Sunday 26 May 2013

Gold Dust

Dedicated to a Comrade having a hard time, politically and otherwise – you aren’t the only one.

The SWP has reached an impasse.
Members of the SWP now reject or question the accepted truths and commands.
The sense of forward advance that was once felt has now disappeared.
Hundreds now dissolved away by frustration anger and doubt, yes, more importantly however political differences and principles.

Stranded at a stand still, as the organisation galls down a dark, quite and solemn pace towards erasing the last 8 months of revolutionary despair which will have gripped, with an encompassing and stone cold blitz feeling felt among the many. The new, old, young, and experienced.

The disconnection, unfortunately, is almost now permanent. As the branches sway, panic and scramble onwards.  The busy-like nature of the weekly meeting, things to build, stalls to do, busy like, even more than ever - a quick succession of busy nothings.
And the irremovable glint in each’s eye, of the horrible scaring, of the entire integrity of that soul – politically, physical and mentally.
Withering of the strongest of the strong.
No brave face can mask it.
An open wound which refuses to heal. No matter time’s passing. The concomitant of the feeling remains; how could this have happened?

Searching for the determination; the root. Able to transcend from one to the next generation of fighters – the methods, the training, the thinking, the acting, the relating.

A Virus of Culture

A Virus - all soured, corrupted, mechanical, inadequate, unemotional, inhuman, and systematic.
It is what infects a comrade, the circles, the philosophy, the atmosphere, the living & then the breathing organ in which it paints us with its colours, strengths and vibrancies.
A culture must be constantly nurtured, paid meticulous attention to when sick, fostered, guided. - given the chance to lead – the opportunity to build – the ability to develop and evolve living revolutionary ideas, by looking on those that have come to past, and those who decay to their death.

Time is short, amplifying the most precious questions and prominent crisis which confronts us.
Questions, which are often visited. Chipped away at by the old comrade, who comes up against the metaphorical and physically gigantic concrete wall; too high to climb or destroy, by the efforts of a sole.
Rebounding the cycle of your own efforts, its own echo - no answer, no reply, nothing – despair, frustration, sorrow, confusion, anger, bitterness, isolation.
Death of the idea, and the hope which came with it.
To change something, anything, at this point, the worst point.

Consigned to the graveyard of once living ideas, one in which sorted to amass inspiration and militancy of those here, and yet to come.


A choking culture, selectivity, breeding animosity between those closest.
The questions, why them, not I, not us, not all?
The fostering of new comrades in preparation to join the circles of thought and the warring bands that shuffle, jostle and scuffle for weight, influence – and ultimately power.
It is a deep rooted problem. Engrained & inbuilt, a way of ‘things’ - Greying gold dust

As those pushed to the front, or proped up, often with little total understanding of their use in another’s means to the ends.
A percentile effect; of those of a generation, the many left to fall in between the gaps of the organisation, and the cracks in which spring from its virused culture: Lost revolutionaries, and with them; lost potential, a lost far future, but near. – Lost Gold Dust

The unappreciated, fighting to grow, completing the ‘dogs-work’, acting as the main mechanical cog, buried beneath the shiner, but smaller cogs, that overlap, overplaced and overlay it.
Yet never the time to spare or interest and encouragement given, to develop beyond your practical perfections, you’re fighting, for the sake of fighting strong, time passes and you’ve grown tired, as revolutionary enthusiasm stagnates, from the lack of care placed under you.
The same is no longer the same; it’s lost its meaning, as you repeat, repeat, and repeat, repeat.
The disconnection growing at each stroke of disarray and crisis – Exhausted Gold Dust

The excited, ever charged, with vigour and zeal to build the organ, they truly want and feel to succeed with every fibre, every thought, every feeling.
But bound to wonder for an answer, a sign – nothing.
Left to explore and wonder, search new possibilities, but alone.
As the organ stagnates, reclines, its pulse slowing, its tone fading, its resonance breaking.
If only, you dream. The organ was next to you, engaging, renewing, growing and living- off this new potential.
Instead rusting, squeaking, if not completely silent in all but words and symbols. As if an error, an incompatibility- Frustrated Gold Dust

Constantly fighting to remedy the immediate problems in the organ, to make a dent, but it regrows even thornier.
At what point will one be able to build as where one’s ambitions truly lay or seek?
Not Deviation, Marxism; living and growing
Relating and learning from people, who struggle to survive or live today.
Against replication, skewing and stretching past struggles to apply now.
The past, always important and a part of, but never the same, never inevitable, never guaranteed, never inherent- No blueprints.
Agency evolves, composition composites’ and compresses, relations react, feelings fester, tensions sinuating.

Many gone now, the organ in failure, decaying – now lays still; and will remain still, but still-borne cannot be what is made from its death.
A real culture different to before. Forged in genuine truth, encouragement, development, trust, confidence, freedom and thought, while free from slant, bias, personal benefit, factioneering and manoeuvre.
A real want for a culture which is breathing of the class, yet instead compromising for a simple plinth listings the organs norms, constructs, its policy – The extent of relations with the Gold Dust.
This must be and can only be created through the process of fighting through real democracy.
To free the embryonic potential inside of each and every separate particle of Gold Dust – Actualised Gold Dust

This culture must be fostered and encouraged through and for a maximum living Marxism. A culture of permanent inclusivity, flexibility and depthful discussion and debate and so much more – as to achieve a real vision, an organ that intertwines with class struggle, in practise, and further to liberate the successes and failures of prospects in which it is engaged in, openly and honestly.

As is an essential of vanguard’s memory. A memory of not purely words, but of reality – The class cannot be fooled, we can only fool ourselves. 
The memory learns from the experiences of all. Managing, filtering and disrupting this process forms cracks, gaps and seizures in this memory.

The infection grows.



Angel Jackson - FL Editor

6 comments:

  1. Leaving aside the lack of any politics at all in this post, if when Cliff used the phrase 'every SWP member should be treated like Gold dust', he could have imagined that one day one SWP comrade would set up a blog like this and write something like this, I think he would have used a different expression. Indeed, another phrase of Cliff's was 'you are only as good as the last thing you did'. This puts a high bar on things for revolutionaries - perhaps too high - admittedly. But if setting up this blog and writing this post was meant to be somehow paying homage to Cliff himself, I think you are seriously mistaken.

    But I think there is a misunderstanding about what Cliff meant by his 'gold dust' phrase among some comrades and ex-comrades. I don't think he meant every individual SWP comrade was inherently so wonderful that they had the right to say and do whatever it was they liked and did not have to respect any collective democratic discipline of the organisation whatsoever. Rather, I think Cliff knew that a particle of gold dust in itself - like any individual revolutionary socialist - is not necessarily particularly much to write home about, but lots of particles forged and organised together in a strong disciplined revolutionary organisation become potentially very valuable indeed.

    Moreover, Cliff was committed to what I think he called (again perhaps slightly problematically) 'the primitive accumulation of cadre'. In other words, what mattered was not simply recruiting people - or gathering together fine particles of gold dust - but turning them into revolutionary Marxists - indeed Bolshevik 'cadre'. I don't see how this post or indeed this blog helps this process along one iota, and so it is hard to see how, for all the apparent verbal commitment to 'the International Socialist tradition', it actually really stands in that tradition in any way at all.

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  2. Whereas sacrificing hundreds of members to defend one rapist is perfectly in keeping...?

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  3. Snowball, as a character from a novel, you might try harder to recognise poetry when you see it. Good or bad poetry is a different matter.

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  4. Actually, I did think it might be poetry when I first read it, but I just couldn't believe that we in the SWP had a budding talent worthy of comparison to Sean Matgamna going unappreciated in our ranks, so wrongly just dismissed it as a kind of embittered 'stream of consciousness' thing...Profuse apologies to 'Angel Jackson'.

    Before I leave, any chance of the faultline comrades deleting the slanderous comment from 'sl4irl'? Cheers.

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  5. Why should the comment be deleted? Is it not true that rapes carried out by Martin Smith, Jake Smith and XX (another former full timer) have been covered up if not apologised for?

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  6. Oh dear :( Doesn't look like this blog has any sort of moderation .
    Along with the above bonkers poem and the slightly odd style and tone of some of the other entries ( a bit pseuds corner at times ) I'm not sure how serious this thing is .

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