Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

what they want to do. This is surely the birth of the struggle
of abstract labour: there is an acceptance of the forms and
rhythms of work within the factory or other workplace. The
struggle against capital goes on, but it is within the ground-rules
established by capital. Thompson concludes:
The first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters
the importance of time; the second generation formed their short-time
committees in the ten-hour movement; the third generation struck for
overtime or time-and-a-half. They had accepted the categories of their
employers and learned to fight back within them. They had learned their
lesson, that time is money, only too well. {ibid.: 86)4
The new time is the time of alienated, abstract labour. Abstract
time is inseparable from abstract labour. When different products
are compared on the market, a quantitative relation is established
between them (the exchange value of the commodities) and
this relation is determined by the socially necessary labour time
required to produce the commodities. To speak of the abstraction
of doing into labour is necessarily to speak of the abstraction of
doing-time into the external, de-subjectified socially necessary
labour time. The rule of socially necessary labour time is
inevitably the rule of a time outside us, abstracted from the
quality of our doing. When we say that abstract labour weaves
capitalist society, we affirm that abstract clock time is an essential
and inevitable part of that weave.5
This is the time of duration, the separation of time from
our doing. Clocks represent not just labour discipline, not
just punctuality, but a whole way of living and understanding
the world. Clock-time, the time of duration, is the time of the
separation of subject from object, of constitution from existence,
of doing from done. We create something and the thing we
create detaches itself from us. It takes on a new existence in
which our constitution or creation of the thing is negated and
our doing-time obliterated. We make a chair with love and
dedication and the chair stands there as a commodity to be sold,
our loving creativity forgotten, the time we spent in its creation
obliterated in its price. The time of constitution is forgotten,
the time of existence takes over: the chair is two years old, ten
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