Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

themselves are abstracted from meaning: the content of the
:1ctivity (whether baking or making rat poison) is a matter of
indifference. The chain of connections is a quantitative chain,
established through money. Each activity acquires significance
only in relation to another activity, as a means to an end. Baking
for its own sake, for the fun of it, makes no sense in the world
of abstract labour. In this world, baking makes sense only as a
means to an end, the end of making money: its end is a senseless
sense, devoid of meaning (so that baking cakes can be substituted
by making poison, writing books, whatever). The concatenation
of activities is purely instrumental, but the instrumentality is
empty. This formal, instrumental series of connections gives
rise to a formal instrumental reasoning.? Abstract labour is
the basis of instrumental reason, the formalisation of reason
that emerged from the Enlightenment to become the basis of
modern bourgeois thought, in which truth has meaning only as
a measurement of the effectiveness of means to achieve an end,
in which people themselves come to be seen simply as means to
an end. In this totality, the only meaning is a quantitative one:
the rate of economic growth, the number of bridges constructed,
the number of kilometres of highway, the number of criminals
imprisoned - Progress, in other words.8
The fact that capitalism is a law-bound society, a society
with its laws of development, means that it is characterised
by rigidities. It is not the infinitely flexible society it sometimes
seems to be. Sometimes it seems that it is capable or absorbing
anything we throw at it, of turning Che and Marcos into designs
for t-shirts, of turning the great revolt of 1968 into a new style
of domination. And yet it is not so. Capital has its limits, must
follow certain rules, of which the basic one is Accumulate,
accumulate! It does make sense, then, to speak of breaking or
cracking capital. It is not a pane of glass, but it does have a
rigidity, however flexible and adaptable that rigidity may appear
to be: capital is a set of rules that channel the flow of our activity:
to break capital, we break the rules. How do we break the rules?
There used to be some rules on how to do it, but fortunately
they were broken.
We create, thirdly, a society that is based on our own
exploitation. The world that we create has at its centre the
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