After the revolution, birds will be birds, yet oppression, class, and the revolution itself, along with the professional revolutionaries who fought it - all of that will be gone. 'After the revolution,' a comrade once said to me, 'I want to be an artist.' And I to wonder, why not now? And not in ten, twenty, thirty years, toward an inexorable future?
After the revolution, an existential crisis will besiege the professional revolutionaries who fought all their lives, so much so that, like a returning soldier or war veteran, they will feel a deep void within. A comrade once told me that through struggle comes transformation. I have struggled all my life to the point that (at the dusk of it) I have forgotten who I am.
Life itself is a struggle, I now see. We fought, not for a cause, but because we felt we had to. Is there another way to live than through fight? Can we dream ourselves to sleep and live in perpetual flight instead? I've tried but I can't. Once conscience arises – class consciousness or the conscience of one's death that is – there is no turning back the clock. Ignorance is bliss.
In the hotel room where I have been staying hiding waiting staring hard and long at the mirror till I feel dizzy, I see an old tree of a man with no roots. Yet behind the wrinkles and the knots and the scars, I can almost see the child that once was. This child now grimacing in front of the mirror makes a mockery of the once-professional, now-(re)tired revolutionary.
After the revolution, we were told that we were not needed anymore and given what seemed at the time a confortable pension, along with the pomp and the medals. I still have the medal while the pomp is but a dwindling memory, and the pension slowly eating itself away. The owner of the hotel likes me (or rather the myth of me). He makes me stay for free, in memory of those good old days which never really existed but in the minds of old fools like he and I.
The younger generations do not care, and why should they? Below my window, I see a man and a woman in their twenties fighting off the night, their face half-lit by street lamps like in a theatre in which I am the unwelcomed and sole voyeur. The man shouts at the woman who shouts back at him who shouts back at her. In this comedy of manners these two appear to have found solace in repetition. Life as it is never seems to stop. Yet as we grow old, nights grow too, they surround us like shadows. Some will seek oblivion of some sort, others enternainment and the illusion of innonence. Others still (like me) have become insomniac.
After the revolution there will still be fights, I think. Fights for the sake of fighting. Fight life as it fights you to rest. The couple suddenly looks up. They have been caught off guard in their absurd little game, and I can read shame in their expression. I must close my eyes. When I reopen them the streets will be empty. The couple will have gone to wherever is their home, wishing that dirty old creeps like me be locked up – and eventually they will have what they want, for they have youth and morality on their side, while I, the old revolutionary, do not pretend to own anything but scattered chimeras.
I once too felt young and fierce and invincible. I not only had ideals but fought for them with the passion of a virgin. I would spend hours drawing theories of oppression and its source – in capitalism, so a comrade once revealed to me. At the time I believed in such a theology. It felt reassuring. Now, I do not know what to believe any longer, for I can see how discourses of origins bear no end.
The revolution has come and gone like the wind. On earth as in heaven (so they say) there is no more famine, wars or discrimination and people now work (for those who wish to) a maximum of three hours a day only. Wage-labour has become a thing of the past. The new values are cooperation, solidarity, collectivity, community, freedom.
Yet I can see in people's eyes a restlessness I have never seen before. Or fear, perhaps. It is as if our newfound freedom has enslaved us once more by revealing to us the naked truth of life. That life is fundamentally useless and does not serve any purpose. That to quit the realm of commodity exchange and capitalism for that of use values and socialism involves accepting being mortal and human again. I (of all) have failed to accept this simple truth and still entertain delusions of grandeur. This is why I hide in this hotel, feeling like an (un)wanted man.
After the revolution, redundant revolutionaries will have to be killed for the revolution to be successful. Failed revolutionaries, a Stalin, a Mao or a Pol Pot, always wanted more than mere material wealth and wished to become little gods in their own right. It is precisely so because (unlike theirs) our own revolution was so sucessful that Marx's "beginning of history" is also its end. I myself was once made to believe that life's tragedy is a life unfulfilled. I say that tragedy is fulfillment itself. Pol Pot must have realised this when he decided (with great pathos himself) to rewrite Time afresh.
Unlike many of my former comrades-in-fight, I do not see the point in partaking in human affairs any longer. In the past, I had been offered several positions as a worker's council's delegate but decided to ignore all of them. With time people even forgot that I existed.
So when the next day, the owner finally knocks at my door, a sad, knowing smile on his face that says more than it should, I am not the least surprised to see beside him the young couple from the other night who have come to deliver me from myself. They say they have top-quality retirement houses that are more like communes, and free child care for everyone. Freedom for everyone, can't you see, no need to fight anymore (old man!). And they say this is progress. I find it hard to believe. I protest: 'Haven't we learned the meaning of communism yet?!'
Suddenly I laugh at the thought that for the first time in my entire life as an adult, I have been given holidays. I no longer am an adult but a child once more. Will I remember how to play? Will I learn again how to live? And what did Trotsky really mean by 'permanent revolution'? Such random thoughts and others will haunt me as they take me to my last abode. An answer (more like an enigma really) has yet to arise in the form of a litany or an incantation: After the revolution, birds...
At the back of my head, I can hear the young woman shouting at her partner: 'You ask too many questions!' The man shouts back: 'You should listen to yourself!' Before we reach the retirement house, I will have found the strength to cut my veins open. My last act of resistance in the face of resignation. It is (always) too late, I know it. My only hope is that they will not stop me, young people always feel they have a right to interfere in others' lives. I used to feel that way, too. I would now like to die without a noise. Yet as the razor hits my forearm I can't help screaming, out of cowardice but also stupid pride so that I leave this world as I came: 'Long live the revolution!'
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