CRACK CAPITALISM

doing into abstract labour, is an episode in the past, a sad story
that is closed, so that there remains only one contradiction, that
between labour and capital.
The alternative approach, far less widespread and less
developed, focuses on the conflict between concrete doing and
abstract labour, on the struggle of doing against labour. In terms
of reading Capital, it attaches great importance to the first
chapter and sees the later analysis of surplus value production
as a development of the fundamental struggle between doing and
abstract labour.? In this approach, the transformation of doing
into labour is not a closed book but a living antagonism. The
revolutionary subject is doing (conscious life activity) and the
enemy to be abolished is abstract labour: the struggle of doing
is the struggle of the working class against its own existence
as working class, and it is not possible to define the working
class since the antagonism between doing and labour is one that
traverses every aspect of our existence - and indeed because the
process of definition is one moment of the process of abstraction
of labour.s
In one sense, the two approaches are diametrically opposed,
since one sees anti-capitalism as the struggle of labour, while
for the other it is the struggle against labour, yet we should not
be too hasty to draw clear lines: in practice, there is a constant
fudging of the separation, a constant overflowing from the more
restrictive to the broader form of struggle.
The understanding of class struggle as the struggle of labour
against capital has dominated both the practice and the theory
of the struggle against capital, at least until very recently.9 This
has had enormous consequences for the theory and the practice
of struggle. Among other things, it has led to the total neglect
of the 'two-fold nature of labour', the theoretical and practical
suppression of useful doing, the relegation of the antagonism
between doing and labour to the historical past, the olden days
of primitive accumulation. The Marxism of the late nineteenth
and most of the twentieth century was part of the class struggle,
but part of a particular form of class struggle in which the
antagonism between doing and abstract labour was relatively
obscure, with the result that the theory of this struggle was
blind to the two-fold nature of labour. Traditional Marxism
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