## Metadata - Author: [[John Holloway]] - Full Title: Hope in Hopeless Times - Category: #books ## Highlights - Explosions of anger that very often become explosions of joy, intensities of emotion that leave a deep mark on people’s lives. There is a transformation of understanding, a transformation of perception, a realisation that we are, or can be, more than mere recipients of social change, mere passengers on the train to destruction. Ruptures. Ruptures that break the limits of possibility, that break barriers in our mind, that make it possible to think things that were not thinkable before. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=232)) - It is rage that says ‘that cannot be, we cannot accept that’ and so opens a grammar of hope, but then these explosions of rage-joy take us further, tumbling the barriers of reality and giving us confidence that the world really could be different, radically different. ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=236)) - And it is not just the great waves of rebellion, it is also the proliferation of refusals and other-doings that open up the bounds of possibility and create the bases here and now for a different way of living, a different way of relating to one another. A multiplication of cracks in the texture of domination, a proliferation of spaces, moments, areas of activity where we say ‘No, here we will not follow the rule of money, here we shall do what we collectively consider necessary or desirable’. ([Location 238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=238)) - Over the last twenty or thirty years there has been an explosion of what is often called ‘autonomist’ politics, a politics based on the idea that the way to change the world is to create, here and now, spaces of otherness, spaces in which our activities are driven not by profit or money but by the collective determination of what we want to do. ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=242)) - As Terry Eagleton puts it in his excellent book on hope, hope ‘represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined’ ([Location 265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=265)) - This is an anguished book, perhaps more anguished than its mother and its grandmother. It is the third in a trilogy that began with Change the World without Taking Power and continued with Crack Capitalism. Catastrophe is on the agenda, probably as never before. To talk of hope without being aware of that context would make little sense. Inevitably, it is part of the time in which it is written: an anguished book in anguished times. This book is a granddaughter, restless as granddaughters should be. It loves its mother and its grandmother but keeps on muttering Not enough! Not enough! Yes, clearly the only way to think about revolution is against any notion of taking state power, and certainly the only way to bring it about is through the recognition, creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of anti-capitalist cracks. Yes, but when I woke up this morning, the monster was still there.3 Not enough! We must kill the monster, but that seems impossible. It seems indestructible. Rebellions all over the place, people building alternatives, but money still rules. As the Zapatistas say, capitalism is like a hydra. Each time we chop off a head, new heads sprout up to terrorise us. How can we reach its heart, its heartless heart? How do we kill money? Start from hope, from richness, from overflowing, from antagonism, but start too from those dreadful words: not enough! ([Location 273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=273)) - We struggle not because we think we will win, but because we cannot accept that which exists. Screaming against a system that dehumanises us needs no justification. It is simply an expression of what we understand to be our humanity. Our anti-capitalism is based on the horrors of the capitalist system, not in any confidence that we can create something else. Our struggles are not a means to an end, they are a dignity, a refusal, that arises from the depths of our being. Struggle against the system that is killing us has no need of hope to justify it. If a mining company announces that it is going to open an open cast mine in an agricultural community and the people realise that this will exhaust and contaminate the water supply, the basis of their farming, then they are likely to resist, whether or not they hope to win the dispute. And yet some sort of hope is nearly always present. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=341)) - The argument of Change the World is that it is necessary to overcome the ‘state illusion’, the idea that anti-capitalist change can be brought about through the state. The state-centred approach of the twentieth century’s revolutions contributed to the tragic outcome of those movements. We need to think not of taking power-over others but of constructing our power-to create a different world. Crack Capitalism suggested that the only way to think of revolution is as the recognition, creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of cracks, of moments or spaces in which we break with the logic of capitalist development and develop our power-to do things differently. The argument centred on the clash between two different doings: the doing that is subject to the logic of capital, what Marx calls abstract or alienated labour, and a doing that pushes towards self-determination. The present book takes this argument in a slightly different direction, making more explicit a theme already present in the earlier books. Capitalism consists of channelling our activity into a social cohesion, a logic of capital. It is a system of containment that threatens us with extinction. Anti-capitalist activity and thought, meanwhile, is an overflowing from this containment, or a multiplicity of overflowings. Containment against overflowing: that is the antagonism that shapes the world. Overflowing against containment: that is hope. ([Location 368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=368)) - Overflowing against containment: anti-identity against identity. Identification is the imposition of limits on what we do and what we think and the way we see the world. Identity contains. Anti-identity overflows. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=378)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The party, for example, is central to the revolutionary tradition. It is common now to criticise the party as a hierarchical organisational form and contrast it with the current trend towards horizontalism. This is correct, but the problem goes deeper. The party is a definitional, identitarian form of organisation. A party typically has a defined membership, a defined territory, a defined programme and a hierarchical structure which determines how changes in the programme and organisation can be made. The definition of membership and programme inevitably entails an exclusion of those who are not members, a distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between outsiders and insiders. This leads to forms of behaviour which include divisions, schisms and expulsions. It promotes a form of language that divides, denouncing and disqualifying those who hold the wrong opinions or act in the wrong manner. Lenin was a master of such language, but it permeates the whole party tradition. The notion of class and especially the working class is an important part of this tradition. How do we define the working class? Is it a group defined by exploitation, the direct production of surplus value? Or is it the group defined by the sale of its labour power? Where do we fit in? What are the limits of the class and how are we to define its consciousness? It is not that the category of class is not important. It is extremely important, but the orthodox tradition takes it as a defined group rather than as a process of class-ification imposed by the dynamic of capitalist development and therefore always at issue. We struggle not because we are working class, but because we overflow, we resist-and-rebel against the very material class-ification that shapes our lives. Our struggle is not identitarian, but anti-identitarian. ([Location 384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=384)) - being of purely historical interest. The rise of identitarianism is at the core of current capitalist development. This is very clear in the rise of the right across the world. The thought and action of what we refer to as the ‘right’ is highly definitional. Nationalism, racism, sexism: all are based on definitions of people as belonging to certain categories, as being contained within certain roles. Anger and very often violence are directed against anyone who attempts to break out of those roles, out of those pre-established definitions. Social order is to be maintained by keeping people within those definitions, by keeping them in their place. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=401)) - An anti-identitarian approach involves understanding people on the basis of the flow (and overflow) of social antagonism, rather than as defined groups. In this sense it is anti-sociological, opposed to the traditional sociology that sees people in terms of their location or roles or interests. It is not that these groups or roles or interests do not exist, but that they exist as blockages or containments of the antagonistic flow. These containments are the reproduction of the society that is destroying us. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=422)) - Perhaps we can think of anti-identitarian thinking as assembly-thinking, as opposed to the identitarian character of political-party thinking. The Party is characterised by definition, by a laying down of a party line. Assembly-thinking is an opening to discussion, a talking-asking: we think this, what do you think? The statement is simultaneously an invitation to overflow. Thus, for example, when the Zapatistas, in their invitation to a seminar in 2015 on critical thought against the hydra of capitalism, introduce their idea that there is a social storm coming, they say: ‘The thing is that what we Zapatistas are seeing and hearing is that there is coming a catastrophe in all the senses, a storm . . . So we Zapatistas think that we have to ask others, from other calendars, from distinct geographies, what it is that they see’.4 The statement questions itself, pushes beyond itself. It in this way that I would like the present book to be understood, as a ‘this is what I think, but how do you see it?’ ([Location 442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=442)) - We push against barriers not because the grass is always greener on the other side, but because our lives are being destroyed on this side. ([Location 481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=481)) - I have elsewhere3 used a metaphor inspired by a story of Edgar Allan Poe that now seems more relevant than ever. We are in a room. On one side there is no wall, just an abyss – extinction. On the other three sides there are walls without windows or doors and the walls are closing in on us, threatening to push us all into the abyss of extinction. We are desperately hammering on the walls with our fists, trying to find a way to break them. At times we make a slight dent and that gives us the courage to go on. But the walls keep on advancing. We desperately need to make the banging with our fists connect with a structural fault in the wall itself. That is our hope. ([Location 482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=482)) - And yet: that which is may be untrue, but it is. It is, it exists, and it exerts an enormous force. It is the brick wall against which we hurl ourselves, the apparently unmovable which we long to move. That which is, Identity, is not just untrue, it is the great Untruth. It is an untruth of great force that constantly pours into us, overwhelms us, tells us to think only within structures, tells us that the idea of hope is absurd. ([Location 503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=503)) - Hope-thinking is the attempt to understand the force of the antiidentitarian in this society, the force of that which does not fit in, of that which pushes towards a different world. Hope is a pushing, in thought and action, against the untruth of identity. That is the only way in which truth exists, as the push against the untruth of that which is. ([Location 510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=510)) - To think hope is to take sides. It is to take the side of that-which-is-not-yet-but-perhaps-could-be against that-which-is, to take the side of anti-identity against identity, of the world we want to create against the world that is destroying us, of the subject against the object. We do not start by trying to be dispassionate and objective. That would be to start from a lie, the foundational lie of traditional academic discourse. ([Location 513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=513)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To think hope is to enter into a different grammar of thought. Existing society produces and is supported by a certain way of thinking that assumes the permanence of the existing forms of social organisation: we think of money, state, labour, poverty as being permanent features of society. To think hope is just the opposite: what interests us is not the permanence of these forms but their impermanence, their existence as historically specific forms of social relations. We are entrapped within these forms, but we are thinking (and acting) against-and-beyond them. In other words, we think negatively about the society that surrounds us, because we are pushing towards a world that does not yet exist but could potentially come into being. ([Location 520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=520)) - What makes thinking of revolutionary hope more difficult is that the subject and object are constituted not just by their mutual antagonism but by their mutual interpenetration. Their clash is not the apparently external shock of two billiard balls, there is an interpenetration. We-who-scream are penetrated by the capital that we scream against. The relation between the two poles in conflict is an internal relation. We are crippled by the world we live in. We are damaged subjects.5 We are not a pure revolutionary subject: that is what makes revolution so difficult to think about. The peculiar force of the capitalist object is that it totalises: it sucks us deeper and deeper into a totality of social relations dominated by the logic of capital. ([Location 593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=593)) - We are damaged, but not (yet) destroyed. To think hope is not to look for a force that comes from outside to save us, but to look for an immanent negation, a negating force that overflows its own immanence. A negation that overflows its own damaged subjectivity into a scream, into resistance-and-rebellion, but that also overflows its subjectivity to penetrate the object as an unrecognised contradiction. We are looking for the gravediggers, but not as a defined group of people, rather as a latent, subversive force that not only breaks the surface volcanically but that also exists inside the object as chronic and possibly fatal illness. ([Location 624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=624)) - Hope is a dangerous game. It is so easy for hope to lead us up a garden path, to disillusion. ([Location 629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=629)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It follows that the defence of diversity must start from the recognition that there is nothing irreducible about it. All the multiple diversities are being reduced by the simple fact of being drawn into a world in which social reproduction (at its most basic, how do we get food to live until tomorrow?) is mediated through money and the constant pressure of obtaining it. This reduction of the ‘irreducible’ is displayed in glaring light by the rampant urbanisation of the world: how do you survive in a city without access to money? But in the countryside too there is an increasing penetration of money into the daily process of physical and social reproduction. All the diversities of the world are united: not by thought but by their having a common enemy, the violent uniting or totalising that is the movement of money, the movement of capital. It is money that constitutes the antagonistic unity of the world and does so with increasing intensity. It is money that is our common enemy, uniting all our diversities. ([Location 663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=663)) - Capitalism is a totalising system that sucks us all into its dynamic and the struggle against it is a struggle to de-totalise, to break away from that dynamic.10 One form of struggle is certainly to de-totalise by living the world we want to create. An example often cited is that of Rosa Parks, who got on a bus and sat in the part reserved for white people, thus acting as though the object of struggle, racial discrimination, did not exist. This is indeed the central theme of Crack Capitalism: the creation of interstitial spaces with different social relations as a means of struggling against capital. This does not mean, however, that we can simply assume that capital no longer exists as a form of domination. The effectiveness of Rosa Parks’ action in acting as though the laws of racial discrimination did not exist was grounded in a firm understanding of the fact that those laws did exist. Thus, in creating anti-capitalist spaces or cracks as a means of struggle, it is still important to realise that capital, the object of our struggle, continues to attack. ([Location 702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=702)) - The separation of the in from the against is the imposition of an identity, the imposition of limits upon that which overflows. It is a common feature of ‘left’ thought: they are ordinary people, contained within the system, we are the critical radicals or revolutionaries. They are the ‘in’, we are the ‘against’. The identification is a double movement: identifying those that are in the system defines the revolutionaries at the same time as those who stand outside the system. This is typical of vanguardist thought and practice, and indeed any thought or practice that distinguishes the masses to be led from the militants that are to lead. ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=735)) - The communising tradition has a different grammar from that of the party. The party is an organisational form that reproduces the identitarian grammar of the state and seeks to achieve change through that grammatical context, whereas communising is better understood as an anti-identitarian overflowing, a moving in-against-and-beyond. Better a verb than a noun, because it is an active, open moving of creating. Eagleton, commenting on Bloch (2015, 52), puts it beautifully: ‘every present is radically in excess of itself’. The overflowing is the pouring of that excess. ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=796)) - Money and the state are particular forms of the same total social cohesion, which subsists and reproduces itself through its constant particularisation into these forms. The constant recreation of money and the state as particular is essential to the recreation of the whole. To hope is to dissolve these coagulations in thought and in action, to emancipate the sheer unrest of life that lies latent in its own negation. ([Location 871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=871)) - In a society dominated by the pursuit of profit, human creativity is channelled into activities and processes of production that favour the expansion of profit. This is what is rejected in the rejection of progress. Progress of this type will not take us forward to the end of the tunnel of capitalism. On the contrary, it takes us deeper into the quagmire that is capitalism. We push forward, ever forward, but we find ourselves sinking deeper and deeper into the logical dynamic of money, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to practise or even conceive of alternatives. Hope itself is gradually sinking into the mud, being reduced to discussions about different paths forward into the swamp. The paths of progress all lead us towards catastrophe, whether by global warming or nuclear war or increasingly random violence. Every progressive government is an appeal to ‘be realistic’, but, whatever the short-term achievements (which may be real in some respects), this realism takes us only deeper into the quagmire.2 The fact that the subordination of creativity to profit is leading us to disaster is not, however, a reason for turning away from the enormous power of that creativity. The laptop that I am using is certainly shaped by the company’s pursuit of profit, but is nevertheless the product of a very highly developed and very highly socialised human creativity. The issue is not to reject that creativity but to emancipate it from its commodified form. Not just in the future, but in the present: the development of computing creativity, like all forms of creativity, exists not only in but also against-and-beyond its commodified form. The commodity is in fact a constant running after our creativity, a constant attempt to capture it and harness it within the logic of capital. The critique of progress should not be confused with a critique of creativity but understood rather as an attempt to emancipate it from capitalist determinants. Our struggle is the struggle of richness against capital. ([Location 907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=907)) - Ernst Bloch was a master of the grand narrative of human emancipation. Even in the darkest night of fascism and exile, he developed a powerful narrative of a hope that exists in every moment of human activity, a pushing against-and-beyond, a longing towards the not-yet that expressed the present force of that which is Not Yet, a hoping always laden with the possibility of reaching Home. ([Location 937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=937)) - Note: Reminds me of Plum Village - We have to move beyond the view that anti-capitalism is something special and understand that it is deeply rooted in everyday life, that we all misfit the requirements of capital, that we all overflow its logic in some way or other. Not only that, but that this misfitting has a force, that it constitutes the crisis of capital. ([Location 1292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=1292)) - Turn it all upside down. Feel sorry for the master, feel sorry for the capitalist. Put yourself in his position and understand his fears. We are looking for hope, and his fears may be a good indication of the strength of our hopes. The slave looks at the master and sees him as all-powerful. The master looks at his slaves and knows he depends on them and fears that they might escape. If the slaves could see the master’s fear, they would understand better their own strength. ([Location 1304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=1304)) - Dependence is the key. Any relation of domination is a relation of dependence. The dominator always depends on the dominated. For food, for profit, for cleaning the house, for recognition. This dependence is an inevitable source of instability and fear in the relationship. What if the slave or servant says ‘no’ and walks away? ([Location 1308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHFBXZH2&location=1308))