i know that we live in times that are very different to those i grew up in.even in the late 1960s i remember passing bombsites on my way from my home town,into and through london.it felt like that until the arrival of hippie culture and a lot that went with it,london,and probably even more the industrial conurbations of england were damp,grey,boring,banal with nothing to do and very limited prospects.then the new left,from about 1956 ad later the hippies arrived.those were times of prosperity and optimism and with a growingself confidence our class and certainly the youth cultures and new left demanded more and better,articulating that what we were being handed out was not enough,and was not good enough.
i myself began to come to political and social conscience from about 1968 when i was 14.i grew up seeing the evidence of my own eyes earlier,and with strong moral values but it was influenced mostly i admit by tv coverage of events across the world in 1968 which led me to think that if people of 18 or so could challenge,be confident,seek to change the world or to stop its excesses,then maybe soon i could join them........
whilst there were plenty of negatives,these were not neccessarilly by themselves entirely daunting.they did not get in the way of independent thought.they did not stop me before i had started,although i did make plenty of mistakes and several false starts along the way.but then dont we all,and actually it is through our mistakes that we learn.we do not neccessarilly realise what we have learned if we simply get things right,becase there is nothing that makes us reflect on it.
the world was apparently divided into 2 major imperialist blocks.i make no apologies for coming to the view that there were 2 imperialist blocks.one of them may have been different once,but that victory had been largely if not fundamentally lost,certainly in its key features.
the cold war got colder and bleaker,so that at various times and for different people and groups there were certainly times when"we"thought that nuclear war/holocaust was imminent.i guess the worst times were the 1980s,for me and the US/UK bombing of tripoli was a personal low point,to which i might well return on another on occassion.
even in britain,this could result in a not just intense commitment to"organised socialism"but a distorted,somewhat monastic outlook,in which everyone was expected to make a commitmet to making revolution which postponed a whole number of issues,and qualities of life to the other side of the revolution.this,i acknowledge could never be matched in lived reality.
at the same time,it seems to me,alongside the collapse of a large part of "stalinism"with the coming down of"the wall"and the collapse of the soviet union,its satellites and the further transformation of china and subsequent isolatiin of north korea,cuba,and some other "distorted"regimes there remains another kind of residual or ghost or shadow of stalinism.
i think that might be called sectarianism.in the 1960s that was a kind of luxury in the context of optimism about other things,but it was still damaging,to all kinds of "things",campaigns,organisations and people.it led to jokes about certain political currents that,say 2 followers of a particular set of ideas would form a party,3 would lead to a split,and in its more hysterical form that amongst 3 members there would be at least 4 opinions.
whilst it WAS and remains the case that some political differences could lead to life threatening or fatal consequencesi,it was equally possible to overestate this.i admit that at some level i enjoyed the occassional "row"with comrades in other political currents about the precise nature of the soviet union and the"eastern bloc"but it was mostly so esoteric that it could do nothing but put off ourselves and others from organising on the many very real issues that came up day by week by month.personally i felt sometimes that those very debates brought comrades into contact with each other in order to conduct the dispute but that at the same time,it would often place an unneccessarry distance between comrades,or more simply me and her or him.it got plain daft at times.i remember being sent off to comrades in other groups for tortured dscussions before returning with an agreemnt almost like munich 1938 and then agreeing to argue together for a simple practical step in the here and now about for example,the literal next step in say a student occupation.at a personal level,i felt it made for difficulties at the simple level of frendship,to my regret.
i do however also recognise that sometimes having agreed to work together in say a "united front"that its possible to become too comfortable with those we meet within a room to organise something on an ongoing basis.we can get too comfortable.we relate to each other and begin to think as if the circumstances in the room are the same as the conditions in our communities,on the streets,in worplaces.whilst it is possible to overtheorise,it seems to me that we ought to be able to conduct our relations with other people,with comrades in the wider movement in a way where we can both work together,act fraternally or soriorally and yet agree to disagree without falling silent over real differences.it does at one level seem absurd that we can argue to the point of anger,rather than passion over krondstadt 1921 or whether the russian/bolshevik revolution was lost at a particular date,when the reality is we still dont know and we have neither established nor agrred facts.in a time of austerity,crisis,cuts and vicious class attack by their class on ours everywhere and all the time,we really do need "stand together,or fall apart".
we ought to focus on learning and teaching ourselves and each other better ways to be-which will always be works in progress,rather than replicating/accepting the psychology that capitalism silently imposes on us all,or the brand mentality of the capitalist market,in which"our party is better /bigger than yours..
for me,there are a few rules of thumb;that friendship and comradeship are a key to our struggles.that in a time when increasingy everything is contested,then each struggle is important and needs to be linked up.and that our models of organising should not be stuck in some"magical mystical"date from the past but that our class(not just the"professional revolutionaries")continue to learn,innovate and create.
it was not me but a friend,and comrade who pointed out that the word "socalism"has the word"social"in it.and a fundamental point made by marx and and many others is that we are social beings.we cannot live or have meaning without each other,and in fact we cannot grow to our full human potential in any way without a mother,without nurturing,and yes without rubbing along in our friendships.
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