by J. T. Marsh
But there are others, yet unknown, who will soon step into the light. At a Royal Navy base not far from the city of Westminster there’s homeported Her Majesty’s Ship Borealis, an Aurora class cruiser. Her sister ship, the Australis, is also homeported here. Sleek, modern vessels armed to the teeth with missile batteries and gun turrets, they were originally built to match the latest American, Chinese, even Russian designs entering into service around the same time. On board the Borealis serves a sailor named Dmitri Malinin, under the command of Captain Abramovich. In his bunk when news breaks among the crew of the massacre, Dmitri feels the same simmering anger as the others, leaping out of his bunk and making for the mess hall where many of the sailors on board have already gathered. “It’s outrageous,” says one. “They’re murderers,” says another. “They gun down innocent people in the streets,” says a third. As Dmitri’s about to add his piece, the loudspeaker crackles, the Captain’s voice announcing, “all crew are confined to quarters until further notice.” The non-coms arrive and start shepherding sailors out of the mess, Dmitri among the last to leave. “I must contact my wife,” he says, later, back in his bunk with the others. “Are you worried she’s caught up in this?” a bunkmate asks. “No,” Dmitri says, “but there’s no telling how this will end. She might get caught up in this whether she wants to or not.” His bunkmate nods, then says, “we all might.” Dmitri agrees.
The working man eventually returns to work, the student to class, the pastor and the preacher to their desks counselling troubled wives with their troubled lives. None are as they were. All have experienced some slight change, imperceptible at a glance, yet surely there. As outrage spreads, this slight change manifests itself in disparate bursts of anger, a thrown stone here, a homemade bomb there, the sound of gunfire chattering off and on through the night. It’s the little differences that catch your mind’s eye. A light, erratic pop of a guerrilla attack followed by the heavy thumping of the police responding, not in kind but with an overwhelming force. It’s over quickly. It’s always over quickly. Already the gunmen, Ian Coleman and Kate Higgins along with a few others disappear into the night. “Have at them!” declares Ian, as they’re on their way back. “We follow our orders,” says Kate. Meanwhile, as Valeri searches the streets for any sign of Maria or Sydney, at the union hall Murray tries to piece together an explanation for why the promised support from the popular front’s guerrillas never came, why they never showed.
It leaves behind no bodies; as with all the other armed clashes that’ve broken out in the time since that dark, dark day, a few rounds have been exchanged and a few holes put into the windows of the shops lining the street, but little else has happened. Again and again this same scenario plays itself out in the streets over the weeks and the months that follow, interspersed against the impassioned dramas of the working men in the street and the students in their lecture halls angrily denouncing the powers that be and plotting their next moves. It’s a deeply confusing time, a time made all the more confusing by the roused passions of each of these disparate interests, each pursuing their own agency, each struggling against the limitations of themselves. None can know where it all must lead, where it all must eventually end, even as all believe they know and that their knowledge is to the exclusion of all others’. The working man is used to invasions of his quarters by the policeman’s truncheon, but not like this, never like this, in full view of the whole world innocent men and women gunned down by straight-faced police. But in the early afterwards following the massacre, questions remain. “They weren’t there,” says Murray, a few days later while talking to Valeri, “they weren’t there.” He speaks of the popular front and their failure to show. By now, a state of emergency has been declared, public gatherings banned, a curfew imposed, and troopers patrol the streets looking for trouble. With nowhere else to go, Valeri has returned to his little box of an apartment where he speaks with Murray on the phone while chafing and chomping at the bit to take back to the streets. Only some hours have passed since his brothers and sisters in union were murdered in cold blood, and the young man in him given to irrational acts of futile rebellion resents being made to seek shelter from the storm.
Let’s take a step back, for a moment, and consider all that’s at stake, all that’s in play. “You must calm down,” Murray says, “or you’ll get yourself killed.” Years earlier, we were all so caught up in the petty minutiae of our own lives that we couldn’t see the sinister forces at work in the background, lurking in the shadows as they’d always lurked. “I’d rather risk death than sit cooped up in this apartment waiting for something to happen,” Valeri says, “they have to pay for their murder.” I’ll be clear; there is no conspiracy and there’s never been a conspiracy. “They’ll pay,” Murray says, “but you’re no good to anyone if you’re bled out on the street.” Elaborate conspiracies are the domain of those with views limited by their own ignorance. “What happens to me is unimportant,” Valeri says, “so long as I can be of use to the cause.” No, these forces I speak of are as forces of nature, as the wind blows and as the tides rise and fall, so too do these forces of men act by vague compulsions and confused motivations, not as self-aware but as self-assured. “You’re a noble man,” says Murray, “and you should serve a higher purpose than sacrificing your life in a street battle.” “You speak of the men in the streets as if they’re mere rabble,” Valeri says. “I know they’re not,” Murray says, “and neither are you.”
Days pass. Unusually, a rhythm returns to the streets, amid the heavy handed presence of the troopers and the martial law that’s been imposed. Working men like Valeri have been an afterthought in this city for some time, chewed up and then spit out when he’s no longer of use to those in power. For his whole life, he’s watched as his world has been transformed, as this city he’s called home for so long as he’s lived now seeks to expel him in a frantic, fevered campaign to eat themselves whole. It’s a disgusting sight, made all the more wretched by the thick stench of a foul winter’s night and the noxious smoke emanating from still-spewing stacks across the river. He leaves his simple, working class apartment, and although he knows it’s an absurd thought he can’t help but entertain the notion that he’ll come home after his shift to find his simple, working class apartment gone, the whole building demolished and replaced by elegance and luxury reserved for those of a higher pedigree than him. He sees in this time the memory of his parents and their failed rising, and chafes for his chance to avenge them anew.
The noxious smell of industrial smoke still lingers in the air, mixed with the foul stench of cigarette smoke. A younger co-worker of Valeri’s, Kyle Bridges, was among those killed in the street. He was a passionate young man, young enough not to know a passion ruined by the creeping cynicism that occurs in all men on the cusp of middle age. It’s a deeply personal crisis, one that strikes a chord with a thousand and one people all at once, but each in a different way. In a deeply personal crisis, one can’t help but isolate one’s self from all those around. It’s a futile effort. In those months, those years before that fateful day when people died in the streets, well, so many had already died in those very streets, so many die every day, some falling prey to a sexual predator, some choking on their own vomit in the midst of an overdose, still some in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides death, the common thread that runs through their lives is privation; none have enough to be deemed worthy of life. In these, the working man will, in time, find an ally natural and indispensible.
A mounting frenzy sets in as each of them frantically works to wring every last pound from the world. Another of Valeri’s co-workers, a still-younger man named Stuart James, is soon forced out of his home, among the first in a new round of evictions aimed at clearing out the under-class. The wealthy man is compulsively exchanging the real for the imagined, trading land for money, when the bottom falls out the people who acquired the imagined finding themselves still living in luxury while the people who’d acquired the real finding themselves lo
sing everything. There’s a great amount of shouting and screaming but in the meanwhile nothing seems to change; the few continue to grow fat and lazy from the suffering of the many. But it’s not true that nothing changes. That’s just what they want you to believe. As they grow complacent, we grow learned in the art of war, each working man pushed out of his home, every working man made to lose his livelihood gaining us a knowledge we’ll soon put to good use.
But progress looms. A woman named Lillian Wolfe, widowed on the day of the massacre, cries softly as she prays in church, she one of many to take refuge in a house of God in times like these. Though it may not be immediately obvious in the aftermath of this latest breakdown in the current order, we’ve reached an epiphany, a transformative moment marking the start of a transition from one era to the next, each step brought down on the ground in front of us, each breath drawn in and pushed out moving us inexorably closer to that historical inevitability waiting for us on the other side of the horizon, just out of view. Even as it dawns on us, though, that the future is ours, we must never regard it as predestined, predetermined, for each day that passes brings us a day closer to our victory only so long as we use each day to work tirelessly and relentlessly towards that goal. In the meanwhile, as we ease ourselves out of this latest crisis, it’s instructive to look on these early, tentative days as an awkward step, one of many on our long and difficult path through to the future.
In the years before massacre in the city’s centre provokes the rise of a revolution, an urgency begins to settle in the streets, nerves rattled and passions become roused. A third young person, a man named Dominic Hayes, is one of the many to lose their livelihoods in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Now, like so many of his brothers and sisters Dominic In the working class tenements that’ve begun to vanish, demolished as the wealthy class sell them in a confusing array of transactions all aimed at increasing their profits, the working man has come to realize he’s been deceived for too long. These companies, impersonal, agreed-upon can hide behind a confusing network of deals only for so long; sooner or later, they all blur into a bureaucratic morass that can no longer confuse or conceal. An apartment block disappears, then another, then another, the very people who work to demolish the old and put up the new the same as those who would find themselves evicted from their own homes.
In the immediate aftermath of that massacre in the city’s streets, a series of rolling strikes cripple the means of production, leaving towers half-finished, leaving them empty concrete shells with jagged beams sticking out like broken bones. Columns of smoke rise from fires burning out of control, along the streets coursing a white hot rage so bright it seems to light up the night’s sky. This vision, this image of our shared future, I ask that you look upon that very moment and see if you can remain forever damned by a past you never wanted, by a future you’ve never deserved. Still this is all disorganized, the whole lot of them acting without thought, without objective, as history has chosen this moment to assert itself, not yet fully formed but in its embryonic stage still showing the early signs of its coming maturity.
In the months leading up to that massacre in the city’s streets, desperation had become the way of things. Stunning glass and steel monuments had come to occupy the spaces where once simple, functional, working-class apartments had stood, cracks in the pavement sprouting weeds and gathering pulverized dust. The working man becomes pitied, mocked for his values, for values like thrift, charity, generosity, selflessness and honesty. He becomes mocked by those who would value duplicity, avarice, idolatry and lies. In the midst of his hometown’s rotting away, he does not arrive at the realization but instead makes the decision that this time is different. Already lost, our future’s end is won, in defeat our victory sees itself through the darkest of nights to the dawning of a new day.
When we come to the right moment, in the lingering aftermath of that first massacre in the streets, the working man will look to his future and see for the first time hope from despair like the rising sun’s first light breaking over the horizon to mark the dawn of a new day. The instruments of oppression are ubiquitous in their presence and steadfast in their resiliency, yet still they resort to the same methods as before the current crisis; the talking heads take to the broadcasts and denounce the lawlessness and the violence in the streets, discovering, to their horror, their methods are no longer effective, the loud-mouths on the screens bellowing their lies ever louder, screaming themselves hoarse only to rouse the anger of the working man towards not himself but to the wealthy man. It’s in a moment of uncertainty that the wealthy man and his allies and his colleagues make that first, critical error, unleashing the one force that would do them in.
A small plane lands, from inside a hooded figure escorted by four armed guards walking along a narrow path reaching into an empty hangar. Perhaps he’s lucky just not be in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, as he’s a wanted figure not only by the counter-revolution but by the revolution itself. He thinks to pay attention to his surroundings; he refuses to simply put his head down in defeat and walk as fast as he can through this current challenge. His faith in the turning of history in his favour, in favour of his people is like that of a religious zealot assured in an impending apocalypse. For the working man, death awaits. For the hooded man, whose name is Elijah, simply Elijah, victory will come at a high price in blood, to be paid by the sons of daughters.
Still he is just a man, and our apocalypse will not be risen by a man but by men. As our future history belongs to they who are least, it’s inevitable that from among their ranks we should find the next generation of leaders. His is a pedigree that comes from a long line of workers, of farmers, of thieves, of prostitutes, of the very people who are so maligned in a world where evil would denounce good, where ignorance would denounce knowledge, where lies would denounce honesty and where cowardice would denounce courage. Remember him. Remember his face. Remember his words, spoken as they are with a gun to his head and with his skin battered and bruised. At the moment, he’s one of many, nameless, faceless, nothing more than another malcontent caught in the sweeps of the streets by the counter-revolution’s uniformed storm troopers.
But while he’s locked away, he’ll find others like him, he’ll form lifelong friendships born of a shared history, a shared fate. And in time, his enemies of the counter-revolution will show themselves foolish enough to release him and his comrades, and they’ll go on to form the core of a new beginning for the revolution, rallying so many disjointed and confused forces under a single banner, around a single ideal, given a new beginning their revolution seeing through to victory. But for now, he’ll take the blows of truncheons and he’ll spend sleepless nights in his airless cube of a cell, every moment spent learning, whether he realizes it or not. While he learns, the world burns, a smoldering fire in search of a spark, the driest of forests looking for a random lightning strike, a lit cigarette tossed carelessly from a passing car’s window, an appliance left on too long.
And not long after his impending release, he’ll be given that gift in the form of so many lifeless bodies strewn across the blood-soaked streets, a gift he and his brothers will put to good use. Though he signs a pledge forbidding him from any rabble rousing, he signs with a wink and a nod, both he and his former captors silently acknowledging the next time they’d meet on the battlefield of the streets where the working man lives. As soon as he walks through the front doors of the prison which could never hold him for long, he meets with the very people who would compel him to power, with the self-selected leaders among the workers, the students, the parishioners, in so meeting the whole lot of them forming the core of the way to the future.
17. A Time to Stand
Tonight, the world burns. Word spreads quickly about what’s happened. Screens flash with footage from the massacre, images of broken bodies and bloodied pavement, these images seeming to be frozen in place even as they click forward with the push of a button and the swipe of a pad. All seem in a state of
shock, as if time has slowed and all are watching from a distance. “For our children,” one man, a worker, urges action. “For our children’s children,” one woman, another worker, urges action. “Not for ourselves,” urges another, an unemployed youth, “but for all those who have died and have yet to die!” At the union hall the mood is one of anger mixed with despair. After fruitless messages left for his contacts in the popular front, Murray comes to realize the truth of why his allies never showed on that fateful day. They were never meant to show. But Murray doesn’t yet realize the traitor in his ranks feeding the troopers information, and it’s his ignorance that will enable further betrayal. Meanwhile, after Stanislaw Czerkawski and the other prisoners have taken over their prison, many of the prisoners flee, some going home to be with their families while others are simply on the run from the law. But Stanislaw and the bulk of them stay, forming a provisional committee not to govern the prison but to organize a defence. They expect the police to strike back at any time, with lethal force. In the heat of the moment there’s little time for meetings, though, and the committee’s time is consumed in fortifying their positions, Stanislaw charged with building a makeshift roadblock along the prison’s access road. In the night, the police have already begun massing in the distance, armoured cars parked strategically, policemen with their guns drawn and pointed right down the way. But the way they seem to shift slightly in their stance, the way their grip on their guns seems to waver slightly makes clear their uncertainty, and it’s in this uncertainty that Stanislaw and the others come to believe they can win.