to it but it's dead easy now. I did that the whole 800 pages of that Historical materialism survey of contemporary marxism on it last week.

not seen that - any chance of pming me a link? Not keen on on-screen reading. I suppose if the i-fad is as good as they claim...

 

[butchersapron]

Give us a sec and i'll edit a link in here.

Here we go - just enter the numbers in the box at top right.

 

[TruXta]

Cheers, butchers, great link! This crack capitalism sounds suspiciously like Bey's TAZ.

 

[articul8]

cheers - need to print out though

 

[chilango]

I'll probably read this if I find a copy.

His last Zapatista book was a good read.