Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

forms of social practice and, yet, become quasi-independent
of the people engaged in these practices' (1996: 3). I share that
conceptualisation and, like Postone, see the historically specific
form of interdependence as being constituted by abstract labour.
The difference lies in the fact that this book does not begin with
the question of how to conceptualise capitalism but with a rude
misfitting, a scream, a determination to break here and now the
historically specific form of interdependence. This misfitting is
not a light preamble to the heavier theoretical discussion that
comes later, but is the very core of the theory. What we look for
is not an understanding of social interdependence but a theory
of how to break it. Starting from that misfitting, the only way in
which we can understand the capitalist forms of social relations
(and, at their centre, abstract labour) is as forms swollen with
their own negation, forms that do not contain their content,
but from which their content constantly overflows. Postone
makes a clear distinction between contradiction and antagonism
(ibid.: 34), whereas the starting-point of this argument makes
such a distinction impossible. For Postone, concrete labour
exists as contradiction within abstract labour, but not as living
antagonism, but here concrete doing presents itself as screaming
antagonism from the very beginning.11 There is no understanding
in Postone's book of an ec-static relation between abstract
and concrete labour, so that, once again, the two-fold nature
of labour which he so rightly emphasises becomes reduced in
practice to a one-fold nature, abstract labour. Consequently,
the perspective of a form of activity beyond abstract labour
is presented constantly as possibility, rather than as present
struggle. This latter point has important political consequences
for it leads (yet again) to a theory of capitalism which is divorced
from present struggle: in spite of the radical nature of his critique
of traditional Marxism, Postone reproduces the separation
between capital and class struggle that is one of the characteristic
hallmarks of that tradition - a problem that recurs in the
work of the Krisis group, also very important and with a similar
theoretical perspective.
A third strand of recent discussions that must be considered
is centred on the conception of self-valorisation. The term is
coined by Toni Negri, but it is particularly instructive to look
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