Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

Rephrasing the question of revolution as stop making
capitalism does not give us the answers. There are very real
pressures (repression, starvation) that push us to reproduce
capitalism each day. What the rephrasing does is to redirect
our attention. It makes us focus first on ourselves as the creators
and potential non-creators of capitalism. Secondly, it brings our
attention to bear on the ec-static tension between doing and
labour which is both a matter of everyday experience and the
space within which our capacity to create another world remains
entrapped. This is a sort of glass bubble of bewitchment. If we
could look from outside we would see ourselves performing
(happily or unhappily) actions that are destroying humanity.
We look at ourselves in our own daily routines and our eyes
open wide with child-like amazement: we want to knock on the
glass and scream 'stop doing it, stop destroying humanity, stop
making capitalism!' But we are not outside, we are inside and
participating in the destruction of humanity, aware-and-notaware
of what we are doing. How do we light up our eyes with
amazement, how do we touch that half-awareness, that tension,
that ec-static distance, how do we bring it clearly into focus, how
do we magnify it, how do we open it up, how do we strengthen
and expand and multiply all those rebellions in which one pole
of the ec-static relation (doing) repudiates with all its force the
other pole (labour)? That is the question of revolution.
Asking we walk: The great problem is that we do not know
the answers, we do not know how to stop making capitalism.
We really do not know. Historically, we stand at the threshold of
a world of struggle and we are still learning. There is no recipe
to be applied.
It is not only that historically we do not know, but not-knowing
is a principle of the knowing that is central to the new pattern of
struggle. The movement of doing against-and-beyond labour is
a thawing, a social flowing that breaks definitions, a flowing in
which the doing of one person blends and mingles indefinably
with the doing of others. The knowing that is part of this doing is
part of the same movement: also a thawing, a social flowing that
breaks definitions, a flowing in which the knowing of one person
blends and mingles indefinably with the knowing of others.2
Knowing is a process constructed collectively (sometimes in the
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