Tim Edison’s Reviews > The Revolution of Everyday Life > Status Update

The proletariat's problem is no longer how to seize power but how to abolish power forever.

Most people are well acquainted with the malaise that accompanies any attempt to join a group and make contac with others. This feeling amounts to stage fright, the feeling of not playing one's part properly. Only with the crumbling of officially controllable attitudes and poses will the true source of this anxiety become clear to us.

So thoroughly, indeed, has habit mutilated human beings that they mistake self-mutilation with obedience to a law of nature ... At all events, it befits the slave mentality to equate Power with the only possible form of life, namely survival. And naturally it suits the masters' purposes to encourage such sentiments.

Art, which is an economy of lived moments, has been absorbed by business. Desires and dreams are now the raw material of marketing. Everyday life has disintegrated into a succession of instants as interchangeable as the gadgets that define them: mixers, stereos, diaphragms, euphorimeters, sleeping pills.

The organisation of work and the organisation of leisure are the twin blades of castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs.

It is not so much death that terrifies twentieth-century humanity as the absence of real life: the lifeless gestures, the mechanised, specialised gestures that steal portions of life hundreds, thousands of times a day until mind and body are exhausted, until an end comes that is less the end of life than an absence at saturation point.

But what about the impossibility of living, this stifling mediocrity, this absence of passion? This jealous fury to which we are driven when the rankling of never being ourselves makes us imagine that others are happy? This feeling of never really being inside your own skin? Let nobody say these are minor details or secondary considerations.

But what about the impossibility of living, this stifling mediocrity, this absence of passion? This jealous fury to which we are driven when the rankling of never being ourselves makes us imagine that others are happy? This feeling of never really being inside your own skin? Let nobody say these are minor details or secondary considerations.