CRACK CAPITALISM

at the work of Harry Cleaver (1979, 1992). It is Cleaver who,
among all the Marxist commentators, addresses explicitly the
political significance of the two-fold nature of labour. In his
book, Reading Capital Politically, he dedicates a chapter to the
topic and opens the question of how 'to interpret this dichotomy
between useful labour and abstract labour politically' (1979:
131). He assumes, however, that useful labour is completely
subordinated to abstract labour:
The elimination of capitalist work or abstract labour can only mean
the elimination of concrete useful labour, insofar as this is an activity
imposed as a form of social control ... Useful labour in industry, whether
of the period of manufacturing or that of machinery, is always shaped
by capital's need to control the class. Because useful labour is in this
way the producer of value/control as well of use-value, it cannot be
'liberated'. It must be smashed in its present forms in order to smash
value itself. (ibid.: 132)
In a later article, Cleaver attaches to the concept of 'self-valorisation'
some of the characteristics that have been conceptualised
here in terms of the movement of doing against labour. Selfvalorisation,
according to Cleaver, 'indicates a process of
valorisation which is autonomous from capitalist valorisation
- a self-defining, self-determining process which goes beyond the
mere resistance to capitalist valorisation to a positive project of
self-constitution' (1992: 129). In the same article, he speaks of
'the many processes of self-valorisation or self-constitution that
escape the control of capital' (ibid.: 134).
It is clear that we are speaking of, and trying to understand,
more or less the same processes of revolt. Cleaver prefers to
conceptualise them as processes of self-valorisation, while I
see them as expressions of the antagonism between concrete
doing and abstract labour. Does the distinction matter? This
is an issue that touches the whole argument of this book:
when an established term such as self-valorisation exists, why
do I leave that aside and talk instead of the dual character of
labour, insisting (against the whole weight of tradition) that the
relation between abstract and concrete labour must be seen as
a live antagonism?
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