MASOCHISM
 Lets try to overcome the boredom which militants naturally generate. We won't bother to decipher the phraseology of their leaflets and speeches. Instead lets question the reasons which impelled them personally into militancy. There is no more embarrassing question for a militant. In the worst cases they will witter on interminably about the horror of capitalism, about the misery of third world children, about cluster bombs, about rising prices, about repression... At best they will explain how having once become conscious of the true nature of capitalism -- how they value this famous « raised consciousness » -- they decided to fight for a better world, for socialism ( real socialism of course, not the other kind ). Filled with enthusiasm by these exciting prospects, they couldn't resist the desire to throw themselves on the handle of the nearest duplicator. Lets look deeper into this question and focus, not on what they say, but on how they live. There is an enormous contradiction between what they claim to want, and the misery and the ineffectiveness of what they do. The efforts which they demand of themselves, and the degree of boredom which they are capable of putting up with, leaves no doubt : these people are primarily masochists. It's not just that in view of their activity, one cannot believe they sincerely want a better life, but that even their masochism shows no originality. While certain perverts may put into a body of work an imagination which ignores the poverty of the old world's rules, this is not the case for militants. Within their organisations they accept the hierarchy and petty leaders they claim they want to rid the world of, and the energy which they expend spontaneously takes on the form of work. Because militants are the kind of people for whom eight or nine hours of daily degradation are not enough. When militants try to justify themselves, they only succeed in showing off their lack of imagination. They cannot conceive of something different, of a form of activity other than that which currently exists. For them the divisions between the serious and the amusing, between ends and means, are not tied to a specific period. These categories are held to be eternal and unsurpassable : one can only be happy later on by sacrificing oneself now. The sacrifice without reward of millions of militant workers, the generations of the stalinist period, stirs nothing in their tiny minds. They do not see that means determine ends, and that by agreeing to sacrifice themselves today, they prepare the sacrifices of tomorrow. One cannot help being struck by the innumerable resemblance's which bring together militancy and religious activity. The same psychological attitudes can be found : the spirit of sacrifice but also the intransigence, the will to convert yet also the spirit of submissiveness. These resemblance's extend to the domain of rituals and ceremonies : sermons on unemployment, processions for Vietnam, references to the sacred texts of marxism-leninism, the cult of emblems ( red flags ). Don't the political churches also have their prophets, their great priests, their converts, their heresies, their schisms, their practising militants and their non-practising sympathisers ! But revolutionary militancy is only a parody of religion. The richness, the insanity, the excesses of religious projects are beyond it; militancy aspires to seriousness, it wants to be reasonable, it believes that in exchange for this it can win a paradise here below. It doesn't even achieve this much. Jesus Christ is resurrected and ascends into heaven. Lenin decomposes in Red Square. If the militant can be compared to the believer in terms of the ingenuousness of his illusions, it is another matter with regard to his real attitude. The sacrifice of the Carmalite nun, who imprisons herself to pray for the salvation of souls, has a very limited effect on social reality. The situation is quite different for the militant. His sacrifice is likely to have distressing consequences for the whole of society. |