Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

the production of surplus value. This relation is a relation
of antagonism, between the abstract labour that is being
exploited and the capital that is produced by that exploitation:
this antagonism is personified as an antagonism between the
personifications of abstract labour (the proletariat) and the personifications
of capital (the capitalists). It is important to keep
hold of these two dimensions: if we see abstract labour simply
as constituting a system of law-bound social compulsion, then
we can easily lose sight of the antagonistic dynamic that is at
the centre of this system;l1 if, on the other hand, we focus purely
on the relation of exploitation, we fail to see the abstracting of
doing into labour that is the pre-condition of the whole system
of exploitation.
There are two crucial antagonisms here. Within capitalism,
this world created by abstract labour, there is the central axis
of exploitation, the antagonism between labour and capital.
But the process that creates this world, the abstraction of doing
into labour, is also an antagonistic process, a bloody, violent
process. The existence of capitalism (a social system based on the
exploitation of labour and with its own antagonistic dynamic)
is based upon a pre-condition: the antagonistic conversion of
doing into abstract labour.
From this point, there are two ways forward, two ways of
thinking about radical social change. The meaning of primitive
accumulation, long treated as a marginal issue by Marxist
theory (and indeed in Marx's presentation in Capital) becomes
a central issue.
The first approach sees primitive accumulation as a past event,
so much water under the bridge. What's done is done: we now
live within the world constituted by the abstraction of doing
into labour. Consequently, the abstraction of doing into labour
can be taken for granted, and indeed there is no need to talk of
the dual character of labour since the only relevant labour in
capitalism is abstract labour: we can just speak of labour and
forget what Marx said of the importance of the dual character
of labour. Primitive accumulation was a violent episode in the
past, which created a capitalist world in which there is one
central antagonism, that between labour and capital. It is from
there that we have to think about the possibilities of change.
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