Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

confluence of our dignities is important, but perhaps it should
be thought of as a confluence of resonance, of trying to play in
the same key: jazz musicians who come together for the fun of
it without a leader, learn to join in the same tune, each with her
particular style of developing themes and variations, moving
together in a discordant harmony.
It might be thought that any attempt to listen to, or touch
the experience of, the tiny fissures (the girl reading her book in
the park, say) means a loss of radicalness, a conversion of the
revolution into something soft and wishy-washy.8 That is not
so at all. The tiny, subterranean revolts may be far more radical
in their potential than the noisiest demonstration. "What the
girl reading her book in the park is saying silently is 'Live for
pleasure, not for pain', a slogan far more radical than the slogans
of the huge anti-US demonstration taking place at the same time.
The issue is not one of degrees of radicalness but of touching
nerves, of channelling angers and dreams, of finding resonances.
Our dignities are dignities in movement, cracks that spread.9
But the spreading is not a question of increasing membership
or enrolling more adherents. Nor is it primarily a matter of
preaching or talking, though that may play a role. It is probably
more helpful to think of contagion, emulation and resonance.
The social centre movement has spread basically in this way:
not through the members of one social centre going to another
town and convincing the people there to set up a social centre,
but through the latter hearing of or seeing the first social centre,
being impressed and deciding to set up something similar in their
own town.IO In this process of contagion, the speaker on the
rostrum is being supplemented by, or replaced by, street theatre.
If the central issue is not so much to convince or explain, but to
touch discontents that are already there, then art, theatre and
music play an especially important part. That is surely why the
aesthetic element of the manifestations of revolt has come to play
such an important part in recent yearsY Theatre, poetry and
humour have been a key element in the impact of the Zapatistas
and other movements, not as instruments of the movement but
as a central element of the movement itself.
The cracks in capitalist domination exist. Logically, perhaps,
they do not and can not exist. But they do. They do exist and
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