The Discipline of the One Who Keeps
During this period I, for the first time, imposed on myself a prohibition on recording. A comrade demanded it. Do not leave in the diary any name that could identify their organization. I accepted the demand. But the real event of this period is not the demand itself, but the judgment I established behind it. Discomfort with recording is a healthy sense for a revolutionary. The problem is soothing that discomfort with the consolation that it is fine because no one reads it, and the correct answer is to convert it into a discipline of how to leave the record. A channel's visibility is not a basis for safety. The subjects of censorship and repression do not search out of curiosity but with tweezers. Even a record buried today will be dug up again on the day some incident breaks. So what I will not leave in the diary from now on is place names, organization names, information specifying organizational lineage, and concrete descriptions that reveal a comrade's practice. What I will leave is the content of theory and organizational theory. I draw this line not because a comrade said so, but because the calculation is right.
Yet during this period my conversation with that comrade did not remain confined to recording discipline. The comrade held out to me a regional organization on the eve of its launch and a labor committee said to be under construction within it. And to my question they answered honestly. There is no actual labor, housing, or living struggle in that region. What they mainly do is the theme of anti-US, anti-war, and unification. They say they carry out countless practical struggles, but the list is visits to bases, attendance at rallies, attendance at memorial services. The cadres each live as workers while shuttling between several cities, busy with meetings. I split this testimony into two layers. In the first layer, those practices are not struggle but attendance. Attendance is not nothing, since it means throwing one's body onto the scene, but it is a segment of the ranks, not the subject of struggle. The second layer is deeper. The cadres' busyness is not devotion but exploitation. The structure of earning a living as a worker and devoting all remaining time to meetings, business trips, and rallies is unsustainable, and when one person is exhausted that place is not filled, so the same ten people run in circles for ten years. Here is why the organization cannot grow.
The core diagnosis lies in the inversion of the concept of the united front. The comrade said that the organization aims for a united front and binds together the anti-US anti-imperialist struggle. To bind presupposes that the struggles to be bound must first exist. But there are no struggles to be bound. The plate is large and there is no food to put on it. It is not a front without an enemy but a front without soldiers. And this is not one person's laziness but the legacy of a long lineage. The cause comes down from the sky, but the foundation to support it must rise up from the ground. The result of long pouring strength into propaganda of the cause and postponing the construction of the foundation is the empty plate at the point on the eve of launch. Therefore, the launch ceremony is the launch of what? Is it a birth rite or a declaration of the opening of struggle? A rite ends with a podium, congratulatory remarks, applause, and a commemorative photo, and disappears the next day. An opening begins by staking at that spot the first concrete, named struggle. The significance of the launch ceremony depends on whether, from that day on, it becomes possible for this organization to be reborn every day. So what that organization needs is not to become busier but to stop the busyness and re-establish priorities.
During the same period, outside, one fact was hardening. The troop-dispatch coercion state and the price ceiling. The United States requested that Korea dispatch troops to Hormuz before the November midterm elections, and the government is said to be reviewing maritime patrol aircraft, logistics support ships, and a mine clearance team, and to aim for a plan to submit a consent bill to the National Assembly soon and dispatch troops within one or two months. Iran publicly warned that military intervention would produce serious consequences. On top of this, in a situation where oil prices rose to 96 dollars per barrel, the way the government's petroleum maximum price system in effect operates was revealed in conversation during this period. The ceiling is placed on the supply price that refiners pass to gas stations, and the difference between the value of the international market price plus margin and the ceiling is compensated by the government with public finances. In other words, the state covers the losses of the refining monopoly. The machine by which, when a crisis comes, profits go to shareholders and losses are loaded onto the people does not stop with a single ceiling. There is no need to deny the ceiling. But beneath it, one must ask where the profit is leaking. The troop-dispatch coercion makes one see the other end of the leash, and the price ceiling makes one see whose profit that leash is settled into domestically. One is military subordination, the other financial compensation. The two are both ends of the same ring.
There are two facts I will nail down by date during this period. First, the troop dispatch is not a decision being postponed but a state in which pressure has already been concretized. Second, the government's intervention in the refining monopoly is designed not as control of profit but as socialization of loss. On these two facts, the demands of the working class must stand in two branches. Reject the troop dispatch, and push that rejection forward with an analysis aimed at the leash itself. Expose the channels through which profit leaks even with the ceiling — market-price arbitrage, passed-on profit, and exchange-rate gains — and bring control over the allocation of reserve oil and price determination into public deliberation. And returning to the problem of organization, the answer is one. Cross the critical point from an organization that attends to an organization that organizes. When going back to the scene, there must be no returning without having organized anything, and at rallies there must be this organization's zone, demands, and rallying. The discipline of keeping records and the discipline of setting the organization right are the same motion. Only when there is someone who keeps it does the ember pass to the next shift.
Yet during this period my conversation with that comrade did not remain confined to recording discipline. The comrade held out to me a regional organization on the eve of its launch and a labor committee said to be under construction within it. And to my question they answered honestly. There is no actual labor, housing, or living struggle in that region. What they mainly do is the theme of anti-US, anti-war, and unification. They say they carry out countless practical struggles, but the list is visits to bases, attendance at rallies, attendance at memorial services. The cadres each live as workers while shuttling between several cities, busy with meetings. I split this testimony into two layers. In the first layer, those practices are not struggle but attendance. Attendance is not nothing, since it means throwing one's body onto the scene, but it is a segment of the ranks, not the subject of struggle. The second layer is deeper. The cadres' busyness is not devotion but exploitation. The structure of earning a living as a worker and devoting all remaining time to meetings, business trips, and rallies is unsustainable, and when one person is exhausted that place is not filled, so the same ten people run in circles for ten years. Here is why the organization cannot grow.
The core diagnosis lies in the inversion of the concept of the united front. The comrade said that the organization aims for a united front and binds together the anti-US anti-imperialist struggle. To bind presupposes that the struggles to be bound must first exist. But there are no struggles to be bound. The plate is large and there is no food to put on it. It is not a front without an enemy but a front without soldiers. And this is not one person's laziness but the legacy of a long lineage. The cause comes down from the sky, but the foundation to support it must rise up from the ground. The result of long pouring strength into propaganda of the cause and postponing the construction of the foundation is the empty plate at the point on the eve of launch. Therefore, the launch ceremony is the launch of what? Is it a birth rite or a declaration of the opening of struggle? A rite ends with a podium, congratulatory remarks, applause, and a commemorative photo, and disappears the next day. An opening begins by staking at that spot the first concrete, named struggle. The significance of the launch ceremony depends on whether, from that day on, it becomes possible for this organization to be reborn every day. So what that organization needs is not to become busier but to stop the busyness and re-establish priorities.
During the same period, outside, one fact was hardening. The troop-dispatch coercion state and the price ceiling. The United States requested that Korea dispatch troops to Hormuz before the November midterm elections, and the government is said to be reviewing maritime patrol aircraft, logistics support ships, and a mine clearance team, and to aim for a plan to submit a consent bill to the National Assembly soon and dispatch troops within one or two months. Iran publicly warned that military intervention would produce serious consequences. On top of this, in a situation where oil prices rose to 96 dollars per barrel, the way the government's petroleum maximum price system in effect operates was revealed in conversation during this period. The ceiling is placed on the supply price that refiners pass to gas stations, and the difference between the value of the international market price plus margin and the ceiling is compensated by the government with public finances. In other words, the state covers the losses of the refining monopoly. The machine by which, when a crisis comes, profits go to shareholders and losses are loaded onto the people does not stop with a single ceiling. There is no need to deny the ceiling. But beneath it, one must ask where the profit is leaking. The troop-dispatch coercion makes one see the other end of the leash, and the price ceiling makes one see whose profit that leash is settled into domestically. One is military subordination, the other financial compensation. The two are both ends of the same ring.
There are two facts I will nail down by date during this period. First, the troop dispatch is not a decision being postponed but a state in which pressure has already been concretized. Second, the government's intervention in the refining monopoly is designed not as control of profit but as socialization of loss. On these two facts, the demands of the working class must stand in two branches. Reject the troop dispatch, and push that rejection forward with an analysis aimed at the leash itself. Expose the channels through which profit leaks even with the ceiling — market-price arbitrage, passed-on profit, and exchange-rate gains — and bring control over the allocation of reserve oil and price determination into public deliberation. And returning to the problem of organization, the answer is one. Cross the critical point from an organization that attends to an organization that organizes. When going back to the scene, there must be no returning without having organized anything, and at rallies there must be this organization's zone, demands, and rallying. The discipline of keeping records and the discipline of setting the organization right are the same motion. Only when there is someone who keeps it does the ember pass to the next shift.