Hope in Hopeless Times

By John Holloway

Hope lies in our richness, in the joy of our collective creativity. But that richness exists in the peculiar form of money. The fact that we relate to on another through money causes tremendous social pain and destruction and is dragging us through pandemics and war towards extinction.

Richness against money: this battle will decide the future of humanity. If we cannot emancipate richness from money-capital-profit, there is probably no hope. Money seems invincible but the constant expansion of debt shows that its rule is fragile. The fictitious expansion of money through debt is driven by fear, fear of us, fear of the rabble. Money contains, but richness overflows.

In this final part of his ground-breaking trilogy, John Holloway expertly fuses anti-capitalism and anti-identitarianism, and brings hope into the critique of political economy and revolutionary theory, challenging us to find hope within ourselves and channel it into a dignified, revolutionary rage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9780745347363

John Holloway

John Holloway has published widely on Marxist theory, on the Zapatista movement and on the new forms of anti-capitalist struggle. His book Change the World without Taking Power has been translated into eleven languages and has stirred an international debate, and Crack Capitalism is a renowned classic. He is currently Professor of Sociology in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla in Mexico.

Book preview

Preface: Stop that train

The train rushes forward into the night, faster, faster. Where is it going, where is it taking us? To the concentration camps? To nuclear war? To a succession of pandemics? We do not know.

But now in the moment of coronavirus-coronacrisis there appears a message on the screen at the end of the carriage: Destination Extinction. The letters still flicker slightly but become ever more confident: Destination Extinction. Global warming, the destruction of biodiversity, the water shortage, more pandemics, growing tensions between states increasing the risk of nuclear war, ever more obscene levels of inequality, everywhere racism and nationalism on the rise.

Stop the train, stop the train, stop the train!

But we are not driving it. We do not control it. There are figures who claim to be its drivers, but behind them stands a darker force that they do not control: Money. The train is driven by Money and Money is an irresistible drive for self-expansion, for profit.

Pull the emergency brake!

Dark times. Hope becomes ridiculous. Worse, it becomes bad taste, insensitive. And yet in the last century, so many people lived and died lives fired by hope. Now too there is a great thirst: for hope, for a way out, for a different world.

This book is dedicated to those who, like me, are stupid enough to think we can still stop the train of death, that we can still create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity.

Wreck the train!

PART I

Rage–Hope–Richness

1Today, any day.

Open this morning’s newspaper. Any morning. You on the day that you read this, me on the morning that I write this paragraph: 25 July 2017. I read of the ten migrants who died from asphyxiation when they were left piled up with about eighty others inside a trailer in the parking lot of a Walmart in San Antonio, Texas.

I feel horror and rage, not just against the driver and the traffickers immediately responsible, but against the whole set of circumstances that led them in to this awful, awful situation: the poverty that drove them to emigrate because the small-scale agriculture that provided the means of living for centuries is no longer viable; the fact that the only way that they can live is by trying to sell their labour power thousands of kilometres away from the people they love; the fact that all states are built upon discrimination against people defined as ‘foreigners’, and that the survivors of this tragedy will be deported; the rule of money, the greed for profit, that draws people into treating the trafficking of people in the same way as the trafficking of any other commodity. And so on, and on, and on.

Open any day’s newspaper and you will read not just of horrific events, but of horrific events that can be understood only as part of a horrific system. Just two days later, one hundred and seventy migrants were released from a trailer parked in a parking lot in Veracruz, Mexico, all suffering from dehydration, although in this case there were no fatalities. And just two years later, on 23 October 2019, an even worse incident in England: thirty-nine bodies of migrants found in the back of a lorry in Essex. And now fifty-five dead in a trailer that overturned in Chiapas in December 2021. And how many thousands of migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean just this year? And in the English Channel? And how many have died of heat and thirst in the desert of Arizona? So many ‘isolated’ cases, so many manifestations of a system that is fundamentally wrong. So many manifestations of a social system based on the rule of money, in which the possession or non-possession of money shapes your life and your death.

We cannot accept that. It cannot be true. The world does not have to be like that. This is a world that is wrong, an untrue world. Already our rage is taking us into the grammar of hope.

But is such hope empty, meaningless? Can we really create a different world, one in which money does not rule? Or is it perhaps too late? That is hope’s question, hope’s anguish. Are we too late? Have we lost the chance to build a society that is not built on the rule of money, if that chance ever existed?

Hope driven by rage, rage infused with hope: hope–rage, rage–hope. The danger is that the two become separated. Then hope is diluted into some ‘oh, wouldn’t-it-be-nice’, or ‘let’s close our eyes and everything will be all right’, or it is simply asphyxiated like those migrants in Texas. We cannot accept – and yet the terrible thing is that we do accept. We read about the asphyxiated migrants and we shrug and move on to the next story. We see the people begging at the traffic lights or sleeping in the streets and we look the other way. Our rage becomes a moral discomfort, an uneasy feeling of guilt. We may assuage that guilt by giving to charity, but that too involves closing our eyes, perhaps not to the immediate problem (homelessness, say), but to the systemic forces that we know cause that and so many other horrifying aspects of today’s society. Hope becomes an uneasy shrug of ‘yes, we know, but what can we do?’.

Or it may become something else: our discomfort at seeing the homeless lying in the street can easily become an anger against them for causing us this unpleasant feeling of guilt. How dare they! Our feeling that there is something wrong is turned against the people who are the manifestation of that wrongness: lock up the homeless, clean up the streets; keep out the migrants, send them home; shut up the women who are always complaining and demanding more. This is the way that the pain-rage-frustration seems to be flowing now, across the world: towards bitterness, hatred, racism, sexism, nationalism, fear. More than ever, we need hope, the hope of a radically different society, the hope that can make the pain of the world flow creatively, the hope that springs from rage and gives meaning to that rage, the hope that can open doors, open windows.

2Start again. Not from fear but from hope. Not from containment but from overflowing.

1

Hope that can make the pain of the world flow creatively: that is our subject. Not the train rushing us towards extinction. Not the trailer asphyxiating us in the hot sun. Start the book again.

Start from hope, not from fear. Fear locks us in, hope pushes us out.

Start from hope, not from hopeless times. Start, as Raoul Vaneigem does in his book with the beautiful title Letter to my Children and the Children of the World to Come:

You are privileged to have been born at a crucial moment in history. A period when everything is being transformed and nothing will ever be the same again . . . One civilisation is collapsing and another is being born. The misfortune of inheriting a planet in ruins is offset by the incomparable joy of witnessing the gradual advent of a society such as history has never known – save in the shape of the mad hope, embraced by thousands of generations, of some day leading a life at last freed from poverty, barbarism and fear . . . . Little by little a new society is emerging from the mist. (2012/2018, 6)

Start from the dance of resistance-and-rebellion. In their extraordinary set of communiqués issued in the closing months of 2020, in which they announce their plan to visit all the continents of the earth, the Zapatistas begin by outlining the dreadful situation of the world and then continue: ‘And this we have decided: That it is again time for our hearts to dance, and that neither their music nor their steps should be those of lament and resignation’ (EZLN, 2020).

Start from dignity. Again, the Zapatistas, always inspiring, in one of their first communiqués:

Then that suffering that united us made us speak, and we recognised that in our words there was truth, we knew that not only pain and suffering lived in our tongue, we recognised that there is hope still in our hearts. We spoke with ourselves, we looked inside ourselves and we looked at our history: we saw our most ancient fathers suffering and struggling, we saw our grandfathers struggling, we saw our fathers with fury in their hands, we saw that not everything had been taken from us, that we had the most valuable, that which made us live, that which made our step rise above plants and animals, that which made the stone be beneath our feet, and we saw, brothers, that all we had was dignity, and we saw that great was the shame of having forgotten it, and we saw that dignity was good for men to be men again, and dignity returned to live in our hearts, and we were new again, and the dead, our dead, saw that we were new again and they called us again to dignity, to struggle (EZLN, 1994, 122).2

Start from richness. Start not from our enclosure but from the force that can break that enclosure: our richness. There is a passage in Marx’s Grundrisse that will rumble and rumble through this book, in which he talks of what wealth, or richness, could mean:

when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of human needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange?3 . . . [t]he absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not produce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? (1857/1973, 488)4

Start, then, from our richness, our absolute working-out of our creative potentialities, our absolute movement of becoming. Start from us, not from them. We can only start from us. To start in the third person, that dreadful, murderous third person, is already to push us down. Start from ourselves, from where we are, from where we go, from our overflowing against that which contains us. Start from our richness overflowing.

Start what? This book: start this book not from fear and enclosure, but from hope and overflowing. Start this book, or start your thesis, your essay, your talk, your thinking, your design, your gardening, your building, your song, your dance not from fear and enclosure but from richness: now is the time for our hearts to dance. Now is the time to write the poetry of overflowing.

3Better, start from antagonism, from struggle.

Where is our richness, our absolute movement of becoming? It is screaming. It is entrapped and screaming against its own entrapment. It is entrapped but overflowing from its entrapment. It is a richness-against, a richness that pushes against-and-beyond.

Start, then, not from some pure richness, because that does not exist. Start from richness-against, from richness in struggle, from antagonism. Antagonism between richness and the world that impoverishes it, between richness and money. Antagonism between hope and the hopeless times that try to asphyxiate it. Between dignity and the world that humiliates it. Between becoming and the identity that seeks to define it, to enclose it. Between life and the capital that is destroying it, that would destroy it if we were to accept.

Start not from domination, but from refusal-resistance-rebellion against such domination. Break the great left tradition of telling ourselves how awful capitalism is, but that one day the revolution will come. But then the one day retreats further and further into the distance until it falls out of the sentence completely and we are left just with how awful capitalism is. Repeating that, we shut ourselves in, we turn our hope into fear.

Start not from the misery of fear but from the joy of struggle. Rage explodes in joy, again and again. Our rage-in-miserable-times paints the world in dark colours, but these explosions light up a world of bright colours. 1968 changed the vision of a whole generation, and there have been so many different waves of revolt since then: Argentina in 2001/ 2002, Oaxaca in 2006, Greece in December 2008, the whole wave of Occupy and Arab Spring and Indignados in many parts of the world in 2011, the women’s movements in Argentina and Chile and Mexico, with the great M8 just before the world was closed down due to the outbreak of the pandemic, the Gilets Jaunes in France, the Zapatistas in Chiapas in wave after wave since 1994, 2019’s year of creative conflict in Hong Kong and Chile, the deep struggles in Kurdistan. We can all think of different places and dates according to our own experiences. Explosions of anger that very often become explosions of joy, intensities of emotion that leave a deep mark on people’s lives. There is a transformation of understanding, a transformation of perception, a realisation that we are, or can be, more than mere recipients of social change, mere passengers on the train to destruction. Ruptures. Ruptures that break the limits of possibility, that break barriers in our mind, that make it possible to think things that were not thinkable before.

It is rage that says ‘that cannot be, we cannot accept that’ and so opens a grammar of hope, but then these explosions of rage-joy take us further, tumbling the barriers of reality and giving us confidence that the world really could be different, radically different.

And it is not just the great waves of rebellion, it is also the proliferation of refusals and other-doings that open up the bounds of possibility and create the bases here and now for a different way of living, a different way of relating to one another. A multiplication of cracks in the texture of domination, a proliferation of spaces, moments, areas of activity where we say ‘No, here we will not follow the rule of money, here we shall do what we collectively consider necessary or desirable’. Over the last twenty or thirty years there has been an explosion of what is often called ‘autonomist’ politics, a politics based on the idea that the way to change the world is to create, here and now, spaces of otherness, spaces in which our activities are driven not by profit or money but by the collective determination of what we want to do. Such autonomous spaces – or ‘cracks’ as I prefer to call them in order to underline their openness, mobility and antagonism to the capitalism that surrounds them – may be large (the Zapatistas or Rojava) or medium (like the town of Cherán in Mexico, where the people have united to throw out both narcos and the state) or small (a community garden, say). They are always contradictory as they try to survive against the logic of the system that surrounds them. Sometimes they thrive and inspire over a long period, and sometimes they collapse, either shutting down or finding a compromise that gradually separates them from their original purpose. As some close, others open. Despite all the difficulties that have become clear in recent years, I see no other way of breaking from present society other than through the recognition, creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of such cracks.1

4Start from anguish, from Janus. Start from Not Enough! Start from the hydra that we must slay.

Start from hope, but an anguished hope, an increasingly anguished hope. There really is a sign at the end of the carriage that says Destination Extinction and we can see it now more clearly than ever. We say start from hope, not from fear, but the only hope that makes sense is a hope tinged with fear.

To think hope today is to think despair. We can have no simple confidence that everything will turn out all right in the end. Total human self-destruction, whether by nuclear war, or by the destruction of the natural preconditions for human survival, is firmly on the agenda.1 With the Covid pandemic, this became clearer than ever. Even if we could right now stop the profit-driven destruction of the environment, it may already be too late to save the necessary conditions for human existence. Not just that: much that is happening in the world today indicates that we are faced with an increasingly hostile and aggressive society, with increasing racism and sexism, terrible violence, ideologies of hate. To think hope is to think what seems impossible.

Thinking hope is January-thinking. Janus, the Roman god after which the month was named, had two faces looking in different directions, one back, one forward. To think hope today is to focus on one of those faces, but it would be quite wrong to separate it from the other. To think hope is to be aware of the current flowing towards destruction. Our hope is a hope-against-hope. It is certainly not an optimism. As Terry Eagleton puts it in his excellent book on hope, hope ‘represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined’ (2015, 114). To think hope is to walk on a tightrope over an abyss without being afraid to look down.

Hope, then, but no certainties. No sureness of a happy ending, a journey with no certainty of reaching home. Just in the last few days as I write, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers movement based in Durban, South Africa, issued a statement headed ‘Organising in the shadow of death’.2 In their case it is very directly true: many of their activists have been killed by the state just because they were struggling for housing in the city. But there is also a sense in which it is generally true: perhaps not in such a direct sense for those of us who sit in the comfort of our professorial chairs, but for humanity as a whole: we think hope in the shadow of death.

This is an anguished book, perhaps more anguished than its mother and its grandmother. It is the third in a trilogy that began with Change the World without Taking Power and continued with Crack Capitalism. Catastrophe is on the agenda, probably as never before. To talk of hope without being aware of that context would make little sense. Inevitably, it is part of the time in which it is written: an anguished book in anguished times. This book is a granddaughter, restless as granddaughters should be. It loves its mother and its grandmother but keeps on muttering Not enough! Not enough! Yes, clearly the only way to think about revolution is against any notion of taking state power, and certainly the only way to bring it about is through the recognition, creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of anti-capitalist cracks. Yes, but when I woke up this morning, the monster was still there.3 Not enough! We must kill the monster, but that seems impossible. It seems indestructible. Rebellions all over the place, people building alternatives, but money still rules. As the Zapatistas say, capitalism is like a hydra. Each time we chop off a head, new heads sprout up to terrorise us. How can we reach its heart, its heartless heart? How do we kill money? Start from hope, from richness, from overflowing, from antagonism, but start too from those dreadful words: not enough!

PART II

We Must Re-Learn Hope

5It is time to re-learn hope.

Ernst Bloch returned to Germany from exile in the United States after the Second World War and proclaimed ‘It is time to learn hope’:1 ‘Es kommt darauf an, das Hoffen zu lernen’ (1959/1985, 1).2 A shocking thing to say after the experiences of fascism and extermination, standing in contrast to Theodor Adorno, who, also a German Jew returning after years of exile in the United States, declared that after Auschwitz it was impossible to write poetry, and indeed impossible to go on living without falling into the cold indifference that had made Auschwitz possible (1966/1990, 363). These two points of view are not as contradictory as they seem: the misery of present times suggests that they should be seen as complementary. And yet the same misery suggests that Bloch’s position is the more daring. In miserable times it is easier to talk of misery than it is to talk of hope.3

Bloch dedicated the three volumes of his great work, The Principle of Hope, to showing the centrality of hope to all sorts of human activity, from fairy tales to dance to music to literature to religion: the constant pushing towards a different world, a longed-for world. He saw in all these longings the present existence of the Not Yet, the present force of a world that does Not Yet exist. He saw this journey of hope as culminating in the understanding, with Marx, that the working class now has the practical potential to create such a world.

Today, almost seventy years later, it is difficult to have the same confidence as Bloch. The world is not dominated by fascism, but fascism or something close to fascism is on the rise in many parts of the world. There are no significant revolutionary parties, there are very few states that would even claim to be non-capitalist, the presence of the working class as a revolutionary force is far from obvious. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for all its horrors, had an important impact on revolutionary hope throughout the world. Even though it was a society which few today would regard as attractive, it did at least keep alive the notion that there could be a different form of social organisation, and its collapse represented for many the closure of that idea. Both the experience of life in the USSR and its collapse made it difficult to maintain the word ‘communism’ as a description of the society to which we aspire.

To speak of hope today is certainly not the same as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Bloch’s work was at its most influential. Gone is the notion that history is on our side, the confidence that we are sure to win in the end, that capitalism will inevitably fall, in one way or another, and give way to a communist organisation of society. This idea is a backdrop to Bloch’s discussion of hope, but it is not one that we can take for granted today. It is certainly not that capitalism has got any better or that there is a less urgent need for radical social change today than there was before. Just the contrary: capital has now brought us close to the abyss of human self-annihilation and it is difficult to maintain the view that we can expect some sort of happy ending to human history (or home-coming, as Bloch would put it). Hope is much more uphill than it was then, and for that reason more necessary. There has been a lowering of expectations, possibly a coming to terms, even in the most radical literature, with the apparently unchangeable reality of capitalist social relations, a gradual replacement of ‘revolution’ by ‘democracy’ (González 2020). It sometimes seems that, since it makes no sense to call for a total abolition of capital, we can at least hope for a more democratic capitalism.

And so, capitalism goes on and becomes more aggressive and violent than ever. The growth of racism and nationalism, the strengthening of borders, the abolition of workers’ rights, the cutting of pensions, the abolition of any form of work security, the increases in working hours and stress, the simultaneous increase in unemployment, the reduction of state welfare systems, the increased spending on police and military, the increasingly authoritarian nature of political systems, the rising inequality between wealthy and poor, the growing violence against women: all these are global phenomena. It has become common now to speak of a parallel with the situation in the 1930s, meaning that the prospect that faces us may well be fascism and war.

Too easy to fall into depression: it is time to re-learn hope.

6To learn hope is to learn to think hope: a docta spes .

To hope is easy, but often has little substance. Much more difficult is to think hope. This is what Bloch calls a docta spes,1 a reasoned or educated hope, a comprehended hope.2

The idea of a docta spes is directed against wishful thinking. Wishful thinking does not lead anywhere. It breaks all practical connection between subject and object. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world in which migrants were not stacked in the back of a trailer like sardines!’ Wishful thinking does nothing to change the world: just the contrary, it anaesthetises.

This book is about hope, not about wishful thinking. And yet, wishful thinking stands at our shoulder, a spectre that we do not want to see, whispering that which we do not want to hear:

What’s all this about anti-capitalism? Why do you say that a different world, a world of mutual recognition and love, is possible when you know that it is not? Look around you, look at the computer you are using, look at the clothes you are wearing, think of the series you are enjoying on Netflix, do you really think that a non-capitalist world can be created? You dedicate your life to thinking about critical theory, a form of thought that derives its claim to validity from the possibility of creating a world beyond capitalism, but do you really think it is possible? Are you and your readers not wasting your lives in wishful thinking? For all your theoretical sophistication, for all your Latin phrases, are you not just lost in a world of ‘wouldn’t it be nice’?

A docta spes, a thinking hope, forces us to confront the spectre of wishful thinking all the time. ‘You talk about creating a different world, a non-capitalist world: show us then, show us then!" How can we show that this world that is Not Yet is more than fantasy, more than wishful thinking?’

One answer is that it does not matter. We struggle not because we think we will win, but because we cannot accept that which exists. Screaming against a system that dehumanises us needs no justification. It is simply an expression of what we understand to be our humanity. Our anti-capitalism is based on the horrors of the capitalist system, not in any confidence that we can create something else. Our struggles are not a means to an end, they are a dignity, a refusal, that arises from the depths of our being.

Struggle against the system that is killing us has no need of hope to justify it. If a mining company announces that it is going to open an open cast mine in an agricultural community and the people realise that this will exhaust and contaminate the water supply, the basis of their farming, then they are likely to resist, whether or not they hope to win the dispute. And yet some sort of hope is nearly always present.

Hope, says Bloch, right at the beginning of The Principle of Hope ‘is in love with success rather than failure’ (1959/1985, 1). Eagleton, no fan of Bloch, qualifies this as an ‘ominous assertion’ (2015, 107). It is ominous, perhaps, in the sense that it can lead easily into an instrumentalism in which the hope of success is used to justify the means used to reach it. It also suggests that there can be an easy definition of success. Was the Russian Revolution a success or a failure? Seen at first by those who longed for another world as a success, it turned out to be a dreadful failure. And yet, Bloch is right: hope points us towards some sort of realisation, some sort of success. We want to do more than die with dignity: we want to win. Faced with the threat of human annihilation, we do not just want to protest, we want to break the dynamic of destruction. We want to stop the train of death, to succeed in pulling the emergency brake.3 We want our hope to be realistic.

Hope grows from dignity but also pushes beyond it. Dignity is at the centre of the struggle for a better world. The Zapatista’s emphasis on dignity underlines a crucial shift away from the instrumentalism of earlier revolutionary thought. We fight because our dignity as humans demands it, not because we want to reach some pre-defined goal. Consistent with this is their rejection of Revolution with a capital R in favour of revolution with a small r, and their current stress on ‘resistance and rebellion’ rather than revolution. The notion of dignity signals a most important, most welcome shift of emphasis from the object of struggle (capitalism) to its subject (our dignity). This shift is present in many other movements of resistance and rebellion and in much that is written about them.

Yet, this is where the rebellious daughter that is this book becomes restless and says ‘yes, yes, dignity, dignity! But we need to go further, we need hope, we want to win! We want to win, even if we know that what winning means can only become clear in the course of achieving it.’ Hope is based in dignity, but it is more demanding. Hope is dignity pushing beyond itself.

7Hope pushes beyond identity.

This book, together with its predecessors, Change the World without Taking Power and Crack Capitalism, is dedicated to re-thinking hope. Of course, these books do not stand on their own. Anti-capitalist thought in general has as a central theme the question of how we change the world now that the context of revolutionary parties no longer exists.

The argument of Change the World is that it is necessary to overcome the ‘state illusion’, the idea that anti-capitalist change can be brought about through the state. The state-centred approach of the twentieth century’s revolutions contributed to the tragic outcome of those movements. We need to think not of taking power-over others but of constructing our power-to create a different world. Crack Capitalism suggested that the only way to think of revolution is as the recognition, creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of cracks, of moments or spaces in which we break with the logic of capitalist development and develop our power-to do things differently. The argument centred on the clash between two different doings: the doing that is subject to the logic of capital, what Marx calls abstract or alienated labour, and a doing that pushes towards self-determination.

The present book takes this argument in a slightly different direction, making more explicit a theme already present in the earlier books. Capitalism consists of channelling our activity into a social cohesion, a logic of capital. It is a system of containment that threatens us with extinction. Anti-capitalist activity and thought, meanwhile, is an overflowing from this containment, or a multiplicity of overflowings. Containment against overflowing: that is the antagonism that shapes the world. Overflowing against containment: that is hope.

Overflowing against containment: anti-identity against identity. Identification is the imposition of limits on what we do and what we think and the way we see the world. Identity contains. Anti-identity overflows.

The ‘state illusion’ that was at the centre of Change can be seen as just one element of a wider identity-thinking. The revolutionary thought and actions that led to the tragic outcomes of the last century were not just state-centred, they were identitarian. The categories that shape the classic revolutionary tradition and its forms of organisation are strongly definitional. In this, they reproduce the schemes of thought and action that characterise the state and other capitalist forms. In the moment of sharpest opposition, they reproduce that which they oppose.