Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

We have a problem, then. How can we think of changing the
world radically in a world in which people are personifications
of their social function? If we are entrapped in roles generated
by capitalism, how can we think of breaking the pattern of social
relations formed by those roles? This touches particularly the
question of class and the revolutionary nature of the working
class. If we think of the working class as people who fit into a
certain classification (as wage earners, as producers of surplus
value), then we treat them as being inherently limited, as personifications
of the social position that they occupy, as bearers
of certain social relations, capitalist social relations. How can
workers, as personifications of labour, constitute a revolutionary
class, a class that would overthrow labour?
There are three simple answers to this dilemma, but none of
them is satisfactory. The first is a structuralist argument. The
structuralist concept of the world sees society as the interaction
of these character-masks, as the structural antagonism of these
bearers of social relations. People are reduced to that which
capitalism makes them. Or rather, from the structuralist
perspective, there is no reduction here: people are that which
capitalism makes them. We are the subjects created by capitalism.
The working class is the changing face of abstract labour,
the character generated by the changing forms of capitalist
organisation. The only possibility of revolution lies then in a
change in the structure as a whole which leads to a change in the
significance of the social personae. Thus, a crisis of capitalism
may lead to a change in the character of the working class
that would lead to radical change. The working class would
then be able to perform its historical function of overthrowing
capitalism. The difficulty with this argument is that, as long
as people are understood as being defined by their position in
capitalism, it remains difficult to see how they can, through their
own movement, break free of those definitions.
The second response, the classic Leninist argument,6 is
much more straightforward. It still sees the workers as being
determined by their structural position: the working class is
limited in its understanding and its consciousness, because it
is effectively enclosed within the character mask of labour.
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