CRACK CAPITALISM

, I 'illS nnd have to find a way of surviving on the basis of
Olll ' 'om bination of occasional employment, petty trading or
nvi ' 'S (s lIing chewing gum or cleaning car windscreens at
I rn (Ii . lights, for example), and of developing forms of solidarity
among family members, friends or neighbours. The power of
lI10n y and of the commodity remains enormous in such cases,
y 't the forms of social solidarity often generate ways of living
:1 nd organising that run counter to the logic of capital. If a large
pnrt of the world's population survives on less than a dollar a
lay, it is usually because they have constructed forms of mutual
solidarity and support that generally do not exist in the more
'advanced' parts of the world.s In many parts of the world, the
construction of alternative social relations is simply a necessity:
capitalist employment is irrelevant and the capitalist state does
not function even as police or constructor of roads. For the state
and for capital, these are no-go areas, not necessarily because of
any political revolt, but simply because the police are afraid to
go in. Simple survival requires that people come together and
ta ke over the running of their neighbourhood or town, and in
the process radical relations of solidarity are often constructed.
An important example of this is El Alto, the indigenous city
that grew up on the outskirts of La Paz in Bolivia and became
(,he centre of the movements of rebellion in recent years. Raul
Zibechi argues that these slums, which have spread with great
ra pidity as a result of the neo-liberal destruction of agriculture,
have created cracks in capitalist domination and in state control,
nnd that these cracks have been at the centre of the outbreaks
of revolt in Latin America in the last twenty years.6
Are we to say, then, that any construction of other forms of
organisation outside the mainstream of capitalist social relations
should be seen as a crack in capitalist domination? Not if we
(hinl of a crack as a space or moment of negation-and-creation,
of r fu a l and other doing. Being unemployed or living in a
slull1 in Mumbai does not necessarily involve any refusal of
Clli i tal ism. It is rather that the relations of mutual support that
MI' T 'a ted in such situations can easily become the material
hnsis for a sort of flip-over, a real detournement in which victims
Huddt'llly 111 rge as rebels, and the structures of suffering are
IlIld 'Il l y tr, nsformed into anticipations of a better world. This
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