 Rough Draft of the Introduction for Sabotage Issue
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Dec. 2nd, 2008 @ 04:01 pm 
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Thought I'd post this for people to respond to. Please Comment if you have anything to say about it.
 In 1981 a ‘zine called “Processed World” was published and distributed along Montgomery Street in San Francisco. The ‘zine aimed to encourage dissatisfied and rebellious workers from the ‘new’ technical and service sectors to organize and resist, but ended up merely expressing the workers’ frustrations. In the 15th issue of “Processed World” the editorial collective mused: “As the Right got a firmer grip on the mass media and as the recession hit, terrorizing millions of workers into submission, the revolt largely faded away. Today, an atmosphere of anxious subservience, thinly veiled in born-again patriotism and consumption-mania, pervades daily life.”
I encountered the first Processed World anthology entitled “Bad Attitude” at Powell’s Books in 1992, more than a decade down the road the attitudes and goals in PW still seemed subversive, and I was inspired to publish the first issue of Diet Soap. Sure, by 1990 the dream of developing a strategy of resistance seemed to require that one join a kind of Ghost Shirt religion and magical thinking prevailed, but I still managed to believe that the revolution could be mine if I simply struck the right pose. I believed that the revolution would be made by the young. The revolution would be Gen-X. The revolution would come with a latte.
I put a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald’s magic bullet on the cover of the first issue. I cut out photographs from magazines, got stoned, typed up rants on a recovered IBM Selectric, used a glue stick to paste it all down, Xeroxed the message, and thought of how all this would help bring down the system. Unlike the crew for Processed World, I didn’t hope that Diet Soap might arrive as a new workers’ movement made up of cubicle dwellers and temps emerged, but rather I hoped that, like the bullet that had ricocheted up, down, and backwards and killed Kennedy, Diet Soap would manage to accomplish something that was formally impossible.
The theme of this third issue of the reinvented Diet Soap is Sabotage, but in 2008 it’s not leftist office workers in San Francisco or college students in Portland who are sabotaging the prevailing order, but rather those at the highest level of the capitalist class are doing the damage. Those who own the world have devised ways to create so much private debt, more debt than there is money in the world, and as the planet warms and the world’s oil supplies dwindle, the delusional economy of money and power is itself collapsing.
This bears repeating and clarifying. The most powerful and moneyed interests in the world have sabotaged their own system. Wall Street has set off bombs in their own house, but the structure they’ve blown up is going to land on us all.
In the 90s the idea of hacking into the computers and emptying everyone’s bank accounts, the notion of slowing productivity in the cubicle next to yours by propping a hand puppet over the barrier conducting all business through a puppet persona, was liberating. The idea that this machine society could be stopped if we were clever spread good cheer, but now that the machine is running down of its own accord it’s impossible to miss that even as it writes its judgments with needles that pierce our flesh and makes our blood flow into concrete gutters, the device is also our life support system, and the magic bullet might bring us all down along with Kennedy.
Sabotage is like Terrorism. Terrorism is no longer primarily a technique of the powerless. Terrorism is built into the State itself, and to live within the bounds of the State is to live with constant terror. The same applies to Sabotage. Today the corporations are the source of sabotage, and to work is to live with a constant awareness of a system at odds with itself, a system that is failing, and a system with astronomic debt.
In this issue of Diet Soap you’ll find stories that focus on Sabotage as a method for liberation, but more often you’ll encounter stories where Sabotage is a reflex, stories wherein the daily lives of the character contains sabotage and collapse in the same way that stories about modern people contain telephones, microwaves, and computers.
Publishing Diet Soap was originally meant to be an act of Sabotage, but sixteen years later as I approach my fourth decade it seems necessary to both let go of my youth and the very notion of the willful destruction of capitalist relations. We don’t need to Sabotage the system, we need to build something to replace it once it has fallen apart. |
The Papercut Zine Library in Boston, MA has a few issues of Processed World! Have no idea where they came from...
i wish i knew people like you in person, Doug.
also, did you mean to use 'formally' or 'formerly' in the last line of the 3rd paragraph? feel free to delete this comment.
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| From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) douglain |
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| Date: |
December 3rd, 2008 05:38 pm (UTC) |
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I meant formally as in technically.
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| From: | douglain |
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| Date: |
December 3rd, 2008 05:38 pm (UTC) |
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no need to delete, it's a legitimate question and points out possible confusion. Thanks.
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