Marx Myths & Legends

John Holloway

The Tradition of Scientific Marxism

In his contribution, John Holloway challenges the myth that Marx promoted a “scientific socialism” in the positivistic understanding of “science” and insists rather on the “negative” and critical aspects of science. For Holloway, the notion of fetishism is central to Marx’s critical approach.

Source: “Change The World Without Taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution Today,” © John Holloway 2002, Chapter 7. Published by Pluto Press. This chapter used with permission of the author, as per Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Licence 2.0.


Biographical information

John Holloway is one of the theoretical supporters of the Zapatista insurgency in Mexico, where he has been living and teaching since 1991. In the widely acclaimed Change the World Without Taking Power - The Meaning of Revolution Today, he drew a picture of a new form of “low intensity revolution,” that changes society not by taking the power, but rather by destroying the power. In Holloway’s view, the impulse for revolution begins from the day-to-day experience of millions of people living in an unjust world. In addition to his numerous works on the Zapatistas, Holloway edited Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money (1995) and Post-Fordism and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State (1992) and has published numerous articles in Common Sense, Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists, such as The Relevance of Marxism Today, The Freeing of Marx, Open Marxism, and History and Class Struggle. John was a Professor at the University of Edinburgh and currently teaches at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Puebla (Mexico).

See also: John Holloway's homepage at [Red]