Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

equirements of socially necessary labour time? Only by seeing
if I can sell my cakes or not: the laws of abstract labour operate
behind my back. The interaction of people's activities is beyond
('heir control, operates according to its own logic.
Like all other aspects of the transformation of doing into
a bstract labour, the constitution of the totality is a historical
process and an extremely violent one. The constitution of the
world market was (and is) not a smooth, rational process but
a process that has condemned millions to misery and a sense of
social redundancy, a process that has wiped out whole cultures
and peoples. The totality (that is, the social cohesion peculiar to
capitalism) is the elimination of alternative ways of doing and
alternative ways of living, of anything that does not fit in with
the blind laws of abstract labour.
Abstract labour constitutes a totality, but it does it in a way
that is not obvious. Precisely because the social cohesion is
not the result of any conscious process, society appears to be a
mass of incoherent particulars, of unrelated phenomena. At first
sight, the connection between sexual dimorphism (say) and the
destruction of other forms of life is not obvious. They appear
to be two unrelated phenomena. It is only by understanding
both as part of a society formed by abstract labour that we can
understand how the struggle against sexual dimorphism is related
to the struggle against the destruction of other forms of life and
the struggle for the abolition of abstract labour. In the face of
a world that presents itself as a mass of particulars, totality is
a fundamental category of critique. This is crucial because it
throws light on the interconnectedness of capitalist domination
(the connection, say, between development aid and arms sales)
and on the unity-in-separation of our own struggles.
To tality, then, has been a central category of Marxist critique,
pointing out the relation between apparently unconnected
phenomena in capitalist society. There is, however, a great
danger here: from being a critical category, totality can easily
be transformed into a positive category.2 This happens if totality
is understood as a trans-historical category.
This is important because if we convert totality into a positive,
trans-historical concept, then we tend to view it as something
that must be liberated from its unconscious, fragmented capitalist
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