Capitalism is sustained through the imposition of money and fiscal policy – monetary policies push and mold people into acting in certain ways recreating their impacts--- the alternative is anticapitalism – recognizing that money and capital is dependent on our labor and to embrace eccentricity rupturing the state from within

The global COVID-19 pandemic is the defining crisis of our historical moment, so let’s start with this. During the pandemic, as you know, racism, violence, exploitation and other injustices, including a system of vaccine apartheid (where only the wealthy world has had abundant access to the vaccines), have increased dramatically against oppressed people: POC, women, workers, refugees. What lessons can we learn about the nature of capitalism from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic? What are your own reflections on this situation? For me, this is a very difficult question. I see it very much as a capitalist crisis in two senses. Firstly, in the sense that the pandemic, which I think is very real indeed, is a product of the destruction of the equilibrium between human and other forms of life. And that destruction is propelled by the capitalist pursuit of profit. The very fact of the pandemic just tells us of the destructive nature of the society in which we live. Secondly, we have to see it as a capitalist crisis in terms of its effects, particularly its economic effects. Before the crisis, many or even most mainstream economists were saying: “There is a crisis coming, we don’t know exactly when, but it is going to be a very major crisis.” The pandemic has precipitated that crisis — the coronavirus “crisis” is very much part of the dynamic of capitalism. Beyond that, what is very clear, is the way in which the political measures taken by different states seem to be a combination of genuinely wanting to reduce the impact of the pandemic and yet also take advantage of the pandemic to increase state control over society. I think that is true everywhere, in terms of the degree of surveillance that has been developed. Moreover, I think that the question of obedience to those state measures is obviously very much an issue at the moment. I see the acceptance of security measures — vaccination, face masks, social distancing — as social solidarity. We do it not just to protect ourselves, but we are also protecting people around us. And that seems to me a very important aspect. The last thing is that this crisis is leaving us in an extremely unpredictable situation. There is an awful lot of frustration from people wanting to get out; wanting to escape this feeling of being closed in. People suffered enormously over the past two years. They have suffered poverty, loss of income, they have suffered in terms of health and because of the loss of their loved ones. I think there is huge frustration there which may express itself in very big eruptions of social discontent. This is already expressing itself, particularly in Europe, in explosions of social anger. But it is really hard to foresee just how far those will go and what their significance will be. You related your discussion of the coronavirus pandemic to the ecological crisis, an issue which many intellectuals and politicians are trying to resolve by means of the state. You criticized this approach in one of your articles, published in ROAR Magazine. How can we face the ecological crisis without relying on the state? That is obviously a huge question. We have just seen COP-26 a few weeks ago. I don’t think that the climate crisis can be solved within capitalism. It is hard to be absolutely sure. If we think of Marx and his discussion of the different Factory Acts passed by the British government in the 19th century and capital, he is saying there, really, that capital comes up against its limits in terms of the destruction of the labor force on which it depends. It manages to solve its self-destructive tendency, Marx argues, by accepting the reduction of the working day. I think we are in a situation now in which the future of capitalism — and of course the future of humanity — is threatened by the destruction of the natural environment. Is it possible to solve that problem within the framework of capitalism? I think probably not. In a society in which the driving power is the pursuit of profit, it is just not going to be possible to solve the climate crisis. In other words, we are in some ways being confronted more urgently than ever with the question of how on earth do we get rid of capital? How do we get rid of money, if we think that money is the dynamic of profit? I think what we are looking for is very much part of the Kurdish movement, the Zapatista movement, and the many other movements that challenge the logic of capital: it is to take this situation into our own hands, and not to depend on the state but to really develop our own practices, our own ways of developing different relations to nature and other forms of life. And that obviously is central in the whole idea of eco-socialism and eco-feminism. I think that has to be a central part of any struggle to transform the world. It is not just getting rid of capital but also transforming our relations to other forms of life. In your book “Change the World Without Taking Power,” you redefined many concepts, such as “doing” vs. ” labor,” “power to” vs. “power over,” “knowledge to” vs. “knowledge over,” as well as the concept of revolution. You continued to develop these themes in your book “Crack Capitalism.” I would like to know what political and philosophical influences inspired you to rethink revolution as a process which must be undertaken without taking state power or winning elections, and the importance of that in the revolutionary practice? Oh, I would like to say something before answering your question because I might forget to say otherwise: Change the World Without Taking Power has been published in Arabic in December. For me it is very exciting! Wow, that is great news! I think it will be read by many people, especially by people from Rojava, northeast Syria. As far as I know your works are not yet available in Arabic. This is great! I think it was a combination of things. In the 1970s, I was involved in the debates around the state in Britain, which were influenced by all the struggles taking place at that time but also by the German state derivation debate. This was concerned with the question of how to understand the state as a particular form of the capital relation. From this came the conclusion that you could not possibly use the state to overcome capitalism. They said from the beginning: “We don’t want to take power.” It is not a question of conquering power, it is a question of making the world anew. And this obviously fitted in perfectly with the theoretical debate that we had been having in Britain. Has Open Marxism played a role in that? Yes, I think so. For me, Open Marxism is really about trying to open the categories of Marxism, and to understand those categories as conceptualizations of struggle. It is really a question of understanding the commodity not as a thing, and not just as a form of domination, but also as a form of struggle. The same is true for money, if you think of it as a constant struggle to push us into a certain way of acting, a certain way of behavior. Just the imposition of money on our daily lives kills thousands and thousands of people each day, it kills them either because of violence, hunger, suicide, or whatever. So, the idea of Open Marxism is trying to understand that these categories are categories for struggle. So, we think of the state as a struggle that comes from above to impose certain ways of acting upon us. To think of the state means that we also think of anti-state; the movement in the opposite direction. Or to think of the state means really to think in terms of the opposite; assemblies, communes, collectives that move in the opposite direction. The state as not just this thing outside us; the state is the struggle that comes from above to impose on us certain forms of behavior and organization. So the commune is a movement in the opposite direction. It is the movement of resistance, rebellion against the state. In other words, the purpose of Open Marxism is to invoke contradiction within these categories.. Yes, contradiction, but we prefer to talk about antagonism because contradiction can be understood in non-social terms. We say that all these categories are antagonistic. Is it enough to go beyond state power? Can domination and hierarchy thrive in a stateless society? Murray Bookchin, Abdullah Öcalan and David Graeber, among others, argued that even in stateless society hierarchy and domination can exist. Can a stateless society be a guarantee our freedom? There is no guarantee of anything [laughs], that is the problem. What we know is that the state is an oppressive form of organization, and we know that the state depends, for its existence, on the reproduction of capital accumulation, because that is where it gets its money from. If you have a big number of state officials who are not producing anything, then for them to survive there has to be an income, an income coming into the state, and that can only come from capital accumulation — which means that the state has to promote capital accumulation. Since we are talking about the state, David Graeber once said that your book “Change the World Without Taking Power” is widely read by many anarchists and attractive to them. Although you identify yourself as a Marxist, what do you think of that? As a Communalist, I am also more attracted to your work than the work of other Marxists. [Laughs] No, I don’t define myself at all. But, yes, of course I come from a Marxist background. I think Marxism is very important. Firstly, because it says capital depends on us. We think that we are just the victim and oppressed, but in fact capital depends on us. Secondly, I think this is what the labor theory of value is about: it says that value is produced by us, and therefore capital depends on us. It opens up, then, a way of understanding capitalist development as the constant struggle of capital to overcome its dependence on us. We may think that we are losing, or have been losing for the past over 30 or 40 years or more, but there is also a sense in which capital is losing, and that the existence of capital is becoming more and more fragile and this is what was expressed in the financial crisis in 2008, and what is also being expressed in a complex way in the coronavirus crisis. Since you have mentioned fragility, is that why you were influenced by Theodor W. Adorno, who gave us tools for negation and going beyond the system? Yes, I mean in terms of theoretical influences I suppose two big influences on me have been Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of hope, and Adorno, because of his view that at the center of society there is a force of non-identity which identity can never capture completely. In other words, we are never contained. We misfit, we overflow all the categories of thought and all forms of social organization. This is expressed for me by the Zapatistas when planning their arrival in Spain on their recent trip: “We are going to Spain and the first thing we will say is: ‘You did not conquer us because we resist and rebel. And we have always resisted and rebelled,'” and for me this is the idea of Adorno. However, I don’t think Adorno thought in these political terms. But if we think of any category, we can always say of that category: “You did not conquer us.” So, we can say to money: “You think you have conquered us, you think we are completely subordinated to the rules of money but no you did not conquer us, we resist and rebel.” Identity encloses us, defines us, but for that reason it is always an untruth simply because we do not fit into any definition, we always overflow. There is in any movement a contradiction between identitarian and anti-identitarian tendencies, an inner tension that is crucial for the movement. If the Kurds defined themselves just as Kurds, they would not be the force they are. The same if the Zapatistas saw themselves as just indigenous, or if the women’s movement defined itself in terms of women, of the movement for Black liberation just in terms of Blackness. It is what Raoul Vaneigem calls the “poetry of overflowing” that is all important. You see that resistance and rebellion in so many different ways in everyday life, when we say: “We will not live according to the logic of money. We will try to live according to the values that go against and beyond the capitalist concept of value.” In “Crack Capitalism,” you tied-up abstract labor with male domination. Does that mean any revolt against capitalism must be feminist as well, and women must play a significant role in the revolt? I think so, yes. Capitalism pushes us all the time into different categories. It pushes us into classes, but also pushes us into genders and says to us: “Because of your physical characteristics you must behave in a certain way.” I think I understand anti-capitalism as being a revolt against classification, therefore, a revolt against genderization. Yes of course, that means the revolt of women against their categorization in gender terms seems to me very important. Now, Bookchin has always insisted that the left should take its guidance from Ernest Bloch’s “Principle of Hope” or else fall into the trap of nihilism and pessimism. You are also influenced by Bloch; how can Bloch’s writings be a guide for our leftist movements in these dark times? Yes, for me Bloch has been an enormous influence, although of course there are many things I disagree with. I started reading Bloch, and really from Bloch I got into Marx, and everything else. The idea of the Principle of Hope is really to think of the world from the perspective of hope. That means to think beyond where we are, to open up a possible future — that has to be at the center of our thoughts. Since you have mentioned “Change the World Without Taking Power” and “Crack Capitalism,” I hope there is a third book coming. I see it as the third in the trilogy, which is called “Think Hope in Hopeless Times.” I thought I had finished it last August, but it will take another couple of months. Hope is limited by money basically. Because, if you think of hope,— this kind of striving to go ahead, trying to break out from where we are and create a different world — then the limit that we hit all the time is money. How are you going to do it if you don’t have money? But money forces us all the time into certain ways of behaving. Just because we need to eat, we need money, unless we cultivate everything ourselves. So, we come up against an enormous force of money as a form of organizing society. So, if you want to take hope seriously, the real question is: “Can you possibly think of hope breaking the power of money?” When I finish the book, of course I will have the answer [laughs]. I would like to move on to Kurdish issues now. How did you find out about the Kurdish struggle and the Rojava revolution (now called the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria)? Azize Aslan has been very important in my education. Of course, I knew of the movement before that from my general reading, and hearing about it from friends. Then I was invited to a conference in Hamburg in 2015 which was tremendously exciting for me. After that, Havin Guneser visited Puebla — where I am based — a few times and talked about the movement. So we had plenty of time to discuss, and then Azize came to us to do her doctorate over four years ago. That has been a terrific experience; learning from her and about the organization and its contradictions. In your opinion, what do you think have been the main achievements of, and the main challenges faced by, the Rojava Revolution? The obvious achievement, I suppose, is just to have moved the whole ground of revolutionary anti-capitalist thought and anti-capitalist organization. The Rojava revolution has shown that by not only saying: “We don’t want to conquer the state,” but by actually putting anti-state organization into practice on a fairly large scale over the past nine years. This anti-state organization is a form of communal organization. It is the revolution that they have achieved, and are achieving in terms of the position of women, and the leading role of women in social transformation. It is the importance that they attach to transforming the relationship between humans and nature. It really takes the challenge of changing the world into new terrain. It opens up a way of thinking about changing the world which, of course, is related also to what Zapatistas have been saying and practicing for 28 years in public, but it is on a different scale; for starters, it is more urbanized. The extraordinary thing is being able to carry on with doing that in such a difficult situation of constant military aggression.