Kaleidoscope

We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the rule of a law, which regulates every event in life—our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship—that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves.

24th June 1894, the President of the French Republic Sadi Carnot reached the end of his life in Lyon under the blows of a young Italian anarchist, Sante Caserio.

This pamphlet is an attempt to analyse the various mechanisms whereby modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery and — at least in the short term — seems to succeed. It does not deal with ‘police’ and ‘jails’ as ordinarily conceived but with those internalised patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons in which the ‘mass individual’ is today entrapped.

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.

The new generation booed Stalinist Bolshevism off the stage while enthusiastically cheering Maoism as the new star of genuine communism. Yet how critical was the inquiring mind of our contemporary Castro-Guevara-and Mao Tse-tung enthusiast?