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Capital & Class

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Crisis and critique


John Holloway
Capital & Class 2012 36: 515
DOI: 10.1177/0309816812460909
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CNC36310.1177/0309816812460909Capital & ClassHolloway

Crisis and critique

Capital & Class


36(3) 515519
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0309816812460909
c&c.sagepub.com

John Holloway
Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla, Mexico

Abstract
Critique is the opening of categories that are closed, to reveal the antagonism
within them, to reveal the crisis that they conceal. The understanding of critique
as the unmasking of domination is reactionary claptrap.
Keywords
Crisis, critique, abstract and concrete labour, open Marxism

I come home to Capital & Class with a mission, a challenge, an attack. I come to split the
atom.
Critique is a splitting of the atom, the opening of categories that are closed, to reveal
the antagonism within them. (In this sense, the term open Marxism, coined by Bonefeld,
Gunn and Psychopedis [1992], is a [helpful] tautology).
Take a category, split it open. What do we see? Perhaps more categories. Take the
commodity, for example, as Marx did. Split it open and we discover the antagonistic
unity of value and use value. But that is not enough. We need to go to the core, we need
to go ad hominem (as Marx insists). We need to reach an understanding of the category
in terms of human action, going through layer after layer of conceptualisation if necessary. Why? Because it is only if we understand the social world in terms of human action
that we can pose clearly the question of what human action is necessary to change it.
Take the antagonistic unity of value and use value, then, and split it open and then we
come to the core, the pivot, a conceptualisation that refers directly to the antagonistic
organisation of human activity, the dual character of labour as abstract labour and useful
or concrete labour. This point, says Marx in the opening pages of Capital, is the pivot
on which a clear comprehension of Political Economy turns (1965 [1867]: 41; 1990
[1867]: 132). (After the publication of the first volume, he wrote to Engels [Marx, 1987
[1867]: 407), The best points in my book are: 1) the two-fold character of labour,
Corresponding author:
John Holloway, Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico
Email: johnholloway@prodigy.net.mx

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according to whether it is expressed as use value or exchange value. [All understanding of


the facts depends upon this. It is emphasised immediately in the first chapter].1)
We take the commodity for the sake of familiarity, but we could have started anywhere. Take the state if you like, split it open, and sooner or later you arrive at the same
point, at the same critique ad hominem: it is the same self-antagonistic unity of abstract
and concrete labour that explains the existence of the state. Capital is a critique of the
categories of political economy, but the same principles apply to a critique of religion, or
politics, or sociology, or gender studies, or whatever: the question is always how do we
understand the existence of the categories ad hominem, on the basis of the way in which
human activity is organised.
We open the category and find the way in which human activity is organised. The
categories of thought are expressions of the social relations that underlie them. (They are
forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite,
historically determined mode of production [1965/1867]: 76; [1990/1867]: 169.)
When we criticise the categories, we criticise the social relations that give rise to those
categories. We open both. We see commodity and value as social relations, and open
them up to discover the dual character of labour that is at the root of both social relations
and their conceptualisation.
What do we see then? We open the commodity and we see value and use value, but
at first that is not really what we see. Our eyes focus on value. We open value and use
value and see the dual character of labour as abstract and concrete labour, but the same
thing happens. In reality our eyes focus on abstract labour. That is why there is so much
discussion of value and so little of use value. That is why, in the recent turning of attention to the dual character of labour, almost all attention focuses on one side of that dual
character, abstract labour.2
What we see first, then, is the dominant moment of the antagonistic unity. And
something awful happens. Our critique degenerates into a theory of domination.
Marxism becomes a theory of capitalist domination. Reactionary claptrap, in other
words a theory that encloses us in the enclosure that it pretends to criticise. A theory
of Cassandra, a theory that separates the analysis of capitalism from the movement of
struggle, a theory that understands Marxism as the analysis of the framework within
which class struggle develops. We do not want a theory of domination, we want a theory
of struggle. We do not want to moan, we want to change the world.
Open the category and look again, look more carefully. Beneath and beyond the
dominant moment of the antagonism we see the subordinate moment and it is moving,
struggling. Beneath value we see use value, beneath the state we see anti-state forms of
social organisation, beneath abstract labour we see concrete labour (or concrete doing).
We do not see them very clearly, we often do not have clear words to express what we see,
because they all exist in the form of something else. Use-value exists in the form of value,
concrete labour exists in the form of abstract labour, social or communal organisation
exists in the form of the state. They all exist, in other words, in the mode of being denied,
as Richard Gunn puts it (1992: 14).
Denied, but not annihilated. Contained but overflowing. Identified, defined, classified, but breaking that identity, definition, class. Critique ad hominem, critique that
takes us to the human roots of social phenomena, is inevitably anti-identitarian because
it takes us to a restlessness that will not accept. Critique ad hominem takes us to ourselves,
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517

to the source of our own criticism, to our refusal, our rage, our dignity, our misfitting,
our creativity, our inevitable schizophrenia. That which exists in the mode of being
denied fights against its own denial, exists not only in but also against and beyond the
mode of being denied. The force of our criticism lies inside that which we criticise, or,
better, lies in-against-and-beyond that which we criticise. The force of our criticism of
abstract labour lies in the fact that we the critics are part of the real movement of concrete
labour in-against-and-beyond its own denial. The critical theorist is not the privileged
intellectual, but the subject, the doer, the concrete labourer who exists not only in the
mode of being denied but also against and beyond it.
Take a category, split it open and what we discover is not a philosophical contradiction
but a living antagonism, a constant struggle, a clash between opposing movings. Abstract
labour is a constant attack, a constant imposing on human activity of the ever-tightening
constraints of socially necessary labour time. And concrete labour is a constant moving in
the opposite direction, a moving towards the social self-determination of our own activity,
the push of human creativity, the driving force of human production.
We uncover an antagonism and our uncovering is part of the antagonism we uncover.
Our opening is part of a social struggle to open. The conceptual splitting of labour is
possible only because the struggles of 1968 split labour3 practically. And the other side,
the moving of abstract labour, the abstracting of our doing into labour, is a closing. The
abstracting of doing into labour is a closing of concepts, and of social relations, the reaching out for other concepts in the process of closure, a social cohering of relations between
people, a drive towards the formation of a system with its own laws of development, with
its own identitarian logic, its own homogeneous time. The drive of formal rationality, the
drive of the Enlightenment. A cohering that gives them confidence, authority, makes it
all sound like the only possibility.
Genetic criticism, then, the derivation of the genesis of the different concepts (what
Marx calls the return journey, in the introduction to the Grundrisse [1973: 100]) is not
the exposition of how capitalism is. Rather, it follows the movement of this closing, the
moving towards a society subject to laws. We trace the movement not just of a past process, but of present struggle.
But the closing is never complete, cannot be complete (because if it were complete we would not be here criticising). It is the closing of a ceiling over our heads,
of walls around us, but we can still see beyond the ceiling, beyond the walls. The
world of abstract labour is a closed world, a world in which everything fits. But we
do not fit. We are part of a world that does not fit. We mumble, we mutter, we are
often incoherent, lacking in confidence but we know that we do not fit. Concrete
doing does not fit into abstract labour. Ours is the voice of misfitting, the voice of
concrete doing.
We open a category and discover the misfitting that it conceals. We open the category
and find that it conceals its own crisis. Critical theory is crisis theory, and crisis theory is
critical theory. A plague on the preciousness of so much critical theory that thinks it can
hold itself aloof from crisis and the social antagonism it indicates. A plague, too, on the
boring emptiness of crisis theory that sees itself as economics unburdened by the headaches of critical theory.
In the centre of critique is the opening of the most important atom of all: labour.
Concrete labour (potentially conscious life-activity) exists in the form of abstract labour,
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but exists in-against-and-beyond abstract labour, exists as the crisis of abstract labour.
Crisis is the moving of concrete doing in-against-and-beyond abstract labour, revolution
is the breaking of concrete doing against-and-through abstract labour: of the creative
force of human activity (force of production) against-and-through the dynamic social
cohesion woven by abstract labour.
This is the pivot, this is the core of the newly emerging grammar of anti-capitalism.
Why? Because if we split open labour, we can no longer conceptualise capitalism or
class struggle as the antagonism between labour and capital. Labour (at least if we
understand it as abstract labour) is the creator, day-in, day-out, of capital. Labour
is on the same side as capital, and not just labour in the narrow sense but the whole
world of theory and practice that springs from the dominance of abstract labour.
That is what the struggles are saying, in the factories and outside the factories: we are
not labour, we do not like labour, we struggle against labour, we fight to emancipate our
doing from labour labour in the sense of abstract labour, an activity we do not determine. We want to dedicate our lives to that which we want to do, that which we consider
important.
I said that I came with a mission. That is my mission: to return to Marx in breaking
open the atom of labour, not just in the sense of rediscovering the concept of abstract
labour, but seeing the revolt against abstract labour as the centre of class struggle, the
hope for another world.
Endnotes
1.

Marx continues. 2) the treatment of surplus value independently of its particular forms as profit,
interest, ground rent, etc., but this does not concern us here. Note that Marx also saw this as his
distinctive contribution: I was the first to point out and to examine critically this two-fold nature
of the labour contained in commodities (1965 [1867]: 41; 1990 [1867]: 132).
2. For a very helpful discussion of recent debates on abstract labour, see Bonefeld (2010).
3. In this use of labour to designate abstract labour, I follow Engels, who commented in
a footnote in Capital: The English language has the advantage of possessing different
words for the two aspects of labour here considered. The labour which creates UseValue, and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour; that which
creates Value and counts quantitatively is Labour as distinguished from Work (Marx
1965 [1867]: 47; 1990 [1867]: 138). In order to emphasise the distinction even
more strongly, I prefer to use doing in place of work, which still carries some of the
disagreeable resonance of labour.

References
Bonefeld W, Gunn R, Psychopedis K (1992) Introduction. In Bonefeld W, Gunn R, Psychopedis K,
Open Marxism, Vol. 1: Dialectics and History. London: Pluto Press, pp. ix-xx.
Bonefeld W (2010) Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time. Capital & Class 34(2).
Gunn R (1992) Against historical materialism: Marxism as a first-order discourse. In
Bonefeld W, Gunn R, Psychopedis K Open Marxism, Vol. 2: Theory and Practice, pp.
1-45.
Marx K (1965 [1867]) Capital, Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress.
Marx K (1990 [1867]) Capital Vol. 1, London: Penguin Books.
Marx K (1987 [1867]) Letter of Marx to Engels, 24 August 1867. In Marx K, Engels F, Collected
Works, Vol. 42. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx K (1973) Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books.

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Author biography
John Holloway is a professor of sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y
Humanidades in the Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla, Mexico. He has
published widely on Marxist theory, on the Zapatista movement and on the new forms
of anti-capitalist struggle. His book Change the World Without Taking Power (London:
Pluto, 2002; new edition 2010) stirred an international debate. His new book, Crack
Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2010), has already been translated into ten languages.

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