Book Review From Marx & Philosophy Review Of Books Of Crack Capitalism By John Holloway

Highly Recommended. The section below from the book sums up in many ways my own personal feelings of anger and defiance (but also ironically hope) concerning the on-going crisis of capitalism.

The law of value, the rule of socially necessary labour time, is a constant tightening of the Procrustean bed, a constant redifinition of the labourer that capital requires. Capital's problem is the problem that it has had since its birth: to transform the savage into a labourer. The constant redefinition of labour (of value production and what it requires) means that capital is ever anew confronted with the task of forcing people to fit into its requirements. Capitalist crisis is always a crisis of fitting: the savages will not do what capital requires of them (of us). 'Fit or be damned!' cries capital. And to more and more people in the world it says 'you do not fit, we have no use for you: you are too old, too pregnant, too unstable emotionally, you know too much philosophy, your children fall ill, you chat to your friends, you do not speak English, you think too little about money and too much about other things.' And more and more people reply, 'yes, it is true, we do not fit.' The crisis is an explosion of misfitting-the result of the lack of fit between humans and the requirements of value production, and the dramatic manifestation of that lack of fit. 'It is true', we repeat, 'we do not fit.' But there is something else on the tip of our tongue, we want to add something else. And on this something else hangs the future of the world. We bow our heads and say 'yes, it is true, we do not fit in, but we shall try harder: we shall learn better English, improve our computing skills, throw out our childish books by Marx and Bakunin, we shall forbid our children to fall ill, we shall stop being too old, too pregnant, too foreign, too in love, too unstable, we shall fit.' We raise our heads and say 'yes. it is true, we do not fit. And do you know something else? We do not want to fit in to this world of destruction. And do you know something else? Your crisis is your incapacity to contain our power-to-do, your crisis is the breakthrough of our creative-productive force. Our misfitting is our overflowing, the overflowing of our creativity, our magnificent being-able-to. So get thee gone to the dustbin of history, capital, and let us get on with making the world anew.' 



For an in-depth review of Crack Capitalism see Christian Garland in Marx & Philosophy Review Of Books here.  Also Wikipedia entry on John Holloway here.