Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

long live the king! Continuity is emphasised, rupture becomes
a theoretical impossibility (or an extraneous possibility, as it
always has been in orthodox (Leninist) theory). The continuity
that is emphasised is the continuity of structure: there is a
restructuring, but the new structure is as closed as the previous
one. The structuralist thought that is one of the aspects of the
domination of abstract labour is extended through the crisis of
abstract labour to reassert the absolute dominance of abstract
labour. If 'there is no longer anything which distinguishes labour
from the rest of human activities', then concrete doing is totally
absorbed within abstract labour, and there is no question of an
against-and-beyond. What gets lost is the crack, the ek-stasis
of concrete doing, the standing out-and-beyond of useful doing
from abstract labour, the opening. The post-operaista, poststructuralist
theorists extend into the crisis of abstract labour
the thought-prison that was part of the domination of abstract
labour. As soon as the world is opened, they leap ahead to close
it, not because they support capital, but because that is what
their understanding of the scientific method tells them to do.
The method adopted in this book is quite different. As explained
in the first part, it is the method of the crack, the method of crisis.
The question asked is not 'how do we understand the patterns
of domination?' but 'how do we find hope in a black night?'
How do we see crisis where it appears that there is no crisis?
Not in order to fall into an unreal optimism, but to follow the
lines of real possibility. When, then, we start from a manifest
crisis of labour such as that of the 1970s, we ask not 'what is the
new pattern of domination?' but rather 'how can we follow the
continuing lines of crisis into the present?' How do we follow
through the antagonism between doing and labour that showed
its face so clearly in 1968?
An approach closer to that proposed here, at least in that
it insists on the continuing centrality of the crisis of labour, is
that of the Krisis groupY The Krisis group too see the crisis of
Fordism as a crisis of labour, but they see it as a permanent and
insuperable crisis: 'With the third industrial revolution of microelectronics,
the labour society reached its absolute historical
barrier' (Krisis Gruppe 1999/2004: 27, s.11). This crisis they see
as the inevitable result of a fundamental contradiction:
193