CRACK CAPITALISM
Holloway - Crack Capitalism
Holloway - Crack Capitalism
- No tags were found...
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
:1 binary gender divide between men and women is the product<br />
of the abstraction of doing into labour. In this sense, the conflict<br />
between doing and labour is prior to other conflicts.19<br />
We are doers-against-Iabour, the true proletariat. We are<br />
doers-against-Iabour, shadows-against-masks. Whether workers<br />
or capitalists, women or men, black or white, we are self-divided,<br />
self-antagonistic, although the intensity and nature of the<br />
antagonism differs according to the role we reject or accept,<br />
or reject-and-accept. We are fragile, unstable, situationally or<br />
temporally schizophrenic. We adopt one personality in one<br />
situation, another in a different situation. At one moment,<br />
we are a doer in revolt against labour; at another, we are a<br />
meek, obedient labourer. This changeableness, often viewed as<br />
abnormality or even as betrayal of the movement, is in fact quite<br />
normal. The antagonism between doing and labour is constantly<br />
shifting. We are all self-antagonistic, but the antagonism is not<br />
stable over time: certain situations (the composition of social<br />
relations around us) bring out one or another side of this<br />
antagonism. Thus, military training is designed to strengthen<br />
the character mask and suppress any kind of hidden impulse<br />
towards humanity, and the army is a situation that strengthens<br />
this process. The same can be said of factory discipline and<br />
the factory, and indeed of any kind of institutional discipline<br />
and of any institution. The party too: the revolutionary party<br />
creates situations or contexts in which we adopt a certain role or<br />
character mask and suppress our drive towards creative doing.<br />
(This role, this character mask of the professional revolutionary<br />
or militant is now in crisis.)<br />
Does this mean that any form of institutionalisation creates a<br />
role, a character mask that disfigures and freezes? The doer-inrevolt,<br />
the rebel, the angry-young-man, the feminist, can easily<br />
become a role, an image that freezes and defines the shadowy<br />
figure that moves behind. The struggle against the role can be<br />
seen as a struggle for authenticity, but authenticity can itself<br />
become a role, a new identity that freezes.2o Capitalist society,<br />
a society characterised by the abstraction of doing into labour,<br />
constantly generates these roles and throws them upon us - there<br />
goes the revolutionary theorist, there is the militant. We want to<br />
oppose them with authenticity, genuineness, to give body to the<br />
223