Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

26
The breakthrough of doing
against labour throws us into
a new world of struggle.
It is clear that the movement of useful doing against abstract
labour cannot be reduced to struggles over work in any narrow
sense. We have seen that abstract labour structures every aspect
of capitalist society. It weaves an elaborate and complex prison of
fetishism, identity, clock-time, dimorphous sexuality, separation
from nature, and so on. Abstract labour provides us with a world
of stability, a world of fixed reference points, in which money
is money, the state is the state, women are women and men are
men. This is the world in which we live, a violent, oppressive,
false world constructed on the lie of identity.
To attack abstract labour is to attack this stable world, to
hack at the pillars that hold the roof above our heads. To attack
abstract labour is to attack the world of it is and try to release
the (contained and not contained) world of we do. This means to
embrace a vertiginous world in which everything is at issue, but
in this world, as Adorno puts it, 'the vertigo which this causes
is an index veri' (Adorno, 1966/1990: 33) This is exciting, and
frightening.
Capitalism is a complex weave of domination which is
generated by the way in which our activity is structured, as
abstract labour. This weave of domination is constantly under
attack, from many different angles. In the factories and offices,
workers struggle for shorter hours, a less direct subjection of
their lives to the command of value. Activists in sexual politics
fight not just for women's or gay rights but question the whole
construction of women and men. Others fight passionately to
create a different relation with plants and animals, some struggle
against poverty or discrimination, others against war. In the
particular struggles, there is always an excess, an overflowing.
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