Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

constantly subjected to question): its relation to the opening or
closing of the crack in question will depend on the context of the
struggle and should not be made a question of dogma. Above
all, it can not be a question of purity. In a struggle in-againstand-beyond
capitalism, there is no purity: what matters rather is
the direction of the struggle, the movement against-and-beyond.
Is the answer, then, to take control of the state and either
neutralise it or use it to spread our cracks? Can we not convert
the state itself into an anti-capitalist crack? Indeed, should we
not focus our activity on organising to gain control of the state
and turn it into an anti-capitalist crack? Is this not what is
happening in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, for example?
The state is not just any organisation, but a particular form of
organisation, and to focus the struggle for change on the state
has profound implications for the movement against capital. The
state is a way of doing things: the wrong way of doing themY
The state is a form of organisation developed over centuries as an
integral part of the capitalist system. Capital is above all a process
of separation: of the separation of the object of creation from the
creating subject, of the subject from herself and those around
her, of that which has been created from the process of creation,
and so on.16 The state is part of this process of separation. It is
the separation of the public from the private, of the co " mmon
affairs of the community from the community itself. The state
is an organisation separated from society, staffed principally
by full-time officials. Its language and its practices express that
separation: the language of officialdom, the practices that follow
set procedures and formalities. The separation from society is
policed by rules and hierarchies that ensure the maintenance of
the established forms of behaviour. The relation of the state to
society is an external relation: it relates to people as citizens (or
non-citizens), as individuals abstracted from their social context
and the particularities of their doing. It is only as such abstract
atoms that the citizens can be represented - the passions and
particularities of real people cannot be 'represented'. The state,
by its very form, and independently of the content of its action,
confirms and reproduces the negation of subjectivity on which
capital is based. It relates to people not as subjects but as objects,
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