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Title: Contrast
Author: Ret Marut
Date: 1921
Language: en
Topics: anti-work, B. Traven, critique, revolution
Source: Retrieved on June 19, 2009 from http://www.non-fides.fr/spip.php?article295
Notes: Ret Marut, dithyrambs in Der Ziegelbrenner, n.35/40, 21st December 1921.

Ret Marut

Contrast

Think! But you can’t think, because you need statutes, because you have

administrators to elect, because you have ministers to enthrone, because

you can’t live without government, because you can’t live without a

boss.

You yield your voices only to lose them, and when you yourselves want to

use them, you don’t have them anymore, you miss them because you gave

them up.

Think! You don’t need anything else. Become conscious of the serene

passivity which exists inside you, in which your invincible power is

rooted. With a calm and carefree heart let economic life crumble down;

it never brought me happiness and neither will it bring you any.

Consciously, let industry rot, otherwise it will rot you.

You go on strike. Well done, bunch of serfs! Industry gets fat from your

strikes and starves you. You go on strike and you win. Oh winners! What

you have won is a tiny chunk of bread: while you were celebrating

victory, the loser bought two estates. Oh, you who win! You who

persuade! Your leader has become a minister, proud winners!

Because you need a plush sofa! It’s the mark of your servitude. You will

remain slaves for as long as you hold onto and tend to your plush

sofa...

So destroy economic life, not only on the inside but also on the

outside. It is upon the ruins of industry that your freedom flowers, not

upon industry’s fortresses and castles.

Let your money be devoured by worms and larvae, extort a salary twenty

times greater and reduce your work to a hundredth of that which you are

able to offer, and happiness will return to you multiplied by a hundred.

Incense in a church or chatting at a meeting are the same thing. To read

or to buy a newspaper is to learn hymns by heart.

No god will help you, no programme, no party, no ballot paper, no

masses, no unity. I’m the only one able to help myself. And it is within

myself that I will help all the people whose tears overflow.

I help myself. Brother, help yourself! Act! Be will! Be action!

You shout: Long live world revolution! It sounds very nice. But are the

telegraph cables already between your hands? Have you already blown up a

rotary press? You shout: Long live world revolution! But your brother,

who you hold between your arms, already doesn’t hear your cry. How could

the universe hear you?

Don’t buy yourself Sunday clothes and don’t be ashamed to sleep on

planks at home, and to walk along posh roads without trousers, laughing;

it furthers the revolution more than singing The Internationale or

studying the conjuring tricks which the popes of Berlin and Moscow have

for sale.