Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

central planning, but in practice central planning has never
been either rational or central, and it certainly has not been an
example of self-determination.34
From the perspective of our multiplicity of cracks in capitalism,
how can we possibly think of a system of planning? Yet value
preys on fragmentation: that is a real problem. If there is no
central planning, then how do we coordinate our different
processes of creation or production, if not through the market?
And if we produce for the market, what distinguishes us from
any other capitalist enterprise?
Whatever the crack, whatever the form of the struggle to
break with capitalism, value lays siege, not just as an external
force, but through the corrosive, destructive force of money.
Money embodies the rationality of capitalism that stands against
the non-sense of rebellion. In capitalism, it is the movement of
value that determines what should be done and how it should
be done: no human, not even the capitalist class, makes those
determinations.
Value attacks as a force operating behind our backs, as the
silent power of money, introducing cheap commodities, luring
people away in the hope of escaping from poverty (the Zapatistas
that migrate to find employment in Cancun, for instance). As
market, it also stands against us as a palpable limit to what we
can do.
Occupied factories, like the hundreds occupied in Argentina in
recent years, face immediately the question of their relation to the
market. In general, the factories occupied (or 'recovered') were
faced with closure before the occupation - closure motivated
by the inability of their owners to sell their products on the
market. When the workers seize the factory, they are faced with
the dilemma of having to produce the same commodities for sale
on the market: that is the only way that they can ensure their
own physical survival. It may be possible to introduce different
working relations within the factory or workplace, to do away
with hierarchies or introduce the rotation of tasks; it may be
possible to use the workplace after working hours for political
meetings or cultural activities, but all such changes (significant
though they undoubtedly are) take place within the context
of the pressures generated by the need to sell the products as
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