Authority 1

We are all in a room with four walls (…) The room is furnished and some of us are sitting comfortably, others most definitely are not. The walls are advancing inwards gradually, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, making us all more uncomfortable (…) From time to time there are elections about how to place the furniture. These elections are not unimportant: they make some people more comfortable, others less so; they may even affect the speed at which the walls are moving, but they do nothing to stop their relentless advance.

John Holloway (2010: 8).

John Holloway (born 1947) is an Irish lawyer, sociologist and philosopher whose early work in the 1970s focussed mainly on Marxist economics. Since 1991, he has been closely associated with the Zapatist@s in Chiapas, Mexico, who are working to build a libertarian form of grassroots government.

Many viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union and other so-called socialist states as representing the disappearance of an alternative model of society. At the end of the 1980s, the West proclaimed what US political scientist Francis Fukuyama, writing in 1989, termed the ‘end of history’. Thus Western representative democracy, coupled with a market economy, was promoted as the only legitimate and imaginable form of society left. Within this framework there are, as Holloway puts it in this quote, different forms. None of these, however, question capitalism and representative democracy’s overall structure.

*John Holloway (2010): Crack Capitalism. London & New York: Pluto Press.

2010