LETTER FROM BULGARIA
I write this overlooking the great expanse of the Black Sea, a gentle breeze blowing into my room from the open door as the early morning sunshine, already warm, heats the decking of the balcony where soon I will be eating breakfast.
Holidays are a creation of ‘enlightened’ late 19th Century capitalism, allowing the workers some time off so that they might return as refreshed willing slaves. A whole industry has been created out of this segmented leisure culture, time given back in exchange for wage slavery. There has consequently always been an element of torture about this phenomenon, with its annual fortnightly taste of freedom, of life as it should be lived, as it should be experienced. As the annual two week trip to sun and sea draws to a close the reality of daily existence is thrown into sharp relief, back to work on Monday and the colourless routine of the factory floor or office.
This was well understood by the Anarchists and Situationists who had a healthy contempt for the phenomenon of the holiday and more recently of writers like Tom Hodkinson in his book ‘How to be Idle,’ a book I strongly recommend, alongside Willing Slaves by Melanie Bunting.
Few things irritate me as much on the radio, as I scrape away the freshly grown bristle each morning, than the endless repetition of statistics detailing days lost each year through, and one always feel slotted between inverted commas, ‘sickness,’ and the related supposition that this carries that we are at best wayward children, or worse malfunctioning machines. No mention is ever made, of course, of the great accumulation of unpaid overtime, the mass of unpaid labour without which, for example, the British Health Service, would cease to function. We work more hours now than we did in the 1960’s, a time in which we were informed that the great challenge for the future would be what to do with the mass of leisure time we would soon accumulate!
So I go to eat my breakfast and pretend to a degree of freedom and liberty I do not in truth possess. Such actions are carried out each day in the great game of the tourist industry. However just for a moment let us be realistic and demand the impossible and imagine a great collective awakening; that each tourist returns, swallowing mouthfuls of unpalatable airline cuisine, with acts of subversion in their hearts.
Holidays are a creation of ‘enlightened’ late 19th Century capitalism, allowing the workers some time off so that they might return as refreshed willing slaves. A whole industry has been created out of this segmented leisure culture, time given back in exchange for wage slavery. There has consequently always been an element of torture about this phenomenon, with its annual fortnightly taste of freedom, of life as it should be lived, as it should be experienced. As the annual two week trip to sun and sea draws to a close the reality of daily existence is thrown into sharp relief, back to work on Monday and the colourless routine of the factory floor or office.
This was well understood by the Anarchists and Situationists who had a healthy contempt for the phenomenon of the holiday and more recently of writers like Tom Hodkinson in his book ‘How to be Idle,’ a book I strongly recommend, alongside Willing Slaves by Melanie Bunting.
Few things irritate me as much on the radio, as I scrape away the freshly grown bristle each morning, than the endless repetition of statistics detailing days lost each year through, and one always feel slotted between inverted commas, ‘sickness,’ and the related supposition that this carries that we are at best wayward children, or worse malfunctioning machines. No mention is ever made, of course, of the great accumulation of unpaid overtime, the mass of unpaid labour without which, for example, the British Health Service, would cease to function. We work more hours now than we did in the 1960’s, a time in which we were informed that the great challenge for the future would be what to do with the mass of leisure time we would soon accumulate!
So I go to eat my breakfast and pretend to a degree of freedom and liberty I do not in truth possess. Such actions are carried out each day in the great game of the tourist industry. However just for a moment let us be realistic and demand the impossible and imagine a great collective awakening; that each tourist returns, swallowing mouthfuls of unpalatable airline cuisine, with acts of subversion in their hearts.
