Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

y a similarly dense weave. This is one of the criticisms rightly
made of the so-called socialist states: that they associated the idea
of socialism with a particularly tight weaving of social relation
that left little room for determination from below: in this sense
they were 'totalitarian'. The very density of the weave of social
relations (mass production, planning of social organisation to
a high degree of detail) is probably difficult to reconcile with
effective social determination from below. What most anticapitalist
struggles of recent years point to is a much looser
integration of social connections, a 'world of many worlds', as
the Zapatista slogan puts it. Just what this might look like can
only be the result of struggle, but it would presumably have at
its base smaller and more autonomous units of production.9
A world of many worlds would be not a new totality but a
shifting constellation or confederation of particularities. Not a
communism, but a communising.lO
But what do we say of issues that seem to require a united-world
solution, such as climate change or the elimination of nuclear
weapons? The imminence of catastrophe seems to push us
towards a positive conception of totality, some idea that we need
a world state. Certainly, some form of global coordination would
be desirable in a post-capitalist society, but the forms of global
coordination that presently exist are so bound up with capital
and the pursuit of profit that they offer little hope of a solution.
It is becoming more and more clear that any solution to the
problem of climate change can come only from a radical change
in the way that we live, and that change cannot come from a
state or some sort of world body, but only from the rejection
of abstract labour, from our own assumption of responsibility
for the way we live.l1
The conceptual and organisational challenge is to turn the
world upside down and move from the particular struggles
outwards, against and beyond: to follow the flow of doing
against and beyond its rigidification as labour. The struggle
against capital is necessarily the unleashing of doing from the
bonds of abstraction. Where abstraction imposes limits, binding
us to value, doing is in-finite, unfinished, a moving against and
beyond all limits.
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