West and East (1979)

From the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “The search for a new job should aim first at obtaining an interview and then being offered a job as a result. The message which comes across clearly for both these tasks is, ‘You are the product — market yourself effectively’.” 

From an advertisement for Dismissal, Redundancy and Job Hunting, a book published by Which?, the consumer magazine. 

  “It seems to me that, right up to the blank page in front of me, money proves the omnipotence that it has already demonstrated in the factory. It does not only have the capacity to guarantee or threaten my existence, but also that of censuring my tongue. When I come to speak of it, I am incapable of finding words which would allow me to express anything which seems in any way adequate. Money exercises an absolute power over the terrain of objectivity: here, as in the factory, it has the power to exile into the realms of poems those who dream of abolishing it, or, which comes to the same thing, to cut out our tongues.”

Haraszti, Worker in a Worker State, p. l15