Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

the state, and so on). Full employment is the closure of the cage,
the completion of the rule of unitary, abstract labour: life-activity
is employment is abstract labour, there is no alternative.
This tight, tense weave splits open in 19683 as a generation
no longer so tamed by the experience of fascism and war rise
up and say 'no, we shall not dedicate our lives to the rule of
money, we shall not dedicate all the days of our lives to abstract
labour, we shall do something else instead.' The revolt against
capital expresses itself openly as that which it always is and
must be: a revolt against labour. It becomes clear that we cannot
think of class struggle as labour against capital, because labour
is on the same side as capital, labour produces capital. This is
what is expressed in the universities, this is what is expressed
in the factories, this is what is expressed on the streets in 1968.
This is what makes it impossible for capital to increase the rate
of exploitation sufficiently to maintain its rate of profit and
hold Fordism in place. It is a revolt that is directed against all
aspects of the abstraction of labour: not just the alienation of
labour in the narrow sense, but also the fetishisation of sex,
nature, time, space and also against the state-oriented forms of
organisation that are part of that fetishisation. There is a release,
an emancipation: it becomes possible to think and do things that
were not possible before. The force of the explosion, the force
of the struggle, splits open the category of labour (opened by
Marx but closed in practice by the Marxist tradition) and, with
it all the other categories of thought.
This splitting of the category of labour throws us into a new
world. This is not entirely new, of course: the rejection of labour
is a strand running through the whole history of anti-capitalist
struggle.4 What is new is the centrality that it acquires with the
crisis of Fordism.
At first sight, the crisis of labours appears to be a defeat for
us. Inevitably, the crisis of abstract labour is the crisis of the
movement constructed on the basis of abstract labour: the labour
movement. That there is a crisis of the labour movement is plain
to see: the decline of the trade union movement everywhere in the
world, the catastrophic erosion of many of the material gains won
by the labour movement in the past, the virtual disappearance
of social democratic parties with a real commitment to radical
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