Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

Therefore, the only way in which we can think of revolution is
in terms of the intervention of an external force, a group who,
for one reason or another, are not enclosed within the personae
of capitalism. In other words, we need a revolutionary Party. It
is a perfectly logical solution: if the workers are the personification
of abstract labour, then the only possible way of thinking of
them as a revolutionary force is under the leadership of a group
who have not been subject to this personification.? The problem
is, first, that it is not clear where these revolutionaries who have
broken free from the constraints of abstract labour come from,
and, secondly, that it is an inherently hierarchical conception of
revolution in which the workers ('the masses') are understood as
the object rather than the subject of the revolution. The historical
experience of this type of revolution is not encouraging.
A third answer is simply to say that the working class is
not (or is no longer) a revolutionary class. The personification
inherent in abstract labour has reached the point where
the worker has become a 'one-dimensional man', in Marcuse's
graphic phase. The one-dimensional man is obviously incapable
of revolution, so that the only way of thinking of an agent of
radical social change is to look elsewhere, to the margins of
society. This view is possibly more influential in recent anticapitalist
struggles than the Leninist position, but the problem
is that it shares the same starting-point: the identification of
the workers with their class persona. This can easily lead to the
recrudescence of elitist, vanguardist positions even in groups
strongly committed to an anti-vanguardist politics.8 When the
vast majority of the population are forced to sell our labour
power in order to survive, any conception of revolution that
excludes us on the basis of our being one-dimensionalised is
highly problematic.
In all of these answers, it is assumed in different ways that
there is an identity between people and the structural position
that they occupy in society, that people really are subsumed
within their character mask. The only other way forward would
be to question the strength of personification, to try and prise
the character mask away from the face of the wearers and see
if there is something behind it, to see the wearer as existing not
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