Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

8
Dignity is our weapon
against a world of destruction.
Cracks break with the logic of capitalist society. To that 10 i.,
we oppose a different way of doing things. We want to bl' 'n k
the system, the social cohesion that holds us in place and oblig 'S
us to act in certain ways.
Dignity is a cutting edge shearing through the tight, tougl ,
compact weave of capitalist domination. Dignity is an ice-breaker,
its sharp bows cutting into an enormous mass of compacted
ice, the apparently unbreakable horror that we call capitalism.
Dignity is a pick-axe wielded against the encroaching walls
that threaten to crush the whole of humanity. Dignity is a blade
hacking at the strands of the spider's web that holds us entrapped.
The weapon of dignity is otherness, other-living, other-doing.
The otherness of dignity is a weapon, an otherness-against, a
misfitting directed (explicitly or not) against that which we do
not fit into: a world of exploitation and destruction.
The spaces and moments we have called cracks are often
described as autonomous spaces, or spaces of exodus or escape.
We have tended to avoid these terms here simply because they
draw attention away from the crucial issue: the conflict between
these space-moments and the world that surrounds them. It is
important to sing the glories of the worlds that are being created,
the new social relations and the new ways of doing things: but
we cannot go very far without talking of the clash with the
world to which these dignities are opposed. There is a constant
antagonism, a constant pressure to make the otherness yield to
the enormous cohesive force of the society that surrounds llS.
The spaces are not autonomous, though they aspire to be. They
are rather cracks, the sharp ends of a social conflict.
Dignity is an attack on capitalism, but not necessari ly a
confrontation. To confront capital is to allow it to set the
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