On the dialectics of power and revolution: a few reflections on the work of John Holloway "Change the World Without Taking Power"

Abstract

This study consists in a critical approach to Holloway’s ‘Open Marxism’, as presented in his Change the world without taking power. In defense of the so-called revolutionary Marxist tradition, represented by radical Marxist thinkers as Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci and Lukács, the author strongly opposes Holloway’s argument that scientific Marxism in toto succumbed actually to the bourgeois ideology of science, state, power etc. Consequently, this analysis focuses on how Holloway himself mistreats crucial concepts such as ‘science’, ‘state’, ‘party’ and ‘power’. Victim and fanatic of a theology of Negation, Holloway follows an abstract ‘either-or’ mode of thinking and arguing, and fails to treat dialectically critical relations as those among science and ideology, state and revolution, movement and party. According to this study, Holloway’s anti-capitalistic rhetoric and post-modernist methodology are nothing more than expressions of an old-fashioned anarchist ideology, against which classical Marxism, adapted to contemporary needs and conditions, can function as a radical critique. As the author suggests, searching for the meaning of the revolution nowadays, Holloway confuses the Marxist concept of science with the positivistic one and fatally mistakes a political caricature of Marxism, i.e. a Blanquist or/ and a Stalinist misinterpretation of the Marxist theory of revolution, for revolutionary Marxism itself.