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The bus was filling up with morning commuters, school children and shoppers or like Blunt making his way to bus driver training. He wasstaring out of the window at the people hurrying their way through as hower, wondering what had happened to Jim. The last time theyspoke was twenty years ago when Jim phoned from Amsterdam. Hesounded happy. Playing guitar in a band. Playing left handed with aguitar whose strings were strung for a right handed player. TypicalJim - upside down. When they had got back to Britain they'd splitup. Jim had headed for Manchester while he went to London andjoined some acquintances from Marrakech in a squat. Blunt thought itstrange the way it is so easy to lose touch with friends.
There was a succession of squats in Stoke Newington and jobs in Hackney, mostly driving. A poor inner city borough where affluencesat cheek by jowl with poverty. A multilingual hive of activity, its schools teaching children with 79 different mother tongues. A worldcould be explored or a prison for the poor could it make. He was still writing poetry. The aid to his psyche whilst isolated bylanguage in Stammheim was still his learning tool and the acid yearswere over. Of all the LSD he dropped, Blunt couldn't replicate the first, repeat the depth and clarity of the purple haze. Marijuana? That was something else. His drug of choice that he wouldoccassionally wish to forsake but always returned to. Unlike alcohol which he could take or leave.
Blunt joined a worker writers workshop - the original WWW -
organised by the Workers Education Association in Hackney. A local
community centre funded by council grant, Centreprise hosted the
weekly meetings. They had a bookshop, a cafe and meeting rooms. It
was always full, bustling with activity as people chased words and
meanings in books or animated chats over a cup of tea. Blunt enjoyed
the workshop, the first time he had found respect for what he
thought and wrote.
The community centre published local writers. Put their words into
books and gave life to the wide worlds local histories. Novels and
poetry, childrens stories and folk tales brought across borders
searched for readers. They could never print enough.
The worker writer group published an anthology of their work and
some of Blunts poetry found its way into it. He looks back on most
of his verse from that time as useless. One or two he still felt proud
of but most shouldn't have seen the light of day. Other contributers
to the anthology were brilliant. An old secular Jewish couple, Lotte
and Ziggy Moos. Refugees from Hitler's Germany with no family left
to return to, they had settled in Hackney. They wrote luminous,
gentle poems questing for truth and a world without borders.
Howard Mingham made words with rhythm, rhyme and reason that
delved deep in the must rising from pavements and people, extracting
nuggets of verse. Howard turned Blunt onto Neruda and the verb
made sensual. It was a sad day when he was found broken bodied at
the base of a Hackney tower block. His lucid words not able to hold
him anymore.
He sent a copy of the groups first book to his mother who was
over-the-moon pleased, but his father just thought him a 'poofter'.
Blunt joined the Communist Party around the same time he got
involved with the worker writers. He joined the CP as it was going
through a convulsion. It was debating it's future programme and
entrenched positions had already been drawn and they started calling
each other names. Tankies and Euros. In the Blue corner were the
'Tankies' and in the Red corner the 'Euros', the boxing metaphor was
apposite so deep was the animosity. The 'Tankies' were considered
anti-democratic Stalinists by the 'Euros', and the 'Euros' were
considered elitist middle-class wankers by the 'Tankies'. And both
terms were spat out with unhidden malice as though by loading the
word with spittle and loathing could neutralise the ideas behind them.
The divide was both ideological and generational. The baby-boomers
were mostly 'Euros' who found their politics with students actions in
the years from '68. Took Gramsci as their theoretician. Not Lenin.
Recognised that revolutionary change was more complex, involved
more forces than just a class. Was not a moment but a diverse
process. The 'Tankies' were from that generation who saw Uncle Joe
as savior against the Nazi's barbarism. The Leader. It was true, the
Soviet Union did bare the brunt of fighting in Europe, sacrificed
millions and tore the belly out of the German war-machine. No
matter what Hollywood war films may propagandise. Without the
broken sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad, without the Russian
winter, Europe would be Nazi now. And any criticism of 'actual
existing socialism' is a betrayal of that legacy.
Before he came to the CP Blunt had learned one fundamental truth on
his travels, that the only way of trying to understanding this world
which could prove fruitful, was to stand critical to it. To ask
questions of it. Be empirical with it. He may have been a total right
off in science at school but it had kindled in him this one over-riding
truth and which was made real by travel.
He also understood where the 'Tankies' were coming from. The
years of hardship they had endured. The cold war had taken its toll.
He remembered his father telling him a story about the job he was
doing driving petrol tankers when Blunt was a toddler. His employer
had called him into the office and demanded his CP membership or his
job. Blunt's father had a young family to raise and had lived the
General Strike and its aftermath - the poverty in unemployability.
Such was the political atmosphere in the Cold War that if he was
sacked his work mates would have voted not to strike in his support.
He choose to confine his activity to the TGWU and left the CP. The
CP lost 10, 000 members to the cold war. Twenty percent. Decimated
twice over.
The 'Tankies' stuck to it through Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
holding to a faith. Their emotional committment to the cause
outweighing the need for intellectual rigour and clarity. They kept the
CP alive in the trade unions and affected progress at the shop floor
and in wages. Had done good in an economistic sort of way.
With the Quakers, the CP had kept CND functioning during its lean
years, in the time of the super-powers equilibrium and Assured
Mutual Destruction. Kept it going until its second coming. Electorally
the CP were reduced to a few local councillors around the country,
most noticably in Leiston, a small town with Sizewell B nuclear
reactor being built a few miles away.
A few months after he joined, Blunt went as a visitor to the Congress
that decided on the new programme, The British Road to Socialism.
The culmination of the arguement. He went to hear, wondering why
some of the baby-booming generation were joining the CP.
Wondering why he had joined himself. Despite the end of the
optimistic 60's the baby-boomers were still carrying it like a beacon,
thinking they could change anything. Even democratic centralism -
the original oxymoron. That contradiction in terms which was the
heart and organising principle of CP's world wide; 'once policy is
decided organisation is all'. Even if the policy is wrong and/or decided
by the leadership.
Blunt held some of the 60's optimism still. His poetry carried it but
he couldn't do the mental gymnastics required to understand
democratic centralism no matter how hard he tried. His main reason
for joining the CP was to outdo his father in principle.
The 'Euros' won the programme with the help of the Executive
Committee or more precisely, the hand full of full-timers who
manouvered and dissembled like the 'professional' revolutionaries they
were. But the CP was fatally split. The policy may be won, maybe
right, but a majority of the membership didn't understand it or were
oppossed to it. Factions formed and democratic centralism bit the
dust, but was given lip service by all in public. A deceit that would be
buried, lost amongst the revelations of deceits to come. For the
next eight years a political struggle would rage through CP branches,
weaking much of its local and community activity, disabling much of its
influence in the trades unions.
There were a few exceptions. Hackney was one. The divide was
sharp, but despite it the Hackney CP grew with new, younger
university educated members moving into the area for jobs and cheap
housing. The CP's broad approach to political activity, its
committment to anti-racism won it much influence within the local
political society.
Blunt had never been so active, doing so much and meeting so many
new people. He was working, writing, reading, attending meetings,
organising and loving again.
Voluptuous Joyce. Rubenesque, beautiful, talented and always
laughing. They lived together for a year, the longest Blunt would
stay with anybody. It was fun and tempetuous. They would take
nights out at alternative theatre, the first time Blunt had been to the
theatre since, Wesker's 'Chips with Everything', accompanied by his
parents as a boy. Touring companies were well funded when Blunt and
Joyce were going to the theatre, the immediacy, intimacy, and the
engagement of theatre impressed on him its ability to question or
re-inforce ideas. Agitprop was everywhere. Brecht had been
resurrected.
Joyce extended his musically choices. Dylan and the american folk
tradition epitomised by Guthrie would always be there, but reggae,
African and Gaelic folk joined his music library. Instrumentation
joining lyric as the driving force to his musical preference.
His reading was prodigious. Neruda, Piercy, Langston and Ted
Hughes, Owen, Angelo, Fannon, Shelley, Jong, Marx, Caudwell,
McDiarmed, Hamburger, Walcott, Mitchell, Mayakovsky, Gramsci,
Morrison, Cardenal, Harrison, Brecht, Blake, Thiongo, Nkrumah,
Baudelaire and a hundred-and-more others; the rarely sung poets of
the worker writer movement; the writers of a thousand magazine and
newspaper articles; all their words passed before his eyes and
through his mind. Changeing, moulding or not, his understandings as
their words impacted the daily reality of his life.
He blossomed but was doing to much, trying to be super human. He
had not yet dismissed Neitsche's answer to the problems of the
world. While he was attending a CP branch meeting, a discussion on
the present political situation and organisation for the upcoming local
elections, he had to stop his contribution half way through and find a
door jamb to scratch his back of an itch his hands couldn't reach. He
felt a bit embarrassed as the twenty or so comrades laughed,
temporarily united at his expense, but the discomfort needed
immediate relief. Over the last year or so he'd had to do this,
scratch his back on a door jamb once or twice and never thought
anything of it. Just a natural scratch like a bear, and whoever he was
with, always giggled.
He didn't know it, but the multiple sclerosis was slowly starting to
show itself. The ex-medic was ignorant of relapsing/remitting MS as it
crept its insidious way through his central nervous system leaving
plaques of scared cells like blown fuses. Disrupting the transmission
of electrical and chemical messages. Short relapses would occur
every year or so. He would be snappy sharp with people, excusing it
later in profuse apologies as his 'temper'. Short psychological spasms
over in seconds. Parasthesia would affect a part of his body,
hyper-sensitise his skin for a minute or so and be easily forgotten.
His back and rectal sphincter the most common site. Anal retentive
would have taken on another new meaning if he had known. He was
just 26.
He was doing to much. Something had to give and to start it was
Joyce. The break up was aweful. The stress had him scratching his a
arse a lot as the secret parasthesia nipped. He felt quilty as sin after
all she had given him when she left for the Orkneys, taking her music
and her love, but he got on with it. Carried on living his life and
hoped she could with hers.
He was still doing to much and something else had to give. And it was
poetry. Blunt gradually relinguished it, put his thinking in community,
CP and trades union activity.
Fun years of working, reading, film going, campaigning, loving. They
called it the horizontal Party so overt the sex and shuffling of
partners. The Hackney CP had a phenomenal social life through the
70's. A young and vibrant party attracting hundreds of people in their
twenties to gather and drink, dance, smoke and laugh and search for
love, or be stuck in earnest and animated conversation, dissecting
the minutiae of dialectical materialism. As always with the CP, these
'socials' would be fund raisers and Blunt could never remember one
losing money. Food and booze are lucractive earners, at the CP
social or in the high street.
Campaigning he enjoyed the most now he wasn't writing poetry. Being
on the street meeting people, organising, marching. That is what he
lived for now. Enjoying the confrontation with Nazi paper sellers
down Brick Lane. Revelling the victory in forcing them out and ending
some of the intimidation and hostility against the Bangla Deshi
community whose home the area was. It had the beneficial effect of
introducing Blunt to some of the best curries and hang-over cures
outside the sub-continent.
Many loves came his way and all he wanted to explore, find some
connection and the extent, the depth of the love. One night stands
became obvious the morning after as is their way. Intense three
month loves were common, the pattern since Fitz. The next step,
the deepening of a relationships commitment and meaning forever
proving ellusive. The ability to negotiate a way through to monogamy
laid siege by his childhood traumas.
Political meetings got tedious. The repetition of position statements
in the branches replaced most forms of activity, even selling the
Morning Star outside the Post Office on a Saturday morning. Blunt
had started working for Hackney council. Driving again. This time a
mechanical broom. After a few months he was elected a shop-steward
and from then on most of his working time was spent on union
activity. One of his members, Lloyd, a 40 year old Jamaican, full of
patios and smiles and with whom Blunt had the occassional breakfast
spliff (bush, you can't drive on senssi), showed him his payslip for
the week. Lloyd had been driving a sludge gulper for the previous two
years after being promoted from driving a small truck collecting the
road-sweepers full bags. The new job meant a re-grading of his
employment, an increase in his hourly rate, but it hadn't been
actioned. For the last two years he had been underpaid. It was typical
of a racist somewhere along the admistrative line being bold while the
NF seemed to be growing. It was Lloyd's supervisor, he had not
passed on the information to the wages section. Spiteful, mean and
petty. Blunt was immediately at personel demanding a regrading and
disciplinary against the supervisor. They dragged their heels, but
eventually worked out that Lloyd was owed £2, 000. The supervisor
was moved instead of being sacked as he should have been.
The manual workforce on the council was vast. Yet most of the
shop-stewards were white and the casual passing of racist remarks at
meetings would keep it that way unless challenged. Blunt's CP
membership meant he had access to the Black, Asian and anti-racist
organisations in the borough and thought he could arrange a meeting
with them and the Manual Shop Stewards Committee. He thought it
would be quite simple. Getting the agreement of the stewards proved
easy, they agreed to write to the organisations inviting them to a
meeting to discuss racism in the borough, try and maybe find some
common ground.
A month later at the next meeting, Blunt asked if their had been any
reply to the invitation. The Secretary, a big burly white East Ender, a
man prone to demagoguery, megalomania and mendacity, said he
hadn't received a reply yet. Blunt spoke to some comrades in the
Black, Asian and anti-racist organisations and they said they haven't
received an invite. It took another three months just to get the
invites sorted out and the meeting, meeting. It was the first time
that representatives of the manual workers on the Council and race
based community groups had come together, met each other face to
face and try to find some common ground or not. Unlike the majority
of council officers, most manual workers lived in the borough and
their interests were similar and complimentary to that of the
community organisations.
Blunt had been warned that the meeting could get out of hand with
people screaming, shouting, throwing racist abuse and punches. That
no good would come of it. None of this happened even though some
of his CP comrades were fearful but they recognised that doing
nothing was not an option. The scaremongers were just that, or
people in positions on the Council whose interests and power would
be undermined by such a meeting. His conviction that if people who
had never met but believed the monstering, the demonising and the
outright lies in the national and local press about each other, got
together, met and talked (albeit in a formal setting) then all this
would be seen for what it was. Just lies designed to keep people apart
- make them Other to each other. That it would dissipate and all
that seemed true would dissolve as mist in the light of the morning
sun.
He was over optimistic for the outcome of the meeting but he didn't
care. The worst prophecies were completely unfounded. Some of the
discussion was sharp but never vicious. For two hours ideas and
histories were raised and thought over without resort to insult. By
the end some preconceptions had been changed and new respect
generated.
Some of the shop stewards weren't happy that what they had thought
everybody thought was not the case. That the hate they felt was only
true to a very small minority of them. They had been isolated and
their ideology undermined.
The Secretary was fuming. Blunts tenacity had weakened and exposed
him to the wider community. He was not to be trusted.
Despite the animosity generated between the two, The Secretary
supported his election to NUPE's area and divisional committees.
Even supported Blunt's nomination as Chair of NUPE's London
Division. Keep him busy and away from the borough was the thinking.
It benefitted Blunt. Being Chair of London NUPE raised his political
profile in the CP substantially.
His housing situation had improved. He no longer lived in squats.
The dilapidated, leaky hovels and procession of bailiffs had, he hoped,
been left behind. Was getting tired of it. He was sharing a five
bedroom flat above a community nursery in the heart of Hackney with
three beautiful women and another man. All single and not fucking
each other. Rumours were rife about the goings on. One of the
thicker shop-stewards made a suprise visit to the flat, spying for the
Secretary. Trying to find 'deviance' to use in revenge for the
anti-racist meeting.
“I couldn't live here without raping the women. How do you do it?”
Joe Thick had asked with a sneer.
“Quite easy really. I treat them as human beings.” Blunt replied as he
threw him out the flat. Another enemy in the union confirmed.
The flat was big. All the rooms were high and spacious. The kitchen
was 20'x20'. The building used to be a deanery to a church and was
built in the gothic style of the late 19th century. Its church had been
knocked down to make way for a new council housing estate and the
deanery was next for demolition, but a local group with CP members
had campaigned to save it and make the deanery a community nursery.
It was four floors tall and was converted into a nursery and a massive
flat with two floors each. The flat provided extra income for the
nursery. Blunt had found his way there by invite to replace one of the
original founders who was moving on to set up home with a girlfriend.
The multiple sclerosis was still winding its way, slowly progressing,
slowly scaring and slowly, quietly gaining momentum; a relapse here,
a remit there; a parasthesia here, a parasthesia there and an
occassional, inappropriate snappiness. Some re-myelation during
remission meant the parasthesia was never permanent but became
more pronounced each time. Dylan was played a lot in the flat. “You
don't know what is happening/Do you, Mr Jones”, it's personal
meaning for Blunt still many years distant before self-recognition.
His political and trades union presence had been noted by the
leaderships. In the CP he was on the 'recommended list' for the
London District Committee. It meant he would be elected. Would
start a climb through the CP heirarchy during the period of its terminal
decline.
The 'recommended list' was given to delegates at the two yearly
district congress by the out going committee members and contained
the names of all those they thought should be elected to the new
committee by the delegates. This didn't mean that the names on the
list were the only ones running in the election. Far from it and all
who ran wanted to be on the 'recommended list'. Throughout the
congress, over the three days, individuals and delegations of
delegates would besiege the Elections Preperations Committee
argueing against someone on the list and for somebody not on it. The
EPC was one of two standing committees that ran in conjunction with
the congress. The other was the Resolutions Committee that
organised the compositing of resolutions, amendments to reports and
speakers in debate. The membership of both the committees was a
mix of appointees from the outgoing district committee and delegates
elected by the branches after faction mobilisations. In a climate of
distrust the EPC became the battle ground. A simple majority vote of
the EPC decided if someone stayed on the 'recommended list' or not.
Smears and lies about peoples lives and their politics were liberally
spread around the EPC. No other party, except the Tories were so
vicious in their leadership elections, nor the outgoing leadership so
determined to perpetuate themselves.
The Chair of the EPC would make periodic reports to the delegates
about any changes they had made to the 'recommended list'. As soon
as they'd finish knots of people would form, a soft murmer of voices
checking the progress or not of their preference. The last afternoon
of the congress was spent in 'closed session' and, after the accounts
were presented, was devoted to the election of the new leadership.
A final report of the EPC was given to delegates along with the final
'recommended list'.
Then a strange thing happened. Delegates formed in an orderly queue
for the microphone chatting in comradely tones to those in front and
behind them and once at the lectern proceeded to spend their allotted
two minutes addressing the delegates and denouncing each other with
uncomradely words. Personal animosity would occassionally pepper
the denunciations to the vocal chagrin of the faction whose member
was being pilloried.
The recommended list always carried. If not in total then with only
one name changed. A more or less fool proof way of ensuring your
succession and perpetuation.
Blunt had been put on the recommened list because of his trades
union activity. He had been elected Chair of the Greater London
Division of NUPE. Had a presence in left and trades union politics
that couldn't be ignored. Not even by his ideological opposition, The
Tankies. They got their nick-name from the Soviet tanks entering
Prague in '68 and still being unable or unwilling to criticise their Soviet
comrades for doing it. It was after all, 'real existing socialism' to be
defended against the vote of the people.
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
The Solution Bertold Brecht
Blunt was being pigeon-holed as a trades union activist and leader. His
other involvements, director of a community cinema, the worker
writer movement and environmental campaigning, his cultural
roundedness, were being forgotten and left behind by all but him.
He thought he was in love again. Her name was Jill Allison. The love
didn't last long. Six months. But this time it left him a father. A
natural father. A weekend father. Jill couldn't keep his love but had a
child from him instead. It wasn't until she was pregnant that he
realised he wanted a child but by then he had already really fucked up.
A friend of Jill, Agnes had caught his eye and he did not demour when
she made an advance. A one night stand would make him a weekend
father.
Blunt kept up his contact with Rosamund his daughter and tried to
build a relationship. He attempted to rationalise the situation with
criticism of the nuclear family and intellectualised that he was trying to
achieve a new way of raising children. His own experience of
childhood had poisoned the concept of the nuclear family and what
sociological studies of the family he had read since had confirmed his
distaste. But the situation was not ideal. In time she would call
another 'Dad'. Quite rightly so. Blunt would not be the man who
raised her, gave her constant support and love. The most he would
be able to offer was a distant supportive back-stop if she ever needed
one.
An added twist to this saga in his life was Jill's surname also being his
mothers maiden name. A daughter and mother with the same
surname. 'Freudian or what?', he would think from Rosamund's birth
on.
To bring an extra touch of the coincidental at important times in
Blunts life, his own mother and the mother of his child also had the
same first name initial. Jill had known of Blunts mothers existance
before they had met. She had received a letter addressed to J.
Allison. Every J. Allison throughout Britain received the letter. It was
from David, Blunts brother, searching for his birth mother. Odd the
ways of families, births and coincidence.
Then it hit him. Hard.
The multiple sclerosis had relapsed big time and parasthesia was not
the signifier of this relapse. A psychological storm engulfed him. By
turns Blunt was euphoric or depressed. Became needy and demanded
a lot of emotional support from his flat mates. They didn't know what
was happening to him and became quite frightened. Thought he was
going mad. For the next twenty years, till his diagnosis, Blunt would
almost think the same. Not questioning 'friends' who
jokingly/seriously told him he was paranoid or schizoid and judged
their relationship and their way of being to him accordingly.
He, like them, was caught up in the Cartesian idea of the seperation
of mind from body. A 16th century idea that had since become
'common sense' with the assiduous promotion of the monotheistic
religious heirarchies. It fitted their world view. Only later, following
his diagnosis was Blunt to discover Spinoza. In one of those moments
of serendipity, Blunt was researching his disease on the Net visiting
sites on MS and neurology. During a break reading the daily paper he
came across a review of a new book on Spinoza by a neurologist.
There it was. A 17th century Jew in Amsterdam, Spinoza had
postulated the idea that the mind was predicated on the body in stark
difference to Descartes. Two centuries before Darwin, Spinoza had
proposed that the starting point for thinking about the nature of what
it is to be human should be physiological - that environment as well
as breeding determined the person. Unlike the Catholic Church's
embrace of Decarte, Spinoza was attacked by organised religion. He
was excommunicated from his Jewishness for refusing to change his
view and genuflect to ignorance. His major works were only published
after his death.
The church, synogoge and mosque will always try to stiffle new
knowledge that questions their dogmas, Blunt thought. But truths
can't be caged, they can make even granite porous and seep their way
through to recognition. Knowledge like life will find a way.
Like Blunt, his flat mates didn't understand this then. They became
more distant, wary around him and demanded he leave. He didn't go
quietly but ensured that everybody left the flat. That they became
fragmented. From then on Blunt would live on his own. The relapse
lasted three months before remission set in. Re-myelation was
disguising the physical symptoms, the parasthesia lessened to the odd
occassion. Emotionally he was more stable. From here he would
continually question his sanity.
Thatcher had been elected and within three years she had taken the
country to war. Cynically using the stupidity of the Argentinian
Generals invasion of the Falklands to ensure her another massive
majority at the next general election. The offers, via America, of
Argentinian withdrawl ignored and deliberately scubbered with the
Belgrano. Thatcher the milk snatcher become Angel of Death.
The Miners got a hammering. As in the Falklands war, Thatchers
preparations were impeccable. Stockpiles of coal stockpiled; small
ports and wharfs around the country identified for coal imports;
police exercises for civil disorder stepped up; agent provocateurs
trained; Money found for police overtime; fleets of trucks put in
place; Scargill monstered in the Antipodean Neanderthal's press -
made Other.
Blunt thought it obvious two months into the strike that the Miners
were on a loser. Sympathy and solidarity in bucket loads of cash and
kind from the poorest in Britain would sustain the strike for a year,
but it would not be enough. All those driven into unemployment and
poverty by Thatchers policies were supporting the miners, wanting an
end to 5 years of her rule, but a fatal democratic flaw in the Miners
case and a split had been exposed. They had walked out without a
vote, provoked, and Nottingham stayed in. Without the vote and
with a split it was made impossible to win wider strike action from
other trades unionists. Some used it as an excuse to hide their right
wing politics behind, but most recognised a problem of democratic
legitimacy. The dockers came out on strike for a while but were
forced back by a combination of Thatchers new trades union laws and
a timid union leadership scared of sequestration and loss of funds.
She of course played it for all it was worth, widening the split
between miner and miner, miner and public. The miners singing,
“Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.” in hope of victory at the
start of the strike, was for Blunt but the sad foretelling of the end of
their communities and way of life.
The CP supported the strike throughout, but their own split was
working its way to a climax with the Miners strike as backdrop. It was
incapable of giving the political leadership to the strike that was
needed and rescuing its democratic legitimacy and widening the
support. How the Establishment loved that. It did its best in the
circumstance. The Hackney CP had managed to get the Oakdale
colliery in South Wales formally twinned with Hackney Council.
Securing a room in the Town Hall as a base for miners to come and
organise support.
The London District full timers, Tankies or 'professional
revolutionaries' had been running a membership scam in Hackney
leading up to the next London District Congress, hoping it wouldn't
be noticed during the strike. The scam started 2 months after Blunt
had passed on the responsibility of party membership in Hackney to
another comrade while he took over the role of Chairperson. The
London full timers, with their allies in the borough had been trying to
inflate the membership with fictitious names in the branches under
their control. A crude and crass attempt to increase the number of
delegates to the District Congress. Hackney was the centre of the
Euros faction, of the nine branches in borough, three were
controlled by the Tankies and the borough sent the greatest number
of delegates to the Congress.
But they underestimated the tenacity of a woman. Planning, a petite
and pretty Dylan fan, who had her in mind when he wrote 'All I
Really Want To Do', had become incendiary at the attempt to subvert
the Party's democratic process. A national trades union official, CP
branch secretary and Euro, she waged a relentless campaign
demanding that the London party release the fictitious names and
addresses to the Hackney membership organiser. The full timers
prograstinated, mumbled bureaucratic platitudes about everything
being above board. Then they were stuffed. Nothing annoyed her
more, hardened her resolve than being brushed off, ignored, lied to
She kept at her investigations.
For a while in the eighties a group of friends, allies and occassional
lovers, all Euros, lead the Hackney CP. Browne, a tall, gawky and
not quite coordinated Cambridge graduate was the Secretary. Planning
was his partner. The group would spend holidays in France and Italy
and Greece together, building trust and knowledge. Blunt told
Planning once, while they were sheltering from a storm in Perugia,
watching an old and dubbed print of 'Nashville' in a leaky cinema,
that what she had done had historic consequences. She, demoured
not being the type to let arrogance corrode her achievements, but it
was obvious in her eye that she was proud of her own tenacity and the
actions that flowed from it.
Planning was a member of the National Executive Committee and
placed a report before them. It freaked them out. The depth of the
Tankies deception and subversion, that their opposition to policy
wasn't just theoretical but organisational and could succeed if not
stopped, freaked them out.
The EC had to act. Had no option, and ordered a full investigation
into the membership in Hackney. They received the report weeks
before the London District Congress. Every detail of Planning's
indictment had been proved and the democractic legitimacy of the
delegates to the London District Congress impossible to sustain.
The first day of the District Congress would indeed be historic. It
was being held in County Hall and McLennan, the General Secretary
of the CPGB made an opening statement saying the Congress could go
ahead but there would be no election for a new District Committee.
The next four hours were mayhem. The Tankies were fuming, violent
with their opposition. Their deviousness had been exposed and made
very public. No compromise was possible when McLennan had told
the delegates the EC's position. Democratic centralism ruled and you
accepted your leaders directions.
Blunt had already made his views clear. 'If Communists were prepared
to subvert the democratic process in their own organisation, what is
their practise in other organisations of the peope?' He didn't need
the constraints of democratic centralism to agree with the EC's
position.
After the four hours of shouting and abuse, Ivan a long time political
enemy of Blunt's who worked for the same borough council and always
tried to undermine his ideas and activity, moved “Next Question.”
“Thats it”, was Blunts immediate and vocal response. McLennan
closed the Congress and led the majority from County Hall. Solly
Kaye, an old Jewish comrade from the East End, didn't think the
majority should leave without letting the rump know what their
feelings were. He jumped on a table - seventy years old and so
hyped he really jumped - and resurrected his Stepney street corner
rhetoric and emotion. Solly exploited the heightened feelings from
four hours tension and after two sentences the majority let out a
roar, turning tension into noise as a material force. The roar was so
loud it stunned the Tankies into the silence of fear for their political
future.
The EC appointed the National Organiser Ian Mckay as temporary
District Secretary. A sharp and proper Scot, warm but bone thin,
rigid and unbending in his opposition to anti-democratic activity.
Blunt called in sick at work, claimed he fell from the vehicle damaging
his back and took eight weeks industrial injury to help with the
reorganisation of the London Party. A hectic time, full of the blur of
activity. Fifteen/sixteen hour days were common while the branches
were contacted, meetings arranged, speakers organised, funds
secured and campaigns maintained.
Like Hephaestus, Blunt toiled. The Smith of Greek myth with the
power of volcanoes. Physically there was some resemblance. The
beard and powerful neck, both squat and broad chested. Lame as
well. Hephaestus' father Zeus, had made him lame when he threw
him out of Olympus for taking his mother's, Hera's side, in a family
arguement. For Blunt it was the MS. Slowly and explorably after each
relapse the demyelation would get nearer to the area of his central
nervous system that controlled and transmitted impulses to his legs.
The occassional scratch to his left toes nothing out of the ordinary.
Nothing to consider medical. Like Blunt's back and the door-jamb
scratching.
Behind their rough hewn exteriors and their high foreheads were
subtle and inventive spirits. Not often recognised but Smiths non the
less. Zeus' thunderbolts and the arrows of love for Eros came from
the forge that Hephaestus organised. Blunts temper could come like
thunderbolts out of the blue, but that was usually forgiven as his
organisation skills came to the fore. In his rugby days, the scrum half
who tended the cauldron of the scrum and the setter up of geometric
patterns as sharp as arrows for the backs.
The reverberations from the actions of the EC were felt throughout
the communist world. It even appeared as an item on the agenda of
the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The item
wasn't spoken to, merely noted. A bi-polar power has more
important items to discuss than the implosion of a tiny CP in a
second-string world player. The schism was deep. Religious imagery
or words like schism would always come to Blunt when thinking about
that time. The fervour, fundamentalism and messianic language of the
Tankies seemed to engender it. The Euro's had a few headbangers
themselves. Those caught up in the heightened emotions of the moment.
The Tankies had regrouped around the Morning Star, the daily paper
of the CP, and it was about to be hijacked, used as a campaigning tool
against the EC. Blunt had never been enamoured of it, he had only
sold it out of a warped sense of duty. It was no more than a glorified
campaign sheet for the trades union movement. A strike here, a
resolution there. Its economism and sycophancy towards the Soviet
Union could be sickening.
To maintain the initiative, the EC called a Special National Congress.
Blunt had thought that he would be returning to driving for the local
authority after the situation in London had settled, continue his battle
with the personable but fundamentally wrong Ivan. Continue
campaigning for the miners and loving Sarah.
Sarah was the daughter of a preacher man, and every story Blunt had
heard about the daughters of preacher men were true. She was them
all, from Madonna to Whore and he loved her for it. Bright, laughing
and petite, he had met her on a sponsored bike ride from Hackney to
Wales raising money for the miners of Oakdale. They had immediately
seen bed in each others eyes. It didn't last long, a slow grumbling
relapse was making him to intense in his desire for the love to
succeed.
The EC had other ideas on Blunts time. He was asked to give up his
job and get paid to be the logistics hub for the Special National
Congress. He agreed to it readily. Nothing easier than organising an
event where people wanted to be. Even if those people can be the
most cantakerous, opinionated and passionate Britain can produce.
That was just it, that was why he enjoyed working with them. They
were excessively passionate and exceedingly brave with their beliefs
and actions, convinced they could change the world with their words
and deeds. And that the CP was THEIR vehicle for achieving it. They
wanted to be there. See their politics triumph. Some were to be
disappointed and demonised their erstwhile comrades, “Traitor!”
Burying himself in the detail of some easy work for a while helped
with his grief at the loss of Sarah. They had lasted four months
together, a slight improvement on his usual pattern of three months.
Rosamund was growing and starting to remember him from the
weekend before. The exuberance and glee at the new she radiated
lifted him. He was hoping the routine, the weekly fun and a childs
generosity could give rise to a new pattern in his life.
Blunts stress levels were increasing and the MS didn't mind. The
rogue prions could come out to rumble and play at de-myelation.
By the end of the Special National Congress, the delegates had
expelled the leading Tankies, reaffirmed the CP's committment to
humanism and pluralism but had not jettisoned democratic centralism.
Blunt could live with the outcome and was pleased with the success of
the logistics, but he was out off a job. He applied to be a full-timer
with the new London District Committee and was appointed political
worker in a young team, some of whom were inspiring. Carol was
there, the only person from the Deanery Blunt had kept any contact
with, and the Bermondsey Beagle Boys. Noddy, Stealth and Mark.
Browne had been appointed the London District Secretary, the worst
nightmares of the Tankies had come true. Their nemesis was now
their leader and the Euros were in the ascendency in London.
The small team tried to help and re-energise London's demoralised
membership with patchy success. Some of the branches just withered,
some defected en masse and joined the Tankies. Yet others
flourished, their politics vindicated, free from the internal struggle
and with a new confidence to engage the wider world. But it was a
diminished party.
Fun times and sad times. Always busy times. Blunts and the Party's
enemy was easily defined now the internal battle had taken a decisive
turn. Thatcher.
The miners had gone back to work. Their banners and bands led them
and their communities back to the pits in organised retreat. Proud
that they had fought. Proud but defeated. They still held the
sympathy of the poor and unemployed but solidarity lay passive. The
entire coercive apparatus of the state had been unleashed against the
mining communities and their supporters for a whole year.
Depression set in, long-term unemployment got longer, wages
shrunk, poverty deepened and Britain was being reshaped in the image
of greed. Being blanketed in Thatchers lie riven rhetoric. “There is
no such thing as society, ” is a lie and that in believing it is the way to
madness.
The world still clung, ever hopeful in its will, to some optimism.
Gorbachov was attempting what seemed mission impossible. The
reform of the Soviet Union. The CPSU had declared the Cold War
over. It kept Blunt going. It seemed to him as if the threat of nuclear
annihilation was receeding, at least for a while and that Communist
Parties were reformable.
Mark died. Short in stature he always stood big. Witty, eloquent,
inspiring. Proud and confident in his Queerness. Aids did for him.
When he was diagnosed HIV+, Mark searched his memory for a while
to try and discover who had passed it on. Fantasing about his revenge.
He gave it up, didn't dwell on it. He would not warp himself, his
generosity of spirit and openness, nor narrow the rest of his life's
horizon to extracting blame. Inspirational till his death at 24 and the
new London party was diminished some more. The atmosphere in the
office became dour.
Blunt's grief for Mark was short lived. He was in love again. The loss
of a friend could not compete. An intelligent, laughing, petite
redhead had come to him. Stunning. Eve.
It lasted three months and the multiple sclerosis fucked him up big
time. They had known each other for a while, but Blunt had kept his
distance thinking she was to volatile a Scot. The red hair a warning,
despite her being the woman of his dreams. While the love lasted
Blunt was in bliss but the break up was traumatic. He had gone nuts.
The rogue prions attacking his myelin disrupted his psychology and he
became needy again. Wouldn't accept the no, accept the end of his
bliss. Started stalking her. Not out of malice but from the regression
that MS caused in this psyche. His mother's leaving home when he was
only a child of four had left him with a deep and hidden flaw that
re-surfaced during a severe relapse. He petrified the woman of his
dreams.
Blunts work was badly affected and the atmosphere in the London
CP's office, recovering slowly from Mark's death, deteriorated again.
His colleagues kept there distance, spoke in hushed tones while
making glances his way.
“He was like this in the Deanery when we were flatmates. Weepy and
needy. His vibes changed the feelings in a room when ever he
entered. From good to bad. What he's doing to Eve is disgraceful, ”
CC whispered. “What are we going to do? It can't go on like this.”
Browne came up with the idea, “I think he is going through a nervous
breakdown. We could ask him to attend therapy and offer to pay for it.
See if it helps”
Noddy was astounded. “He won't wear that. To new and alternative
for him. I can't see counselling being part of his world view. He was
a union activist after all. Its been wages and conditions for him not
personal growth. Get rid of him.”
He was young, personable and eager to change the world and anyone
over thirty was in the way. Noddy always felt slightly embarrassed
around heightened emotion and weepy men. Would prefer not to be
in the vicinity.
Full of potential, he brought new ways of organising which were
engaging people in political activity against Thatcher for the first time.
Much welcomed by Blunt. Unfortunately Noddy's arrogance about his
organising ability blinded him occassionally and he still judged people
by how they dressed or spoke, and not by what they said or did.
Browne was sharp, “Your wrong about Blunt. He may be blunt in
word and name, but his politics are fully rounded not just trades
union economistic or party organisational. Find out who Hephaestus
was. We are not going to repeat the sort of behaviour the previous
regime used in dealing with stress related problems amongst its
full-timers. If its agreeable, CC and I will talk to him about
counselling. He'll listen to you CC. He always has.”
They all agreed. Noddy accented, not afraid to change his views if put
right. He would have to get to know Blunt better if people cared for
him so much. He started with Hephaestus.
Browne didn't realise how close he was to understanding Blunt's
situation. He had identified stress as a causal agent to a relapse, but
was still Cartesian in thinking, 'its all to do with the mind'. Blunts
disease was physiological and could express itself both psychologically
and physically. Rogue prions would be activated, a relapse initiated by
stress and over strong emotions. The prions, small parts of proteins
that are integral to the bodies auto-immune system, had been made
rogue, changed their physiology. Prions that were suppossed to look
after the myelin were now attacking it, killing the axions protective
sheath. The early stages of an MS relapse are characterised by
psychological distrubances and Blunt would shape-shift, change his
presence and vibe. If it had happened on a stage, he would have been
named 'Actor'. As it was he was named 'Nuts'.
So he attended therapy. A waste of time and a waste of money. Do
the Jungian thing - search for supressed childhood memories and
fears that may be determining his actions today. Release them and
find a new self to meet the world with. Cul-de-sacs of Cartesian
nonsense. But remission set in as the counselling was under way,
perpetuating the myth of mind over matter and disquising the true
disease and cause of Blunts strangeness. The stress levels eased and
the talking with the Counsellor about his past may have helped but he
never got to the point of his mother leaving home. The stalking stopped
and a deep shame that he could act so outlandishly set in.
Blunt was feeling more stable and cancelled the therapy. When he did
so, a comrade on the district committee had the gall to ask Blunt
whether he had spoken with the therapist about the situation in the
London Communist Party. He was suspicious that Blunt would be
giving away confidentialities. Even secrets! What secrets?
Blunt left the London Party. The Eastern District had lost their
District Secretary and needed another. Blunt applied, the only one
and so was appointed. He was still being seen as a builder, an
enabler. The final few months working for the London Party and his
distruptive behaviour had not destroyed his reputation. Compromised
it, but not destroyed it. He was the sole full timer surrounded by a
sea of volunteers. A friendly, open group of people who accepted
him without reservation.
The District was big. Not in membership but in geographical area.
From Kings Lynn in the north, to Dagenham in the south. East Anglia,
and four of the London Boroughs. Blunt travelled a lot for meetings
and organising. He discovered the gentle beauties of Norfolk's and
Suffolk's landscapes and seascapes. Constable country.
Blunt had never liked Constable. Thought his work romanticised the
country life. He rendered the landscape well enough for chocolate
boxes, but throughout his working life the Enclosure Acts were
stealing the common lands from the poor for the rich. Forcing the
commoner, those dependent on the commons for grazing their
animals and coppicing, off the land and into abject poverty. Blunt had
never seen a Constable landscape that addressed this conflict despite
Suffolk witnessing some of the most brutal forced exclusions. Murder
by hanging was not uncommon and the lash on the back well known.
What he saw in Constable instead was a reactionary idealisation, the
making of an idyll where the farm worker was happy with his lot and
the landlord was benign. That the then rural life was as it had always
been and always would be. Is the natural order of things. The
brooding clouds the only hint, an abstracted and nigh impossible hint,
that brutality was in the air and in the soil.
Constable's patrons, the people who paid him to paint, were the
landlords who benefitted from the enclosures. He was painting to
order and acting as propagandist in spreading a lie that festers still.
The one time Blunt had appreciated a Constable, had been the
Haywain montaged into a Cruise Missile launcher on a poster for CND
by Kennard.
Blunts views on Constable had shocked a few of his comrades until he
had recited an old nursery rhyme that they were suprised to
remember from their childhoods.
They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the Common;
But let the greater criminal loose
Who steals the Common from the goose.
Suffolk Nursery Rhyme
The Party was ageing. The average age in the Eastern District was
forty-four. 'Its the young that change the world and not the
middle-aged or retired', Blunt had said once. In the two years he was
there all he managed to achieve was a slowing of the haemorrhaging of
members. The new were replacing only those that left and not those
that died. The hours he put in, the energy he expended, the cajoling,
the pleading couldn't win more activity from people already stretched
to their maximum.
Thatcher had imposed the Poll Tax and campaigns in opposition
started up throughout East Anglia. The CP was extended beyond its
capabilities yet managed to put some energy and people into the
campaign. Enough to gain a little influence and try to develop a broad
coalition of forces to fight Thatcher as best they could.
He'd met sweet Marian at a New Years Eve party as the clock struck
midnight. He had gate crashed the party with a friend. The next
morning was not a one-night stand, instead the start of a new affair
and he thought he was in love again.
Gorgeous. Honest and straight she worked as an arts administrator
and she loved him. He wanted it to work and he genuinely thought he
loved her. The electricity in her touch exciting, getting the
endorphins going and flooding the brain with happiness. Happy enough
to meet her mother. Spring came and went but summer never
arrived. Blunts pattern had become so entrenched that even the love
of sweet Marian couldn't change it. He was cruel, broke her heart
when he broke it off as he always did. Pushing away those he loved
before they could leave him as his mother did when he was 4 and 5.
That love was to be beaten by his father. He could never acknowledge
this. Would never recognise that he was scared of being loved. That
it would hurt him, not bring care and deep friendship that he craved
for his life.
The MS was raging when he split from Marian. The stress of the
work, the self imposed responsibilities and his failings with the
emotions of love had made for a low level growler of a relapse that
occassionally flared spectacular.
“This is about me. Not you.” He had said not knowing that it meant
a relapse of the MS and stormed from her flat. For ever embarrassed.
He'd spent all the money that Eastern District had had and it was time
to move on again. Blunt would take with him a feeling of being
respected and liked, leaving behind fewer enemies than usual and
having made fruitful acquiantance with science at last. Cyril Drake, a
chemist had turned his head to its beauties. The maths, the bed rock
was not comprehended. He wouldn't make a scientist. The best he
could do was to read the popular scientific magazines. Gain some
insight, or more usually be agog at the splendours in blue that are
Neptune and Uranus, the curve trace left by a quark or the
complexity in a virus.
With Cyril's direction, Blunt got hold of 'Order out of Chaos' by
Prigogine and Stengers. The formulae to the '2nd Law of
Thermodynamics' was beyond him but the prose gave him insights into
stasis, flux, inertia and the chemical clock. A physicist he met a few
years later became very upset with Blunt, when he said,
“Chemistry is the coming science. Physics is in crisis, stuck between
the Big Bang and the Singularity, looking to metaphysics for answers.
Chasing strings through worm holes into another universe, into an
n'th dimension.”
Blunt had never meant to rubbish the achievements of physics and
Physicists, they've helped make us what we are, he just wanted to
question unified field theory. The Theory of Everything. The Physicist
thought him nuts. Another theoretical physicist in pursuit of Physics'
Holy Grail said it was like looking for;
“An equation an inch long
that would allow us
to read the mind of God”
Michio Katu
Language can make scientists into poets but still be wrong. And there
is nothing wrong in being wrong when searching for truth. It
eliminates a line of enquiry. Truth only becomes wrong when anybody
who thinks they have found it, tries to impose their version of truth
on others while not letting them test it.
Blunt had been asked to apply for the Welsh Secretary's job. He
applied and went through a farce of an interview process. He was the
only candidate. The organisation was accelerating in its terminal
decline and Blunt wasn't thinking right despite his decline being at a
slower rate. He was starting to think that the only reason he was
now a national political leader, albeit of a nation of 2 million, was
because of the decline of the party and that it had a smaller group
of cadres to choose from. That he was the best of a second-rate
group. His wilful refusal to address his problem, the refusal to accept
he had a problem, was starting to affect his confidence.
Blunt lost his daughter for Wales. Rosamund had asked him not to go.
The chance to be there, in the land of his fathers and outdo his
father, had defeated the love of his child.
Wales was not a good place to be poor in the late eighties and early
nineties. There were only two pits left working in South Wales after
the strike of '84. The intellectual level of the people suffered. The
Miners Institutes, hothouses of learning and intellectual pursuit, the
social centres of the mining communites from the thirties till the
seventies and eighties, had fallen into decline and disrepair. They
were mostly vandalised wrecks or sold off by the time Blunt arrived in
Wales.
The poverty was horrendous. A mining village, Maerdy, famous
around the world as Little Moscow, was harder hit than most.
Maerdy was in the Rhondda Fach, the smaller of the two Rhondda
Valley's, on the B4277 road. A one road, minor road village. While
the pit was alive the community lived. An old cliche that sprung to
Blunts mind at his first meeting there, yet true all the same.
Everybody knew everbody's business. The comradery engended in the
dangerous working conditions underground, each looking after each
others back, extended to the surface and the miners families and
community. Everybody looked out for everybody. A persons privacy
sacrificied for the collective wellbeing. And it worked. Respect for
each other, irrespective of gender or age was palpable in the air.
A years strike had left the people of Maerdy surviving on health
sapping foods. Obese making foods. The salt and sugar saturated
processed foods. The cheapest foods. But still clinging to their
self-respect. Then the pit was closed. The only employer. The only
generator of income taken from them. Their reason for being gone.
Within six months shops were being shut and houses deserted, the
windows smashed and vandalised, then boarded up. Long rows of
houses and shops windowless, lightless and lonely. Respect died and
heroin came calling with the false promise of a way to dull the despair.
Crime mushroomed. The streets of Maerdy became dangerous and
domestic violence entered the home. Despair had set in.
Blunts hatred of Thatcher, the Tories, a class, became personal. No
longer the coldly intellectual analysis and critique of their policies.
More a visceral loathing of a class who had no regard for working
people but instead thought them Other, sub-human, a unit of
production to be dispossed of by the scrap merchant.
Saddam invaded Kuwait. Thatcher went to America and handbagged
the first Bush. War. And America would gain a long sought for
military presence in the Middle East in support of its ally Israel. The
CP oppossed the war of course. The Russians were in no state to
oppose it. Gorbachov had lost control of the centrifugal forces he
had unleashed and they spun out of control. 'Real existing socialism'
collapsed and the Berlin Wall dissolved as mist. Epoch making times
as
“we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing”
Chimes of Freedom Bob Dylan
The euphoria at seeing the Berlin wall fall, an idea become a material
force, didn't last long. Saddam saw to that. The bi-polar world was
no more and America, the hype-power, was now in position to try
and impose 'full spectrum domination' across the globe. Saddam,
their erstwhile ally against the Iranians, had given them the
opportunity to impress and intimidate all with the most advanced
weaponry the world had ever seen.
Non of the western governments had done anything about Saddams
gassing of the Kurds in Halabja. The opposite was true. Britain and
America had secretly been helping the secular Ba'ath regime in
Baghdad. Supplying the chemicals for the bombs. Iraq was to
important to them in destabilising its neighbour, Islamist Iran, until
oil was at stake.
The time of the Energy Wars were upon us, but Thatcher had gone.
Between her handbagging of the first Bush and the start of operation
'Desert Storm' she had been ousted by her own, the ones who were
“one of us”, and replaced by the man who wore his Y-fronts outside
his trousers.
The Poll Tax did for her. A heavy defeat in the local elections, riots
and the Establishment remembering 600 years of history and the
Peasants Revolt in 1381, did for her. Blunts optimism took a lift.
Popular opposition was starting its long trek back to activity.
The Welsh CP, though only a fraction of its size from the fifties still
carried forward respect and support from broad sections of the
population. Had a place in the collective memory of Wales that no
other CP in Britain could claim from their respective populations.
But it would all have to go and the assets passed on to any organisation
that suceeded it
Blunt had come to the conclusion, after a lot of thinking, that the
changes going on in the world and the challenges they represent; the
advent of new technologies; the developments towards globalisation;
the rise and dominance of trans-national conglomerates; the
degredation of the environment; the growth in identity politics; the
complexity and diversity of civil and political society; could not be
met or resolved in the interests of the worlds poor by any of the
existing political parties. Even the CP. Politics could no longer be
based solely on class. Or that every struggle had to be evaluated,
be supported or not, by its relation to the 'class struggle'. That the
fight against racism and sexism and for an inclusive society had to take
second place to the mantra of class struggle. Or in the words of some
old Tankie, “when we get socialism, racism and sexism will disappear.”
Tell the Russians that.
What was needed now was a 'new political formation'. A formation
that did away with heirarchal structures representative of military
organisation. It is a trueism that there are leaders and led, but how do
the led decide who their leaders are? By patronage of the leaders as in
democratic centralism or with the spending of vast amounts of money
that leaves the field open only to the rich like the American system?
Neither.
It will be one that represents the aspirations, desires and interests of
the poor and exploited peoples in a complex and diverse world. A
political formation that is loose, lets individuals or groups come and go
as their interests wax or wane but that is influenced by those interests;
allows space for initiative, develops new ways of imagining and whose
range of possibilities will not be defined or confined by capital's
neoliberalism or the now defunct and failed state socialism. It will be
a formation that respects the autonomy of individuals and the
differences within its constituent parts and yet that can still respond
quickly to events. That marries the intellect to the will to act for the
common good. A new start to history not it's end.
In some of the words of the Zapatistas Fourth Declaration of the
Lacondon Jungle:
“A new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope,
the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity....In place
of humanity, they offer us the stock market index. In place of dignity,
they offer us the globalisation of misery. In place of hope, they offer us
emptiness. In place of life, they offer us an International of Terror.
Against the International of Terror that neoliberalism represents, we
must raise an International of Hope. Unity, beyond borders, languages,
colors, cultures, sexes, strategies and thoughts, of all those who prefer a
living humanity. The International of Hope. Not the bureaucracy of hope,
not an image inverse to, and thus similar to, what is annihilating us. Not
power with the a new sign or new clothes. A flower, yes, that flower of
hope.”
Blunt put his ideas to the last congress he would ever attend. When it
finished in November 1991 so did the CP. A new organisation replaced
it called Democratic Left but Blunt had left. He would spend the next 10
years trying to establish himself as a photographer and fail. And signing on.
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