(versión en español)
Michael Hardt and John Holloway
July 2010
Dear John,
One of the things I love about Crack Capitalism, which it shares with Change the World Without Taking Power, is that its argument traces the genealogy of revolt. In other words, you start with the indignation, rage, and anger that people feel but you don't stop there. Your argument leads revolt toward both creative practice and theoretical investigation.
On the one hand, although refusal is essential, perhaps even primary in your argument, especially the break with or exodus from capitalist social forms, every destructive force has to be accompanied by a creative one, every effort to tear down the world around us has to be aimed also toward the creation of a new one. And moreover these two processes, the destructive and the constructive, are not separable but completely embedded or entwined with each other. That is why, as you say, it makes no sense to defer creating a new society until after the complete collapse or demolition of capitalist society. Instead we must struggle now to create a new society in the shell of the old or, rather, in its cracks, its interstices.
On the other hand, you demonstrate how revolt must lead not only to practical but also theoretical innovation. Although your book starts with an affective state and instances of practical resistance, the central argument involves a conceptual investigation, most importantly, it seems to me, about the role and potential of our productive capacities in capitalist society. I don't mean to pose a separation here between practice and theory. In fact, your argument requires that they too are completely embedded or entwined. In order to change the world we need not only to act differently but also to think differently, which requires that we work on concepts and sometimes invent new concepts.