John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power is an
attempt to translate the Zapatista experience into Marxist categories—an
undertaking fraught with many difficulties. This review interrogates the four
key issues addressed by Holloway: the state, the nature of power, commodity
fetishism and the meaning and relevance of revolution.

The NHS LIFT (local improvement finance trust) programme is a new form
of privatisation of UK primary care, based on the private finance initiative
but going beyond it in important ways. It covers half of all English primary
care trusts, and the approach has also been extended into education (the
‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme). The LIFT model embeds
multinational capital and corporate forms into UK primary care and affects
both staff and services, but challenges to it have been patchy and low-key.
There is a need to theorise what this new development means for public
services, and to examine the potential for resistance to it.

This article documents the resurgence of US prison work programmes under
neoliberalism, investigating the dynamics through which state and private
corporations have erected factories inside public prisons, moving manufacturing
jobs behind bars. It contends that the corporate use of inmate labour
has not resulted from an autonomous capital’s quest for profit, but rather that
it is a strategy that has developed through and cannot be abstracted from the
US state as it has restructured in order to author processes of globalisation,
and as it has adopted the neoliberal domestic policy of mass incarceration.

This article examines proposals for the reform of the relationship between
internal security and state-society relations in Northern Ireland and finds a
divergence from the usual liberal package of police reforms. These proposals
embraced the political nature of security provision and aimed to create
authentically democratic institutions endowed with sufficient power to contest
the state’s control over the monopoly of force. Through a Habermassian
lens, the research analyses the emancipatory potential of these proposals, and
examines the reasons why they were rejected in favour of a state-centric, liberal
model that did not deliver the structural transformation of police–society
relations sought by the people of Northern Ireland.