Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge Richard Greeman Page A

their pocket to buy an evening of painted pleasure—without confidence in the future, or rather with no other hope than that of their simmering revolt.
    Every city contains many cities. This was ours. We did not penetrate into the others. There was the city of the calculating businessmen who gorged themselves in the best restaurants and who spent their nights undressing the expensive creatures whom we glimpsed passing in limousines. There was the city of the priests, the monks, the Jesuits in their monasteries surrounded by vast gardens like fortified cities. The city of power—held in contempt—with its decorated generals, its policemen bought for a
douro,
its jailers, its informers. The city of writers,professors, journalists—a city of paid phrases, of poisoned words and ideas, of lucrative alchemies. The city of spies, labyrinth of mines and countermines, of secret rendezvous, of multiple treacheries like equations with several unknowns: military intelligence, consulates, Herr Werner, financial dealings through Amsterdam, Mata Hari carrying an address in her handbag (another equation—the exact equivalent of that last bullet, the
coup de grâce,
that would crash through her skull within a few months at the foot of the stake in Vincennes).
    Prowling spies sometimes crossed our paths, ready to strip our power bare like the vermin who strip corpses on the battlefields. They offered their money and they asked for nothing in return: the last word in subtlety! The careers of secret agents would be made or broken by the general strike, the possible ruin of the industries working for the Entente. A whole stinking underground mob, drooling over the limbs of a proletarian giant ready to leap forward, imagined they were making it move at their will, like a puppet. That made us laugh. “What a rude awakening they’ll have, those s.o.b.s, if things work out! …” In those cities the blood of Europe and the labor of three hundred thousand workers had brought forth a strange spring of wealth, spurting into a network of golden rivulets. And we knew it. It was in the order of things! Dario would explain:
“They
can no longer put up with the rule of the bureaucrats in Madrid and the political bosses in the provinces. Neither their wealth nor their businesses will be safe as long as the old court camarillas and their personnel of pious, lazy, corrupt scribblers whose bribes start at twenty-five centimes are in power. They are choking, and money is suffocating them.” Dario laughed. “And they need us to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We need them to shake up the old edifice. Afterwards, we’ll see …” Yes, we’ll see. We know the old story. With the monarchists overthrown and the Jesuits in flight, three to six months later, the republics establish order by machine-gunning the workers. An old tradition. Whoever lives will see. We won’t always be the weaker. With what is brewing on the other side of the Pyrenees …” We’ll twist the neck of tradition, right?”—“We’re the power, the only power.”—“In ’73 Alcoy and Cartagena held out for months. We have our Communes, which will be remembered. Wait a bit.
Hombre!
this will be something beautiful!”
    It is already something beautiful to be carrying that victory within us. I have doubts, but it is because I am a newcomer in this city: I cannot, as you do, Dario, feel the strength of this people mounting in my veryveins. In spite of myself, I often see you with the skeptical eyes of a foreigner: and I see your inexperience, your embryonic organization, your boldly delineated ideas, shedding great light here and there, but incapable of organizing themselves, of becoming precise, disciplined, implacable and self-critical in order to transform the world … Only a few thousand union members among three hundred thousand proletarians. Tiny unions that are in reality