As we head towards the climax of the novel, I continue to appreciate the progressively unfolding politics of our now familiar insurgents. We’ve known from the very first exchange of letters that we can never be sure anyone is genuinely on the same “side.” Now, Yarostan sees that it is impossible for Alberts and Titus to have fought, in that long-ago revolution, on the same side as Manuel and Nachalo.  Albert’s role in the army is clearly exposed, and I am even beginning to be suspicious of Titus.

When Manuel returned from the front to the city he found former union militants working as supervisors and speed-up engineers, lubricating the production of weapons for a “popular army” whose guns were turned against the workers themselves. Luisa fails to clarify precisely what’s obscure. How could Nachalo, George Alberts and Titus Zabran all have fought on the same front?

Immediately after the street fighting, militia units were quickly organized to take the revolution to the country-side, to the “front.”  A few days later, a “popular army” was formed, and took off after the militia units.  Alberts was a member of this “popular army,” organized by union militants-turned-state functionaries, which ended up attacking those villages that did not welcome them. He may have been encouraged to join the popular army by a uniformed Titus on his own way to rejoin the militias, presumbly ignorant of the mounting conflict between the two forces. Disturbingly, Alberts returned “shell-shocked” and “transformed” – he “served on a firing squad that liquidated members of the militia unit after calling them ‘infiltrators’.”  George Alberts and Titus Zabran, it seems, having “both joined with Nachalo at the front,” apparently “joined” him in geography only, since they were on the side of the new statist regime.

We are left with some big questions. Did Alberts make a mistake to find that he was on the wrong side of the firing line?  Was Titus, a member of the popular army, there to defend the milita or attack it?  What were Titus’s previous (and subsequent) relationships to both military and state?  Did Sophia really see Titus when she was released from prison, and, if so, why was he not arrested with the rest of the carton factory workers?  Yarostan still wants to believe the best of both Titus and Alberts, imagining that any counter-revolutionary activities were somehow accidental.

Unfortunately, Alberts was not so charitable to Yarostan, apparently considering him a “hooligan.” We can guess that he felt the same about Nachalo, too – and that while he was attracted to Margarita’s wildness, he sought ultimately to tame her.  His ideas were actually diametrically opposed to Margarita’s entire being. As Sabina reveals, Alberts wanted to overcome nature with science, even if his “project” with Margarita was by this measure a total failure.

Luisa’s motivations turn out to be much the same as Alberts’, but focused more on the development of the workers’ union. As Sabina descibes it,

Luisa got Nachalo into the union, but she didn’t thereby transform Nachalo; she transformed the union instead.  Nachalo and Margarita caused a split in the union local. Instead of bending to the appartus, they made it bend.  They formed something like a terrorist gang inside the union. [...] Yarostan told us why else Margarita would have fought: to clear away the obstacles to their enjoyment, not to clear away fetters to the development of productive forces.  It was that “popular army” Alberts joined that fought to remove the fetters to the construction of his crystal palace, and Margarita as well as Nachalo were among those fetters! That was the struggle Luisa tried to channel them into!  She and Alberts were able to present them as forerunners of that struggle only because they were dead! Luisa tried to turn them into agents of their own repression and failed.

Figuring out just who was on whose “side” seems to be a means for thinking about who is pursuing a project of true human enjoyment, and who is committed to the development of the workers’ state, with all the “productive forces” and “peoples’ military” that invokes.

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These relations between dehumanizing work and progressive politics return over and over again, not just in Letters (for instance, with Zdenek), but also in the contemporary world of “the left.” Here in the Bay Area, we have plenty of opportunities for “political” work.  Whether it concerns labor, environment or health, there is a lot of “work” in organizations advocating for changes in policy. Indeed, there is a lot of money going toward trying to “make the world a better place” through state reform. Still, radicals have been scrutinizing the limits, and even setbacks, being created by the very same non-profits which are often dependent on state money. As a consequence, they end up compromising “the left” and protecting the state.

Should politics and work be combined in this way, or should they be combined in a different way – or not at all? Can “work” and “political change” be linked? Yarostan’s constant insight is that what he ironically refers to as a “genuine workers’ union” (such as Zdenek is working to create) doesn’t actually change anything or, in his words, “create a new form of human activity.”  The goal of these unions is actually to replicate the same form of activity and labor that preceded the union. The only difference is the workers exploiting themselves rather than being exploited by another apparatus. Indeed, as Yarostan writes, Zdenek has “worked much harder and has been far more ‘responsible’ at his job since the strike at his plant took place.” Zdenek’s work hasn’t changed, he is simply more driven in the drudgery now that it is self-imposed. This makes me suspicious that work and politics can be combined at all, or that the goal of our work can be separated from the practices through which we bring that goal about.