CRACK CAPITALISM

machinery. This does not make capital any less exigent, however,
since the relative growth in investment in machinery means that
capital requires an ever-increasing rate of exploitation in order to
maintain its rate of profit: this is Marx's argument in his analysis
of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.1
However we look at it, the fall in capital's rate of profit has as
its base a non-subordination, a failure to subordinate ourselves
to the degree that capital demands of us, a 'whoa, no more,
you can't push us any more, we are humans not machines,
humans with our lives and loves, our children, our friends, our
parents.' Simply trying to be human, chatting to our friends,
falling in love, becomes converted by the dynamic of capital,
that constant turning of the screw, into an act of insubordination.
And conversely: it is this trying to be human that is
our revolutionary hope, the potential breakthrough of another
world, another doing, another way of relating.
The law of value, the rule of socially necessary labour time,
is a constant tightening of the Procrustean bed, a constant
redefinition of the labourer that capital requires. Capital's
problem is the problem that it has had since its birth: to
transform the savage into a labourer. The constant redefinition
of labour (of value production and what it requires) means that
capital is ever anew confronted with the task of forcing people
to fit into its requirements. Capitalist crisis is always a crisis of
fitting: the savages will not do what capital requires of them (of
us). 'Fit or be damned!' cries capital. And to more and more
people in the world it says 'you do not fit, we have no use for
you: you are too old, too pregnant, too unstable emotionally,
you know too much philosophy, your children fall ill, you chat
to your friends, you do not speak English, you think too little
about money and too much about other things.' And more and
more people reply, 'yes, it is true, we do not fit.' The crisis is
an explosion of misfitting - the result of the lack of fit between
humans and the requirements of value production, and the
dramatic manifestation of that lack of fit. 'It is true', we repeat,
'we do not fit.' But there is something else on the tip of our
tongue, we want to add something else. And on this something
else hangs the future of the world. We bow our heads and say
'yes, it is true, we do not fit in, but we shall try harder: we shall
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