Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

of structural functionalism,10 dedicated to the study of th '
structures of capitalist society and the functional connection,
between them. Since the crucial category of labour is unidi·
mensional, we are led into a unidimensional Marxism whi h
focuses on the analysis of capital and its logic, or the structur s
and movements of capitalist domination. Marxism, from bein
a theory of struggle, becomes a theory of domination. It i
not that struggle is forgotten, but it is seen as lying outsid
the central categories of Marxism. Capital accumulation, for
example, is understood not as struggle but as the context within
which struggle takes place; capitalist crisis is understood not a
intensification of struggle but as providing opportunities for
struggle. The categories are understood as closed categories
rather than as conceptualisations of antagonistic relations, as
relations of struggle, and therefore open. All this has been said
before, and is indeed central to the argument of 'open Marxism'.
What is new for me, perhaps, is the realisation that the central
category in all this is labour. A closed, unitary concept of labour
generates a closed understanding of all the categories, while an
understanding of labour as an open antagonism gives rise to an
understanding of all categories as open antagonisms. If labour is
to be understood as concealing a live antagonism between doing
what we want and labouring under the dictate of capital, then
so must all the categories be understood as concealing related
struggles: these are the battlefields on which we all live and die.
Abstract labour has incarcerated the movement against
capitalism for 150 years. To say this is not to belittle the
struggles of all those people who have dedicated and often
sacrificed their lives to the struggle for a better world. Quite the
contrary. If the dream of a better world lives on, it is thanks to
their struggles: a book like this is necessarily a declaration of
profound gratitude and admiration for their lives of rebellion.11
The tragedy is that those rebellions were entrapped within an
organisational and conceptual framework that arose on the
basis of abstract labour.
There has, however, always been an overflowing of anticapitalist
struggle from the labour movement, there has always
been an 'other labour movement' .12 The struggles against
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