Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

9
Cracks dash with the
social synthesis of capitalism.
1. OUR CRACKS ARE VULNERABLE TO THE GELATI NOUS
SUCTION OF THE CAPITALIST SYNTHESIS.
We wield our dignity like a pick-axe against the encroaching walls
of destruction, and then feel a little embarrassed and disheartened
as it sinks with a splodge and a squish into a gooey jelly.
All metaphors are dangerous games that may have to be
abandoned at some point. But not now. We want to break: that
is what the idea of the crack expresses in the first place. We must
not lose that. Rupture is what it is all about. We want to break,
not just to make things a little better, not just to have Obama in
place of Bush, the Kirchners in place of Menem, Lopez Obrador
instead of Calderon. We do not just want to build a movement
or stop the privatisation of water or oil: that certainly, but we
want more, we want to break capitalism, to break the dynamic
of a system that is destroying us. It is precisely when the idea of
breaking seems so hopeless that we need to reassert it.
It is just that at times it seems so terribly difficult. All our
attempts to break seem to get sucked back into the system, if
not openly repressed. It is not enough to celebrate the cracks.
We must talk also about their problems.!
The argument is clear: the only way to think about revolution
is in terms of the creation, expansion and multiplication of
cracks in capitalist domination. This is not an empty abstraction
because these moments or spaces of revolt-and-other-doing
already exist all over the place and because they have been at
the forefront of anti-capitalist struggle in recent years. But it
has become increasingly obvious in the last few years that these
cracks face big problems. Thus, the Otra Campana initiated by
the Zapatistas, the attempt to spread their movement beyond
51