Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct
social relations between individuals at work, but as what they
really are, material relations between persons and social relations
between things' (Marx 186711965: 73; 186711990: 166). When
I buy a car, say, my relation with the people who made it is a
relation between my money and the car, not a relation of love
and gratitude between those who made the car and me who
am able to enjoy the benefits of their careful activity. We begin
to think of the whole world in terms of things, not in terms of
relations between people.
It is not a mistake or a mere illusion when I see my relation
with the workers who built my car in terms of things. The relation
between my doing and their doing really exists in the form of a
relation between things. Social relations really exist in the form
of things. The car in this case is a social relation between the
activity of the car workers and mine. The money I pay for the
car is likewise a social relation between my doing and theirs. We
are surrounded by things that seem to (and do) hem us in. To
think of changing the world, we need to dissolve the thing-ness
of these things, understand them as social relations, understand
them as the forms of existence of our social subjectivity, our
doing. This means criticising these things as forms of social
relations, subjecting them to what Marx called a critique that
brings everything back to human doing and its organisation.
The existence of the relations between human doers as things
(reification) means that the world around us acquires a fixity,
a permanence. Social relations acquire a rigidity. Whereas we
are aware in our daily lives that our most intense relations with
friends and lovers are constantly changing, at a more general
level, once those relations are converted into things, once they
are reified or fetishised, then they appear to be permanent. They
acquire the character of just being there and it becomes difficult
to even imagine a society without them. Money, or the state, or
capital, for example: instead of being seen as social relations with
other people which we have created (and which we create and
re-create each day and can stop creating), money and the state
appear to be unavoidable facts of life and we find it hard even to
imagine a life without them. Or labour, to take another example,
is seen as a timeless, trans-historical category, the inevitable
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