Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

Progress is the technology that we must introduce in order for
the abstraction of doing into labour to be effective, to meet the
requirements of socially necessary labour time.
It is striking that many of the anti-capitalist struggles of recent
years have been explicitly opposed to progress: to the building
of highways, of high-speed trains (the no-TAV movement in
Italy), of airports (Atenco in Mexico). This is one of the reasons
why indigenous movements have gained such importance: their
opposition to the integration of their distinctive cultures into the
mainstream flow of progress touches strong chords of sympathy
even among people who have never heard of those cultures.
Doing-time is inevitably opposed to progress in this sense.
To the external pressure of 'we must get on with things, we
must move forward', it opposes the 'we must get together and
talk about which way we want to go'. It is the time of 'asking
we walk', rather than the time of 'we must get there quickly'.
The push towards self-determination probably means that we
do things at a gentler pace, simply because we take the time to
consider what we want to do and because we resist the pressures
of value production, the rule of socially necessary labour time.
If this were generalised, there is no reason why it should lead to
greater poverty (whatever that may mean), simply because the
vast number of people currently employed in tasks of supervision
and enforcement would be able to devote their energies to
activities that they considered necessary or desirable.
Doing-time meanders. It is not the forward march of the
five-year plan. Self-determination must include being able to
question decisions that we have already taken, being able to
experiment and change our course. Doing-time is a time in which
we take our time to do, and since the world we want is a world
of many worlds, doing-time must be a loose interweaving, or
perhaps just mutual respect, of many times.
Doing-time is not the forward march of history, but just the
opposite. It is the collective cry that is growing louder and louder
each day: 'No! Stop! The train is going too fast, and going in
the wrong direction, it is heading straight towards the cliff!' Or,
as Benjamin put it, 'Marx called Revolutions the locomotives
of world history. But perhaps it is totally different: perhaps it is
the people in these trains reaching for the emergency brake.'15
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