CRACK CAPITALISM

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Abstract labour rules: the abstraction
of doing into labour is the creation of a
cohesive law-bound totality sustained
by the exploitation of labour.
Much of the story recounted in the previous sections could have
been (and has been) told in different ways. The creation of our
modern society with all that it implies in terms of labour, rationalscientific
thought, dimorphous male-dominated sexuality, the
objectification of nature, the homogenisation of time, enclosure
in an all-embracing system, and so on, and so on: all this can be
(and has been) seen simply as modernisation, the creation of a
modern industrial society. More critically, it can be discussed in
terms of the establishment of a disciplined society,1 or in terms
of the critique of the Enlightenment,2 or, fascinatingly, as the
'struggle between Pentheus and Dionysus' for the suppression
of collective joy.3
Here we insist that the establishment of the society in which
we live should be seen as being created by abstract labour (the
abstraction of doing into labour). This is an attempt to bring
it home to us, to put our activity, what we do from day to
day, in the centre of analysis. This can be seen as critique ad
hominem, or simply as materialism: materialism is quite simply
the understanding that we humans create the world in which
we live.4 1t is not culture, it is not an external force, that creates
the society that is destroying us: it is we ourselves, through our
peculiarly deformed activity, abstract labour: 'Human beings
produce, through their own labour, a reality which increasingly
enslaves them.'s And if it is we who create this society, then we
can stop doing it and do something else instead.
Abstract labour rules, then.
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