Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

conditions, the actual fund-raising itself will probably create
patterns of behaviour and organisation that tend to reproduce
the capitalism that we are fighting against. The point is surely
that there is no purity here. In order to create a different world,
we need to survive physically and, unless we cultivate our own
food from the land (a real possibility in the case of peasant
revolutionary groups, but difficult in the cities), this requires
some sort of access to money, and money, whether it comes from
external funding or crime or some sort of employment, always
brings limitations and contradictions with it. The challenge is
always to see to what extent we can use money without being
used by it, without allowing our activities and our relations to
be determined by it.
Funding can perhaps be seen as a particular way of building
structures of mutual support. A more direct way of doing this
is to construct links of mutual assistance between the different
cracks. The Italian i Ya basta! group organise financial and
practical support to install an electric generator in a Zapatista
community. The workers in Zan6n, the largest of the recovered
factories in Argentina, buy their materials from mapuche
cooperatives in Chile and in this way give their support to the
mapuche movement.36 The interconnections between rebellions
in the world take the form of informal and constantly changing
networks,37 often providing important practical support.
These sorts of links are often contradictory. If the support
flows in one direction, it may result in a loss of self-determination
for the group supported, although it is not necessarily so. More
generally, solidarity can mean dilution. If it is understood as
support for the struggle of others, it is likely to contain the struggle
within certain limits. It is only if the struggle is understood as our
struggle that there can be a real joining of cracks.38
This building of links of mutual support between the
different cracks in capitalist domination is sometimes seen
in terms of the construction of an alternative economy or an
economy of solidarity (economia solidaria). This refers to the
construction of an economy that is not dominated by value or
the pursuit of profit. This is an important development, but
there are problems. First, the notion of an alternative economy
already seems to impose a definition on the organisation of
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