Drifting: 3.
To move leisurely or sporadically from
place to place, especially without purpose or regular employment: a day
laborer, drifting from town to town.
Oxford English Dictionary
Reminiscences,
even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even
if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of
recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in
neither case the stuff that life is made of.
Benjamin, Walter. A Berlin Chronicle. 1932.
Benjamin, Walter. A Berlin Chronicle. 1932.
 |
| Bulgaria 1989 |
Setting
the scene
It’s probably a contradiction in terms but I’ve
always been good at drifting. Not in a sophisticated Guy Debord, Derive way, nor
in a Clint Eastwood High Plains Drifter style and not even in a Jack Black[1]
hobo manner. Instead, my drifting was just an antidote to making any hard
decisions and is probably part of my DNA. I drifted through school from one
thing to another, then from job to job, then to university and, decades later,
even 11,000 km across the world. And
through my aptitude for drifting is how I came to travel around Eastern Europe
for 6 months with my then girlfriend, Sheela.[2]
Inspired by the fall of the East European states and
by the possibility of the re-emergence of a non-Stalinist left, and by the
example of an Socialist Workers Party (SWP) member who, once he heard of the
revolution in Romania, packed his job in and hitched a lift there, partly with
a BBC World service journalist, a trip there began to seem a possibility. We
never actually sat down and discussed whether or not it was worth doing, but we
did talk about it with fellow SWP members and quite quickly the idea of the
trip took on a life of its own, like the Golem of Prague. Eventually, it was
taken for granted by everyone we knew that we were going to Eastern Europe. And
we did.
 |
| Hungary 1989 |
Despite appearances, the reason for
writing this isn’t as a form of memoir[3], something which I detest.
I did think of writing it in the third person or fictionalising it but I
couldn’t be arsed. I intended to write an account of what happened when we
returned but the need to find work took precedent and afterwards the time never
seemed right. I’ve written a few short pieces about specific events from the
trip on a now defunct website and they generated some interest, so I felt that
the time was right to give it a go. I think that the account will be of
interest to more than just those with an interest in socialist politics as it
also provides a snapshot of a very specific time and place. In addition, the
experience we had in arguing that the capitalism of the west wasn’t the
solution to the problems of the post-communist regimes alongside the attempt to
create proto SWP offshoots is worth repeating. In my own case, the latter
experience chimed with already existing doubts about the validity of this type
of organisation which have a certain contemporary validity.
I also see the writing itself as a form
of experiment as the problem of writing about events of over 20 years ago is
the haziness of many of the memories. Whilst there, I did make lots of notes
and take dozens of photos but as is the way with these things, I lost the notes
and the pictures never came out properly. This means there will be gaps in the
story as a well as a certain vagueness at times about specific details so
nothing new there. I intend, though this might not happen, to include a summary
for each country of what has happened politically in the last few decade though
this will of course be only from secondary sources.
A detour on the road to Warsaw[4]
 |
| Poland 1989 |
From a very early age, I’ve always been
instinctively anti-authority; my first political action was at the age of 5 or
6 when my school was herded onto the local railway platform to wave at the
Royal train speeding past. I turned my back on the train and gave it a v sign.
As I got older I was constantly in trouble for challenging teachers and
intervening in defence of other pupils being told off by teachers. I'd already
realised that there was an 'us' and 'them' in the world as an instinct and this
became part of my mindset. Labelled a troublemaker and classed as semi-retarded
for my inability to transfer my thoughts to paper in a form that could be
understood by anyone else, I was always in the thick of any
opposition to school authority.
By the age of 15, and the onset of
punk, I was called commie by my peers even though I identified myself more as
an anarchist. It's hard to describe the liberating effect of punk for those who
weren’t there but for me, at least, it validated a lot of my attitudes and
beliefs, and helped me begin to develop a more critical view of society.
This wasn't difficult given the sense of economic and political crisis
that was around, including the large amount of youth unemployment. In particular,
the growth of the fascist National Front, especially its influence in parts of
the skinhead and punk scene, stood out as an urgent problem. The Anti-Nazi
League (ANL) and rock Against Racism (RAR) probably wouldn't have had
quite the momentum they had without the boost provided by the culture around
punk and reggae. They were both influences on how my politics developed but at
the time, it never occurred to me to join the SWP, or any other grouping for
that matter, but as Thatcher became Prime Minister and the 1980s came along, I
thought it was time to become involved in a socialist organisation. Prior to
this I’d argued my own hybrid of politics and been involved in a few punch ups
with fascists but felt that I had to do something more.
Living in Liverpool at the time, it was
inevitable that my first contact with organised left politics, as opposed to
the ANL, should be with members of the Militant Tendency. Whilst I was
attracted to the idea of belonging to a secret revolutionary organisation
dedicated to the overthrow of society, I wasn’t so enamoured by the diseased
entity into which they were burrowing. Even as a teenager, it was obvious to me
that the Labour Party, despite or because of its longstanding working class
support, was basically as much a part of the system as the Tories. I knew a
couple of Militant members vaguely, including Derek Hatton and they struck me
as decent guys but I knew that the Labour Party as a way of changing the world
was a dead end. That’s why I could never have joined them; that and their
mechanical view of the world and the world’s most boring socialist paper.
In the early 80s, there was a wrong conception that
the SWP were mainly students but certainly that wasn’t the case in Liverpool.
The key problem was its small size and the fact that with few exceptions, its
members weren’t rooted in workplaces or communities. I joined some time in 1981 and
became a regular attendee at meetings and a less regular paper seller due to
working on Saturdays. I spent the next
couple of years reading a lot of basic political stuff: Marx’s Capital, Lenin,
Trotsky and Tony Cliff amongst others. Marx was the real revelation and so
different to both the right wing caricature and the left wing
misunderstandings.
By the time of the 1984 Miners' Strike, I had some
doubts about the whole SWP project. However, the strike was greeted with
enthusiasm by the party, who threw all its resources into supporting the
strike, despite a formalism that saw flying pickets and mass pickets,
especially at Orgreave, as in the 1972 strike as being the only way forward.
The official line at least in the early months of the strike was that the party
should argue in the Miners' Support Groups that they should be focused on
organising picketing rather than collecting money or food to support. There was
also the issue of what the NUM rank and file did as in organising hit squads
etc; this was counterposed to mass action
and seen as detrimental to the strike. This is despite the fact that it
was the miners’ themselves doing this actvitiy. As Dave Douglas points out in
this review of Socialist Workers’2o year anniversary coverage of the strike (http://www.minersadvice.co.uk/reviews_sw_anniv_miners_strike.htm),
The
strike of 84 more than any other strike was a strike of the rank and file,
where they couldn't control official strategies they went out and did their
own, hit squads, scab watches, petrol bombs and catapults. Mass demonstrations,
mass kitchens, mass food and cloth distribution. Collections in the four
corners of the world. Logging, fuel gathering the length and breadth of the
country and free fuel distribution throughout the communities. A challenge to
the states elaborate forces, cobbled together through networks, official,
unofficial, ad-hoc, and all points in between. 1974 although victorious had
nothing like this. Remarkably the conclusion of SW is the reverse " the
miners lost in 1984 despite incomparably better national leadership, because
those rank and file networks (of the 70’s) had withered away". Well, it
just goes to show, it depends how you choose to tell the tale.
Whilst never resigning from the SWP, I drifted out
of the organisation, spending most of my energies in the Miners' Support Group
and my union. I actually spent the next year or so, reading a lot of ultra-left
material, particularly various Bordiga offshoots as well as their theoretical
opposite, council communism. Despite this and an increasingly critical view of
aspects of the SWP, I rejoined at the end of 1995, and even more perversely,
became part of the local leadership the following year with the arrival of a
new full time organiser, Andy Wilson. For a few short years, I was probably the
closest I came to being what is known as a party hack. However, it couldn’t last
and I fell out of favour around the same time that Andy was sacked as organiser.
 |
| Prague 1989 |
 |
| Romania 1989 |
It probably seems odd that whilst we were preparing
for the trip to Eastern Europe, effectively acting as full timers for the SWP,
albeit unpaid, I had already convinced myself that the Leninist model of the
party and more specifically, the idea of building an organisation from 2 or 3 people
based on a specific theory such as State Capitalism, was a mistake. I’d also
grown tired of being told that the essence of being a revolutionary was selling
Socialist Worker and recruiting people to the party and the endless use of ‘building’,
‘build’ in relation to the organisation and everything else. Nonetheless, I
didn’t see a contradiction between this view and effectively going abroad to
recruit for the SWP, as I saw the possibilities for socialists in a
transitional situation such as Eastern Europe was in. As it turned out, the situation was far more complex than I could ever have imagined.
To be continued in part two.
[1]
This Jack Black is author of ‘You can’t win’, not the actor, Jack Black who has
become the Jim Carrey of our times.
[2]
Her name and that of everyone I mention in the series is a pseudonym. This is
because I’m no longer in contact with any of them and wouldn’t feel comfortable
using their real names.
[3]
I’ve always disliked the idea of talking about the minutiae of my life to
strangers; not necessarily because it is uninteresting but because I like the
idea of privacy. I’ve always admired writers such as Thomas Pynchon who refuse
to reveal their non-literary identities to the world.
[4]
This section is more like a memoir but I think the background to how I ended up
in the SWP and Eastern Europe adds useful information.
[5]
With apologies to Half man Half biscuit
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