through europe

In the early autumn of 2010, Sergio Marchionne declared that he lives in the AD era and cannot be dealing with listening to people who come from the time Before Christ. This blasphemous metaphor means that from the moment globalisation came into existence it has become impossible to defend the social rights that predated it.

I

At the end of the 1960s young and cocky Situationists like myself talked of the  Japanese economic miracle – because then it was the Japanese miracle –as being fuelled by amphetamine. The evidence was anecdotal, but it was well known that the cheaply-made drug was a major business for the Yakuza. This particular miracle was manufacturing-based, electronics and autos figured prominently. In modern parlance, it was Fordist.

In June of 2000 58 Chinese people died of mass suffocation in the container of a lorry that arrived on a ferry at Dover. They died trying to enter the UK illegally. The direct cause of these deaths was the blocking of the air vents worked into the container by the driver, a Dutchman, Perry Wacker. He is the worst of criminals, a panicker lacking the basic nerve required, in this case, cutting the air supply from a fear of being caught. The reporting of the case by large sections of the British media was either downright callous, or sympathetic in abstract terms only, the horror felt from putting ourselves in the shoes of those who died, presumed to be too much.