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...by James Mason
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I once knew a woman who worked as a check-out clerk in a super market. After work, she would relate to me all the little cliques, personality clashes, back-biting, petty intrigues, not to mention the rottenness and carousing of the boss himself. And it struck me that right there, in the confines of a few thousand square feet, involving only a few dozen individuals, was all the same nonsense– and all its deadly earnest ferocity– that I was running into in the Movement at that time. Our struggles, it seemed, were of a higher order with higher stakes and so, therefore, merited such in-house conflicts whereas to indulge in these stupidities in such a minute fashion, where there were no real stakes at all, appeared to be most childish. I was rather amazed.
Then it wasn't too long before it dawned over me that such silliness properly belonged to the realm of the inconsequential, where no outcome mattered. In affairs of trying to build a viable political movement with aims such as ours, it had no place at all. It wasn't long thereafter that I separated myself from it completely by undertaking what I've been doing with SIEGE and Universal Order.
Idiotic, meaningless struggles, rivalries, quarrels. Among drunks, punks, jealous women, gangs of kids, neighbors, co-workers, the Right Wing, etc.. The intrigues, the vendettas, the pettiness, the thievery, the meanness that goes on constantly. With no real outcome, nothing learned, nothing gained, and leading to yet more cycles of the same mistakes.
The winners? The System, the Pigs, the Establishment. The real results? Mutual loss for those who can afford it the least, making laughing stocks of themselves, one divided against another even into the family level. Helplesssness and ridiculousness.
Here again is the difference between the average person and the revolutionary. For one, the revolutionary scrupulously AVOIDS the havens and breeding grounds of common misery and trouble. He stays out of habitual, useless trouble spots and situations. He never helps police against any other nor does he invite them down upon himself. He doesn't engage in drunkenness or "highs". His is self-discipline and clear perspectives. He will never attack or betray a comrade. In fact he will never initiate any unnecessary hostility as he has more than enough on his hands handling matters of urgent importance. He engages in nothing petty, common or mean.
His enemy is the System– as the System is the Enemy of one and all. He is different because he knows it fully well and is serious enough about himself and what is at stake to conduct himself at all times in an appropriate manner: as a sober and effective revolutionary soldier.
[Vol. XV, #3 – Mar., 1986]
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