Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

the abstraction of labour. Abstraction, the determination of
labour by money, means in practice the necessity to produce
things in the shortest time possible. This means a constant
restructuring of the labour process and a constant conflict with
concrete labour, which knows no such time constraints. In the
individual commodity producer, this conflict will be experienced
as a conflict between market requirements and the established
habits of the producer. Where it is wage labourers who produce
the commodity, the conflict will obviously become an open one
between the demands of the employer and the struggle of the
workers to do things at their own rhythm.
Abstraction, then, is inseparable from conflict. Where abstract
labour exists as wage labour, the conflict takes the form of a
conflict between workers and capitalists:
What we are confronted by here is the alienation [EntfremdungJ of man
from his own labour. To that extent, the worker stands on a higher plane
than the capitalist from the outset, since the latter has his roots in the
process of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right
from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and
experiences it as a process of enslavement. (Marx 1867/1990: 990)
The struggle is a struggle against abstract or alienated labour and
this struggle comes from those who suffer most this abstraction
or alienation.
If abstraction is a conflictive process, then its relation to
concrete doing cannot be understood as other than antagonistic.
The rebellion against abstraction is a 'No, we shall not do that,
we shall not do it that way. We shall do it the way we think best.
We shall do what we want to do, what we consider necessary
or desirable.' The rebellion against abstract labour is concrete
doing in movement.
Concrete doing, then, is not totally subordinate to abstract
labour, as most of the literature assumes. Certainly it exists in
abstract labour: abstract labour is the form in which concrete
doing exists in capitalist society. The doing that is involved
in any sort of production is subjected, directly or indirectly,
to the requirements of having to produce for the market, the
requirements of value production. The qualitative aspect of the
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