Empathy is not a Colour. Chapter 7

The bus was filling up with morning commuters, school children and

shoppers or like Blunt making his way to bus driver training. He was

staring out of the window at the people hurrying their way through a

shower, wondering what had happened to Jim. The last time they

spoke was twenty years ago when Jim phoned from Amsterdam. He

sounded happy. Playing guitar in a band. Playing left handed with a

guitar whose strings were strung for a right handed player. Typical

Jim - upside down. When they had got back to Britain they'd split

up. Jim had headed for Manchester while he went to London and

joined some acquintances from Marrakech in a squat. Blunt thought it

strange 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 affluence

sat cheek by jowl with poverty. A multilingual hive of activity, its

schools teaching children with 79 different mother tongues. A world

could be explored or a prison for the poor could it make.



He was still writing poetry. The aid to his psyche whilst isolated by

language in Stammheim was still his learning tool and the acid years

were 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 would

occassionally 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.