Additional information
by John Holloway (Author), Andrej Grubačic (Preface by)
In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism is based on three recent lectures delivered by John Holloway at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. The lectures focus on what anticapitalist revolution can mean today--after the historic failure of the idea that the conquest of state power was the key to radical change--and offer a brilliant and engaging introduction to the central themes of Holloway's work.
The lectures take as their central challenge the idea that "We Are the Crisis of Capital and Proud of It." This runs counter to many leftist assumptions that the capitalists are to blame for the crisis, or that crisis is simply the expression of the bankruptcy of the system. The only way to see crisis as the possible threshold to a better world is to understand the failure of capitalism as the face of the push of our creative force. This poses a theoretical challenge. The first lecture focuses on the meaning of "We," the second on the understanding of capital as a system of social cohesion that systematically frustrates our creative force, and the third on the proposal that we are the crisis of this system of cohesion.
"His Marxism is premised on another form of logic, one that affirms movement, instability, and struggle. This is a movement of thought that affirms the richness of life, particularity (non-identity) and 'walking in the opposite direction'; walking, that is, away from exploitation, domination, and classification. Without contradictory thinking in, against, and beyond the capitalist society, capital once again becomes a reified object, a thing, and not a social relation that signifies transformation of a useful and creative activity (doing) into (abstract) labor. Only open dialectics, a right kind of thinking for the wrong kind of world, non-unitary thinking without guarantees, is able to assist us in our contradictory struggle for a world free of contradiction."--Andrej Grubačic, from his Preface
Author Biography
John Holloway is a professor of sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades in the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He has published widely on Marxist theory, on the Zapatista movement, and on the new forms of anticapitalist struggle. He is the author of Change the World without Taking Power, which has been translated into 11 languages and has stirred an international debate, Crack Capitalism, and Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico. Andrej Grubacic is the chair of the Anthropology and Social Change Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of Don't Mourn, Balkanize: Essays after Yugoslavia; the editor of From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader; and the coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History. He lives in San Francisco.
