How can we speak of a dream factory?
Socialism?
Capitalism?
Classless Society?
What are our dreams? A better life, a life of co-operation, of working together.
What is a factory? A place to work, where things are made. From Blombos Cave to the Apple plants in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, we come together to make things. Man woman young old black white. Work is what unites us, the coming together to work. Work must become play.
Even deeper work ((think elastically) and the complex of changes (social and physiologically) and feedbacks involved) created us.
Does work create language? Have women always done the bulk of the work? Did women create language?
Factory from the Latin factor. a maker, a doer, performer, perpetrator, one who strikes the ball.
We need to turn away from the dystopian narrative. We need to create utopias - we can write of utopia and mock the plutocrats.
Thomas Moore brought the word Utopia into being. The idea is old, older than the name, think of the utopian farces of Aristophones. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pisthetaerus chases away the poet, the town planner, the inspector, the oracle peddler, the law mason.
Pisthetaerus becomes like a God.
Utopia; what is the meaning? It could be outopia - no place, or it could be eutopia, good place. Does it matter? Moore gives us only utopia, teasing us or misunderstanding? Culture arises equally from the fact of not remembering the quote correctly as it does the note perfect recital.
Tales and myths, or so I am told, are powerful emotional tools that pass culture and morality down the ages. Let us not pass down the morality of our parents, of the police man, or an edginess that actually dulls.
Reject bourgeois concepts of conflict in literature! Let us build to our own climaxes!
I am not naive, but I seek to become naive.
Johnny Rotten sang "There is no future", it was implied but not understood, unless you make it yourself.
He also sang, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme." Let us write, let us spew, let us draw, let us extrude, sing, scream, paint, cry, act, shout, perform, build our dreams. For ourselves.
No more tales of junkie lusers - realistic and gritty as they may be, they only reinforce the power of Kapital over us, they only reinforce our alienation.
Reject the cult of violence and death. we are, our children are fed a steady diet of death, let us say enuf. Choose (as George Michael quaintly said) Life. Real active live work, as opposed to the concentration of dead labour.
Work going back the generations - something done, deed, action - weorc, worc, werkan, werk, verk, warc, werah, werk, gawaurki, vareza, ergon, orgia, gorc, verziu, vargas, vragu, waurkjan, wyrcan, wrikan, wrecan, yrka - and PIE *werg-. Also an urge, THE HUMAN URGE.
Do not be wishy-washy.
If you want to be cynical, do it properly, give up all wealth and possessions, live in a wine cask, do not eat meat, and see the knife as your friendly doctor.
If you wish to be a skeptic, again do it properly, doubt all things, even your own thoughts and experiences. Walk with friends who will save you from the cliff.
To create to make to do to act to play to dream. To struggle to win.
Be realistic, the graffito spoke to me, demand the impossible. The Dream Factory. The space where we build our dreams. A place of work and struggle.
A lifetime of compulsion. A dream of play. Two or three days a week at most, maybe a week in every six. Child care at the work place, schools serving breakfast and lunch, helpful police men and women dressed in natty grey uniforms with pink piping, passing out condoms, and directions to lost tourists, lovely and unarmed.
Philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Is not art a mode of philosophy? Is not art a love of wisdom, a way of interacting with the world. The point of art is to change the world.
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