CRACK CAPITALISM

I't'form, the collapse of the Soviet Union and other 'communist
('ountries' and the integration of China into world capitalism, the
Ii ,feat of the movements of national liberation in Latin America
lild Africa, and the crisis of Marxism both within the universities
nod above all as a theory of struggle.
All this is widely seen as a historic defeat for the working
·Iass. Historic defeat no doubt, but defeat of what? A defeat for
(he labour movement, for the movement based upon abstract
labour. A defeat for a movement entrapped within the fetishised
forms of abstract labour. A defeat for the struggle of labour
:lgainst capital, and possibly an opening for the struggle of doing
against labour-and-capital. If that is the case, then it is not a
defeat for class struggle, but a shift to a more profound level
of class struggle.
The crisis of labour (and therefore of the struggle of labour
against capital) precipitates us into a world with different
dimensions. Class struggle continues to be central. We are
still in capitalism, in a society driven by the pursuit of profit
and based, therefore, on the constant struggle to subordinate
human activity to the requirements of the production of profit,
and on the opposing struggle to free human activity from this
determination. Class struggle is central, but it has changed and is
changing. It is no longer adequate to think of it as the struggle of
labour against capital (since this formulation leaves the unitary
character of labour unquestioned). We are forced to learn a
new language of struggle, with a new conceptuality. We are, as
Sergio Tischler puts it, in the penumbra of the threshold, still
struggling to discern clearly the new patterns of struggle, to see
our way forward. This is a time of doubts and uncertainties,
possibly opening to a new world, and possibly not. Asking is
the only way that we can walk.6
The general terms of the struggle follow from the analysis
of crisis as the crisis of abstract labour, that is, the crisis of
the abstraction of doing into labour. From the capitalist side,
the resolution of the crisis means rechannelling doing into the
parameters of abstract labour and containing it within those
parameters. At its simplest, this means employment and the
maintenance of discipline in the labour process: in other words,
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