Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

asis of the separation between the economic and the political.
Abstract labour is already pre-supposed when we make a
distinction between economic and political struggle, so that the
complementing of economic struggle by political struggle does
not challenge the existence of abstract labour but confirms it. It
does not overcome the limits of the trade union movement, but
consolidates them. Abstract labour is the basis of the fetishism
on which the separation of economic and political is based: the
very separation of the economic and the political is a moment
of the abstraction of labour.
To take wage labour (or simply labour) as the basis of the
anti-capitalist movement is quite simply to entrap that movement
within capital. All the features of abstract labour which were
singled out in the previous discussion are characteristic of
the labour movement: the reification of social relations, the
reproduction of the hierarchy between men and women and
the dimorphisation of sexuality, the objectification of nature,
the acceptance of the capitalist concept oitime, and above all,
the orientation towards the state and the idea of influencing the
state or taking state power. We could go on, and on, but the
point is clear. As long as abstract (or wage) labour is taken as the
unquestioned basis of the labour movement, or the revolutionary
movement, then that movement will carry forward all the reified
concepts and forms of behaviour that arise from the abstraction
of doing into labour.
We can now see that the non-recognition of the dual character
of labour is the core of a larger problem in the Marxist tradition.
In the same way that abstract labour creates a closed world
of things and laws of development, so a theory that takes the
abstraction of doing into labour for granted and bases itself
upon a unitary concept of labour encloses itself conceptually
within the same world. In this conceptual world, people become
converted into the bearers of social relations; classes become
definable and defined groups of people: money, capital, interest
and so on become the key categories of a new political economy
centred on understanding the laws of capitalist development.
This is the Marxism of Marxist economics, Marxist sociology,
Marxist philosophy, Marxist political science and so on. Critique
is forgotten and Marxism is treated as a positive science, a sort
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