SHWI repost: Heart of Redness (Red Europe)

The Seed: Heart of Redness

George Loveless's 15" guns shuddered into the Jungle as Mateusz's motor
boat passed by. [1,2] Further out to sea 8-Hour-day was resting
easily.[3] He had asked for a job, and after this one, he would never
want to work again. He was coming back to the Jungle, after all those
years in the cold. His employers may have changed, but his purpose
hadn't. It would be good to be again in the Jungle, where there wasn't
any difficulty of killing Europeans or civil war, back where Darkie
fought for real, moving fast, living on stolen rice for Sunday Dinner.

* * *

Back in Red Brussels they had dragged him out of a bordello and a few
weeks away from permanent liver damage to a suite of undamaged bourgeois
rooms.

The two men met him on pastel pink silk couches. Only one introduced
himself. The other wore a conspicuous suit with an unusually well made
Party badge of the currently most influential party.

The undersubsecretary of the committee for West Africa of the Commission
for Socialist Development in pre-modern areas had informed him,
individually, not before any committee, that a regional rotating militia
commander had refused recall and was operating beyond any conception of
socialist legality. Apparently he had taken to the jungle with a rag
tag group of rich peasants, after massacring the Dutch rubber workers
who were on station. "Karl Radek appears to have gone insane." The
modulated tones were those of a person of middling good background,
struggling against his own upbringing, but with insufficient talent and
education to be genuinely an intellectual. The u/s/sec. was obviously a
party-minder, even the phraseology mimicked the newspaper opinion
columns of the great lights of socialism.[4]

The silent party leader gently smoked a cigarette in the background,
covering the elegant Asian carpets with ash and beginning the process of
yellowing curtains that thousands of hours of women's labour had kept
virgin white.

The undersubsecretary wound the rare gramophone and placed the needle on
the outside of the platter, "A shore party of 8-hours cut this recording
months ago." Radek's voice crackled out through the material
limitations of the objective factors of jungle, radio and recording,
making insane jokes about leading economic and management figures in
Germany and Belgium. It was as though Radek had inverted the whole
social order. He called Martyr Luxembourg a petit-bourgeois
social-climber! It was as though Radek had put a dialectics of the mind
and apprehension prior to the material circumstances of being.[5] Of
course, this situation could never last for long. Mateusz was well
aware that social relations would be brought into line with the
conditions of social being; if necessary with the midwife of history.

The undersubsecretary coughed up, "We'd like you to synthesise his
contradictions."

"Synthesise?"

The silent man breathed smoke out through his nose, "Synthesise, with
negation of the negation."

It was a Bolshevik job, and after this, he would never want another
party assignment.[6]

Sam R.

[1] www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs
[2] Former HMS Resolution
[3] Former HMS Queen Elizabeth
[4] The contradiction of Capitalism was that bourgeois tafetta requires
Indian starvation. The contradiction of Socialism is that workers'
tyres require Congalese murders. We're bringing them into proletarian
social relations, of course they don't want to leave the conditions of
their material existance behind. That's why we need militia columns there.
[5] www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Radek appears to be a bit of a joker, an
intellectual, a deeply humane individual. I mean, look at Radek's work
in the 1936 constitution!
[6] Win or lose in Russia, I suspect that "Bolshevik" is likely to be a
term denoting hardness and "giving ones all" within the revolutionary
movement.
 
Top