For a neophyte writer who had seen his knowledge start to grow from mere juvenile jottings first attempted in, of all places, a German gaol just 2 or 3 years earlier, the phrase had a visceral impact. What I had been experiencing from my own experiments with words was a universal truth. A confirmation I was not alone and strange, that all could grow intellectually, change the trajectory of their life and start to try and live a new morality through the practise of writing.

Other books before and since have also brought with them an emotional recognition that my understandings and exposure to life were not exceptional, but nothing with such gut intensity as the phrase - "writing is a process of learning".

Even a scribbled description of a pastoral scene, its lush greenery the result of sweaty toil can lead to discoveries of our relationship to the land and which once written becomes owned by the writer, both the scribble and the land, and, if the writing is good enough, by the reader.

I've nicked a lot of words, burgled the vaults of poets for their rhythm and rhyme till finding my own - like a tyro guitarist borrowing riffs. Still do.

But then I took a break for 20+ years and sought a new way of learning and seeing through party political engagement and photography. It was not as clinically thought through as that may sound, life after all has been unplanned, selfish even, and writings till then never thought of having much worth or weight. Or that what I could see would resonate with others - even when it did I wouldn't believe it. And I wanted to do something practical about the injustice I felt and saw around the world there and then, so allowed my passion to find new outlets.

Both political activity and photography allow for spontaneity and intuition which fitted with my personality. But it was political activity that brought praxis, that symbiotic relationship between theory and action, the great driver of cooperative learning. An understanding of the complexity and diversity of a wider world, how the brutal politics of capital accumulation worked and ways of overcoming it came this way, as well as through writing.

The return to the jottings and ponderings, after the shock of discovering my own personal Maggie, the MS, and subsequent relapse, required a re-entry into deliberation and structured thought which has always been a pain. Writing does not come easy to me and never did, it's displacement activity what does. Words, their phrasing and arrangement needed to make some sense, come smeared with neurons and their molecular cascades by the time they hit the page.

The speed by which some writers can churn out words amazes me. Thousands and thousands of words a day. If I had stayed with writing all that time, practised every day exercising Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the brain helping them grow in volume the more that is learnt, or become more disciplined with the use of time, maybe I could now match the prolific output of some political columnists and commentators on the internet. But then would it still be as "writing is a process of learning"?

Latterly I've been reading a lot of USA essayists on the internet writing about the state of the world and America, and to generalise, it seems to me they are pervaded with a deep and demobilising pessimism.

 

A similar malady affected some of the political commentators and columnists during the 1920s and early 1930s in Germany as the Nazi party was growing with some banking help from Prescott Bush - Dubya's granddad. Able to see the coming descent into hell and write eloquently about it, they pfaffed about proclaiming the end of times - "we are all dooooomed". Not applying themselves to learn from their writing, it was as though they were caught, enmeshed and their intellectual faculties disabled by the power of the Nazi propaganda machine. Dazzled in the headlights of a seeming juggernaut they knew not what to do, except fail their readers. And fail them they did by not having the strength to imagine, let alone suggest alternative futures which could encourage people, bring them "hope in the dark". Perhaps they were frightened of being labelled 'communist' or 'terrorist' or something. As what happened to writers of conscience like Brecht, whom they did not support.

The modern day equivalent of these writers come across as dismissive of the extraordinary ability of ordinary, everyday people to face, challenge and change the disastrous course of events instigated by their own governments; that the end result has already been decided and all we can do is await the inevitable fascist dystopia to appear handcuffed to eternity and stripped of hope.

This is a new literature of defeatism which has emerged out of the rubble of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine and seems to be concentrated in Europe and America. It's exponents have fine, analytical words for that which is, and usually words of truth, yet despair the ordinary people for not doing anything about it because blinded by a mendacious media or crushed by poverty. Blame the poor as excuse for one's own weakness in failing to suggest alternatives displays a distinct lack of respect toward readers looking for answers or direction. Especially when the contradictions between what is portrayed in the mainstream media and peoples actual lived lifes become so glaringly extreme, like the vast, obscene inequalities between rich and poor.

It could be argued, I suppose that editorial decisions constrict what writers and what words are published, but this is the age of the internet and new rules for scribblers apply.

It is easy to do, suggesting alternatives that is, it only requires mentioning some of the myriad of activities ordinary people are involved in in civil society, the literacy campaigns, petitions, demos, strikes etc, across all the issues affecting us, locally, regionally and even globally. These activities are the intellectual hothouses, the universities of cooperative learning for changing the way things are and the learning is in the process of doing. And it is in the doing that hope thrives.

 

 

Ambiguities 

In January 2001, Ken Livingston the Mayor of London, appointed Bob Kiley as Commissioner of Transport for Britain's capital city. Kiley was a CIA employee from 1963 until 1970 and rose through the agency heirarchy, via Manager of Intelligence Operations, ending up as Executive Assistant to the Director, Richard Helms - the CIA's head honcho at the time.

Kiley was no minor office staff, though he did carry through some bag work for the CIA in his early career;

"Two years after graduating from Notre Dame with a business degree, he was serving as president of the left-leaning National Student Association, later exposed as having been covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Kiley enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard but left early to work directly for the CIA. There he helped arrange covert financial support to youth and student groups in foreign countries".

While some of the baby-booming generation of students in Europe were just starting to engage with political organising during the 1960s, in an attempt to find new ways forward for humankind, Kiley was actively undermining the optimism they brought to those times. Could the largesse he was spreading through student groups have even helped fund the rise of the Red Brigades in Italy or the Baader/Meinhoff Gang (Red Army Faction) in Germany? Just a thought.

For a short history of the CIA and a flavour of their activities during the time that Kiley was Manager of Intelligence Operations it is worth reading Roger Morris' latest essays for TomDispatch . They should be treated as an introduction to the 'Family Jewels', a 700 page dossier of 25 years of CIA dirty tricks, recently released to the National Security Archive .

Kiley left the CIA in 1970 and spent the next two years at the Police Foundation in Washington, then he had 3 years as the deputy mayor of Boston. After a few stints as CEO or Chairman of various private sector companies he moved into transport management where he made a name for himself as a crisis manager not averse to using "zero tolerance" policing on New York's transit system.

' "A CIA activist working for an unreconstructed Trotskyite" was how Bob Kiley and Ken Livingstone described their professional relationship,....' from the BBC . This was a statement made at the very beginning of Kiley's appointment as Commissioner of Transport for London. It reminds me of that old adage - the best place to hide something is in plain view. Especially if 'once CIA, always CIA'.

Why would a "CIA activist" move into mass transit management? It's to do with the strategic importance of transport in the accumulation of capital and the CIA's prime motive for its own existence in trying to make things run smooth throughout the world for that accumulation to make its way to the USA.

The City of London is one of the major financial centres of the capitalist world and getting those who make it function to and from their work-stations is a non-negotiable condition for such a position. Obviously it requires the removing or neutralising of any perceived 'enemy' on the transport network - organisation or individual - during a time of war. The first priority of the Metropolitan Police and London Transport Police is therefore to keep the roads open and Livingston must know this as the statutes governing the office of mayor probably codifies this role in law.

Me turning up to drive a London bus the same month, April 2002, that Bush/blair met in Texas and decided to commit the 'supreme crime' by invading Iraq, must have scared them shitless in light of what they let loose at me. Which is a bit odd considering I'm not all that clever and this they should have known.

All I wanted to do was try and stave off bankruptcy by driving a bus till something else appeared, not get involved in mobilising London bus drivers to choke the strategic one-way systems, as I recently wrote about. Unfortunately I have an inability to keep my trap shut especially when class war extends to the illegal invasion of another country, a weak one, by my own.