John Holloway: We are the Crisis of Abstract Labour

John Holloway: We are the Crisis of Abstract Labour

Transcript of a talk given in Rome, 2006

“Voices of resistance: alternative voices”. What are our voices? Our voices are the voices of the crisis of abstract labour. We

are the crisis of abstract labour. We are the power of creative doing.

We are crisis. We are not in the first place a positive force, but a

negative one. What brings us here today is not something positive

that we have in common, but the No that we all share. No to

capitalism, no to a world of violence and exploitation, no to a form of

social organisation that is quite literally destroying humanity, in

every sense of the word. No to a world in which what we do is

determined by forces we do not control. ¡Ya basta! But this ¡ya

basta!, this refusal, does not stand outside capital, it goes to the very

heart of capital, simply because capital depends on our yes, on our

acceptance, on our agreement to labour and create value, on our

reproduction of the obscenity that surrounds us. Our NO is a no with

force, simply because the existence of capital depends upon our

saying yes. Our NO is the endemic crisis of capital.

We are NO, we are negativity, we are the crisis of capital. But we are

more than that. We are the crisis of that which produces capital, the

crisis of abstract, alienated labour. Abstract labour produces capital.

Indeed, capital is the abstraction of labour, the process by which the

immense richness of human creativity is controlled, contained,

harnessed in the service of the expansion of value. The abstraction

of labour reduces the intense colour of creative doing to the greyness

of value production, to the emptiness of money-making. In

capitalism, creative doing (what Marx called concrete or useful

labour) is subjected to abstract labour, it exists in the form of

abstract labour, but this form conceals a constant tension, a constant

antagonism between content and form, between creative doing and

abstract labour. Creative doing is subjected, but not eliminated by

abstract labour: it exists in constant rebellion against abstract labour,

it exists as the latent crisis of abstract labour.

Here then is the core of class struggle: it is the struggle between

creative doing and abstract labour. In the past it has been common to

think of class struggle as the struggle between capital and labour,

understanding labour as wage labour, abstract labour, and the

working class has often been defined as the class of wage labourers.

But this is quite wrong. Wage labour and capital complement each

other, wage labour is a moment of capital. There is indeed a conflict

between wage labour and capital, but it is a relatively superficial

conflict. It is a conflict over the level of wages, the length of the

working day, the conditions of labour: all of these are important, but

they presuppose the existence of capital. The real threat to capital

comes not from abstract labour but from useful labour or creative

doing, for it is creative doing that stands in radical opposition to

capital, that is, to its own abstraction. It is creative doing that says

“no, we shall not do what capital commands, we shall do what

we consider necessary or desirable”.

We are the crisis of abstract labour, we are the crisis of the labour

movement, the movement built upon the struggle of abstract labour.

Since the early days of capitalism, abstract labour has organised its

struggle against capital, its struggle for better conditions for wage

labour. At the core of this movement is the trade union movement

with its struggle for higher wages and better conditions. In the

classic literature of orthodox Marxism, this is seen as the economic

struggle, which must be complemented by political struggle. The

political struggle is organised in parties, which have the winning of

state power as their focus - either by parliamentary means or by

armed struggle. The classic revolutionary party aims, of course, to

go beyond the perspective of the trade unions and to lead a

revolution that will abolish abstract, wage labour, but in reality it is

(or was) trapped within the world of abstract labour. The world of

abstract labour is a world of fetishism, a world in which social

relations exist as things. It is a world populated by money, capital,

the state, the parties, institutions, a world filled by false stabilities, a

world of identities. It is a world of separation, in which the political is

separated from the economic, the public from the private, the future

from the present, the subject from the object, a world in which the

revolutionary subject is a they (the working class, the peasantry), not

a we. Fetishism is the world of the movement built upon the struggle

of wage labour, abstract labour, and from this fetishism there is no

escape: it is a world that is oppressive and frustrating and terribly,

terribly boring. It is also a world in which class struggle is

symmetrical. The complementarity of abstract labour and capital is

reflected in a basic symmetry between the struggle of abstract labour

and the struggle of capital. Both revolve around the state and the

struggle for power-over others; both are hierarchical; both seek

legitimacy in acting on behalf of others.

We are the crisis of abstract labour and its labour movement. That

has always been true, but what is new is that we are no longer just

its latent crisis, but its open, manifest crisis. Abstract labour has

always been the key to capitalist domination, that is to say, the

conversion of creative doing into abstract labour and, with it, the

transformation of human creators into wage labourers. Employment,

in other words, has always been the core of capitalist control. The

so-called full-employment economies of the post-war period,

combined with the massive and intense abstraction of labour in the

Fordist era were perhaps the high point of the rule of abstract labour

and its institutions - of which the classic labour movement was a

central part. This mode of domination has been in open crisis for the

last thirty years, and we are that crisis, our NO, our refusal to accept

the conversion of our creativity into meaningless abstract labour, the

conversion of ourselves into machines.

But what of neo-liberalism, what of war, what of empire and

biopower and the new forms of social control? Have they not

overcome the crisis and created a new basis for capitalism? No, I do

not think so, and we should be very careful in our theorisations not

to turn crisis into a new paradigm, a new era of domination, a new

empire, simply because the positivities of paradigmatic thought

incarcerate our negativity, close our perspectives. It is capital’s

task to create a new paradigm, not ours. Our task, both theoretical

and practical, is to create instability, not stability. Marxism is a

theory of crisis, not of forms of domination: not of the strength of

domination, but of its fragility. And there are many, many

indications of the fundamental fragility of capital at this moment:

both its growing violence and its continued dependence on the

constant expansion of debt. Certainly, there is a constant expansion

and intensification of the abstraction of labour: we in the universities,

for example, are very aware of the way in which our work is being

subjected more and more directly to the demands of the market. But

at the same time, there is an increasing failure of abstract labour to

contain the thrust of creative doing within the bounds of value

production, within the bounds of the market.

That is the crisis of abstract labour: the inability of abstract labour to

contain the force of creative doing. Employment has always been,

and continues to be (despite the extension of discipline to the whole

of the “social factory”), the principal disciplinary force of

capitalism, the principal means of containing and reducing our

humanity, our refusal-and-creation. The crisis of employment

everywhere both intensifies this discipline (as people compete for

jobs) and weakens it, as it fails to fill people’s lives: the

precariousness of employment is also the precariousness of the

abstraction of labour. Increasingly, the struggles of protest against

capitalism go beyond the bounds of the movement based on abstract

labour. It is not that the old labour movement ceases to exist, or that

it ceases to be important for the improvement of living conditions,

but increasingly the struggles against capitalism overflow from the

structures and conceptions of this movement. Whether or not the

category of class is used explicitly, this is not an abandonment of

class struggle, but an intensification of class struggle, a different

level of struggle. This is a struggle that breaks the symmetry that

characterised the struggle of abstract labour, a struggle that is

fundamentally asymmetrical to the struggle of capital and rejoices in

that asymmetry: to do things in a different way, to create different

social relations, is a guiding principal.

In this new reconfiguration of class struggle, we are the

revolutionary subject. We? Who are we? We are a question, an

experiment, a scream, a challenge. We need no definition, we reject

all definition, because we are the anti-identitarian power of creative

doing and defy all definition. Call us the multitude if you like, or,

better, call us the working class, but any attempt at definition makes

sense only in so far as we break the definition. We are

heterogeneous, we are dissonant, we are the affirmation of

ourselves, the refusal of alien determination of our lives. We are,

therefore, the critique of representation, the critique of verticality and

of any form of organisation that takes responsibility for our lives

away from us. Listen to the voices of the Zapatistas, of the

piqueteros of Argentina, of the indigenous in Bolivia, of the people of

the social centres of Italy: the subject they use all the time to speak

of their struggle is “we”, and it is a category that carries real

force.

We are feminine, nosotras not nosotros, because the crisis of

abstract labour is the crisis of a male-dominated activity and form of

struggle and because the new class struggle does not have the same

gender composition as the old.

We are the breaking of time, the shooting of clocks. The movement

of abstract labour projects revolution into the future, but our

revolution can only be here and now, because we are alive here and

now and in the future we shall be dead (or immortal). We are the

intensity of the moment, the search (Faust’s search, Bloch’s

search) for the moment of absolute fulfilment. We are the poetry of

the working class, the working class as poetry.

Our revolution, then, cannot be understood as building for the great

event in the future, but only as the creation here and now of cracks

or fissures or ruptures in the texture of domination, spaces or

moments in which we say clearly “no, we will not accept that

capital should shape our lives, we shall do what we consider

necessary or desirable”. Look around and we can see that these

spaces or moments of refusal-and-creation exist everywhere, from

the Selva Lacandona to the momentary refusal-and-creation of an

event like this. Revolution, our revolution, can be understood only as

the expansion and multiplication of these cracks, these

lightning-flashes of refusal-and-creation, these volcanic eruptions of

doing against labour.

Asking we walk. Preguntando caminamos.