Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

exploitation of labour by capital. The abstraction of doing
into labour is generalised throughout society only when labour
power itself becomes a commodity. In other words, as we saw,
it is through the expansion of wage labour that abstract labour
becomes established as the organising principle of society.
Wage labour means that the worker sells his9 labour power to
a capitalist in return for a wage (the monetary equivalent of
the value of his labour power); the capitalist puts the worker
to labour and he produces more value than that of his labour
power, the surplus value which is appropriated by the capitalist.
This is the process of capitalist exploitation. The generalisation
of abstract labour is simultaneously the generalisation of
capitalist exploitation. Exploitation existed in pre-capitalist
societies: in feudal societies, for example, the serf is forced to
work to supply not only his own needs but also the demands of
his lord. With the transition to capitalism (the bloody process
of primitive accumulation), exploitation is re-constituted on
the basis of abstract labour. The transformation of doing into
abstract labour is a pre-condition of capitalist exploitation.
Without abstract labour, there can be no production of capital;
without value production there can be no production of surplus
value. The production of surplus value and capital is in turn
necessary for the reproduction of doing as abstract labour, but
it is the abstraction of doing into labour that is logically prior.
Abstract labour creates, therefore, a class-divided society.
Class antagonism, like exploitation, existed before capitalism,
but it is reconstituted on the basis of abstract labour. The process
of surplus value production creates two antagonistic classes: the
class of those whose labour creates surplus value (the proletariat,
the working class) and the class of those who exploit this labour.
The antagonism inherent in the process of exploitation (the
capitalist process of production) structures the whole of society
and infuses it with the same antagonism. This division of society,
this process of class-ification, is one aspect of the fetishisation/
identification/classification of society which we have already seen
as one of the moments of the process of abstraction.1o
Abstract labour, then, constitutes a system of social cohesion
that is governed by objective laws of development outside our
control, and that has as its core a relation of exploitation,
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