Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

The central issue is that of the externality between capital
and class struggle. We have seen that a separation between
capital and struggle is a characteristic of traditional Marxism,
and that the same (ultimately structuralist) distinction recurs in
Postone's critique of the Marxist tradition. Cleaver (and indeed
Negri and the operaista tradition) approach the matter from the
other side because they place struggle in the foreground, but the
categories themselves are never understood as conceptualisations
of struggle,12 so that the externality remainsY In this, Cleaver's
rejection of the dual nature of labour as being an antagonistic
relation and his espousal of the concept of self-valorisation as
a process that is 'autonomous from capitalist valorisation' is
significant. He also goes on to say that 'the refusal of work ...
creates the very possibility of self-valorisation' (1992: 130).
This externality matters simply because it removes selfvalorisation
from the daily experience of labour. It becomes
something special, rather than the routine experience of everyday
doing in-against-and-beyond labour. Perhaps the great appeal
and the strength and weakness of autonomist or operaista theory
is that it is a theory for activists, a theory of activism, but of an
activism separated from the experience of everyday living. I want
to reach beyond that and to ground our understanding of revolt
in everyday life. I argue here that the pivot for an understanding
not just of political economy but of social antagonism is the
dual nature of labour, and that this dual nature of labour is the
inherent and constant antagonism of daily doing and living.
Quite simply, life is the antagonism between doing and abstract
labour,14 and activism is simply a particularly intense expression
of that all-pervasive antagonism, from which it separates itself
at its peril.15
5. THE CRISIS OF ABSTRACT LABOUR IS OPEN.
There are those who argue that the revolt against labour has
already been closed.
The autonomist (or operaista) interpretation of the crisis of
the 1960s and 1970s attaches central importance to the workers'
revolt against labour. Workers were no longer prepared to accept
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