Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

In this case, the invisibility refers to the fact that what goes
on in the factory is away from the public eye. We must leave the
surface of society to understand the reality of class relations. But
there is more to it than that: Marx's whole argument, with its
emphasis on surface, on personification and character masks,
points us constantly to a hidden substratum. In a society in which
the relations between doers are established through the exchange
of commodities, relations between people are transformed into
relations between things: the relations between the producers
exist in the form of relations between their products, and the
producers themselves become invisible, or rather they appear
as the exchangers of things, as agents of circulation, but not as
producers or doers. Their subjectivity is invisible. People as doers
become buried under a whole edifice of social forms constructed
upon this initial negation of the subject. This is what Marx refers
to as fetishism.
Theory, then, is the uncovering of that which is hidden. In
other words, theory is critique, critique of the forms that conceal,
and yet are generated by, human activity. Critique is critique ad
hominem, recuperation of the concealed creative subjectivity
of people; or, since the subject to which the critique refers is
necessarily a hidden subject, we should say that it is critique ad
hominem absconditum.
Revolutionary theory is part of the struggle of that which is
hidden (doing) against its own invisibility. Or perhaps we should
speak of latency rather than total invisibility. Doing is visible, but
as abstract labour: it is the hidden or latent substance of abstract
labour. Doers too are visible, but in the way that actors on a
stage are visible: as character masks, as roles. Doing and doers
exist in the form of something else, in the 'mode of being denied'.
What we see is their own denial, just as what we see in an actor
on a stage is her own negation as person, her presentation as
someone she is not. Behind the character mask is a latent force,
a menace, a potential.
Latency is not absence, but of course if something is hidden
or latent, then we are not absolutely sure if it is there. Building
on that which is latent involves an element of risk, an inevitable
degree of uncertainty: revolt always surges from the invisible,
but precisely because it is invisible we cannot know for sure
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