CRACK CAPITALISM

activity to the demands of abstract labour and to find ways of
liberating it from the demands of money.
It is true that in capitalism concrete doing exists in the form
of abstract labour, but the relation of form and content cannot
be understood as one of simple identity or containment. As we
saw in the previous thesis, the forms of capitalist relations should
be understood as form-processes: abstract labour is an active
process of forming our activity, of abstracting concrete doing.
That means that there is necessarily a relation of non-identity
between them, a misfitting, a tension, a resistance, an antagonism.
Concrete and abstract labour may be two aspects of the same
labour, but they are contradictory, antagonistic aspects.
Concrete doing is not, and cannot be, totally subordinated to
abstract labour. There is a non-identity between them: doing does
not fit in to abstract labour without a remainder. There is always
a surplus, an overflowing. There is always a pushing in different
directions. The drive of abstraction is money: what matters is
the social validation of labour through money. The drive of
concrete labour is towards doing the activity well, whether this
be teaching, or making a car, or designing a web page. This
implies a drive towards self-determination: doing something well
means trying to exercise our own judgement as to what is well
or ill done. In so far as we recognise that our activity, like any
activity, is a social activity, our drive towards self-determination
is necessarily a drive towards social self-determination. Abstract
labour involves a drive towards determination of our activity
by money, whereas useful labour implies a drive towards social
self-determination.
We can think of the antagonism in terms of socially necessary
labour time. In order for the commodity-producer to sell his
commodity, he must have produced it with socially established
levels of efficiency: the value of the commodity is determined
by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it.
That which creates value is 'undifferentiated, socially necessary
general labour utterly indifferent to any particular content. For
that very reason ... it is defined in a manner common to all
commodities and is distinguished from others only quantitatively',
as Marx puts it (1867/1 990: 993). In other words,
the imposition of socially necessary labour time is one with
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