Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

compelling people to perform abstract labour. For those who
are not employed, it means imposing a social discipline that
ensures that their activity remains within the general framework
determined by abstract labour. For capital, the important thing
is to seal up again the unitary character of labour, to show
that there is no alternative to value-producing, money-making
labour. There must be no escape from labour. In countries
with a welfare-state system, it is crucial to tighten the rules
to make sure that they do not provide havens for those who
might want to do something else with their lives. The same in
the universities: they must not be allowed to become places
for relaxing or (worse) thinking: it is essential to tighten the
educational system, speed up the process of learning and above
all to measure the productivity of both teachers and students
all the time, so that their activity is contained within abstract
labour.7 Neo-liberalism, post-Fordism, post-modernism are
names given to different aspects of this struggle to subordinate
human doing to the rule of money, to re-establish the idea that
there is no alternative to labour, that all possible human activity
is encompassed within the rule of labour.
This is a prolonged and constant struggle: it is not a new
stable pattern of domination, although the terms mentioned
(neo-liberalism, post-Fordism, post-modernism) may present
it as such. A crucial factor in the struggle to reimpose labour
is the expansion of credit. Credit creates a fictional world, a
world based on the expectation of future surplus value. It allows
individual capitals to avoid going bankrupt, and in this sense
softens the collapse of the cage of full employment - abstract
labour. The fictional world of credit thus softens the asperities of
the disciplines of abstract labour, but also extends and deepens
them. The company that is heavily in debt must desperately
seek to make more efficient the labour under its command. And
the person that is in debt is effectively bound into selling her
labour power for money in order to pay the debt. The expansion
of debt creates an image of stability, but is at the same time
fundamentally unstable because it is based on an expectation
that may not be realised.
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