Has it ever happened that, outside your place of work, you have felt the
same distaste and weariness as you do inside the factory’? In that case,
you have come to understand that:
a. The factory is all around us. It is the morning,
the train, the car, the ravaged countryside, the machine, the bosses, the
chief, the house,the newspapers, the family, the trade union, the street,
one’s purchases, pictures, one’s pay, the television, one’s language, one’s
holidays, school, housework, boredom, prison, the hospital and the night.
It is the time and space of our everyday subsistence. It is the becoming
accustomed to repetitive moves and suppressed emotions, emotions sampled
through the proxy of intermediary images.
b. Every activity reduced to mere existence is obligatory
work: and all obligatory work transforms the product and the producer into
objects of mere existence, into commodities themselves.
c. Rejection of the universal factory is everywhere, since
sabotage and re-appropriation are everywhere among the proletariat, allowing
them still to derive some morsel of pleasure from idleness, or from love-making,
or socialising or chatting or eating, drinking, dreaming or preparing to
revolutionise everyday life by neglecting none of the delights of being not
quite totally alienated.
So you see, you are fighting, consciously or otherwise, for a society where
feelings will be all, and boredom and work, nothing. Mere survival has so far prevented us from really living. We
must now stand the world on its head and value those glimpses of authentic
living which are fated to be covered up and distorted in the system of the
commodity and the spectacle… these moments of real contentment,
of boundless pleasure and passion.
