Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

If the struggle from the point of view of capital is the struggle
1"0 close down the possibility of a different organisation of human
activity, to seal the unitary character of labour, then the struggle
:lgainst capital must be to open the split, to break the integument
that holds human activity imprisoned, to do everything we can
to realise the possibility of a different doing.
At the centre of all this is the precariousness of labour.
Throughout the world, there has been a decline in the relative
stability of employment that, for many, characterised the Fordist
period. The concessions won by trade union struggle have been
dismantled everywhere by new labour legislation. Employment
has become much more precarious, much more likely to be
based on short-term contracts and variable hours. This means
considerable material and emotional hardship for millions of
people. And yet, if we focus solely on the suffering involved, we
lose sight of the obvious, namely, that precariousness of labour
is precisely what it says: the precariousness of capital, the precariousness
of the labour that creates capital. People are forced
into developing other forms of social relations and other forms
of activity as the basis for survival. The suffering inherent in precariousness
can flip over (and is flipping over) into its opposite,
a growth of doing-against-labour. Similarly with unemployment:
the rise of unemployment means enormous hardship for millions
and millions of people, yet to call for a return to full employment,
as the labour movement does and must do, is to call for a closure
of unitary labour, to proclaim that employment is (at least for the
moment) the only way forward for human activity, that doing
must be subordinated to abstract labour. The alternative is to
say, as radical groups of unemployed in Argentina and elsewhere
have done, overflowing the struggles of the unemployed, that we
do not want a return to employment and the exploitation that
it implies, that we want to shape our own activity according to
what we consider desirable or necessary.
The way forward is difficult to see, the paths hard to create,
but it is clear that the precariousness of labour in all its senses
is the crucial issue, that the future of the world depends on the
splitting open of the unitary character of labour.
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