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.

"The first thing you have to understand is that this is a fucking professional environment. "It's like any other job. "But its also a lot tougher, you can't blink for a minute, there is always an opportunity to boost your value, make connections, develop your brand. "But we're also not looking for any grandstanding, you aint shit at the moment, and if you peacock yourself around like an asshole, no one is going to want to give your tragic ass a break - no one wants some over inflated ego or some old meat.

He hadn’t the time to get changed and the collar of his shirt was starting to annoy him. It was a stiff collar, almost ceremonial. Considering the total price of the shirt, that short strip of fabric must have been worth at least ten pounds. More or less the reimbursement fund for a whole day spent at ‘work’. And, to be at ‘work’, this kind of shirt was compulsory. There wasn’t a real uniform, apart from the price-tag of the clothes.

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.

There is a place, at the periphery of the work market, where many of us are still held. It is a space that resembles that of the ‘sweat lodge’, the tent at the periphery of the village where teenage Lakota Native Americans used to spend a few weeks of sacrifice and purification before entering the adult age. This place is now called internship, and, like all peripheries, it is a grey limbo, a space of suspension, where the laws of the centre do not apply and the freedom of the terra incognita remains only as the memory of a mythical past.