John Holloway

"It is not a question of real, nor even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequently must appear to Saint Bruno as a series of 'thoughts' that devour one another and are finally swallowed up in 'self-consciousness'." The German Ideology by Karl Marx (1845)

The importance of John Holloway's writing is that it reflects and systematises a range of ideas that are influential within the anti-capitalist movement.

He stands within the postmodernist tradition but, as well as drawing on Michel Foucault, he also refers to a range of Western Marxian critics, starting with Lukacs and extending to Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, and to Negri. Although fulsome in his praise for Marx himself, his only uncritical remarks are reserved for the Zapatistas.

Philosophically, he is an idealist. That is to say, he works with concepts and categories; "the state", "power", "work", whose meaning and content appear to be the same in all circumstances and for all societies. This allows him to make generalisations and derive lessons from one historical period which he then applies to the present day. Not surprisingly, because they are not derived from today's world, his political strategies, insofar as he has any, are completely vacuous and totally inoperable. In both his method and his conclusions, he expresses the point of view of the petit bourgeois who is obliged to recognise his own impotence but consoles himself with the thought that he can defend his own dignity through some petty insubordination....

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