CRACK CAPITALISM

;lI1tagonism against-and-beyond abstract labour. The result is
that emancipated activity appears only as a future possibility
devoid of any real grounding in present-day society.18 Without
an understanding of emancipated activity as present struggle,
the members of the labour society appear as Pavlov's dogs, of
whom we can only hope that somehow they will be able to break
their conditioning: 'We cannot know whether Pavlov's dogs can
escape from their conditioned existence. It remains to be seen
whether the decline of labour will lead to a cure of labour-mania
or to the end of civilisation' (ibid., 44, s.17).
Another way of expressing our difference with the Krisis
group's analysis is to say that they see the crisis of labour as a
breakdown which shows the necessity of revolution, but they
do not understand it as being simultaneously and immediately
the potential breakthrough of a different activity, of a human
doing existing not only in but also against and beyond labour. In
spite of their criticism of orthodox Marxism as being the theory
of labour, they follow the logic of that tradition in making a
separation between capital and class struggle, and hence between
crisis and struggle. In this logic, the crisis of capital can only
provide an opportunity for revolutionary change or point to
the necessity of revolutionary change: the push for change is
not understood as being the stuff of crisis. To see doing (or
concrete labour) as the crisis of abstract labour is to see the
push for change as being the core of the crisis: crisis, then, is
not breakdown but potential breakthrough.
In the face of these arguments it is important to reiterate the
argument presented here.
There is a permanent antagonism between abstract labour and
doing, that is, between the abstraction of doing into labour and
the push of doing towards self-determination: this is what Marx
refers to as the dual character of labour. There is a relation of
constant tension between the two types of activity, but this is
concealed by the dominance of abstract labour. Abstract labour
appears to be the only possible type of activity: a unitary concept
of labour prevails. The abstraction of doing into labour (and
the unitary concept of labour) is constantly threatened by the
inherent dynamic of abstraction itself, the constant turning
of the screw that is inherent in the drive of socially necessary
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