Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

Let us take the argument more slowly. The argument in this
book is that we are living through a crisis of abstract labour and
that this transforms the meaning of class struggle. In this transformation
of class struggle, the quality (and not just the quantity)
of time becomes a central and overt point of conflict, again. To
the extent that the reality and the concept of class struggle were
dominated by the conflict between abstract labour and capital,
the quality of time was not an issue. It could not be, simply
because the abstraction of doing into labour is inseparable from
the abstraction of time. It is only with the crisis of abstract labour
that the quality of time comes to the fore and it again becomes
clear that class struggle can (and must) be understood not just as
a quantitative conflict about time, but as a qualitative conflict,
that is, as a conflict between two different concepts and practices
of time. There is their time, the time of capital: the abstraction
of time from our lives, the negation by time of our humanity.
And there is our time, a time that springs from our lives: not a
time-in-which we live, but a time-as-which we live. Their time
against ours; our time against theirs - that is the conflict, and it
is now an open and intense conflict present in every moment of
existence. For us the challenge is to break their time, to shoot
clocks.2 But what is our time, and how can we nourish it in
such a way as to break their time? The following points seek to
suggest a way forward.
2. OUR TIME BREAKS DURATI ON.
In Mary Shelley's famous story (1818/1985), Dr Frankenstein
creates a Creature, and the Creature then acquires an independent
existence, a durable existence in which he no longer depends on
the creative activity of Dr Frankenstein. In another story, a story
by Jorge Luis Borges, 'Las Ruinas Circulares' (194112000a), a
man creates another man, but he does it not in a laboratory but
by dreaming. The man created has all the appearance of being
a normal man with an independent, durable existence, but in
fact he is kept alive only by the constant creative activity, the
dreaming, of the first man. In neither case is the existence of the
created being an illusion, but in the second case his duration is
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