from Red Pepper (Britain): John Holloway and Hilary Wainwright debate strategy and tactics for social change
I found the abstract nature of this discussions a bit off-putting. (What can you expect of a couple of academicians?) Maybe I read it too hurriedly. I think what they were arguing about was working within the system to change it or working from without to transform it. You decide. In any case, I found many of their observations interesting.
Hillary writes:
...I’ve come to believe that flows need foundations and conditions of a more enduring kind. The flow of citizens’ movements against privatisation of public goods, for example, needed the ‘backbone’, as one Uruguayan activist in the movement for public water put it, of the trade union confederation born two decades earlier in the struggle against the dictatorship. Similarly, the flow of relationships in the open software movement is conditional on the institutional framework provided by the GNU General Public License.
John counters:
To fit in to a society of death is to die ourselves. Let us misfit and grow in our misfittings and let our misfittings flow together. That is surely the only way in which we can pose the question of breaking this world and creating another one.
