Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution – John Holloway Keynote

We resist. We have come here to resist. Just by participating in this conference, in this country, at this moment, we are resisting. Just by being here, we are already saying NO to a government and a system that is making all forms of resistance more and more difficult and dangerous. In this context, a conference on Resistance Studies cannot be considered innocent. It is a finger raised against authority.

Resistance Studies, it says. But there is an ambiguity in the phrase that has always worried me. Clearly, we are not talking of studies about resistance, but studies that resist. We are here to resist, to resist through our studies and in other ways. But what does this mean? It means taking sides. It means shaking the grammar of university study. We are the subject of resistance studies. Resistance is not the object of study. The idea of Resistance Studies attacks the separation of subject and object. It attacks the third person. The third person (or third personification) is the enemy. The dominance of the object over the subject, of the third person over the first, is rooted not only in the university tradition, but also in society.

II

        I love the fact that this has been convened as an Intergalactic Conference. This already announces that it is a conference that resists. It is of course a reference to the Zapatistas’ meeting of 1996, when they broke all the rules of what a revolutionary group should do by inviting thousands of people to go to the Lacandon Jungle to discuss different aspects of the struggle for a different world, for humanity and against neoliberalism (they would now say capitalism). Just the name of the Intergalactic was a challenge to the traditional revolutionary left. It mixed fun and jokes with revolution. There was a wonderful welcoming speech delivered by Major Ana María that included:

Behind our dark face.

Behind our armed voice.

Behind our unnameable name.

Behind the we that you see.

Behind is the we that are you. (Detrás estamos ustedes).

        There is no third person here. She does not say: we are an indigenous movement and we are looking for your solidarity, but we are you, in the deepest sense. Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish leader, says something similar in his book on the Sociology of Freedom: “Freedom in the true sense is the transcendence of the distinction between us and others.”

        Both are expressions of a strong anti-identitarianism. Our pain and our struggle are your pain and your struggle. Your pain and your struggle are our pain and our struggle. We are not a “they” for you, you are not a third person for us.

        Anti-identitarian is a slightly misleading phrase. It is not that they deny that they are indigenous or Kurdish, but that they move in-against-and-beyond that identity, that they overflow from it. They reject any notion of identity as closure, as definition.

III

        Should we think of Resistance Studies then as being anti-identitarian? I think we should, but not in the sense of imposing a method or a correctness. Rather, in the sense of exploring, of questioning. And perhaps in the sense of recognising that all movements of resistance involve a conflict between identitarian and anti-identitarian tendencies.

        All resistance movements are contradictory. On the one hand they are conservative. We resist because we are attacked. We resist because we are conservative. We want to conserve that which is attacked. A mining company wants to start fracking beside our community and we say No because it will destroy the community and absorb all the water needed for farming. One of the tech giants wants to build a data centre beside where we live, and we say No because the consumption of electricity involved will affect our whole way of living. The university says that we must take or teach an extra course each semester and we say No because we like the balance that exists already.In Mexico the government in 1992 changed Article 27 of the Constitution in order to open up the collectively-held land of the ejidos for private sale and in Chiapas thousands flocked to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation to defend their way of life.Factories in a city close down because they are no longer competitive and people resist – by voting for Trump. Conservatism should be treated with respect as the starting point of resistance – against Progress.

        But resistance is not just conservative, it is more than that, because it is organised around a central word: NO. The state or some capitalist enterprise says “Do this”, and we say NO, we refuse. The refusal goes beyond conservatism because it undermines the existing relations of authority. The state says “We have decided to build a highway through the middle of your village”, and we reply “sorry, we have decided that it will not happen”. There is an overflowing from the initial conservative resistance and this overflowing is all-important. The No breaks the grammar of the world and takes us into a cascading in which all definitions are questioned. Perhaps.

        It may not happen, of course. It could be that there is no overflowing, that when the state decides that it will build the highway, we simply say “we don’t like that, we won’t vote for you next time.” In that case there is no subversion of authority, the resistance is contained within the existing structures.It may be that the state’s decision is changed and the highway is not built, and then we say “Enough, we have won, time to go home.” The original No is discarded.

        Or the resistance could go in a different direction. It could become “we refuse and we will block your machinery”, or “we refuse, we reject your authority, from now on this village is going to be run entirely by the people in assembly”. Or it could become “we refuse and we reject the rule of the motor car that you are trying to impose on us”. Or it could go further, we could say “you just want the highway to bring in capitalist development of the region, but we reject capitalism because we know it is driving humanity towards extinction.” And if the highway is cancelled, we say “Great, but it is Not Enough.”

        In this case, there is a conflict or a tension between the two tendencies, the one that says Enough and puts a closure, and the one that says Not Enough, and overflows.

IV

        Is there anything wrong with the closure? Not necessarily. But it does mean coming to terms with a system of oppression. This idea of resistance (and indeed of Resistance Studies) can fit quite easily into a liberal understanding of politics. A social balance is reached not just by elections but by the give-and-take of resistances. There is no challenge here to capitalism.

        I think the same contradiction, or tension, exists in the two great movements that inspire people throughout the world, the Zapatistas and the Kurdish Freedom Movement. In the case of the Zapatistas, at least in the sense of the wider pro-zapatista movement of support, there is a tendency to see the struggle as an indigenous struggle for indigenous rights, something that could achieved within the system, whereas the EZLN themselves have always said that, beyond indigenous rights, their struggle is for humanity and, more recently, that their struggle is for life against money. And in the case of the Kurdish movement, I feel that there is a tendency that sees the struggle simply as a struggle for the rights of the Kurdish people, one that could be satisfied by the creation of pluri-ethnic states, something along the lines of Bolivia, as distinct from the much more radical struggle for the creation of a system of democratic confederalism espoused by Abdullah Öcalan and practised, but now very much under threat, in Rojava.

        Perhaps we can distinguish between the two approaches by referring to them as resistance and rebellion. Rebellion is a resistance that overflows, that says Not Enough, that pushes beyond. The Zapatistas now speak always of their movement as a movement of resistance and rebellion (as if the two words were hyphenated).

        There are two logics at work here, and two different ways of organising. An identitarian resistance movement that defines its aim clearly is likely to adopt an instrumental approach. How do we best organise in order to achieve our goal? This is likely to involve some sort of orientation towards the state, either to influence its policies or possibly to gain control of the state and change the policies from there. In order to achieve its aims, it is likely to adopt leadership structures that dovetail with the structures of the state.

        An anti-identitarian resistance, a movement of resistance-and-rebellion, moves in the opposite direction. Its overflowing means that there is no clearly defined aim, that the resistance is also a resistance to existing structures. It moves from below and this means a rejection of structures that dovetail with the state. The overflowing is a movement of constant rethinking, of constant redefining itself, of moving forward by asking. Preguntando caminamos, as the Zapatistas put it, asking we walk. And this means some sort of non-instrumental communal organisation, in which the organisation is shaped not by the goal to be reached but by the wish to get people to articulate their opinions and build their own strength. Communal organisation is central to both the Zapatista and the Kurdish movements, and to thousands and thousands of other movements around the world.

V

        And what about revolution? The title of this talk is Resistance, Rebellion and Revolution. Not many people are talking of revolution now. The Zapatistas rejected the idea of Revolution with a capital R and said they were interested in revolution with a small r. But nowadays they prefer to talk just of resistance-and-rebellion. So what happens to revolution? Should we forget about it? There is a danger that talking about resistance can become a substitute for talking about revolution.

        I don’t think we can forget about revolution, even if it seems unthinkable, simply because it is becoming more urgent than ever. Capitalism is becoming more and more destructive. The problem is not just colonialism or patriarchy or neo liberalism, it is capitalism. We live in a system based on the rule of money, on the pursuit of profits. It promotes an extraordinary growth in our creative forces, but the way in which it shapes that creation causes enormous human suffering, through exploitation, poverty and insecurity for a big part of the human population and is now clearly taking us deeper into catastrophe, through global warming, climate change, the massacre of other forms of life, the growing threat of nuclear war etc. Capitalism is a dynamic of destruction that we need to stop. Capitalism is the enemy, not just neoliberalism or colonialism or patriarchy. It is important to name names.

        But how can we think of revolution when there is no revolutionary party? And when we see that the revolutions of the twentieth century did not achieve what those who lived and died for them hoped for, but created nasty, repressive societies. How can we think of an anti-capitalist revolution today?

        I think we have to say firstly that we do not know. This is important because it’s true, we don’t know, but also because saying it is already revolutionary, it opens up a different type of politics. If we know, then we need to tell others what to do and what to think: our politics is then a politics of monologue. If we don’t know, then we are immediately into a politics of dialogue: I don’t know, but this is what I think, what do you think? Preguntando caminamos, in other words: an assembly, a commune. This builds a different How.

        I think we have to think of revolution in terms of a clash of Hows, not of Whos or Whats or Wheres. Any society is characterised by a pattern of social cohesion which shapes the dynamic of the society. In existing society, social cohesion (the way we come together and interrelate) is dominated by the exchange of commodities, and therefore money. We know that this pattern of relations is taking us deeper and deeper into catastrophe. It is the dominant pattern but it is not exclusive and certainly not uncontested.

        It is not exclusive because we also relate to others in non-commodified ways. There is a sort of baseline communism of sharing and mutual support, of friendship and love, on which the reproduction of society depends. It is also not uncontested because all the time we say No, we resist the dynamic of destruction in many, many different ways. Within the structure of the existing social cohesion there is then a counter-cohesion, a different sort of coming together, a communising, what Ernst Bloch calls the Not-Yet, the world that does not yet exist but already exists as Not Yet, as refusal-and-anticipation.

        Revolution then is a question of strengthening this counter-cohesion and pushing back the money-cohesion. This is a how-against-how that will also inevitably express itself as a who-against-whom, as a clash between those who defend the existing system of social cohesion and those who push for a new world. Class struggle, but the central issue is the possibility of changing the structure of our social relations, the way we cohere as a society. That is why the distinction between the different forms of resistance matters so much. An identitarian form of resistance can easily strengthen the resilience of the system, whereas the overflowing of resistance into communal rebellion strengthens the counter-cohesion on which our future depends.

        Can we really think of a resistance that is capable of pushing back the rule of money? Can we really think of a revolutionary transformation of society? Before it’s too late? We don’t know. That is why we need conferences like this one.

Keynote Speech by John Holloway, presented at the ‘Intergalactic’ Conference on Resistance Studies, at Umass Amherst, 18 June 2026