Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

agreements on indigenous rights that the Zapatista movement
completely abandons the politics of demands, and, with it, all
contact with the state, and the creation of its own communal
life becomes unambiguously the core of the movement.
By asserting our own world, we set the agenda, the timetable
of struggle. A major problem of the left, even the radical left,
is that it follows the agenda set by capital. Movements like the
movement against the Gelmini proposals in Italy, the movement
against the war in Iraq, the anti-summit mobilisations over the
last ten years: all of these mobilise action to stop the worst
barbarities of capitalist rule, but they allow capital to set the
agenda. All these movements have been very important, and
more than a reaction to capital, or rather the reaction overflows
the immediate cause. It remains true, however, that they allow
capital to set the timetable of conflict. For the emancipation of
doing from abstract labour, on the other hand, it is essential
to alter the perspective radically. To place doing in the centre
is to restore ourselves to the centre of the universe. The young
Marx says of the criticism of religion 'The criticism of religion
disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality
like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason,
so that he will revolve around himself and therefore round his
true sun' (1844/1975a: 176). The struggle that puts doing at
the centre forces a Copernican inversion upon capital: it forces
capital to revolve explicitly around us. Capital is always a
reaction to anti-capitalist struggle,16 but it is important to make
this explicit both to capital and to ourselves as the pre-condition
of emancipation. Revolution is precisely that: the assertion of
ourselves as our own true sun.
242