Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

10
Cracks exist on the edge of impossibility,
but they do exist. Moving they exist:
dignity is a fleet-footed dance.
On the one hand, the drive to break the logic of capital: the push
to create moments or spaces of refusal-and-creation, dignities.
On the other hand, the enormous cohesive force of capital: the
great sucking that pulls us back into conformity, that reabsorbs
our efforts to break away, that tells us over and over again 'Run
if you like, this is a free society, but there is no escape, there is
no escape, there is no escape.'
A real and constant clash. We fling ourselves over and over
again against the advancing walls, and we get hurt. We scream
until the ice cracks, and then watch as it freezes over again.
Our cracks exist, but they exist on the edge of impossibility.
Disillusion and disappointment are never far away: they are
written into the attempt to create another world.! That should
not surprise us, for objectively that is where we are: always
pushing at the limits, always trying to do the impossible, always
trying to break the logic of the system, always half afraid that
perhaps they are right, perhaps we are crazy. We spend years
building an alternative space, then realise that it is not so
alternative, that the other social relations we are building are
not so other, after all. We throw all our energies into breaking
the logic of capital, then look around three years later and ask
'where is the break?' This walking on the edge of disillusionment
is what dignity means in a society based on its negation.
The logic of capital, that great destructive force of social
synthesis, tells us that there is no room for dignity in a society
based on the negation of dignity. Everything must fit together,
and that is the glory of money: it is such a flexible form of
fitting things together that all sorts of activities can be bent to
its dominion.
71