Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

2
Our method is the method of the crack.
The image that keeps coming to my mind is a nightmarish one
inspired by Edgar Allen Poe.! We are all in a room with four walls,
a floor, a ceiling and no windows or door. The room is furnished
and some of us are sitting comfortably, others most definitely
are not. The walls are advancing inwards gradually, sometimes
slower, sometimes faster, making us all more uncomfortable,
advancing all the time, threatening to crush us all to death.
There are discussions within the room, but they are mostly
about how to arrange the furniture. People do not seem to see
the walls advancing. From time to time there are elections about
how to place the furniture. These elections are not unimportant:
they make some people more comfortable, others less so; they
may even affect the speed at which the walls are moving, but
they do nothing to stop their relentless advance.
As the walls grow closer, people react in different ways.
Some refuse absolutely to see the advance of the walls, shutting
themselves tightly into a world of Disney and defending with
determination the chairs on which they are sitting. Some see and
denounce the movement of the walls, build a party with a radical
programme and look forward to a day in the future when there
will be no walls. Others (and among these I include myself) run
to the walls and try desperately to find cracks, or faults beneath
the surface, or to create cracks by banging the walls. This looking
for (and creation of) cracks is a practical-theoretical activity, a
throwing ourselves against the walls but also a standing back to
try and see cracks or faults in the surface. The two activities are
complementary: theory makes little sense unless it is understood
as part of the desperate effort to find a way out, to create cracks
that defy the apparently unstoppable advance of capital, of the
w:1l1s that are pushing us to our destruction.
W' ;) r mad, of course. From the point of view of those who
lit, (('Illi 1"11 i r armchairs and discuss the arrangement of the
8