Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

accompaniment of our existence on this earth, rather than a
historically specific form of acting and relating to others.l These
apparently timeless things hold our minds in captivity, limit what
we can think, just as surely as the factory or the office or simply
the need to sell the products of our labour imprisons our bodies
and limits what we can do each day.
Reification can be seen as a process of identification, of creating
identities. The abstraction of doing into labour constrains what
we do. We do, but our doing is channelled into strict lines, lines
that prolong the present. We are converted from doers into
beings. The world of things is a world that is. All aspects of
life acquire an 'is-ness', an identity. Identity becomes the key
category for conceptualising the world, the key category of
bourgeois thought. Identity is the core of the prison that holds
us tight, the key ingredient in the web of entrapment that we
ourselves weave.
Doing is a flow, a flow of life, in which there are no clear
dividing lines, in which the doing of one person flows into the
doing of another and is inconceivable without the doing of
others. Your reading of this book (if indeed you are reading it)
would be impossible without the doing of the writer (me), but
that would be impossible without a whole world of previous
reading, writing, computer-making, electricity-generating,
desk-making, language-teaching, and so on and on and on. The
abstraction of labour converts a part of that doing into a separate
action, breaks that flow of doing. By breaking the social flow of
doing, it breaks too the social-doer, the We, into a multiplicity
of individual subjects, a multiplicity of identities. The breaking
of social cooperation into a system of commodity exchange
produces the individuals that exchange those commodities: in
order for exchange to take place
... it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each
other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as
independent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal independence has
no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether
such a society take the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian
community, or a Peruvian Inca State. (1867/1965: 87; 186711990: 182)
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