Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

evils or cnpiwli m and the urgent necessity of a radical change
in I'h ' r lation between humans and other forms of life as he
wnt rs his plants, while the woman who clashes with the army
to prevent the privatisation of water may be thinking simply
of how to feed her family rather than of the global struggle
against the commodification of basic necessities. There is a
dynamic in all of this. The point about cracks is that they run,
and they may move fast and unpredictably. That is why it does
not help to make sharp distinctions. The car worker is watering
hi plants on the allotment today, but he may be out on the
streets fighting Monsanto tomorrow. The woman who fights
for water today may start reflecting tomorrow on the way in
which capitalism is destroying the world. The movement of the
cracks is a movement of experience, very often a learning-instruggle,2
although it would be wrong to think of the movement
as unidirectional: it also happens that people get tired and the
crack freezes over again.
All of these people reject, in one way or another, the
determination of their activity by money and oppose to that logic
another concept of doing, an other-doing, which they seek to
determine themselves, individually or collectively. They try to do
what they themselves consider desirable or necessary. Of course
this is not pure self-determination, because what we consider
desirable or necessary is affected by the society in which we
live and because we do not control the environment in which
we act, but it is a drive towards social self-determination, it is
a push not only against but also beyond the determination of
our lives by capital.
The crack does not stand on its own. Very often it is an excess,
an overflowing from a more limited struggle. The teachers in
Puebla fight against the neo-liberal restructuring of education
that the government seeks to impose; when the government
refuses to accept their proposal, they draw up their own
alternative plan for improving the educational system.3 A factory
closure is announced and workers start to negotiate the terms of
red undancy; when they do not get what they want, they decide
t·o occupy the factory and run it as a cooperative, and then they
slC1 rt to ca II for a world without bosses. Students protest against
t h . ill trod Llction of fees, and, when there is no response, they
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