‘If you’re not busy being born you’re busy buying’. All the sales girls in the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have the same make-up, representing the 1940’s. In fashion as in everything else, capitalism can only go backwards. We’ve nowhere else to go. We’re dead.
Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt.
The politicians, the leaders, the rich, the big bosses, are in command … THEY control. WE, THE PEOPLE, SUFFER… THEY have tried to make us mere functions of a production process. THEY have polluted the world with chemical waste from their factories. THEY shoved garbage from their media down our throats. THEY made us absurd sexual caricatures, all of us, men and women. THEY killed, napalmed, burned us into soap, mutilated us, raped us.
Slowly we started understanding the BIG CON. We saw that they had defined ‘our possibilities’. They said: You can demonstrate … between police lines. You can have sex… in the normal position and as a commodity; commodities are good. You can rally in defence of the TUC … The ‘leadership’ is wise.
THEY used confusing words like ‘public’ or the ‘National Interest’. Is the public some kind of dignified body which we belong to, only until we go on strike? Why are we reduced then to dreaded scroungers, ruining the country’s economy? Is ‘National interest’ anything more than THEIR interest?
Brothers and sisters, what are your real desires?
Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? The future is ours.
The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses—called boutiques—is wreck them. You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.
People’s sweat and blood is used and exploited. They make us produce shit.. they give us next to nothing while their class pockets huge profits.
Then, when we put the overalls aside, we clean up the muck from our faces and we take the boring bus or train home and they suddenly transform us into consumers. In other words, when we are not working they make us buy… the same shit we produced.
The miserable wage packet they gave us they make us spend on useless food, on machines specially designed to break down and on houses we know look and feel like prisons.
Prisons we helped build. And paid (more specifically promised to pay over the next twenty years for we never have enough dough to pay for a house or a car or anything for that matter—they have to exploit us even more by making us pay interest) for them. We build the prisons and then we live in them. We produce shit and then we eat it.
Producers of shit—consumers of shit.
There are many of our brothers and sisters inside. An old revolutionary once called prisons ‘an occupational hazard’. A hazard which may hit any person who chooses to take up action. But to lose a finger, a limb, your lungs—any accident at work—this too is an occupational hazard. Not only a limb but your life. So what’s the bloody difference?
We are celebrating the hundred years of the Paris Commune. We are celebrating our REVOLUTION which won’t be controlled.
We know that every moment of badly paid boredom in a production line is a violent crime. We reject all the senile hierarchies and ALL the structures, the liars, the poverty pimps.
Our revolution is autonomous rank and file action—we create it ourselves. We have confidence now … we don’t have to wait for them to dangle something tempting like a bad apple in front of our faces before we jump like rabbits. We don’t clutch desperately at the illusion of FREEDOM.
The Communist Party, the Union leaders, the social workers, the old-old left… All these people have presumed to act on our behalf. All these people have certain things in common …they always sell us out. They are all afraid of us. They’ll preach towards keeping the peace … and we are bored … poor … and very tired of keeping the peace.
Our strategy is clear: How can we smash the system? How can the people take power?
WE BELIEVE IN THE AUTONOMOUS WORKING CLASS.
It refuses the logic of the power centre and ‘voluntary helpers’. Each individual is responsible for his or her action which is based on decisions reached through the endless task of acquiring information and understanding.
This movement from below, which emerged in force at the end of the Sixties, dispelled the myth of the passive, stable English working class.
The system will never collapse or capitulate by itself. More and more workers now realise this and are transforming union consciousness into offensive political militancy.
Our role is to deepen the political contradictions at every level. We will not achieve this by concentrating on ‘issues’ or by using watered down socialist platitudes.
Repression always exists, and that only in its most sophisticated form creates the peaceful graveyard of acquiescence where only ghosts are allowed to tread.
Adapted from Angry Brigade Britain. Published under a Creative Commons license.
