Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

A new, updated edition of John Holloway’s acclaimed guide to the politics of revolution and protest.

The wave of political demonstrations since Seattle have crystallized a new trend in left-wing politics. Modern protest movements are grounding their actions in both Marxism and Anarchism, fighting for radical social change in terms that have nothing to do with the taking of state power. This is in clear opposition to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution which centers on taking state power. In this book, the author asks how we can reformulate our understanding of revolution as the struggle against power, not for power. After a century of failed attempts by revolutionary and reformist movements to bring about radical social change, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis.

Holloway opens up the theoretical debate, reposing some of the basic concepts of Marxism in a critical development of the subversive Marxist tradition represented by Adorno, Bloch, and Lukacs, among others, and grounded in a rethinking if Marx’s concept of “fetishization”—How doing is transformed into being.