Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

The very concept of the individual is product of the spread
of commodity exchange and the growth of capitalist society.
But capitalism does not just produce the individual: it breaks
the We-Doer and breaks the flow of social doing. The flowing
together of social doings becomes converted into a noun, Society,
with its defined forms of social cohesion. And Society, then,
is composed of a multitude of fragmented persons-that-are,
identities, all limited and defined in their doing.
Identities give rise to identitarian thought, the form of
thinking that starts from the unquestioned existence of identity
and identities and constructs on the basis of being rather than
doing. To start from identities means to create a positive basis for
thought, whereas to understand those identities as historically
specific forms of social relations immediately puts thought on
a negative footing. To start from identities is to start from the
idea that we are, or they are, women, workers, Irish, Mexicans,
gays, Jews, capitalists, and to construct a world from there. To
understand these different identities as forms of social relations,
on the other hand, is to say that we are formed as women, Irish,
gay, and so on, and this immediately leads us to look behind
these identities, to ask what has constituted us as women, gay,
workers and thereby to pose the inadequacy of these forms,
the possibility of being more. To proclaim an identity without
simultaneously proclaiming its inadequacy, to give ourselves
an identity without simultaneously saying that we exist inagainst-and-beyond
that identity, is to strengthen the walls of
the capitalist prison.
Identitarian thought acquires a particular solidity in
structuralist thought, the understanding of the world in terms of
structures which rest on the 'bearers' of these structures, people
understood simply in terms of their roles, people understood
as personifications of their social functions. This approach can
be attractive in the sense of offering a complex portrayal of
the structures of oppression, but it offers no way out, since
the subject is reduced to a bearer of capitalist social relations.
Structuralism is the ideology of Cassandra, the left intellectual
who bemoans the world and its fate but assumes there is nothing
to be done about it.
112