Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

The second approach is to argue that if we take abstract labour
for granted, then we already enclose ourselves within the world
constituted by abstract labour, and then there is no way out: both
logic and tragic historical experience tell us that it is so. The
alternative is to question the abstraction of doing into labour:
primitive accumulation should not be seen as a closed process,
something that happened in the past, but as something that is
open, a live antagonism.
Abstract labour rules, but there is more to be said. From
the beginning, abstract labour announces its own antithesis.
Abstract labour is one face of the 'dual character of labour'. But
we have not spoken yet of the other face, the dark face, the face
for which we really do not even have a satisfactory name, though
for the moment we shall stick with 'concrete-creative doing'.
The dark side creeps in through the cracks. Abstract labour
is, as we have seen, a constituted form of social relations,12 a
constituted form of human activity. Centuries of struggle have
led to the constitution of abstract labour. But if that were all, we
would not be able to criticise it, we would have no standpoint
from which to gaze critically. The fact that we criticise suggests
that there is more than abstract labour, that the transformation
of doing into abstract labour is not closed, is not complete. We
are more than the perverted performers of abstract labour. It
is this 'more than', this remainder, this misfitting, that is the
source of hope.
We cannot speak of abstract labour without talking of that
misfit, concrete-creative doing, that which fits into and yet does
not fit into abstract labour, that which is contained in and yet
overflows from abstract labour. This is what we must move on
to: the other face of the dual character of labour. But first we
must look at the terrible hold of abstract labour over the anticapitalist
movement.
150