Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

labour time. The unitary character of the category of labour is
first split open on a massive scale by the struggles of the 1960s
and 1970s: there is a recognition of the struggle of and for an
alternative doing against labour. This splitting of the category
of labour splits open the whole configuration of abstract labour
and all its component categories. All fetishes reveal themselves
to be battles between a process of fetishisation and a process of
anti-fetishisation: sexuality, state, nature, money, totality, time,
and so on. These battles continue to be fought in an enormous
variety of ways and places. This is the substance of the cracks
in capitalist command.
An appearance of resolution of the crisis of labour is created
by the massive expansion of credit and debt after the 1970s.
This expansion of credit facilitates a real reimposition of the
disciplines of labour, but it also creates a world that rests on a
very fragile basis. The apparent resolution of the crisis rests on
a gamble, on the expectation of the future production of surplus
value. The danger of speaking of this apparent resolution as a
new paradigm of domination19 is that it gives a false solidity
to what is a fragile and open situation. The fragility of the
resolution has become clear with the world financial crisis that
exploded in 2008. The mediation of credit has converted what
was overtly a crisis of labour (in the 1970s) into what appears
now as a financial crisis, but the basis of crisis remains the
same: the weakness of the abstraction of doing into labour, the
difficulty of containing human activity within the confines of
abstract labour.
Doing is the crisis of labour. It is important to keep hold of
this, because the concept of crisis as breakdown leads us nowhere
beyond a despairing conjunction of urgent necessity and empty
possibility. It is only if we think of crisis as breakthrough, as the
moving of doing against-and-beyond labour, that we can open
up perspectives of a different world.
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