Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom
Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom
Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom
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machinery. This does not make capital any less exigent, however,<br />
since the relative growth in investment in machinery means that<br />
capital requires an ever-increasing rate of exploitation in order to<br />
maintain its rate of profit: this is Marx's argument in his analysis<br />
of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.1<br />
However we look at it, the fall in capital's rate of profit has as<br />
its base a non-subordination, a failure to subordinate ourselves<br />
to the degree that capital demands of us, a 'whoa, no more,<br />
you can't push us any more, we are humans not machines,<br />
humans with our lives and loves, our children, our friends, our<br />
parents.' Simply trying to be human, chatting to our friends,<br />
falling in love, becomes converted by the dynamic of capital,<br />
that constant turning of the screw, into an act of insubordination.<br />
And conversely: it is this trying to be human that is<br />
our revolutionary hope, the potential breakthrough of another<br />
world, another doing, another way of relating.<br />
The law of value, the rule of socially necessary labour time,<br />
is a constant tightening of the Procrustean bed, a constant<br />
redefinition of the labourer that capital requires. Capital's<br />
problem is the problem that it has had since its birth: to<br />
transform the savage into a labourer. The constant redefinition<br />
of labour (of value production and what it requires) means that<br />
capital is ever anew confronted with the task of forcing people<br />
to fit into its requirements. Capitalist crisis is always a crisis of<br />
fitting: the savages will not do what capital requires of them (of<br />
us). 'Fit or be damned!' cries capital. And to more and more<br />
people in the world it says 'you do not fit, we have no use for<br />
you: you are too old, too pregnant, too unstable emotionally,<br />
you know too much philosophy, your children fall ill, you chat<br />
to your friends, you do not speak English, you think too little<br />
about money and too much about other things.' And more and<br />
more people reply, 'yes, it is true, we do not fit.' The crisis is<br />
an explosion of misfitting - the result of the lack of fit between<br />
humans and the requirements of value production, and the<br />
dramatic manifestation of that lack of fit. 'It is true', we repeat,<br />
'we do not fit.' But there is something else on the tip of our<br />
tongue, we want to add something else. And on this something<br />
else hangs the future of the world. We bow our heads and say<br />
'yes, it is true, we do not fit in, but we shall try harder: we shall<br />
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