Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

and-create. Class struggle involves taking sides in this conflict
that exists both within and outwith all of us.
Is this to say that there is no difference between a capitalist and
a worker? No. They wear different character masks. And behind
the character masks? Behind the character masks, there is no
pure, real human being but simply a shadowy figure disfigured
by, and in tension with, the character mask. Where the character
mask is comfortable, there will be little incentive to revolt against
it: this does not mean that the owner of capital is reduced entirely
to his character mask, but he is unlikely to rebel strongly against
it. Certainly Engels, although a capitalist, took the side of the
struggle against capital, but there are relatively few examples of
this. Where the character mask is uncomfortable or unbearable,
the force of the revolt against it will be so much stronger. The
worker has much more reason to revolt against the character
mask than the capitalist has. The tension between character
mask and shadowy figure exists in both cases, but in a different
intensity. The class divide (the antagonism between doing and
abstract labour) cuts through both, but in different ways. IS
Similarly, one might say that, although many men revolt
against the gender divide and the masculine character mask,
women have more reason to do so. The same with racism: one
does not have to be black to be anti-racist, but the intensity of the
reaction against racism is likely to be greater. And so on. Does
this mean, then, that we should understand capitalist society as
being structured by a range of different conflicts: not only class
conflict, but also all sorts of non-class conflict? At the superficial
(and real) level of character masks, this is certainly the case: at
this level, there are all sorts of ways in which conflict can be
understood. There is, however, always the prior question of
what generates the character masks, what produces the different
identities that enter into conflict, as male or female, black or
white. This brings us back to the fundamental antagonism in
the organisation of our doing between abstract labour and the
(shadowy) drive towards a self-determining doing. It is the
repression of doing by abstract labour that generates male and
female, black and white as identities, as conflicting character
masks. It is not that gender conflict, say, must be added to class
conflict to understand society: it is rather that the very concept of
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