Against the Planetary Work Machine

"Three thousand years of civilization and 200 years of accelerated industrial progress have left us with a terrible hang-over. "Economy" has become a goal in itself, and we're about to be swallowed by it. This hotel terrorizes its guests. Even when we're guests and hosts at the same time...

...It is a Planetary Machine: it eats in Africa, digests in Asia and shits in Europe. It is planned and regulated by international companies, the banking system, the circuit of fuels, raw materials and other goods. There are a lot of illusions about nations, states, blocks, First, Second, Third or Rourth Worlds, but these are only minor subdivisions, parts of the same machinery. Of course thera are distinct wheels and transmissions that exert pressure, tensions, frictions on each other. The Machine is bulit on its inner contradictions: workers/capital; private capital/state capital (capitalism/socialism); development/underdevelopment; misery/waste; war/peace; women/men; etc. The Machine is not a homogeneous structure; it uses its internal contradictions to expand its control and to refine its instruments. Unlike fascist or theocratic systems or like in Orwell's 1984, the Work Machine permits a "sane" level of resistance, unrest, provocation and rebellion. It digests unions, radical parties, protest movements, demonstrations and democratic changes of regimes. if democracy doesn't function, it uses a dictatorship. If its legitimation is in crisis, it has prisons, torture and camps in reserve...Not even in the remotest parts of the Gobi Desert can you be assured of an unobserved shit."


bolo 'bolo, 1983