Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

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The abstraction of doing into labour
is a process of personification,
the creation of character masks,
the formation of the working class.
The creation of labour is the creation of the labourer. It cannot
be otherwise: labour cannot be performed if there is no labourer
to perform it.
Think of the Yamana of Tierra del Fuego who, after any
concentrated effort, would lie around for ages doing nothing.
They could not perform labour because they were not labourers.
Even an effort in the early nineteenth century to take a group to
England, teach them to speak English and drink tea, dress them
properly and generally civilise them, did not produce results,
because they simply took off their clothes and reverted to their
savage customs when they were taken back to their native land.!
The labourer, just like labour, is the product of centuries of
struggle. The doers, the savages, are forced by starvation, by
repression, by education, by discipline to adopt certain ways of
behaving, to learn to labour.2 They become labourers, people
who labour for certain hours of the day, who obey the orders
of their employers or otherwise accomplish what is required
by the market. People were forced to adapt to fit the function
thrust upon them by the new form of socialisation. Those who
did not adapt (like the Yamana) became extinct.
This adaptation to the social function thrust upon us can be
seen as personification.3 We come to personify a social relation.
Marx insists on seeing the capitalist and the worker as personifications
of capital and labour: 'The capitalist functions only as
personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no
more than labour personified. That labour is for him just effort
and torment, whereas it belongs to the capitalist as a substance
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