My somewhat belated reflections on Inventing Anna (2022) were published last week on Tom Pazderka’s substack A Secret Plot. The article in part seeks to question what it is about contemporary con artists and hustlers that makes them historically distinct (assuming they are indeed historically distinct) from the mythic snake oil salesman that haunts the commodity (especially in the United States). For what it’s worth, I would want to suggest that there is a connection between: the crisis of ‘good jobs’ (or, rather, something like worsening proletarianization, understood as a concept related to both the deskilling and degradation of work within the labor process but also to the exclusion from stable employment altogether, a working class without work); the ‘ideology of work’, which manifests itself most perniciously in the myth of the self-made entrepreneur; and what I would be tempted to call a Utopian longing for autonomy, but a longing that can only seem to express itself in a form that makes it constitutively impossible to realize that longing – that is, as labor.
The title ‘Cracking Capitalism’ is a fairly loose reference to John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism (2010), the second installment in a trilogy of works which question the meaning of revolution in the twenty-first century. As well as providing a critique of the party as the organizational form, Holloway places special emphasis on the dual character of labor, on its two-fold composition as abstract and concrete. In Holloway’s reading, concrete labor produces use values, it is the practical activity that makes particular objects, that performs particular services. Abstract labor, on the other hand, produces value, it produces commodities that are meaningful to the producer only insofar as they can be exchanged. One of the histories of capitalism, then, is the enclosure of concrete-creative labor into the performance of abstract labor, of subordinating self-determined doing into the ways of work imposed by employers who, in turn, are compelled to intensify exploitation due to the competitive pressures of the market.
Enclosure within the abstractions of abstract labor is not a one off event in Holloway’s account but a permanent process, as capital has to continually reassert its dominance and subject social activity and world making to the imperatives of accumulation. By virtue of its insistence of the struggle of labor against capital, the traditional workers’ movement overlooks the antagonism between doing and labor, which leaves the movement ‘incarcerated’ in a struggle that can only seek marginal gains for workers but cannot transform the underlying structures whose permanent processes of alienation and dispossesion produce proletarians in the first place. Rather than naturalize a transhistorical concept of labor, whose liberation we strive for, Holloway cleaves to a reading in which wage labor is just one historical form the production and reproduction of collective social life has assumed and, as such, revolutionary movements should direct their energies towards the emancipation of creative-doing from labor itself – a fight whose terrain, setting, and medium is our everyday interactions and existences.
In Holloway’s work, creative-doing always appears to be virtuous, always engaged in the mutual recognition of the other, a crack in which cooperation within and beyond capital might be constituted. Dreamers like Anna Sorokin gesture towards a wicked inversion of this creative-doing, and instead push towards a form of self-determination that intends to free itself from abstract labor and the commodity form but has no interest in the ‘Good’, cares little for the ‘rabble’. The imaginary labor of making money and the fictions it requires in order to sustain its fantasies are crisscrossed by utopian currents; however, they are unable to overcome the obstacle immanent to their form – their constitution as labor.
Thomas Travers 