Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

as Porto Alegre, Venice, East Manchester, and so on) through
the promotion of 'participatory democracy'. 22 Is it possible
to re-signify the state (as Nicanoff (2007: 12) puts it), or to
harmonise the dynamics of sovereignty and autonomy (Mazzeo
2007: 28)? This approach is sometimes discussed in terms of
'popular power' and the insistence that power comes from the
people.23 This is an attractive formulation, but the category
of 'the people' actually conceals that the source of power is
doing: it abstracts from the organisation of human activity and
its antagonistic existence. It is this antagonism that is skated
over in the formulations that look to an easy combination of a
movement from above and a movement from below.
That the state should be dissolved from within, or as a comingtogether
of pressures from within and from without, is difficult,
because of the weight of inherited structures and forms of
behaviour, because of the separation of paid state functionaries
from the rest of the population and because of the pressures to
secure the functioning of 'the economy' (as though this were
not a system of exploitation). If it were to be possible, then the
crucial factor would be not the revolutionary commitment of the
state functionaries or politicians themselves, but the force of the
struggles outside the state apparatus for a different form of social
organisation. The movement of 'from above' and 'from below' is
inevitably an antagonistic process, although the contours of this
antagonism may not follow institutional demarcations: it can be
displaced into the state apparatus itself. Certainly the movement
of history constantly defies theory, yet the term 'popular power'
conceals the real antagonisms and difficulties.
A rebellion does not cease to be a rebellion just because
it is channelled towards the state. The drive towards selfdetermination
remains alive, although it is likely to be
increasingly suppressed to the degree that the state structures
become consolidated. A state-centred revolution is a highly
self-antagonistic process, a crack that widens and plasters itself
over at the same time. Whether, and at what point, the hand
that plasters succeeds in suppressing the hand that opens the
crack is always the outcome of struggle, the struggle for selfdetermination
on the one hand and the struggle to contain it
within forms of alien determination on the other.24 Certainly in
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