Revolution and detotalization: An approach to John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism

I

John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism (2010) is a book whose main aim is to think revolution today. If, for over seven decades, the theoretical paradigm of revolution was Lenin’s What is to Be Done, Holloway’s book, which continues on the same line of the reflections laid out in Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (2002), could very well be called the Anti-What is to Be Done. Its main theses constitute a radical critique of Leninism as a revolutionary theory and practice. For Holloway, to update the notion of revolution we must overcome not only capitalism, but also the kind of political praxis which derives from the Leninist conception of revolution. His idea of the revolutionary subject is the antithesis of the one elaborated by Lenin in his famous work. One of his main arguments is that there cannot be a radical, communist revolution on the basis of the separation of subject and object (in terms of party/class, vanguard/masses, state/society) which is characteristic of Leninism and which, moreover, paradoxically turned out to be an expression of the bourgeois form of the political, even if it had consciously intended to embody the overcoming of the latter. That is because this work is driven by the question of how to overcome the political as a form of capital domination. These issues, of course, had already been formulated in Holloway’s Change the World; however, in this work, the author deploys a systematic reflection starting from a scarcely visited or – even better – almost invisible locus of class struggle: in the words of the author, the antagonism between doing and labour. And we say it is an almost invisible locus of reflection because it is through Holloway’s pen that we approach it, and because the centre of traditional Marxist analysis has always been the contradiction between capital and labour, as he points out. Through this essential contradiction, widely ignored in traditional analysis, the author derives an idea of the revolutionary subject in close relation to real life, understood as a living expression of social antagonism.

II

Holloway’s theory of the revolutionary subject is a theory of everyday life. This is probably one of the text’s most important contributions. If we think of everyday life as a defined structure, because it is such a structure and because of the relations of domination and exploitation, the logical consequence when thinking of a revolutionary change is that revolution is a rupture, that it emerges against everyday life, from outside everyday life, for everyday life is a closure which reproduces itself: that is, a logic that cannot but reproduce closures. That is so insofar as the notion of structure implies the reified dimension of social relations whereby the subject appears crystallized in the form of an object; in other words, in this structure the subject exists in the form of its negation, in the form of the object. Thus, everyday life can be comprehended exclusively in terms of the form of existence of power and everyday domination. Everyday life is determined by the structure that shapes the commodity form and social relations. Therefore, workers exist as a personification of waged labour and their struggle does not transcend this form of capitalist relations, for they identify with their condition of sellers of their own labour power or their condition of capital; in other words, they identify with their existence as a commodity form.

So, in order to think of the revolution, there must be an organization, a vanguard, which will bring revolutionary conscience to the masses ‘from the outside’. To put it briefly, according to this approach one could say that revolution is an event which concentrates on the time that denies everyday life, and the vanguard is a vanguard because it is an agent of the extraordinary, because it lies outside the structure of this everyday life and can operate upon its contradictions. It is only through the breaking from the outside of this reified structure that the subjective conditions for revolutionary triumph can be created. These conditions ultimately allow for the handling of a crisis which is derived from the objective contradictions of the system. Between subjective and objective conditions, there is a duality which is inherent in the separation of subject and object. The subjective conditions of revolutionary change emerge from the autonomy of the political and not as a movement of the antagonism which reaches beyond the structure of everyday life. It is the vanguard that is in charge of creating them.

However, Holloway tells us this approach is mistaken, that revolution is, rather, the realization of everyday life in a sense which is radically different from the one implied by the identity of the commodity form.

Everyday life is indeed dominated by the commodity form of social relations or capital, but that does not necessarily mean it is a closed structure. It is the fetishism of the commodity that makes us regard everyday life in these terms. Following Marx, Holloway goes deep into the obscure, scarcely studied and widely ignored side of value. He tells us that, as it is written in the first chapter of Capital, commodity is the contradictory unity between use value and value; that use value is produced by concrete labour and value by abstract labour, and that this dual character of labour is a specific feature of capitalism. However, what is new in this analysis is the formulation that the subordination of specific labour to abstract labour within the capitalist relation does not imply the creation of a flat and functional reality for capital, but rather the opposite: the antagonism lives on as part of the process of the creation of value and the reproduction of the system. Capital can only be explained in terms of a process that never ceases to be the movement of reproduction of a contradictory totality, precisely because it is not an ‘automatic subject’, even if it might seem like it, but rather struggle, class struggle. In other words, capital is not a structure that self-reproduces once it has created the preconditions for its existence. Rather, it is a structure that should be thought of as the reified moment of social existence; a moment, however, that does not exhaust social reality itself. On the contrary, this moment is explained in terms of estrangement from what Holloway calls social doing in the category of labour.

This is precisely the focal point of Holloway’s analysis. He proceeds through an inversion of the traditional Marxist analysis of capital, whose starting point is the domination which in capital appears as something given. In this perspective, use value and specific labour exist only as the bearers of value: that is, their existence is functional to the capitalist relation. The dual character of labour explains the commodity in terms of a physical thing and a social relation and, in broader terms, the movement of the system and its contradictions which are expressed in the falling rate of profit. But all this occurs within the system; it is part of the conception of labour as a category of capital. Holloway wants to go beyond that, because he is convinced that a starting point which is focused on domination can only produce a paralysing and, at the same time, fetishizing result. According to his line of argument, this approach turns us into spectators of an objective reality that moves according to its own laws and is absolutely independent from us. So, far from stressing the importance of the object, he actually underlines the antagonism that explains the object itself, for which it is fundamental to highlight how human creative activity or the subject interacts in the specific objectivization which is dominated by capital.

Holloway points out that the antagonism of capitalist society – as well as the source for its overcoming – must be sought in the dual character of labour. It is in the non-identitary, contradictory and antagonistic relation that exists in the unity between specific and abstract labour that the fundamental node of class struggle can be found. Holloway’s category of doing aims at highlighting this dimension of the capitalist relation, which has traditionally remained hidden in Marxist analysis – including that of Postone (2006), which, because of its rigour and scope, is undoubtedly one of the most important analyses today.

Doing presents itself mainly in two moments: (a) in its estranged form as value- producing labour – that is, as an activity that takes place within the capitalist relation and is therefore directed towards valorization (production as a moment of capital); and (b) as an antithesis of value or as non-capital – that is, as a negative activity which does not identify with capital. Thus, the objectified moment of labour as a category of capital does not suppress the antagonism presented in the (capitalist) power relation which defines the one-way orientation (directed towards the production of value) of human doing (which denies the capacity of creating a world as self-determination of the human species or as polymorphic universality). Therefore, breaking labour as a unitary category and placing antagonism at its centre – which leads to us comprehending labour not in terms of neutrality but rather as a form of antagonism – is one of Holloway’s main achievements.

As we have already claimed, Holloway starts from the Marxian analysis of the dual character of labour in capitalism. In this sense, one cannot but ask oneself if the answers to the questions that guide Holloway’s line of reflection are not, somehow, already present in Marx’s work. Regardless of the fact that he makes that point clearly in his text, it is my opinion that these answers are not that obvious in Marx, to the extent that there has been a solid continuity of the objectivist vision in the different versions of Marxism, from Kautsky to Postone, passing through Althusser.

That means, amongst other things, that Marx’s texts, especially Capital, allow for a reading with such characteristics. And I am not referring to the obvious observation that we all read texts such as Capital in different ways, but rather to an epistemic form. In other words, however pregnant with our personal and collective experiences our readings might be, they still follow up on a conceptual order which is imposed by the structure of the text. Therefore, Capital can be approached in an objectivist manner, whereby capital is regarded as a thing ruled by its own laws, as an automatic subject that evaluates itself, leading to the reproduction of the separation of subject and object in its conceptualizations – an approach that ignores the fundamental issue that this precise type of conceptualizing is part of a specific social form, of a type of abstraction which characterizes capitalist social relations. This is largely related to the concept of labour. (However, it must be underlined that, in the Grundrisse (1973 [1857]), the conceptualization of labour appears in Marx more clearly linked to antagonism; it is presented as a unity which is established in terms of the synthesis of capital and, as such a synthesis, of an antagonistic relation which does not disappear because its reproduction is capital itself.)

At the same time, this concept has a political projection. If ‘productive labour’ is seen as the labour (defined in meta-historical terms and as something neutral and positive) and not as a category of capital as value-producing labour, the logical consequence is that we should think of emancipation in terms of these categories, as Gramsci and Lenin did in relation to Taylorism, for example. ¹ In political terms this implies a vertical relation between command and the continuation of the subordinate form of doing. That is why it is so important to define labour as a form of antagonism inside capital. In fact, this issue is not expressed clearly in Holloway, but it can be interpreted like this following his argument on the relation between doing and labour.

At the same time, we must clearly point out that Holloway does not limit himself to presenting the contradictory and antagonistic nature of labour. A central part of his argument consists of the conceptual deployment of the antagonism from the active side of what is negated in capital: that is, doing. Through this conceptual deployment of the pole that is negated in the capitalist relation, doing is theoretically highlighted and no longer appears in terms of subordination, passivity and domination, but as an activity that, while being part of the capitalist relation, overflows it. This is where the in-against-and-beyond of capital appears. The territory of struggle against capital is not located outside this relation; it is rather a part of it, of its antagonism.

Thus, everyday life appears before us not as a closed structure but as a living antagonism, filled with struggles and fissures. The commodity form of social relations is no longer a one-way movement of power and rule, a crushing structure made up of people performing pre-established roles, resigned to an existence of definite negation inside these roles, but a movement in which the against-and-beyond shapes a central space of reality which allows us to think of everyday life as a struggle and possibility in the here and now of another world. We are faced no longer with the predetermined horizon of capital, but rather with different thresholds of possible change. The world of capital is deprived of its guise of bulletproof fixity and is revealed as a world cracked by struggles. The against-and-beyond of doing is expressed in cracks (a central category in Holloway’s work) and these cracks are created by us, the subjects negated in the capitalist form of social relations.

III

In Crack Capitalism, the category of everyday life ceases to be closed, as we have seen, and appears as an open category, as struggle. Everyday life is revealed as a living process that is marked by antagonism and defies its representation in terms of a completed, closed domination without loopholes of dead labour over living labour. However, the argument moves beyond this: the movement of negation from below which emerges from doing and is expressed in cracks is detotalizing. Doing is seen as the negation of capital, and this negation is understood in terms of the detotalization of social relations. This is very important because, for Holloway, it is not enough to claim that everyday life is filled with resistances against capital; it is necessary to go deeper into the nature of the against-and-beyond of resistances and struggles. This has nothing to do with the search for a teleology and a predetermined direction of the existing struggles; it rather points towards the moment of rupture with the relation of capital, which encloses the clash with totality and must be comprehended in order to understand anticapitalist struggles.

So it is not about understanding struggle as a movement that fights against capital in order to establish a new totality, as Lukács (1988 [1923]) claims based on Hegel and the Leninist experience. On the contrary, it is a struggle against totality, because totality is not a neutral category but rather a category of domination which cannot be separated from the capitalist relation. The system which is based on the valorization of value, on the production and appropriation of abstract labour, is a totality. Therefore, as the author points out following Lukács, in cognitive terms totality is very important because it allows us to see the forms in which capital is expressed (economy/politics, money, commodity, profit, and so on) in terms of a unity in difference, which is necessarily manifested in forms that appear as autonomous (fetishism) and display the image of a fragmented world.

By contrast, however, following Adorno, the author points out the danger of positivization. In that sense, totality might be understood as something that goes beyond capitalist domination and, therefore, emancipation would be seen as a sort of realization of a positive totality, divested of its alienated form as capital. In that sense, the revolutionary subject would be totality expressed in a revolutionary class, the proletariat (see Lukács, 1988 [1923]). At this point also the concept of labour intervenes in a fundamental manner. As historical experience has shown, a positive concept of labour – such as the one presented by Gramsci and Lenin in their analysis of Taylorism – will very probably lead to the negation of the self-determining moment of labour in the revolutionary process: that is, in party discipline and in state power as expressions of a totality.

The solution of this issue is so important that two diametrically opposed conceptions of class struggle depend on it. On the one hand, there is the traditional conception, marked by Leninism, in which class struggle is understood as a positively totalizing movement of a revolutionary class which is led by a vanguard. The instrumental conception of revolution is part of this: class, party and state are regarded as tools for a necessary change; we are its means, and full sacrifice to the abstract idea of revolution is required. And, on the other hand, there is the notion of a movement from below which constructs a non-totalized, horizontal space. Here, particularities are elementary in the struggle against capital, for one cannot conceive the overcoming of the homogeneity which characterizes totality and its expressions – amongst them the vanguard party – without this category being central.

Let us outline Holloway’s argument in relation to this. According to him, the capitalist relation is centred in the abstraction of doing into labour. This abstraction of doing into the category of labour is a relation of domination which is oriented towards the production and private appropriation of surplus value or excess abstract labour. The characteristic feature of the domination of capital is that it appears in the form of real abstraction and not as direct and personal rule. And this real abstraction is labour as a category of capital: that is, where specific labour is subsumed under abstract labour.

Breaking away from the fetishism that is implied in the idea of overcoming the separation between economy and politics, Holloway approaches the subordination of doing to labour as a process that must be comprehended in terms of totality, for the process itself generates a totality. In Part V of his book, he writes that abstract labour emprisons our bodies and minds; that the abstraction of doing into labour is a process of personification and of the creation of the working class, as of the dimorphism of sexuality, the constitution of nature as an object, the creation of the citizen, of politics and the state, the homogenization of time, the creation of totality and the labour movement. Regarding totality, he writes:

Abstract labour constitutes a totality that is independent of conscious determination. It has its own logic, its own laws of development: the logic of capital, with its laws that operate behind the backs of the producers. … Abstract labour constitutes a totality, but it does it in a way that is not obvious. Precisely because the social cohesion is not the result of any conscious process, society appears to be a mass of incoherent particulars, of unrelated phenomena. … In the face of a world that presents itself as a mass of particulars, totality is a fundamental category of critique. This is crucial not only because it throws light on the interconnectedness of capitalist domination … and on the unity-in-separation of our own struggles.

And, he warns, if we assume this category is transhistorical, there is risk of rendering it positive (Holloway, 2010: 143–144).

If, however, we see the totality as the product of abstract labour, then the struggle against capitalism is not only a struggle against fragmentation and lack of social control, but the struggle against totality as such. … If abstract labour totalises, then the struggle against abstract labour is a struggle against totalisation.

Therefore, anticapitalist struggle aims at liberating doing, our doing, from the process of abstraction that turns it into part of a totality which is defined by abstract labour. The category of doing is presented here as something essentially detotalizing, as the irreducible moment of capital which, being non-capital, has the real possibility of going-beyond-capital and totality. Without this non-capitalist moment in the capitalist relation, it is impossible to think of struggle as an antagonism which is inscribed in the form of capital itself, an antagonism which does not stop at a moment which is functional for form, but rather overflows it. Holloway writes in relation to this:

It is true that in capitalism concrete doing exists in the form of abstract labour, but the relation of form and content cannot be understood as one of simple identity or containment. As we saw in the previous thesis, the forms of capitalist relations should be understood as form-processes: abstract labour is an active process of forming our activity, of abstracting concrete doing. That means that there is necessarily a relation of non-identity between them, a misfitting, a tension, a resistance, an antagonism. Concrete and abstract labour may be two aspects of the same labour, but they are contradictory, antagonistic aspects.

Concrete doing is not, and cannot be, totally subordinated to abstract labour. There is a non-identity between them: doing does not fit in to abstract labour without a remainder. There is always a surplus, an overflowing. There is always a pushing in different directions. The drive of abstraction is money: what matters is the social validation of labour through money. The drive of concrete labour is towards doing the activity well, whether this be teaching or making a car or designing a web page. This implies a drive towards self-determination.

It is obvious that this issue has a clear political dimension, which is openly presented through the notion of the revolutionary subject. One could say that Holloway’s theorization dissolves the classic category of the revolutionary subject that is constructed upon the idea of totality and synthesis. This has to do with the issue of personification. The capitalist relation, or the abstraction of doing into labour, in the author’s terminology, is a process of personification. Capitalists, as Marx says, are personifications of capital. Workers, in turn, embody waged labour. Their existence as personifications of labour turns them into a part of capital.

This is indeed so, Holloway says, but not in an absolute way. The working class can be considered revolutionary insofar as it moves against itself – that is, against its positivization with the mask of personification; insofar as its struggle is directed against labour (Holloway, 2010: 117–118). Thus, the working class is not revolutionary because it is the productive class, the value-producing class, but because of the fact that its struggle is directed against the production of value, against its condition of productive class.

Furthermore, this formulation opens up the concept of the subject in the sense that it is not its structural place in totality which gives it the condition of revolutionary class, but rather what is revolutionary is the movement of doing in its diversity of expressions against abstract labour and totality (the state also being a form of this). Thus, the revolutionary subject should be thought of in terms not of synthesis and totality, but rather of antitotalizing and detotalizing struggles, which can also be described as a process of de-hierarchization of struggles. According to Holloway, struggles produce cracks in capital which are not uniform (some are bigger than others), but which do not form a hierarchy in themselves. They can be seen as stars in a constellation, following Benjamin (1969 [1940]). These struggles are part of everyday life, as many present-day movements prove. It is not in the event that totality enters in crisis, but rather in the diversity of struggles that express the antagonism between doing and labour.

IV

Are Holloway’s insights part of the real historical movement, or are they the result of the author’s theoretical imagination? It seems to me that they are both, if we take into account that theoretical imagination is not a mere invention or the projection of personal desires upon an abstract image that evades reality. On the contrary, it is the elaboration of a theoretical image of reality which is being consciously assumed not as a a neutral object, but as a form of the social antagonism that marks the real historical movement, inside of which we exist as negated subjects struggling against this condition.

In this sense, as we have seen, it is not about theorizing on a certain object (capital) so as to attain a better knowledge of its structure and operation in terms of laws and tendencies, seeing it as an independent objectivity. The centre of the theorization is struggle: reality is not a structure which is reproduced in the form of an automatic subject, but struggle, class struggle. Capital is seen as a struggle to valorize and impose the conditions of valorization: that is, to subordinate human activity to abstract labour. By contrast, human activity, which in capital exists in the form of labour (as a relation of subordination), is not only a category of capital, but also a force which overflows it. Without this ‘excess’ or plus, life would be condemned to merely reproducing a structure: that is, the reified form which derives from abstract labour (dead labour) and accumulation. And this excess or plus can only be conceived from antagonism. That is why the starting point is of crucial importance.

To think from this point, to take antagonism as a starting point, is Crack Capitalism’s greatest challenge. For it is one thing to point out that capital is a relation of domination which determines our everyday lives, leading to our own negation as subjects in the form of money as the synthesis of social relations – which is, of course, a very important observation. But to draw out an argumentation from the side of the negated pole, non-capital, as a capillary movement that explains the crisis of capital and the creation of thresholds where a different society is being created, that is a very different matter. ² It amounts to the creation of a new language. That is why we must approach doing as a concept which is different from labour, namely doing as a negated moment in the labour form which, however, cannot be reduced to it and, therefore, can always move beyond it. In this sense, there is a double active negation, a negation of the negation: active inside capital, but also inside what is not capital. It is a language that sheds light upon the social force of that which cannot be reduced to capital, of its active-negative existence in the author’s against-and-beyond-capital. This language allows us to think of and imagine struggle beyond and against the epistemic limitations of the classic (especially Leninist) cannon of revolutionary theory.

However, Holloway’s formulations can also be interpreted as a struggle against the radical forgetting which is implicit in the reified form of social relations and the representation of the world that this entails. Reification is oblivion, a forgetting of the centrality of human beings, of their praxis, in the creation of bourgeois society as the subject. Therefore, it is a forgetting of the fact that, as makers of this society, we have also been given the possibility to transform it. ³ That we should attribute to capital the characteristics of the subject par excellence does not amount only to an inversion, but actually to a subjective dispossession which goes hand in hand with the material one.

The production of this radical oblivion is essential in capital’s struggle to dominate life and the world. This oblivion is present in the different forms that the capital relation assumes as autonomous forms. It is present in the state form, in the economy form, in the culture form. At a microlevel, the oblivion-present is expressed in the subjectivity imposed by roles and in our existence as personifications of labour. It is also present in science, particularly in social science. Science defines nature as an object, and it does the same thing with society, too. Even orthodox Marxist stances reproduce this forgetting epistemologically, as is stated in the book.

What Holloway emphatically stresses is that, in order to bring about radical change, it is necessary that we remember our central role in the world, and this central role is expressed in doing. In this sense, this theoretical category sheds light upon everything that is negated in the commodity form of social relations and therefore exists as oblivion-present, as expropriation of memory. And the negation of our memory as doers turns us into aching bodies that cannot articulate their suffering or find a way out of this condition. On the contrary, the struggle against this expropriation reinstates us in our condition of rebel subjects. Holloway’s text is a theoretical effort that can be understood as a voice which amplifies the memory of struggles and allows us to think of revolution as a process of updating collective memory against capital’s subjectivity.

V

The political implications of this line of argument are quite clear. To conceptually update the issue of revolution, according to Holloway, there must be a radical critique of the classical idea of revolution and of the revolutionary subject. In his critique, the notions of vanguard, the party and, generally, the revolutionary – as expressions of what had been considered a historical necessity for revolutionary change – are dissolved. For the sake of contextualization, it must be pointed out that the general crisis of the (classic) canon in conceptual and ethical-moral terms came about with the collapse of the ex-Soviet Union, although in the 1960s and 1970s there had already been an important debate amongst the sectors of the left, parallel to the European mobilizations of that time, which questioned that canon and its variants. ⁴ Holloway’s recent production is a continuation, a going deeper into these debates and, at the same time, an answer to the crisis of the classical canon. It is an answer which, far from throwing the issue of revolution into the rubbish bin of history, places it first in the list of present-day concerns.

In the classic conception, the centre of gravity of revolutionary action was focused on the professional revolutionary, a character with the mission to bring revolutionary conscience to those classes that, owing to their place in the mode of production, had the possibility of assuming the role of revolutionary classes. The relation between theory and practice was established through the mediation of an organization of professional revolutionaries, who were the depositaries of scientific knowledge and the revolutionary programme. Therefore, the production of revolutionary theory was placed not in the centre of the everyday struggles of the working classes, but in a region that was privileged and relatively autonomous from these classes.

The radical organizational separation between the revolutionary party and the ‘empirical’ class, to quote Lukács (1988 [1923]), was, therefore, the political condition which allowed bringing class consciousness to the workers and thus establishing the unity between revolutionary theory and practice. According to this perspective, the ‘empirical’ class could not achieve true class consciousness because its struggles were primarily taking place within an economic context; in order to overcome this lack, it was necessary to produce a radicalization from the autonomy of the political: that is, from outside the ‘spontaneous’ movement of the class. The passing from ‘empirical’ class to revolutionary class did not have to do with the self-determination of the class itself; it was rather the result of the action of the vanguard upon the class. That, in practical terms, translated into a hieararchic scale which went from the party to the party members belonging to the class and then to the rest of the class, which had to be convinced that they should follow the vanguard’s guidelines.

Amongst other things, this perspective posed the possibility of overcoming the separation of subject and object which characterized capitalist domination through a vertical act, from above; however, far from overcoming the divide, the latter was reproduced in terms of vanguard and class (class as the object of politics). One could say, following Benjamin (1969 [1940]), that in the core of such a conception can be found homogeneous time and synthesis; or maybe, even better, that the idea of vanguard pays tribute to an idea of progress. Revolution is progress, a new synthesis. However, synthesis cannot be explained without the rational-abstract temporal core; the latter is part of the former, and that is presented in a state form which, in turn, implies a real separation and abstraction.

Holloway tells us that this concept of class struggle and revolution cannot possibly lead to a transformation of the world in an anticapitalist direction, and that it can, indeed, be considered instrumental. The centrality of revolution and class struggle can be found in doing as a movement against-and-beyond capital, and in the cracks, the particular expressions of this movement. ‘The crack is the revolt of doing against labour’ (Holloway, 2010: 85). The crack, however, far from being a punctual and positive answer to capital’s domination, is a form of existing in antagonism, a movement which implies the formulation of questions, a way of walking against-and-beyond capital. ‘The cracks are always questions, not answers’ (Holloway, 2010: 20). That is why they must not be idealized, but must, however, be recognized as our starting point:

It is important not to romanticise the cracks, or give them a positive force that they do not possess. And yet, this is where we start: from the cracks, the fissures, the rents, the spaces of rebellious negation-and-creation.

So who is the subject? The crack is not a class, it is not a party or a group of revolutionaries. The cracks are us, ordinary people (‘This is the story of ordinary people’, Holloway, 2010: 5); we who, in our double condition of dominated and rebel beings, resist domination and want to create a world where there will be no place for domination. Ordinary people, as the Zapatistas showed us. Here Holloway sees himself as part of the ordinary people in the Zapatista mirror and quotes Marcos: ‘We are quite ordinary women and men, children and old people, that is, rebels, non-conformists, misfits, dreamers’ (Holloway, 2010: 5–6). We are: the language of the crack is not impersonal, as in a text where people appear as a defined category. ‘We are’ is fundamental, for in the language of the cracks it is our overflowing.

A romantic evaluation of a ‘sponteneous’ subject? An overestimation of the active force of negation in everyday life? Holloway is conscious of the asymmetry of this struggle and of the difficult conditions in which it is taking place. I have to admit that his formulations cause me to feel uneasy, uncertain, doubtful; that is the result of my cautiousness before excessive optimism and of the embers of my Leninist experience. But that is what this book is about. It is not trying to establish a new dogma and a fetishist certainty. That is why it causes in me a certain vertigo, fear perhaps, just as the one I felt, for different reasons and in a different context, when reading Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom years ago. In any case, Holloway points out a starting point and not a finishing line. Whoever reads the book in search of a strategy pointing towards a previously theorized path will end up empty-handed or, rather, standing before a paradox. In this point also, his theorizing meets the revolutionary practice of the Zapatistas. His method is to locate the production of knowledge in the struggle of ordinary men and women, in the anticapitalist movement of those who are below. Revolutionary knowledge, and revolutionary theory as part of this knowledge, is not the privilege of a specialized stratum and of the autonomy of the political, but rather an elaboration which starts from the centre of antagonism itself, and, for the author, is expressed in the movement of doing in-against-and-beyond capital and in a ‘we’ that is revolutionary. That is why the author insists on presenting his reflections as part of this movement.

This thought brings us to Walter Benjamin (1969 [1940]), for whom revolutionary knowledge was not the heritage of an elite, but rather a quality of the struggling revolutionary classes, the only ones who can break the continuum of domination and thought. In this sense, one could say that the revolutionary class must be understood as the breaking itself of the destructive moment of class struggle; a moment that liberates the constellation that is negated by the homogeneity of time as an expression of the domination of capital. In other words, class is a positive category insofar as it is a dominated class; but class struggle destroys this determination of power and class is transformed into a critical category which incorporates the moment of its own negation as class. With this movement comes the redemption of human beings who are negated in class and capital. Certain differences notwithstanding, for Holloway this movement of class struggle is part of doing’s against-and-beyond capital.

We have reached a point that calls for a final reflection and not for the opening of more issues that arise from the reading of the book. As we have already mentioned, no revolutionary strategy can be derived from Holloway’s line of argument, but that does not mean it does not have a horizon. The anticapitalist movement is presented as a radical detotalization of life starting from the cracks, which are not only resistances, but also our own presence in-against-and-beyond capital. This can only be achieved if we dissolve in the experience of everyday struggles the practices and subjectivity that turn us into the objects of politics, regardless of whether they come from the state or from revolutionary organizations.

This is where the text comes in to draw a horizon. It does not tell us what to do; it rather says against whom we must struggle. Although it is true that, in Holloway, all we can do is mediated by against whom we must struggle, what to do remains a territory which cannot be defined in an abstract way. In this sense, we speak of a horizon. It is a problematic horizon, because the uncertainty of ‘what’ cannot be resolved through a single and homogeneous organizational theory. In this sense, Crack Capitalism is a book that throws down the gauntlet, just as Marcos did during the 2006 Otra Campaña. Travelling across Mexico, he said he did not intend to offer solutions but to pose problems, which could find a solution only if the different struggles entered in direct communication. I do not bring solutions, he said, because I do not want to be your president.

The book poses problems; it does not aspire to being a conceptual ‘president’. In this sense, it is open. We could formulate a few of the problems here, such as the relation between the movement of the cracks and time, or that of the revolutionaries and revolution as an interstitial movement, or that of violence. It seems to me, for example, that there is a danger that the cracks might be interpreted as a drift if one does not take into account that the cracks themselves – I suppose – can produce a concentrated temporality of rupture which would have the particularity of no longer producing a new totality (which can exist in terms of a concentration of detotalizing action). In this direction, state violence cannot be dismissed insofar as it is a struggle for the totalization of life. With this arises the problem of how to face the violence without reproducing the forms that one aims at overcoming. Conversely, the crisis of the idea of the vanguard does not necessarily translate into the disappearing of the figure of the revolutionary, but maybe into its radical redefinition, as in the case of the Zapatistas.

It is by now obvious that most of the questions have to do with the problematic ‘what is to be done’. However, what is important in this text is the inversion of this perspective, the reinstatement of the central character of the issue of revolution on the basis of a new conceptual horizon of class struggle, where what is to be done cannot be answered in an instrumental way.