Crack Capitalism, argues that radical change can only come
about through the creation, expansion and multiplication of 'cracks' in the
capitalist system. These cracks are ordinary moments or spaces of rebellion in
which we assert a different type of doing.
John Holloway's previous book, Change the World Without
Taking Power, sparked a world-wide debate among activists and scholars about
the most effective methods of going beyond capitalism. Now Holloway rejects the
idea of a disconnected array of struggles and finds a unifying contradiction -
the opposition between the capitalist labour we undertake in our jobs and the
drive towards doing what we consider necessary or desirable.
Clearly and accessibly presented in the form of 33 theses,
Crack Capitalism is set to reopen the debate among radical scholars and
activists seeking to break capitalism now.
This book can be downloaded in pdf here or here.
A review by Christian Garland, Marxism & Philosophy
John
Holloway’s Crack
Capitalism, which
takes the form of thirty three chapter length theses in eight parts,
is a forceful ‘crack’ in the false closure of capitalism, and
makes for a formidable contribution to creating the fault lines of
rupture that are necessary, and indeed already exist ‘in-and-against’
this world we inhabit but seek to go ‘beyond.’ As Holloway shows
very early on, “we negate, but out of our negation grows
another-doing, an activity that is not determined by money, an
activity that is not shaped by the rules of power.” (3)
The
first three sections are a detailed excursion into the nature of
‘being-in-the-world’ that is also simply by its existence
‘against’ ‘things as they are’, for to simply exist, to
be is
not recognised by capital which only recognises the reproduction of
value and the extraction of profit, human beings exist only as
instrumental means to that end. In this sense, it is possible to
speak of anegative
ontology,
“there is a movement of refusal-and-other-creation” (6) for as a
Philippina domestic worker said recently in relation to her own
contestation of the relations of exploitation, “we will fight, we
will get stronger …we exist in this world.” As is noted in the
first section entitled simply ‘Break’: “the opening of cracks
is the opening of a world that presents itself as closed. It is the
opening of categories that on the surface negate the power of human
doing in order to discover at their core the doing that they deny
and incarcerate.” (9)
It is not
hyperbolic to say, that the book employs negative dialectics to
extraordinary effect: “The method of the crack is dialectical, not
in the sense of presenting a neat flow of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, but in the sense of a negative dialectics, dialectic of
misfitting. Quite simply, we think from our misfitting.” (9)
Indeed, Crack
Capitalism seeks
to do just that, to crack capitalism to “break it in as many ways
as we can and try to expand and multiply the cracks and promote
their confluence.” (11) As Holloway shows with exemplary clarity,
“dignity is the unfolding of the power of No.” (19), for against
the instrumental and always conditional objectification of human
beings there is the negative ontology of “movements of
negation-and-creation”. (27) Ontology understood as ‘being-in-the
world’, can be said to describe material existence, as the factual
observation of social reality ‘as it is’. In recognising that
this same social reality is itself not ‘given’, but the result
of a very specific material ordering of society, one riven by
antagonism and contradiction, and thus it is possible to define a
turn against it, to speak of a negative ontology, for in spite of
everything, “we are still alive” as Adorno said; we exist and in
so doing run up against the reified and deadening social relations
of a world we reject and did not choose – for, as the book
demonstrates, the urgency of this need to break with the present is
felt all the more the longer we are forced to exist within it. In
these same efforts to make cracks and see them spread we make
attempts toward “another-doing implicit in the No.” (29)
Holloway
offers numerous examples in the way of theorising these multiple
cracks that can be made in the seemingly impenetrable surface of
capitalism, showing that just as we reproduce capital, in everyday
social relations, so too can we cease to do so in the refusal of
relations of hierarchy and domination. Capital is after all, a
social relation that we (are compelled to) reproduce everyday. Crack
Capitalism argues
that a differentway-of-doing,
of being-in-the-world –
this world we exist in, but are also against – is possible and
everywhere present, frequently in small daily acts which just by
their doing, by their very existence, are antagonistic to capital.
The book is also well aware however, of the difficulty and imperfect
nature of refusal, and existing in an alien world which negates our
very being yet feeds ‘vampire-like’ off human subjects who are
themselves rendered as objects. Quoting Etienne de la Boetie:
“resolve to serve no more and you are at once freed,” Holloway
illuminates the nature of our servitude, but clarifies this
exhilarating maxim, by noting that it is also nearly impossible, for
there is indeed “nothing more common, nothing more obvious [but
also] nothing more difficult”. However, as the book shows,
to exist in
spite of
capital and its imperatives and against the infernal continuum of
the history it has made and would make for the future, is merely ‘to
be’ and so the negation of that which negates us.
There
is a different kind of ‘doing’, remaking the world in accordance
with one worthy of human beings, one that is not based on
objectified, reified – or as Holloway forcefully
explains, abstract
labour –
which enmeshes men and women in an alien and hostile struggle for
material (and mental and emotional) survival. In so doing, we can
and do, remake the world according to another way of doing and
relating to one another, whether this be something as seemingly
‘non-political’ as sitting in the park reading a book, or
savouring time with friends or lovers, or engaging in openly and
explicitly antagonistic rebellions against the world of money and
power. The book adds to Marx’s own recognition that a
‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen) or
creative human essence, is what distinguishes human beings from
every other species alive. We have the ‘power to’ consciously
remake both the form and content of the world, and yet we are
prisoners of it. Thus in existing ‘in spite’ of this, and
choosing to do what we consider necessary or desirable, and also
refusing as far as possible to reproduce the relations of
capitalism, we assert our own negative and resistant subjectivity.
This subjectivity, this negative ontology, is also the struggle for
human dignity. Crack
Capitalism makes
an immensely important contribution to this project of refusal.
The
fourth section of Crack
Capitalism is
a substantial development of how this doing is rendered into labour
and imprisons human beings in the world of capitalism, which they
are compelled to (re)produce against themselves as labour, a
‘power over’ and outside themselves if ever there was one.
Sections III-VI should be studied by anyone who still cannot grasp
the concept of ‘abstract labour’, which, it must be said could
include Moishe Postone and his followers. For it is the ‘two fold
nature of labour’ where ‘doing’ – the capacity of men and
women to consciously remake the world – is made into the onerous
and dead weight of abstract labourproductive
of value:
such is the nature of the capital-labour relation.
The story of
the cracks is the story of a doing that does not fit. Into a world
dominated by labour. The cracks are mis-fittings, mis-doings.… To
put cracks at the centre gives us a different vantage point: we
start from that which does not fit in, that which overflows that
which is not contained that which exists not only in but also
against-and-beyond. (85)
This
negativity, against capitalism and all of its social relations of
exploitation, hierarchy and domination, may be seen as a negative
dialectic, what Holloway has previously called ‘the restless
movement of negation’: the collective social subject refusing and
breaking – or at least seeking to break – the class relation it
remains objectified by. As Holloway shows throughout the course of
the book, to think against the world can perhaps most usefully be
seen in negative dialectical terms. As such, any reconciliation with
the ‘given’ reality of the present is rendered impossible, but
no less than this material negation of the existent, it embodies
contradiction, rupture, antagonism and refusal: opposing the false
assurances of reconciliation and closure promised by positive
identity-thinking, the synthetic totality of closure that is
capitalism. Against identity-thinking and the spurious
naturalisation of fixed social roles, such as gender divisions and
the reduction of sexuality to genital sex-as-procreation, Holloway
identifies sexual desire, the erotic – Marcuse’s ‘pleasure
principle’ – as a uniquely rich process of life-lived-for-
its-own-sake, as an end in itself, and not fulfilling any functional
instrumentality, which can thus be correctly viewed as a
significant, and inherently subversive activity which makes
noticeable cracks to the system. Looking at the history of the
domestication of sexuality and construction of male-female roles as
an example of abstract labour produced against human beings, by
human beings, Holloway recognises , “the particular patterns of
domination, then are not something that happens to us … but
patterns of domination that we create
through our activity and the way it is organised.” (123)
Throughout
the impressive critical mapping of the struggle against abstract
labour, Holloway goes some way to demonstrating the way in which
“the antagonism between labour and capital … the abstraction of
doing into labour, is also an antagonistic process” (149) for
“capitalist production is based both on the abstraction of doing
into labour and on the exploitation of labour - abstract labour.
Without the abstraction of doing into labour, exploitation would not
be possible.” (155)
As
the second half of the book shows, capitalism is based on an
inherent antagonism and struggle between diametrically opposed
material forces. The class struggle is this self-same process,
indeed it is the disruption and non-reproduction of capitalist
social relations, their refusal and potential rupture in which the
future becomes truly unwritten, and a glimpse of a mode of life
qualitatively beyond the form it presently takes as it is ‘not
lived’. For a social subjectivity must refuse – and does refuse
– the objective subsumption of life under conditions of the class
relation. Class struggle is the recurrent social antagonism, the
material contestation of the capitalist mode of production itself,
indeed as Holloway observes, the form of orthodox Marxism that
predominated in the twentieth century is now in crisis, and cannot
offer anything in the reality we face in the twenty first. This
ideology saw the class struggle as “the struggle of labour
against capital … when
it is doing against labour (and therefore against capital) (157)
which is at stake.
Simply
by existing within but also against this
world of the present, the proletariat – the revolutionary social
subject – becomes the inimical contradiction and contravention of
what is imposed and demanded by the class relation, the objective
necessity and prerequisite for the functioning and reproduction of
capital, and so its own dissolution. Indeed, the capital-labour –
the class relation for all its apparent opaque abstraction is in
fact a very real ‘actually existing’ material relation,
something explored in detail in the course of the second half the
book. One of the great strengths of Crack
Capitalism is
its critical exploration of how ‘doing’ is the struggle against
abstract labour and the discipline of labour: “the fragility of
abstraction … the permanent crisis of capitalism” (178) As
Holloway argues, in reference to the original Critical Theory of
Horkheimer and Adorno, “Critical theory is crisis theory: the
theory of doing as the crisis of abstract labour.” (200) The book
concludes with some examples of a practice which can be said to
offer examples of what might be seen as an autonomous practice, from
simply living for pleasure, and banishing the infernal logic of
capital from life, to rebellions both individual and collective that
“exist as-resentment, tension-against, rebellion-against,
rebellion against ourselves, as menace, as potential.” (221) It is
in this continual subversion and rebellion that we become truly
ourselves, rediscover our subjectivity against the
objectification, the ‘thingification’ of market relations.
Holloway
concludes without offering any false assurances, stating “there is
no Right Answer, just millions of experiments.” (256) There are
many different ways in which it is possible to break capitalism, to
open cracks. For we have no prophets, no saviours, “just
ourselves.” To break capitalism to rupture and create the ‘real
crisis’ Benjamin speaks of , to assert a new way-of-doing, and
being that is also, by its very nature antagonistic to capitalism is
the means and end of Crack
Capitalism,
of the ‘present movement’ toward communism.
4
April 2011
