Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

are irrelevant for reproduction is denied, and may be tabooized. These
'desexualized' body areas are thus made irrelevant for the sexual classification
of bodies, too. The concept of 'the two sexes', the one sex
and the other sex, is therefore an effect of heterosexuality as a societal
norm. In European societies before the modern era, sexuality seems to
have been less clearly dichotomized into hetero- and homosexuality.
Everybody was assumed (or, rather, suspected) to perpetrate homosexual
acts along with heterosexual ones, the former of which would be more
or less severely persecuted and punished. Since the nineteenth century,
however, homosexual acts are automatically considered to be expressive
of a homosexual nature of the actor who is not anymore a human being
perpetrating sinful homosexual (or, rather, 'sodomite') acts, but who is 'a
homosexual', i.e. a member of a particular human species. The discourse
moves from whether, or how, homosexual acts need to be punished to
whether the homosexual as such, as a different species, is persecuted,
psychiatrized or tolerated. (Stoetzler 2009: 165-6)
This suggests, then, that woman and man should be seen not
as trans-historical categories, but as specifically capitalist forms
of social relations, akin to value or money or state.6 Man and
woman (and indeed homosexual and heterosexual) are identifications,
aspects of the society of identity, part of the mutilation
involved in the creation of the labourer, the performer of abstract
labour. A classification to be fought against.
Labour is an abstraction, a separation of labour from the world
of doing or life-activity. This fragmentation of our life-activity
is a fragmentation of our lives in every aspect. The separation
of sexuality from the body as a whole and its concentration
in the genitals was imposed historically at the same time as
the abstraction of labour, made a fundamental contribution to
the creation of the body as a machine for labour and is part of
the general process of abstraction or separation, the process of
limitation, classification and identification.7
The particular patterns of domination, then, are not something
that happens to us or that they (men, capitalists, whoever)
impose on us, but patterns of domination that we create through
our activity and the way in which it is organised. That is the
importance of the critique ad hominem (or ad mulierem, or
ad humanum): it is only by bringing everything back to our
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