CRACK CAPITALISM

structure of what it is [we] choose to do.' Self-determination
means lifting the present moment from the continuum of history
and abolishing the past:
In Hegel's succinct expression, 'there is no past'. The past lives on 'in the
depths of the present' not in the sense that it determines this present, but
in the sense that it is always some specific free action which, as its context
or background, makes a particular interpretation of the past appear ...
Action in time is past-determined, whereas action which is time knows
nothing of a past which determines it but only a future towards which it
aims. (Gunn, 1985: 11-12)
The struggle for self-determination is the struggle for time-aswhich.
Time then leaps out of the clock, leaves time-in-which
behind, reaches for eternity. Gunn, recalling that Lenin argued
that Marx's Capital could be understood only through reading
Hegel's Logic, suggests that 'both Marx and Hegel can be
understood only by means of a reading of Boethius's Consolation
of Philosophy'. Boethius, a theologian of the fourth century,
understood eternity as the nunc stans, the moment of 'perfect
possession at the same time of endless life', 11 a moment in which
'all moments of history are laid out co-temporally before God's
view' (Gunn 1985 : 9) , 1 2
This is Benjamin's Jetztzeit or now-time, or Bloch's constant
pursuit of the Faustian moment of perfection in which we say to
the moment itself 'stay a while, you are so beautiful' (verweile
doch, du bist so schon). For Bloch, the revolutionary impulse,
the drive towards self-determination, can be traced in all those
moments of creativity which break with that which is and open
towards a world which does not yet exist. The third volume of
his great work, The Principle of Hope (1959/1986), is devoted
entirely to the pursuit of the moment of perfection, the nunc
stans, suggesting that this is the way in which we should think
of revolution and communism. For Benjamin, this breaking of
time is a flash of lightning, a flash of intense present that breaks
that-which-is and opens a different present, an intense Now.
These are the 'moments of excess'13 characteristic of acts of
rebellion. Any great act of rebellion is a moment of excess in
which inhibitions and established patterns of social behaviour
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