The Scream

The Scream

Holloway argues that we ‘scream’, we are born screaming and our life is a scream against: “the mutilation of human life by capitalism”. We scream because of the mutilation of our lives by those with ‘power- over’ furthermore, this scream: “carries within itself a hope, a projection of a possible otherness” The opportunity we scream for is hope for a possibility of an autonomous ‘I’ that may exist “against- and -beyond” the system with which we are signified within. ‘I’ may not exist autonomously because ‘I’ is currently infiltrated by the numerous reflected images of ‘we’ imposed upon ‘us and me’ by a capitalist system. The weight of this imposition is too much to carry and therefore we scream; ‘NO!’ We hear these screams in the activist and revolutionary practices around the globe. These screams may be the first pre figurative idea of a sense of a self-realization of a future of ‘I’.

John Holloway was born in Dublin, Ireland in (1947) He is a Sociologist and social philosopher.

Holloway is a contentious writer, taking his inspiration from Marxist, Anarchists and anti capitalists.  Yet he differs from Traditional Marxism, in his understanding of how power may be achieved for the working classes.  He offers an alternative view.  Other than taking a single, revolutionary act to seize control of the state apparatus of power; we can, he argues, also resist power on a daily basis. In doing so, create ‘cracks’ in capitalism till it is so weak, it collapses in on itself.

We have often heard the term ‘he/she was the face of the movement’ this is based on a centered identity, a unitary ideology of a homogenous them and us that emerged out of  Marxist ideas of class and the state  Holloway,  argues we can no longer rely on this form of unitary ideology and particularistic practice.  We are flies caught in a web of social relations, gone is the certainties of the old revolutionaries.