CRACK CAPITALISM

a common generating force that we can actually change: the
current organisation of human activity as abstract labour. Even
if only in pencil, we draw lines on the sheet of ice showing how
the different crackings are connected.
There is more than an intellectual force behind this criticism:
behind all the struggles mentioned is the drive against abstract
labour, the drive to do things in a different way, the force of our
power-to-do things differently. Our power-to-do is perverted in
capitalism into a power-over, the power of capitalism to tell us
what to do with our lives, but it exists not only in power-over,
but also as the drive against-and-beyond power-over.3 The drive
of our power-to-do in, against and beyond power-over is the
movement of doing in, against and beyond abstract labour.
A new world of struggle has opened. At its core is the struggle
against labour, capitalist labour, the labour that produces capital.
I write this paragraph at the end of a week of riots in Greece,
in which one of the communiques issued by the students reads:
'At this historical conjuncture of crisis, rage and the dismissal
of institutions at which we finally stand, the only thing that can
convert the systemic deregulation into a social revolution is the
total rejection of labour.'4 The turning of anti-capitalist struggle
against labour obliges us to rethink the categories of struggle.
We must learn a new language of anti-capitalism.
It is difficult to think of the new language as having a grammar,s
since grammar implies rules and the only rule of a language
of doing is break the rules: perhaps we should think rather
of an anti-grammar or, better, rhythms or melodies. Learning
the melodies of the new language is a process of exploring,
asking, provoking, discussing.6 It is of course the moving of
struggle that creates the melodies, but, precisely because we are
in the penumbra of a threshold trying to see our way forward,
theoretical reflection has an important role to play. The modest
proposal of this book is that the central axis of these new
melodies of struggle is the revolt of doing against labour.
Much of what is proposed in this book, particularly the critique
of abstract labour, has already been put forward by classical
critical theory (the theory of the Frankfurt School), but their
critique of capitalism comes from an unvoiced standpoint. Or
rather, they had difficulties in recognising their own standpoint.
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