Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

of exploitation. Trade union struggle is an economic struggle
that needs to be complemented by political struggle. Political
struggle is the struggle to take state power and, using state power,
to socialise the means of production and abolish wage labour.
This is the classical model of revolution of the Second, Third
and Fourth Internationals. It is the model not just of Lenin
but of all the leading revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and
the first part of the twentieth century. The separation between
trade union or economic struggle on the one hand, and political,
revolutionary struggle on the other is a cornerstone of Lenin's
theory of revolution, as sketched in What is to be Done?
(1902/1968) But it is not just Lenin: Rosa Luxemburg is an
interesting example to take, not in order to single her out for
criticism, but simply because she is perhaps (and understandably)
the most widely admired revolutionary of the classic
period. Even in her pamphlet on The Mass Strike (1906/1970),
Luxemburg maintains the separation between economic and
political struggle.
In the separation between the economic and the political
struggle, the transformation of our doing into abstract labour
which is at the centre of capitalism, simply gets lost. It is not
present in the idea of economic struggle, because economic
struggle is about improving the conditions of wage labour.
And it is not present in political struggle, because the political
struggle takes the economic struggle for granted, as a basis
on which to construct a revolutionary movement. In political
struggle, abstract labour appears only (if at all) as something to
be abolished in the future, after the taking of power, but not as
present struggle. In practice, however, the taking of power by
revolutionary movements has never led to the transformation of
the labour process, to the emancipation of doing from labour.
The very idea of socialist or communist revolution simply became
uncoupled from any notion of liberating doing. The concept of
the two-fold nature of labour disappears not only from theory
but also from practice. Notorious is the support of Lenin for the
adoption of Taylorism in the USSR: the open proclamation of
the continuing rule of socially necessary labour time.
A struggle divided into economic and political struggles cannot
question abstract labour simply because abstract labour is the
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