It all starts with the Engineers and Inventors. Weaseley little math—and—science geeks obsessed with creating the perfect circle, the perfect square, the perfect system, the perfect mass-manufacturing process for a mass-manufactured society. The perfect Machine. Ideas are spawned in the grid-haunted depths of Euclidean brains, plans are drawn up and copied and revised and reworked by little front-line armies of CAD-artists and R&D-specialists, part molds are designed and ordered from machine shops, and labor-contracts are devised over boardroom coffee and donuts by underworked/overpaid fat-cats in suits whose only real job is making six figures a year deciding the fate of thousands of manual-labor shitworkers. Ladies and gentlemen, the new Chevy SUV is a go-ahead, lets order ten million of them! A toast to the auto industry! It’s only 10 a.m., the day is over... anyone for 18 holes on the green?

"The green", the golf course, the country-club...even more so than the factory farm, the symptom par excellence of corrupt capitalism and industry run amuck. The futures of millions of wage-slaves are decided by a small handful of filthy-rich old men whacking little white balls around meticulously manicured lawns. It would almost be funny, if it weren’t such a disgusting travesty.

My workday begins at 3 p.m., and lasts for 8 long hours in 105-degree heat. While the random ad-execs in some random skyscraper in some random city are just finishing their grueling day in central air-conditioning, alternating between flirting with secretaries and surfing the web for e-porn and sitting around in padded conference room chairs brainstorming about why the all-consuming american public needs one more SUV to choose from and how to convince them of this (though considering the mentality of the average consumer, this task is never too difficult). I meanwhile am at my assigned press, getting my paperwork in order and preparing to start my first "heat," or machine-cycle.

I currently work in a rubber parts factory. We manufacture parts almost exclusively for the american auto industry. When you see cars on the road at any given time, chances are pretty high that a few of its countless little rubber whatnots came from this factory in northern Indiana or form one just like it in some other anonymous little factory-town somewhere. Detroit is hard-pressed to meet production deadlines to satiate the ravenous auto-driving public. Consequently, all its umpteen-kazillion parts suppliers, like this place, are under even more pressure. Quantity must be high or else we don’t make crucial quotas, causing us to lose contracts. Quality must be high or else the parent companies get fed up with the numbers of bad parts we’re sending out and cancel our contracts. But as hard as these idiots making the big decisions in modern industry try to convince themselves otherwise, they can never get past one small and simple fact: QUALITY AND QUANTITY ARE COUNTERPOISED, MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE AND ULTIMATELY IRRECONCILABLE. You can have small quantities of high-quality craftsmanship, handmade with loving care and pride, or you can have mass-quantities of shit. One or the other. Our society naturally opts for quantity, so quality necessarily becomes a mere facade, a crass and hypocritical illusion deftly concealing the tenuous house of cards beneath...

But anyway, back to my mindless job. The rubber is milled and prepped (i.e. mixed together with various chemicals, then cut to size) in the millroom. The people working in the millroom push a cart load of rubber "preps"-some round, some square, some sticky, some grainy, etc. depending on the part that’s being made-over to the press operators like myself. On go the gloves, push goes the button, down go the hydraulics, and in go my gloved hands to pull out the hundred pound, 350-degree steel mold. I brush it clean, blow it off with pressurized air, slap on a piece of rubber, push it back in, and press the start button. The press closes at between 1000 and 1500 psi, and the timer sets itself for a 6-minute cycle. Then I repeat the same process on 2 or 3 other presses, and wait for the cycle to end. After 6 minutes elapse on the timer, the presses open. I put on my gloves and pull the hot molds out, punch all the parts out onto a cooling screen, and repeat the entire process the entire shift. Like clockwork, a well-oiled wage-slave performing the well-oiled machinations of factory life. Every odd hour I write down a cycle-count on the Production Control paper, every even hour I take the molds’ temperatures (or, more often, fabricate temperatures within the allowable range) and write them down on a quality-control graph.

I slack off as much as possible, as do most of the other press operators and workers in other departments. We drink lots of water and soda, take lots of restroom breaks (the restroom is a good 15 degrees cooler than the factory floor), have play-wars with all the little pieces of scrap rubber our machines produce, leave early and return late from lunch and sneak outside for illicit smoke-breaks whenever possible. Trust me, inhaling cigarette smoke is quite healthy compared to the various silicon-polymer and hydrocarbon-polymer vapors workers are forced to inhale for 8 hours per day at this factory and many, many others like it. As evil and insidious as the tobacco companies might be, they do provide a valuable service to hundreds of millions of wage workers worldwide: stress relief and a tangible social bond to combat the massively alienating and reifying effects of the artificial division of labor necessary to support the vicious circle of mass-production and mass-consumption. Besides, most low-end factory workers smoke generics anyway, simply because they’re too poor to afford the name brands; with recent tax and price increases, Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man are fast becoming the SUV’s of the cigarette world: only the middle and upper classes can afford them. And when you’re sucking on a cancer stick, you know that to a certain degree, at least your death is still in your own hands. They might own my life, by God, but I’ll die on MY terms...

The systemic powerlessness that industrial capitalism forces onto countless millions of people, all in the name of more and better and cheaper products of consumption and convenience, is far beyond pathological. The machine chokes the bodies and souls of living, breathing human beings in perpetual slavery so it can in turn choke the planet with more automobiles and more concrete and more nonbiodegradable waste and more noxious pollution. The average city’s daily routine fresh out of high school, intelligent and creative kids who come from poor families and are too poor to afford college, selling their bodies and souls to these industrial sweatshops just to help pay their family’s bills and put food on the table. I see people working two full-time jobs trying their hardest to take care of babies they never get to see anyway. I see apathetic souls and ruined minds, wreckage from the human sacrifices made to the great Machine-Gods. I see kids younger than me whose arms are covered in permanent burn-scars, kids younger than me forced by their mere birth into an industrial-capitalist technocracy to spend the beautiful sunny afternoons inside a fume-filled concrete building operating dangerous machinery, just so they can eat. Kids younger than me handling liquid nitrogen and caustic acids and bases and carcinogenic superheated silicone and working next to wide-open vats of boiling oil. On and on the list of atrocities goes...and I go home at night, and think about it all, about what we’ve done to ourselves and our Mother Earth, and tears come to my eyes, and I weep... Every bad part I "miss" during inspection is a tiny but conscious prayer of hope that we might see a new and better world come into being. Every intentional act of sabotage is my heartfelt cry of passion against the inhumanity of a machine that I know, one way or another, can be stopped...

So the next time you hear of a car accident involving malfunctioning or poorly-crafted internal parts, you can thank me and people like me. We do not care. We’re only here for the paycheck, because we have to be, because we have babies to feed and bills to pay. We do not care about this system, we’d much rather see it crumble and give way to a more humane way of life on Earth. We don’t give a shit whether or not the 2003 Cadillac Escalade is a "top-quality" piece of gas-guzzling, air-polluting, earth-raping machinery. Some of us will not rest until the scrapyards of the world are piled high with wrecked, destroyed and abandoned automobiles waiting to be converted into iron skillets, bicycle parts and alternative energy sources. One Wrench will break the Machine, and its a wrench we all have a handle on, but we must wield it in one final and deadly blow, a collective effort of will and passion and desperation that will sever every single head of the techno-industrial hydra in a single death-knell. Until we reach that penultimate point of despair for our lives and the life of our planet and environment, despair for LIFE ITSELF, we will remain doomed to the silenced powerlessness of slavery and the hopeless futility of isolated individual action. But let us act together, as one, and... NO machine will stop us.

For the immanent industrial apocalypse,

David