Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

assume that there is no useful doing other than that which has
been subsumed into its own abstraction.
This is not to say that all these activities are untouched by
abstract labour, or that they are in some way outside the process
of abstraction.5 All are contradictory, part of a society dominated
by capital. Certainly it is tempting to think that our spacesmoments
of other-doing exist outside capital, that when we sit
with our friends in the garden, or dance all night with those we
love, we are living outside capital. The spaces of otherness appear
as differences, rather than contradictions. Yet this is dangerous.
Capital (abstract labour) is far more voracious than we may
think, invading every aspect of the way in which we act and
think. Our spaces of otherness are always threatened, always in
danger of being eliminated by the movement of abstract labour.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, our other-doings exist
in defiance of the claims of money, the demand that all human
activity should be converted into abstract labour. Our moments
or spaces of non-subordination are insubordinations, defiances.
Apparent differences are contradictions.6 This is important if we
are to understand the unity of our variegated desires to live as
we want: the unity is negative, anti-capitalist.
In the earlier anticipation of the present argument, we
characterised the relation between concrete doing and abstract
labour as ecstatic.7 Doing is the ecstasy of abstract labour: ecstasy
as ek-stasis, standing outside abstract labour while existing
within it, standing outside as actual and potential otherness. It
is quite true to say that abstract labour and concrete labour (or
doing) are aspects of the same process, but the relation between
the two aspects is an ecstatic one, a relation of containmentrebellion-and-overflowing,
a relation of in-against-and-beyond.
We must be careful not to give a false positivity to useful doing,
or to attribute to it an essential a-historical character. It exists
as struggle, as the struggle to escape from its abstraction.
Its moments of freedom are often both contradictory and
evanescent, sandcastles built on the ocean shore. The 'freedom'
should be thought of not in terms of stable autonomies but rather
as the force of that which is not-yet, lightning flashes of a world
that could be. But, however evanescent these escapes may be -
whether they be that of the assembly-line worker fingering his
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