The life of an activist (1973-1976)
In previous posts, I talked mostly about my experiences as a worker and living in Molenbeek. Here, I describe the daily life of a Maoist activist working in factories.
In previous posts, I talked mostly about my experiences as a worker (dockworker in the Brussels-Vilvoorde port, in the Assembly line at Citroën, unskilled worker in Côte d’Or and Michelin) living in the immigrant working class neighborhood in Molenbeek. I barely mentioned my militant activities within UCMLB. There is a reason for that. I had been partly isolated by the organization since being demoted from the leadership of Rebelle early 1973. I explain this here in more detail. But first, I want to describe the daily life of a Maoist activist, as I experienced it.
According to Leninist theory, only the most devoted activists should become members of the communist Party. Indeed, being member of a Leninist party means working 24/7 for the Party. For those like me who worked in factories, our job as activist was not only inside the factory. All our free time was devoted to revolutionary activities. This involved selling newspapers and distributing pamphlets. A lot of time was devoted to visits of potential new members who had expressed interest in the organization, with as a priority the recruitment of workers as full-time members. Only a few of those did become effective party members, either because they were not fully prepared or because they were not deemed ready yet. This could be because of lack of discipline or insufficient political consciousness. Party cells met generally once a week and people used to note down what was discussed. Some time was also spent on writing reports on one’s activities. There were many, many other activities. Also, participation in all the demonstrations and mass movements that were taking place was standqrd. There was hardly even any time left to read books on Marxism-Leninism or even the works of Mao, Lenin, etc.. I remember spending once a whole week without sleeping. I was working the night shift at Côte d’Or and during the day, I was full time busy with a big hunger strike organized by illegal workers who wanted to receive legal work permits. After 5 days without sleep, I felt like drunk, was not able to think straight and had a really hard time falling asleep. Sleep deprivation was standard for professional revolutionaries and it numbed one’s ability to think straight. This is typical of life inside sects.
Let me now come back to my demotion from Rebelle early 1973. After the movement against Army reform, one of the cadres of UCMLB, Léon Bertrand who I admired very much and considered a role model as an activist, invited himself abruptly to a meeting of Rebelle. He came with sharp criticism of how we had behaved during that mass movement. We had not been able to include ourselves in the national coordination committee of high school students. The propaganda we had distributed was quite dogmatic. If I remember correctly, our style of propaganda followed a systematic pattern: 1) denounce some incident or event (here Army reform), 2) explain how this is a consequence of the capitalist system, which needs to be overthrown, 3) this can only be done through a vanguard Marxist-Leninist party. Seen today, this is of course quite laughable. At the time, this was considered dogmatic, because some discontent or mass movement was used to propagate Marxist-Leninist ideas. Instead, what we should have done was to see how we could help the mass movement grow, and through this grow our political influence, provided we had made the right analysis of how to help expand the mass movement. That was the way of deserving leadership through our active role in the movement. This political analysis, which I found correct, was however associated with personal accusations that would literally traumatize me, and nearly break me psychologically. I was accused by my role model Léon of having unmasked myself as a Bourgeois arrivist (social climber). He also made similar accusations against Laurent.
It is difficult to express how devastating these criticisms were for an eighteen-year-old high school student who wanted to devote his entire life to the cause of the revolution. The first reaction is not one of protest or denial but of total bewildering, a sense of utter self-defeat and total loss of energy. I felt like a balloon that had popped. I was accused by someone I admired of being the enemy within, a young Belgian Liu Shaoqi.[1] If others saw me like this, who was I? What was I still worth for? How come I had not seen this? Laurent and I were not only demoted, but we were urged to write self-criticisms if we wanted to avoid exclusion from UCMLB. I was interviewed fifteen years later by a former member of the organization who was doing her honors thesis in psychology on the traumas experienced by members of UCMLB (much more is still to come) and her diagnosis was that I had suffered from personality destruction. As much as I was devastated and deeply traumatized, I must say I never had ideas of suicide.
I have not kept a copy of my self-criticism from 1973, but I remember reinterpreting my revolutionary enthusiasm as hidden personal ambition, and turning my hatred for the system against myself. This totally dampened my enthusiasm, to say the least. I did not know any more if this enthusiasm was passion for the cause or a Machiavellian unconscious plot to further my hidden personal ambitions. For weeks in a row, I literally felt like a zombie. It took me months to recover a minimum of energy and appetite for life. I was still young, I had friends, a girlfriend and I could go on with my life, albeit as a very modest cog in the machine of the revolution. Fortunately, I had recovered sufficient energy to pass the exams for the German Abitur at the end of the school year. Working in factories after that also helped me recover a semblance of sanity.
Liu Shaoqi, the number one target of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Being accused of being like Liu Shaoqi was one of the worst criticisms Maoists like me could receive.
This episode of self-criticism reveals a specificity of Maoism relative to Leninism. Leninism is mostly about the organization of the vanguard party and the rules within the party. After the October revolution, all communist parties were organized following the Leninist model. A member of a Leninist party is required to work 24/7 for the revolution, to be ready to sacrifice his or her life for the cause, but the practice of self-criticism is not Leninist, it is typically Maoist. When the Stalinist purges of the Bolshevik leaders took place in the 1930s, the “confessions” made by the Bolshevik leaders like Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were obtained through torture, sleep deprivation and threats to do bad things to their family members. During the Cultural Revolution, millions of Communist Party members were encouraged to engage in self-criticism. Mao’s idea was that in order to avoid the Communist Party from degenerating into a revisionist “capitalist road” Party, people should work to change their view of the world, abandon feudal and Bourgeois ideas and embrace the communist, revolutionary view of the world. As I learned many decades later, this is a typical Asian collectivist view: people are assumed to be infinitely malleable and to be able to change themselves with enough effort. These Chinese exercises in introspection, self-criticism and transformation of one’s personality and world views were exported to Maoist parties abroad. They would prove utterly totalitarian, dystopian and destructive.
While I was still a dockworker in the Fall of 1973, I was asked by the two leaders of UCMLB (Eric Pollet and Michel Nesjzaten) to officiate as a translator (French-Flemish and Flemish-French) for top level meetings they were having with the leaders of AMADA, the quite bigger Flemish sister organization. The meetings were to take place in Antwerp where AMADA had the biggest presence. Nesjzaten knew no Flemish, Pollet understood it but could not speak it well. The AMADA leaders could speak French, but preferred to speak Flemish. The leaders of UCMLB wanted to negotiate a merger of the two organizations into a single Marxist-Leninist Party. Their view was that there were minor differences between the two organizations and it would be a sin if they did not merge. The AMADA leaders were more skeptical. They claimed UCMLB was following a wrong dogmatic line. I was then surprised to hear them making the same criticisms that I had heard a few months earlier against the REBELLE leaders. This was truly eye-opening to me. I realized that the criticisms made against us were actually the consequence of following the UCMLB line, not of some deviation from it. It goes without saying that I felt much better and realized I had previously been unjustly accused. In the travel in the car back from Antwerp to Brussels, I told the UCMLB leaders that I actually agreed with the criticism of dogmatism made by the AMADA leaders. They laughed at me.
After that, I was known inside UCMLB as the lone member who agreed with the AMADA political line. I was asked to change my views, but I refused. From then on, I was isolated within the organization. My own political work in factories and in Molenbeek was freewheeling and without supervision. The irony was that they could not exclude me from the organization, because defending the line of AMADA was not seen as an “antagonistic contradiction”, which in Maoist terms means as divergences that were not strong enough to label me a revisionist or a traitor. Excluding me would actually contradict their political line, which emphasized that the most urgent task was to unite the two organizations.
The person the closest to me in these hard times was my little brother Damien. In the Fall of 1973, he was 16. Just like my father had sent me to a German school, he had enrolled Damien in the Flemish Atheneum, just next to the family house in Etterbeek, to improve his Flemish. Like in most other schools in Brussels, there were leftists there too, not only among the pupils but also among the teachers. There was a cell of the KJB (Kommunistisch Jeugd Bond – Communist Youth League-), the youth organization of AMADA and Damien was recruited by them.[2] After I became the single pro-AMADA member within UCMLB, I sometimes confided in Damien telling him about my isolation in the cell I was in (which worked mostly in St-Gilles, Anderlecht and Forest, leaving me to work alone in Molenbeek), including the constant criticisms I received from the cell secretary Michel Collon and other intellectual figures like Eric Clemens. Damien encouraged me to stay inside UCMLB and fight for my ideas. While AMADA leaders were somewhat suspicious towards the francophone organization and not at all in a hurry to merge the two organizations, they also considered that the contradiction between the two organizations was not antagonistic and did not call for members of UCMLB to leave the organization and join them. Things would, however, evolve very rapidly early 1976.
(To be continued)
[1] Liu Shaoqi was the main target of the Cultural Revolution in China. Being accused of being like Liu Shaoqi was one of the worst things that could happen to a Maoist.
[2] After “losing” two sons to Maoism, my parents made sure my youngest sister Marie would go to a Catholic all-girls school, so as not to be contaminated by leftist ideas.