Now they’re all saying that I’m a thoroughly wicked lot, really, because I’m a designer.
They say I shouldn’t do such work, or so it seems, that the designer’s job is oniric; they say that the designer’s «only real objective is a relationship with the production-consumption cycle» and that he never thinks of class-struggle, never served the cause, and instead he works for the system.

They say that whatever one does as a designer, the system eats it up, digests it, and gets nice and plump on it.

They say there’s nothing one can do about it, that it’s like a horrible original sin that one has and that’s all there is to it.

They make me feel as if I were responsible for everything that goes wrong, the may even blame me for Vietnam since, by definition I work for industry, which industry is of course capital, and it is Capital that carrying on the war in Vietnam and so on. Of course.

I suppose I must be responsible for all the deaths in the highway for the same reason that Capital makes the motorcar ; in the same way, I should be blamed for all the suicides in town, all the love affairs that never blossomed and let’s not forget sick children, hunger, sickness itself and all such macabre things, my fault again since I work for the industry and so I’m a technocrat; there are certain things that only I know and I shouldn’t know them; they say I should know other things useful in destroying Capital.

But what does one do to destroy Capital? And what is a designer to do to destroy Capital? And how does one go about creating an industry without design? The problem is not wether one is wicked or not in being a designer but what one manages to make out of his being a designer. I refuse to be manipulated with jargon or conditioned by words, words, words.

I wish that they would use words so near the words that I use every day that they would have some meaning for what I’m doing and not for what I might do. What I’m saying is that if one wants to be a designer he must do a designer’s work, and his more or less liberating choices can be made practicing design, and put into his design. these choices cannot be made by engaging in politics, by becoming one of those who use the jargon and do nothing but talk, talk, talk.