Class Warfare (7 page)

…
Et surtout mon corps aussi bien que mon âme, gardez-vous de vous crosier les bras en l'attitude sterile du spectateur, car la vie n'est pas un spectacle, car une mer de doleurs n'est pas un proscenium, car un homme qui crie, n'est pas un ours qui danse
.

—Aimé Césaire,
Cahier d'un retour an pays natal

TIME SEEMS TO BE running out, for all of us. Many of the stories lately have an apocalyptic ring; the air is full of rumours, intimations of collapse. It is being said, more and more often with more and more conviction, that things are getting “out of control,” that Order is “breaking down,” that Civilization-as-we-know-it is at an end, or close to it. That is entirely possible. It was what we were hoping for, at the outset; it was what we planned for, what we conspired to accomplish. True, we were as surprised as anybody else when it began to happen: but now we are no longer greatly surprised by anything. Events occur, and we participate in them, we do what demands to be done, we allow for contingency, even for the possibility of success. It is not as remote an eventuality, today, as it once was. Even if we fail, we succeed.

The abduction itself was almost laughably simple. The essential factors were speed and timing, coordination, a precise calculation of the knowable variables. No bodily violence, no theatrics, no gunfire in the night. The prisoner made no attempt to resist us, or to escape; he did not once cry out. It was strangely as if he had been expecting us, waiting for us—as if he had known for a long time that, sooner or later, we would be coming for him. Whatever the reason, he was calm and co-operative. What the press subsequently referred to as our “daring midnight raid” was as straightforward as going to call on an old acquaintance, and taking him away. Some of us, perhaps, were even slightly disappointed by the ease with which we were able to achieve our objective. We had geared up for heroics, and none were necessary.

 

At present, there are five of us active in the collective; until recently, there were six, but it became expedient to eliminate the sixth. That was Alex, whom we executed. Our history has been a succession of such adjustments, revisions of the scenario, improvisations; for this, we are sometimes called “adventurists,” and disowned by other, more rigidly programmatic groups. It is a subtle accusation, and there is doubtless a degree of merit in it, but less now than formerly—although, like all human creatures, we are to some extent at the mercy of circumstances, and it would be delusional to suppose otherwise. We are not delusional: rather we strive for, and often attain, a synthesis of doctrine and praxis. The exigencies of praxis should not be underestimated. When it seemed appropriate to arm ourselves, we went out and bought guns, or stole them, and in time we taught ourselves how—and when—to use them. (It was difficult at first, to be sure; it was somewhat like being in the audience at one of those performances, much in vogue a few years ago, in which the actors come down from the stage to embrace the spectators, drawing them into the play, reciting in some counterfeit of intimacy
I love you, do you love me?
… To which the answer must always be
no
. Guilt is involved here, and a certain residual paranoia. We are children of peacetime, after all, and the arts of warfare do not always come naturally to us. I, for example, had never fired a gun before, had never even had occasion to hold one in my hand, and I was unprepared for the weight of it, for the recoil.) We find ourselves, again and again, doing things for the first time.

 

It is probably unwise to be writing this, producing evidence which, if discovered, can only incriminate us. That was the mistake Alex made, one of his mistakes: he allowed himself to become conspicuous, a “personality.” His name was widely known, and his face, his mannerisms, his style. In our work, visibility is counterproductive, individual recognition a hindrance. One cannot proceed directly from a raid to a television studio. But, at this point, I am still invisible: you have passed me a thousand times, in public places, without seeing me. And it will be easy enough to destroy these papers, if I must; I have no great attachment to them. It was harder to destroy Alex.

This should not be construed as an official communiqué. I am writing merely on my own initiative, for my own purposes, not the least of which is to pass the time. Required as we are to guard the prisoner constantly, we become, in effect, prisoners ourselves; it is an irony my comrades may not appreciate. There is the element of hazard, of course, to spice the days—admittedly, we feel a spasm of apprehension whenever we hear a siren, or whenever some passerby seems to gaze too long at our house—but that order of hazard is so much a commonplace of our lives that, for most of us, it is no longer really a stimulant. We either will, or will not, be captured. As propositions go, that one is hardly sufficient to occupy the mind through these hours of tedium.

In the group photograph, before we destroyed it, Alex was the third from the left; smiling wickedly, in his outsize sombrero, he could have been the villain in a spaghetti western. (It was our early,
bandito
period, before the purge, before we went underground.) It may be significant that, on the day of our first serious raid, he managed to have urgent business elsewhere. It may be significant, too, that the raid was not a strategic success, that we very quickly found it advisable to abort it. We may have had insufficient discipline, in those days. The issue has never been wholly resolved to anyone's satisfaction, but it was taken into account—perhaps too much so—in our eventual judgement of Alex. It had not entered our minds, then, that we might be making a mistake, overreacting.

 

There was no coherent intention, at first, to form a cell: it was more as if the cell had always been there, an empty space in history, waiting for us to come along, discover it, take possession of it, fill it. It seemed to exist before we knew what it was, or what it could become … But it may be premature, absurd, to linger on this, to ask: what happened to us all, how did it happen, by what route have we come here, to this dim and barricaded room, these policies? It is not a subject we discuss often among ourselves, having little taste for nostalgia, preferring to speak of more impersonal things, specifics of action, points of theory, our quotidian preoccupations. Introspection is not encouraged, nor should it be. What do I know of my comrades, or they of me?—only everything that matters: who is competent to do what, who can be trusted, whose thinking has evolved to what stage, in which direction. Of the rest, the private histories, there is occasionally a glimpse, no more: a story told for some instructive purpose, a confession, a self-criticism, sometimes—very rarely—an incursion of something like wistfulness, the merest glimmer of sadness, regret. Such moments go by swiftly, driven out by the urgencies we deal in. But the temptation to remember the irrelevant is difficult to resist at times, and the days are long, and in our present isolation it is easier than before to drift carelessly into reminiscence, the old miasma of a life long since renounced, abandoned, almost forgotten, never completely forgotten …

Somewhere it begins. Somewhere (after you're already moving, on your way, too late to get off, go back, even if you wanted to) it dawns on you that the journey is not an excursion tour, a holiday, that it's not a round-trip ticket you have. That can be exhilarating—and dangerous. And it is true that in the early phases of that journey our liberty, the sense of
release,
was always teetering on the edge of hysteria. It was the hysteria encountered, from time to time, on shipboard: a sanctuary into which the Real World may not venture. The wars and punishments go on elsewhere, in other coordinates of time and attention. A treaty is confirmed with one's ticket, an amnesty for all us shabby travellers—the old women wrapped in furs and Central European dialects, the mothers of yowling infants, the beaten fathers, movie-mag addicts, guileless hippies in happy dopehaze, itinerant workers, eager juicers, seducers and seduced—the whole kit-n-caboodle of us abruptly reprieved, pardoned, delivered of all such burdens as the ordinary world afflicts us with, set briefly free to celebrate the transient madnesses, the ritual lies of passage. We were aboard ship, indeed, in our innocence, in the merciful night, toot-toot and then gone, and who remembers what manic jazz-loud parties there were, whooping and hollering in every bottle-strewn stateroom, every streamered corridor, love in the lifeboats,
everything allowed,
the band swinging into the
Muskrat Ramble
now, and why not,
dance, you buggers, get it on, yeah,
and every bleary eye blind to the icebergs, the treacherous heaving water, fog sneaking up closer and closer with none of that pretended majesty of final, absolute things … It didn't last long. We were children in those times.

Enough, enough. How can I explain, justify to the collective, the compulsion under which I fill these pages? It is surely no more than foolishness, no more than presumption, to expect that an arbitrary arrangement of words—words no other eyes than mine may ever see—will in some fashion advance our cause. I know better. Even Alex, toward the end, knew better. What was it he said? We were walking home from an incident, a rally we'd done our best to disrupt; it was raining; I had been holding forth on Revolutionary Art, the need for it, the function it could perform in the pre-revolutionary state. All at once Alex stopped walking, and turned on me:
Ah, you dumb bastard, you think you're so fucking tough, such a hardliner, and you're soft as a baby's arse. Admit it. Look at yourself, sitting up scribbling your pretty words in the middle of the night, digging every moment of it, that's the way to fight for the masses, sure it is. Do you imagine they love you for it? Or care at all? Who're you trying to kid? Do you seriously believe you're defending anything, liberating anything, redeeming anything, inciting anyone to action, feeding one empty belly except your own? Some shit-hot revolutionary you are, yapping all the time about your precious Art, just like any other faggot lackey, as if a goddamned word of it is ever going to change a thing on earth. Ah yes, wonderful, isn't it. People are out there working and dying like animals while you sit on your ass and dither about Style, about aesthetics, world without end amen. That's great, you're just what we've all been waiting for, a raving comsymp who writes Nice Prose. With all the punctuation in the right place, too. Next you'll be telling us the story of your life: How I Forsook the Bourgeoisie and Became a Fearless Urban Guerrilla. Big deal, buddy. When are you going to wake up to what's going down in this world? When are you going to wake the fuck up?
I heard the argument before: in the revolutionary society there would be no artists, no need for them. Come the day, I'll have to accept it. But it seemed a curious sentiment, somehow incongruous, coming from Alex.

We are listening now, fitfully, to the radio. The news is unenlightening: we are believed to be hiding in another city, in the south. A house there—the home of a known sympathizer—was raided, firebombed, in expectation of flushing us out, but we were not there to be flushed. Several persons are dead, several others wounded; it seems they were having a birthday party, for one of their children, at the time. At a nearby commune a quantity of weaponry was seized, arrests were made, witnesses were interrogated. The operation was organized and carried out along the lines of a game-plan first tested, and perfected, during the recent Asian war. Now, the search is reportedly being intensified; anyone with information is urged to relay it, immediately, to the nearest authorities. We have been seen in the east, in the midwest, in Algeria, Cuba, and Mexico, in a Canadian border town, entering a famous bordello in Reno, eating lasagna in an underworld café in New Orleans, boarding flights for London, Damascus, Lisbon, and Hanoi. We have allies everywhere.

 

At the beginning, to be truthful, I had reservations about our project. It was a matter of readiness, chiefly: I was not convinced that we had the means, or the stamina, to sustain an act of war. We had had, up to then, only rather haphazard experience of praxis. A few isolated experiments in shoplifting, armed robbery, random bombing—routine guerrilla offensives—did not seem to me, then, adequate preparation for the kind of activity we were contemplating. And it was far from clear, too, whether abduction had ever been wholly efficacious, as a tactic. I think a number of us entertained these doubts, and others like them, but at that stage of our development we tended to identify our qualms with cowardice, or at least quietism, and consequently were reluctant to voice them. That may have been a mistake. In certain instances the correct policy does not automatically present itself: killing Alex, for instance, may also in retrospect appear to have been a mistake, and it is too late now to undo it. We will learn, as we learn everything, through hindsight.

The prisoner is a young man, good-looking in an unformed way, the son of a prominent and inordinately admired political figure; to ensure our security, and his, we have assigned him the code-name Dionysius. Recorded messages have been supplied to the media, defining our position, our objectives. We are demanding a variety of small arms and munitions, $1 million in unmarked bills of low denomination, and unconditional amnesty in the event of our capture. We are demanding, further, the release from jail of our brothers Eduardo Donaro, Eugene Lilienthal, Gerard Macklewain, and Constantin Stavros, and our sister Marie Tyrell. We are confident that our terms will be met, in full, before the deadline.

 

It is necessary to correct the popular misapprehensions about our motives and actions. We are not conscienceless. In the newspapers we are most often portrayed, falsely, as a band of savages, heartless adventurers, nihilists, wanton lovers of destruction and death. Pulp novelists write inflammatory thrillers in which we invariably appear as soul-less robots, the puppets of foreign malefactors. That is merely propaganda, devised to titillate the gullible and deceive the masses.
Terrorists,
we are called, time and again; but the real Terror is not of our making. It is true that on occasion we have acted rashly, in desperation or haste; it is equally true that we have committed ourselves, irrevocably, to the eradication of our enemies—as they, with their superior numbers and sophisticated gadgetry, have pledged themselves to eradicate
us.
The enterprise is permanent, and continually self-renewing. We may, in the end, be more evenly matched than they suspect: they are powerful, but we are clever. We have routes, redoubts, they know nothing of. And our mission is just, as theirs is not.