Simon Tormey
April 2006

“To sleep perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub” (Hamlet)

I close my eyes and I dream of ‘revolution’. What do I see? The world turns black and white, though perhaps tinged with sepia. I see a white male, balding with a goatee beard haranguing an audience infused with enthusiasm for his message of class struggle, heroic deeds, new and optimistic visions of machines and men working in perfect harmony – a pain-free, alienation-free future. This world is an absolute or complete break from the present. It is a world where the pain and fear of our world, the hunger, the agony has disappeared. Those listening to the bald man try to imagine a world that is so radically different from the one they are in that when they think of how they are going to get there they describe this process as a ‘revolution’. Revolution is not reform – how could it be when what they want is so radically different to the world that exists? NO, it must be a revolution – a fast-spinning vortex of energy, desire, solidarity. They see some pain, but not as much as staying where they are. Some shots are fired, screams, guns, bombs, firing squads. The dream turns black.

I wake up. Did I dream all of this? Yes, I must have done. It must be a dream because it is no longer ‘real’ in some meaningful respect –or it must not be real in the part of the world I inhabit. In this world, my world, those things that we thought of as components of the revolutionary dream seem to have shrivelled to the point of irrelevance. Modernist dreams of impressive new world orders have died in my world, withered on the vine of disappointments, despondency, dictatorships. As Lyotard puts it, we are no longer ‘believers’ in revolution. We have become Pagans – we live for today, for the corporeal, the immediate, the sensual, the personal.

And yet (contra Lyotard) we are angry, and getting angrier – at war, at imperialism, at poverty, at environmental degradation, at waste, at oppression, at the abuse of our fellow men and women. History has not come to an end. We still care; but we do not care for ‘revolution’. ‘We scream’, as John Holloway aptly puts it, but where do the resources to turn the scream into the kind of action that will relieve our agony come from? How do we turn the scream into something that overturns that which makes us scream? This is the question of ‘revolution’ today.
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J.K. Gibson-Graham
April 2006

It seems that the making of a new revolutionary imaginary is underway. Coming into being over the past few decades and into visibility and self-awareness through the Internet, independent media and most recently the World Social Forums, this emergent imaginary confounds the time-worn oppositions between global and local, revolution and reform, opposition and experiment, institutional and individual transformation. It is not that these paired evaluative terms are no longer useful but that they now refer to processes that inevitably overlap and intertwine.
We glimpse the broad outlines of this new imaginary in the performative self-designations of the “movement of movements”—We Are Everywhere, Other Economies are Possible, One No, Many Yeses, Life After Capitalism —and in the statements of movement activists like John Jordan:

Our movements are trying to create a politics that challenges all the certainties of traditional leftist politics, not by replacing them with new ones, but by dissolving any notion that we have answers, plans or strategies that are watertight or universal…We are trying to build a politics…that acts in the moment, not to create something in the future but to build in the present, it’s the politics of the here and now.
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Introduction

“I have enough of being too busy
and the stress is dreadful, too. I wish people would not rush…
If only we walked.”

Kayhan,
Complaining in Internet chat.

This is a study about busy professionals- or as I call them, golden collars. Golden collars are the manifested model workers of the last few decades with far greater control over the product, and the process of production; they are defined as more of entrepreneurs than proletarians, responsible for their own performance. Their value addition is mostly through innovation and information generation. They are relatively autonomous, responsible, highly skilled workers with upgraded abilities in interpersonal communication, leadership, and motivation. They have outstanding analytical capabilities; they make up the brain trust of global capitalism.

Global capitalism is about speed when viewed from the perspective of golden collars. They are forced to adapt to meticulously planned time schedules both in their leisure time and also in their working time. Indeed, the two domains often overlap, as will be discussed in this research and so, an optimum life is required in all realms and at all time.

I take up this question as a problem of “effectiveness” – one of the central significations, which assumes a central role in modern capitalist society, hence in bureaucratic organization. Striving for more effective technologies, more effective production chains and more effective lives are the inviolable, undeniable truth in contemporary discourses. “Everything is actually subordinated to effectiveness –but effective for whom, in view of what, and in order to do what?”
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