Without the brigade you are an individual. You yourself choose your own line of conduct. Without the brigade you can at least die proudly, but in the brigade the only way they allow you even to die is in humiliation, on your belly. From the chief, from the camp foreman, from the jailer, from the convoy guard, from all of them you can hide and catch a moment of rest, you can ease up a bit here on hauling, shirk a bit there on lifting.

*

It's obvious that in an apparatus like an army or a factory or some other such type of institution the system of power takes a pyramidical form. Hence there is an apex. But even so, even in such a simple case, this summit doesn't form the source or principle from which all power derives, as though from a luminous focus, the image by which the monarchy represents itself.

*

But from the driving belts, from your comrades in the brigade there is neither a hiding place nor salvation nor mercy.

*

The summit and the lower elements of the hierarchy stand in a relationship of mutual support and conditioning.

*

You cannot, conscious of being a political, prefer death from hunger to work. No, once you have been registered as going out to work, everything the brigade does today will be divided not by twenty-five but by twenty-six. And because of you, the entire brigade's percentage of norm will fall from 123 to 119, which makes the difference between the ration allotted record breakers and ordinary rations. And everyone will lose a millet cake and three and a half ounces of bread.

*

But if you ask me, does this new technology of power take its historical origin from an identifiable individual or group of individuals who decide to implement it so as to further their interest, or facilitate their utilization of the social body, then I would say no. These tactics were invented and organized from the starting points of local conditions and particular needs. They took place in piecemeal fashion prior to any class strategy designed to weld them into vast coherent ensembles.

*

And that is why your comrades…

*

These ensembles don't consist in a homogenization, but rather of a complex play of supports, in mutual engagement, different mechanisms of power which retain all thei specific character.

*

…and the brigade leader's fist will punish you far more effectively than the whole people's commissariat of internal affairs.