Re: <nettime> Marion von Osten: email interview with Brian Holmes

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

> the end of ' the dictatorship
>of the proletariat", or of unionised and regulated labour in this case,
>facilitates the reproduction of  bonded slavery as a substitute for the
>proletariat.......
>
>the reality is that thousands of bonded workers are doing the jobs
>britons don't want to do, from picking fruit and flowers to packing
>meat and there are plans to import even greater numbers of migrant
>workers under controlled conditions...

When I said at the end of the interview with Marion von Osten that
cultural workers are humiliated by their linguistic function in the
production system, it is because in most contexts we don't talk about
these exact issues,these ostensibly "invisible" realities which are
everywhere right beneath our eyes.

In my opinion, that's a form of repression, operating in language - minor
with respect to the domination operating on bonded labor, but still
humiliating. That so much conventional silence be imposed on the
"professions" of speech and gesture is to my mind and senses, absurd.

Beyond these minor observations, there is also the question concerning the
extent to which union/state co-management has shaped (and continues to
shape) the conditions under which economic domination is extended and
contractualized, to the point where the very law hides the legal
inequality of those growing the vegetables you eat (for instance, the
legal paperless Moroccan agricultural workers in the glass gardens of
southern Spain). The solution is not to look back to a previous phase in
the decay of the egalitarian movements, but to look exactly at the present
and cease to accept its inevitability. How to put that non-acceptance into
political, economic and psychic effect then becomes a
practical-technical-ethical discussion which is worth being part of.

Thanks to Monica for a very exact statement of the way things are.

best, Brian

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