Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

furniture in the run-up to the next election, we are undou bted ly
mad, we who run about seeing cracks that are invisible to the
eyes of those who sit in the armchairs (or which appear to th In,
if at all, as changes in the pattern of the wallpaper, to which
they give the name of 'new social movements'). The worst of it
is that they may be right: perhaps we are mad, perhaps there is
no way out, perhaps the cracks we see exist only in our fantasy.
The old revolutionary certainty can no longer stand" There i
absolutely no guarantee of a happy ending.
The opening of cracks is the opening of a world that presents
itself as closed. It is the opening of categories that on the surface
negate the power of human doing, in order to discover at their
core the doing that they deny and incarcerate.2 In Marx's terms,
it is critique ad hominem, the attempt to break through the
appearances of a world of things and uncontrollable forces
and to understand the world in terms of the power of human
doing.3 The method of the crack is dialectical, not in the sense
of presenting a neat flow of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but
in the sense of a negative dialectics, a dialectic of misfitting.4
Quite simply, we think the world from our misfitting"
The method of the crack is the method of crisis: we wish to
understand the wall not from its solidity but from its cracks; we
wish to understand capitalism not as domination, but: from the
perspective of its crisis, its contradictions, its weaknesses, and we
want to understand how we ourselves are those contradictions.
This is crisis theory, critical theory. Critical/crisis theory is the
theory of our own misfitting. Humanity (in all its senses) jars
increasingly with capitalism. It becomes harder and harder to fit
as capital demands more and more. Ever more people simply do
not fit in to the system, or, if we do manage to squeeze ourselves
on to capital's ever-tightening Procrustean bed, we do so at the
cost of leaving fragments of ourselves behind, to haunt. That
is the basis of our cracks and of the growing importance of a
dialectic of misfitting . .
We want to understand the force of our misfitting, we want
to know how banging our head against the wall over and over
again will bring the wall crumbling down.
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