#guy-debord

[jonnyopinion]

Work, Monotony, and Happiness

[hidden-writing-blog]

`Cowboy 1: "What's your scene, man?" Cowboy 2: "Reification" Cowboy 1: "Yeah? I guess that means pretty hard work with big books and piles of paper on a big table." Cowboy 2: "Nope. I drift. Mostly I just drift."`

<)%)_&^$>

{[andré bertrand--LE RETOUR DE LA COLONNE DURUTTI--détourned film stills & photographs/wheatpasted comic strip-1966{} <@&*%)>

[precariat-blog]

B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S

From the realism and the achievements of this splendid system one could already infer the personal capacities of the underlings it has produced. Misled about everything, they can only spout absurdities based on lies — these poor wage earners who see themselves as property owners, these mystified ignoramuses who think they’re educated, these zombies with the delusion that their votes mean something.

How harshly the mode of production has treated them! With all their “upward mobility” they have lost the little they had and gained what no one wanted. They share poverties and humiliations from all the past systems of exploitation without sharing in the revolts against those systems. In many ways they resemble slaves, because they are herded into cramped habitations that are gloomy, ugly and unhealthy; ill-nourished with tasteless and adulterated food; poorly treated for their constantly recurring illnesses; under constant petty surveillance; and maintained in the modernized illiteracy and spectacular superstitions that reinforce the power of their masters. For the convenience of present-day industry they are transplanted far from their own neighborhoods or regions and concentrated into new and hostile environments. They are nothing but numbers on charts drawn up by idiots.

They die in droves on the freeways, and in each flu epidemic and each heat wave, and with each mistake of those who adulterate their food, and each technical innovation profitable to the numerous entrepreneurs for whose environmental developments they serve as guinea pigs. Their nerve-racking conditions of existence produce physical, intellectual, and psychological degeneration. They are always spoken to like obedient children — always willing to do what they’re told as long as they’re told that they “must” do it. But above all they are treated like retarded children, forced to accept the delirious gibberish of dozens of recently concocted paternalistic specializations, which one day tell them one thing and the next day perhaps the very opposite.

full text after the jump, by Guy Debord