CRACK CAPITALISM

form.3 This slippage from totality as a critical to totality as
a positive concept is associated especially with Lukacs and
his book, History and Class Consciousness. In this book, he
famously asserted that Marxism is the 'point of view of totality'.4
In so far as totality is the critique of fragmentation and of all
phenomena that obscure the central role of human creation, this
is very important, but Lukacs himself goes further and interprets
totality to refer to the proletariat as the subject-object of history.
The struggle against capitalism becomes the struggle for the
emancipation of the totality from its fragmentation and this is
closely associated with the idea of the Party (as representative
of the totality) and central socialist planning. At present, the
totality is fragmented and anarchic: what is needed is a unified
and socially controlled totality. It is little wonder that many
regard such a perspective as frightening.
If, however, we see the totality as the product of abstract
labour, then the struggle against capitalism is not only a struggle
against fragmentation and lack of social control, but the struggle
against totality as such. This opens up very different perspectives,
both in the short and long term. The cracks of which we have
spoken are not a struggle to establish an alternative totality,
but rather to break the existing one. If abstract labour totalises,
then the struggle against abstract labour is a struggle against
totalisation.5 This is an important practical point, simply because
the positive concept of totality is an objection raised time and
time again against the autonomist movements of recent years:
where is your programme, your national plan, your strategy,
your theory of transition? Over and over again we are invited
to conceptualise our struggles from the perspective of totality,
positively understood, that is, to incorporate them into the logic
which we reject.
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