Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

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A crack is the perfectly ordinary creation
of a space or moment in which we assert
a different type of doing.
'No, in this space, in this moment, we are not going to do what
capitalist society expects of us. We are going to do whatever
we consider necessary or desirable.' We take the moment or
space into our own hands and try to make it a place of selfdetermination,
refusing to let money (or any other alien force)
determine what we do.
This is surely what all the 'ordinary people' mentioned at the
beginning of the book have in common: the refusal to let the
logic of money shape their activity, the determination to take
a space or moment into their own hands and shape their lives
according to their own decisions.1 In some cases, this is direct
and un-theorised: the friends who form a choir because they like
to sing, the nurse who really tries to help her patients, the car
worker who spends as much time as possible on his allotment.
In other cases, it is part of an understanding that the rule of
money is the centre of a whole system of social organisation, a
system of domination that we call capitalism: in that case, the
refusal to let money determine our activity is part of a conscious
rejection of capitalism and understood as part of the struggle
against capitalism: the theatre director in Vienna, the people of
Cochabamba who fought against the privatisation of water, the
peasants in Chiapas who struggle to change their communities,
and so on. It is not that there is any clear division between those
who are 'class conscious' and those who are not: there is rather
a constantly shifting spectrum of awareness of the resonances
and implications of what they are doing, an awareness that
may be only indirectly connected to the impact of the actions
themselves. The car worker who goes to the allotment in the
evening may well have read Capital and be meditating on the
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