CRACK CAPITALISM

The lines of continuity are the lines of potential movement
and possible confluence. The obvious end of the crack is the
Zapatista uprising or the great counter-summit demonstrations.
The fine end is the woman who sits at her kitchen table reading
with enthusiasm of the latest anti-imperialist demonstrations or
the girl who, instead of going to work, sits in the park reading a
book, simply for the pleasure it gives her. Do these fine fissures
have the potential to widen into big cracks? We do not know,
cannot know in advance. The woman reading at her kitchen table
may go out and join the next demonstration, or she may not.
The girl reading her book in the park may conclude that there
is something fundamentally wrong with a society that does not
have pleasure as its principle, or she may not. But these are the
lines of continuity upon which the future of the world depends.
This is where the war is fought. Capital is a constant process of
blocking these continuities, of dividing people into blocks, of
telling the woman at the kitchen table that her frustration has
nothing to do with the anger of the demonstrators against the
G8 - and in this process, the left, with its definitions and classifications,
often plays an active part.
But is there a problem here? Do we not also have to establish
distinctions, lines of division? The book started with the anguished
cry of 'what can we do, what can we do to change the world?'
Is the answer 'go and sit in the park', or 'join the local choir',
or 'go for a hike in the mountains'? No. The answer is rather
'Revolt in whatever way we can', but what matters most is not
just the cry of revolutionary hatred for capitalism but the ways
in which we try to develop in our everyday practice activities
that misfit with the cohesive suction of capitalist activity.
But how do we know if our activity is a misfit or if it simply
complements the development of capitalism? The difficult thing
is that we do not know. We analyse it and think about it, but
we cannot know for sure. Moreover, our evaluation of what
breaks and what complements capitalism is shifting all the
time. In the last century, thousands, perhaps millions, of people
gave their lives to the struggle to break the logic of capital and
create a different society. And now we look at the results -
the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and so on
- and suspect that their lives of struggle did more to strengthen
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