Class Warfare by D. M. Fraser

They are welcome to the name; if they use it well, it is theirs. Whoever does the work we do must be our ally; there are no more splendid words than these:
We are with you.
Alex said it better once, before an audience of the innocent. “Every disruption of the entrenched order, every crime,” he said, leaning into the microphone as though it had leaped erect from his beloved’s navel, “every discomfort inflicted upon the comfortable, every assault, every ambush, every raid, every strike, every act of war against the powerful and propertied, everything that cannot be comprehended, works to our ends. Every man who dies of hunger feeds us. Every woman who fights for her life gives birth to us. Everyone who stumbles and stands up again, who refuses to lie down, carries us forward.
We are all one force, and you will never be rid of us, you will never prevail.
”
    I was in the crowd, listening, hearing his voice—with the regional twang it had never completely lost—ricochet off the concrete and steel walls around us. His hair flapped; his eyes were aimed straight out at a horizon only he saw. It was one of his better speeches.
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    It is reasonable to assume, for the present, that we will not be discovered; if we are, we will not hesitate to defend ourselves. Our arsenal is adequate. We have no wish to kill the prisoner, whom we would prefer to rehabilitate, but we are not yet unwilling to do it if we must. Only one of us is squeamish, but he is very likely thinking of Alex, about whom we have all had second thoughts. We can trust him to come around, if the situation compels it.
    Between bulletins, the radio plays songs of disgruntled love, pain, the familiar grievances. Between commercials (for pizza joints, rental agencies, popular causes), the announcer has forgotten to switch off his mike. “Listen to me,” he shouts across acres of tiled studio space. “Listen to me. It’s my job to send my voice out into the dark, from here, to be retrieved by someone else’s receiver. It’s my job to be listened to. I’m paid money by the purveyors of shit to convince the would-be purchasers of shit that they should purchase the particular shit I’m being paid to purvey. No one loves me for it, for what I do. The softer I speak, the gentler I make my voice sound, the more they buy. Sheets and towels, lawn furniture, soap, appliances.
Home delivery.
And some of them phone me up in the middle of the night; they say things like,
Hey, big boy, how’re you hung? What’s happenin’ when yer shift ends?
Usually I just laugh, when that happens …”
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    Alex loved the battle itself, for its poetry, its pyrotechnics. He loved the music he heard, the drums and whistles in his head, when we went out adventuring. He was often in the vanguard of our undertakings, in the early days, with his transcendental smile and demon’s laughter, his characteristic mane of fiery hair. His beauty was dangerous to us, but we followed it like a lodestar, in the early days. Those days are gone now, and when we understood that they were gone, that the gay music had finally turned sombre and purposeful, we executed him. I will concede it was a mistake, at least a failure of imagination, but it taught us what we needed to know. The next time, it will not be a mistake. Alex understood that, I think. We are different now,
other:
we have come—through years of indecision, years of indifference, acquiescence, oppression, years of futility—we have come to know our terms and to set them, to accept nothing less, permit no compromise. To say, meaning it:
Give us what is ours, or we will take it away from you.
    Alex said, in one of the speeches he made before he went underground: “Give us what we ask for, that infinitesimal fraction of what you owe us by your greed, your rapacity, or it will be extracted from you in another currency: your children, your estates, your miserable