Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

which are also constantly under attack. All the social relations
::Ire active battlegrounds, live antagonisms.
Form-determination, then, is never total: it is always a
struggle. The determination of our activities by the forms of
capitalist social relations is not given, but a constant battle.
Rebellion is always an option, in any situation. The teacher can
::Ilways refuse to teach what capital seeks to impose. The student
can always criticise. The worker can always refuse to obey. The
soldier can always refuse to kill. That is why capital invests so
much energy and resources in trying to ensure that it does not
happen. Yet finally the choice, and the responsibility, is ours:
not as individual, free choice but as part of the struggle over
the future of humanity. Rebellion is always an option, but much
more than that, it is an integral part of everyday life. That is why
the existence of capitalism is based on its own constant reconstitution,
the constant recreation of its forms of social relations.
All the forms of social relations are processes, processes of
struggle, live antagonisms. Our creative doing exists in alien
forms, forms that deny its existence. As Richard Gunn points
out, to say that something exists in the form of something else
means that it exists 'in the mode of being denied' (Gunn 1992:
14). But to understand form as form-process is to insist that
that which exists in the mode of being denied exists in constant
revolt against its own denial: the relation between doing and
abstract labour is one of tension and rebellion.
The issue is not new: it was posed in theological terms by
Eriugena, the heterodox theologian of the ninth century. He
argued that God created man, not just at the beginning of
human history, but as a constantly repeated process, that he
constantly creates and re-creates man. What this does is to
open an enormous fragility in our lives: our existence depends
from one moment to the next on the active process of divine
creation.6
The point can be rephrased yet again in terms of 'the truth
value of memory' (Marcuse 1956/1998: 18). The imposition of
abstract labour required centuries of often violent struggle. The
struggles of the women, men and others who resisted lie in the
past, but also live on in the present, as memory. The present force
or truth value of memory, whether of the individual or of society,
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