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Title: The Tyrant From Below Author: Andre Lorulot Date: 1939 Language: en Topics: individualist, mass society, voluntary servitude Source: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lorulot/1939/tyrant-below.htm Notes: Source: Les Hommes me Dégoutent. [Herblay], L’Idée Libre, 1939; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor.
No, liberty is not for us. We
are too ignorant, too vain, too presumptuous,
too cowardly, too vile, too corrupted
— Marat
I have to say it and I will say it.
In taking up the pen I committed myself, all alone, to banishing all
forms of partisanship and to refusing to retreat before any truths.
Hypocrisy is repugnant to me, if it’s from the Right or the Left. This
need for honesty has made me many enemies, even — and how ironic- among
“friends” and “brothers.”
Beat up on the capitalist and the fascist: that’s fine. Bravo! You’ll be
encouraged, at least verbally (when you have to pay with your own money
it’s already more difficult — you end up paying with your skin).
But, loyal man, don’t allow yourself to criticize what is going on in
your own house. Reveal the flaws of your neighbor, but close your eyes
to the turpitudes of your party.
I never knew how to do this. This is probably why I never wanted to join
any party, any church, any sect. My independence is my most precious
good.
This is not a comfortable position. You draw much animosity to yourself.
The troublemaker. He who refuses to be the accomplice of the ambitious,
the traitors, the profiteers. For they exist. And everywhere,
everywhere.
I passionately love humanity, and have dedicated my best efforts to the
fight for the oppressed. All tyrants disgust me — and all those who put
up with them, adulate them, support them. After having brought them down
will I make myself a tyrant in their place? I would be disgusted with
myself.
People, beware of demagogues. They are your worst enemies. They caress
you only so they can better shear you. Deep down they detest and mock
you, but your shoulders are necessary to them for carrying their
kettledrum (which won’t beat for you). They hate you, and if they could
squeeze you for once and for all in the vise, they’d gladly do it. And
later maybe they will. For the moment they need your votes, your
suffrage, and your dues. So they’ll call you great, noble and beautiful,
and that you have both all rights and all virtues.
If you believe them you are an imbecile, and you are lost.
Telling a worker the truth, the whole truth, even when it is painful, is
perhaps the best way of serving his cause and working for his true
liberation.
They disgust me, those who tell the people they’ll arrive at complete
and universal happiness without having to make an effort or perfecting
themselves. They lie — and willfully. It is, incidentally, in their
interest — that of the masters, or the aspiring masters — to prevent the
masses from educating themselves. Is it not by correcting themselves
that they will be capable of progressing and taking in hand the guiding
of their own destiny? That day, having become useless, chiefs and
leaders will have nothing to do but disappear.
They disgust me, those who refuse the worker the right to the ideal and
speak exclusively of his belly.
For them, everything is subordinated to beefsteak.
An ever bigger, ever bloodier, ever easier-to-conquer-beefsteak. The
ideal of a wild beast, or a starving dog.
To be sure, one must live. I concede you this. But adding: we must live
in order to develop in ourselves the highest and noblest qualities of
man: Dignity! Consciousness! Love! Liberty!
What good would it be for me to gorge myself like a bulldog or to digest
like a canon if I have to renounce the most elevated aspirations and the
purest, most disinterested joys?
Don’t listen to those who want to subordinate everything to the stomach:
they insult you. Become capable of fighting for something other than
tripe or the wallet. Without detesting them for all that (let’s not go
from one extreme to the other) let us mistrust flatterers, professional
politicians, phrasemakers. Let us go towards the truth, whatever it
might be, with all our heart, without putting on blinders, without
stifling anyone’s voice.
I have no particular hatred for the rich. If it happens that I complain
of their stupidity or mock their pretentions, I am not jealous of their
money.
Must I add that it is not enough to be poor to merit my sympathy?
Money makes stupid or crooked those who have it. But those who don’t
have it are generally as cretinous and villainous as the rich. The
desire to enrich themselves suffices to stifle in them all generous
feelings and any aspiration to justice — and cleanliness.
And those 100% revolutionaries, those organized proletarians, those
conscious union members, those pioneers of the future who get as drunk
as skunks? Who don’t have ten francs to buy a book but who spend twice
that at the bar. Who stumble around the streets and disgorge their wine
while climbing the stairs? These are the pioneers of the future, the
precursors of the Harmonious City, with their dirty feet, their bestial
ignorance, their animalistic pretentions, their appetite for alcohol and
bordellos?
Thanks to a certain minister named Pomaret, since last winter workers
who have been employed for 60 consecutive years in the same
establishment receive a medal of honor for labor.
You read correctly: they will give a medal to workers who have remained
sixty years with the same boss.
It’s hard to more openly make fun of these poor proles.
But they accept the medal (which won’t even be of chocolate). They will
be as proud as peacocks and will strive to hold straight their carcasses
that have been emptied, worn out, crushed by so much suffering, so much
prolonged effort, so much pitiless exploitation.
They’ll go be photographed with their little bauble. As proud, as
foolish as those fathers of fourteen whose unintelligent mugs “La Croix”
(edited by bachelors) regularly publishes.
The lowest of slaves is he who is happy to be one.
So admit it: in many ways the slave is as repugnant as his master.
If he trembles in a cowardly way before his superior, he avenges himself
in a no less cowardly way on his inferior.
A prole who stammers with servility before his factory foreman makes up
for it in the evening by beating his wife and kids. Then he stands up
straight. And he shouts. Then he’s a real male!
At the factory itself, if he has any apprentices under him, he uses them
as whipping boys; he tyrannizes over them wears them out through ill
treatment.
Just like the sergeant who works over the recruit at the barracks
because the captain yelled at him.
Humanity doesn’t shine too brightly?
Once we said: the people. Today we say: the masses.
Once we said: your delegates. Today there is the base and the summit.
The delegates, secretaries, etc., we call them the responsables. Does
that mean that the voters are all irresponsible? That is, unaware?
What contempt for the individual. Conformism is ever more triumphant.
The human personality is neglected. What am I saying: it is
disappearing. If it existed it would show itself, it would react, it
would complain. It is only capable of bleating out applause and weakly
following chiefs who lead it to the slaughterhouse. In the immense
leveling of the social herds MAN becomes increasingly rare. And we make
life tougher and tougher for him.
With your millions of members, dues-payers, you weren’t capable of
saving the Spanish Republic. CGT, Communist and Socialist parties, what
did your try that was effective? Serious? All you know are materialistic
demands, cash, but the Ideal, the defense of a great disinterested
cause? How could your members know about this, since their bad shepherds
never spoke to them about it?