My short story, Rebecca - Adam Carlton

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I first wrote about Rebecca here on the author site, Booksie, back in January 2019. One of my earlier efforts. The theme was somewhat based on a story Nigel had mentioned once about his time with the IMG in London, when he was a regional organiser and in charge of the 'Red Defence Force'. This would have been in the early 1970s.

Needless to say, my story is very different from his experiences and more intriguing. I slightly revised it when it was published on this blog, here - which is the version you should read.

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The Catholic Church and the Comintern

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I began my adult life as an activist in the IMG, the British Section of the Fourth International and successor to the Comintern, immersed in the rituals of Marxist politics, endless meetings, and the promise of a transformed world. Decades later, I now find myself an activist in the Catholic Church (parish treasurer and project manager for our facilities) and I am struck by how familiar it all feels. These two great global organisations, one secular and revolutionary, the other religious and traditional, are oddly similar in their institutional life, with the activists still complaining about the passivity of most of the ordinary members...

Both claim to speak a universal truth. For the Comintern it was Marxism-Leninism, the scientific doctrine of history; for the Church it is the legacy of faith handed down from the Apostles. If you hold the key to human destiny, then errors and deviations should not be tolerated.

Hence orthodoxy, hence heresy, hence the long shadow of discipline.

For both rest on centralised authority. The Party had the Central and Political Committees - and the Control Commission; the Church has the Pope and the Magisterium. Democratic centralism vs. (in extremis) papal infallibility. Different idioms, same structural necessity: following discussion, unity is determined by a final arbiter.

Both manage conscience. In the Comintern, members were subjected to criticism and self-criticism (in the IMG not so much). In the Church, we have the confessional, the insistence on recognising fault and reaffirming commitment. In both settings, the ethos is interiorised, made personal (and thus more effective).

Both are missionary - universal in scope. The Comintern aspired to world revolution; the Church, to universal salvation. Both sprawl across cultures, nationalities, and centuries, and both face the constant problem of cohesion in the face of secular challenge.

Any institution that combines (1) a monopoly on truth, (2) a universal mission, and (3) a fragile global reach will converge on the same logic: central authority, discipline, self-examination, orthodoxy and exclusion. Whether the foundation is transcendental revelation or historical materialism, the organisational necessities are much the same.

Inside both, there is reward for those signed-up. In the Party it was the intoxicating sense of being active on the side of history. In the parish it is the palpable commitment of people who give their time, energy, and skill for something beyond themselves. Work can be mundane but has its life-affirming qualities. You are sustained by a sense of purpose and by the comradeship of those around you.

So from the Comintern to the Catholic Church, structures resemble while ideologies diverge. But in the lived experience of the activist core, the resemblance is remarkably similar, and the reward is the same: a life shaped by shared labour in service of a mission that transcends the individual.

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The Fourth International at Your Party

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From the IMG to A*CR: Whatever Happened to the Fourth International?

At the recent Your Party inaugural conference in Liverpool, the usual assemblage of Trotskyist organisations was out in force – Socialist Workers Party, stray sects, vetero-Leninist grouplets doing that haunting-the-edges-of-history thing. Listening to the reports, I found myself wondering whether any former comrades from the Fourth International tradition – the old Ernest Mandel “United Secretariat” current – were actually present.

Is there still a British section of the FI in any meaningful sense, and if so, what on earth are they doing these days?

Back in 1972-76, when I was an IMG member, the politics were straightforward, whatever the internal (in retrospect) absurdities. We were Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist: pitched at a genuinely high intellectual level. I possessed - and studied - Lenin's Selected Works in two thick volumes, Trotsky's classic works, and a smattering of modern texts on Marxist economics (Capital was too boring for me in those days).

You might have mocked our delusions of revolutionary imminence, but you couldn’t say we hadn’t done the reading. Fast forward fifty years and the contemporary FI seems unrecognisable: a loosely-connected ecosocialist talking shop, with a politics that looks like faddish environmentalism plus identity-adjacent moralism.

Not much attention to the conquest of power: the old, hard arts of street-fighting victory over the bourgeoisie. 

The IMG: a flawed but serious attempt at Leninism

The IMG of the early seventies was, for all its faults, a serious organisation.

Structurally, it was a party project, not a lifestyle collective. Branches, fractions, organised interventions in the labour movement and student unions. There was an assumption that we were training the future leadership for a British October which would, sometime soon, be pencilled into the calendar. Discipline and education were not optional extras - we were truly in the End Times.

Theoretically, we were orthodox in the Trotskyist sense: transitional method, workers’ government, permanent revolution, the united front, democratic centralism. People argued furiously all the time, but they were arguing inside a shared conceptual framework; Leninism was the grammar of the organisation. You could reasonably say, “These people are wrong about the nature of the Labour Party, or the dynamics of Portugal, or the women’s movement,” but we were at least trying to locate those things inside a theory of the state, class power, and revolutionary praxis.

The FI today: ecosocialist salon with Trotskyist wallpaper

By contrast, the contemporary British section of the FI - Anti*Capitalist Resistance (A*CR), plus its Scottish cousin - reads and behaves very differently. This may be their public face rather than the inner life of any given branch - but politics, like theology, exists in its outward forms.

The centre of gravity has visibly shifted:

– 'Climate catastrophe' is now the organising horizon. Capitalism is bad not because it immiserates the working class and blocks human potential, but because it incinerates the planet. The class problematic is presented, but often as a kind of grey backdrop to a green foreground. Naturally none of this is properly analysed.

– The daily diet is social-movement work around race, gender, sexuality, refugees, and so on, refracted through current academic fashions. They tend to appear as self-contained spheres rather than mediated expressions of the underlying class structure - as we would have demanded.

– Trade-union implantation is patchy and modest. There is very little sense that the organised working class is still the decisive lever of social transformation, as opposed to one “movement” among many in an archipelago of resistances.

– Above all, there is a palpable aversion to anything which smells of Leninist party-building. “Centralism” is suspect; “vanguard” is practically a slur. The organisational imagination hovers somewhere between a campaigning NGO, a reading group, and a loose federation of activists.

It is still recognisably left-wing, often morally serious, occasionally insightful – but it is not what anyone in 1972 would have recognised as a revolutionary Marxist organisation in the Bolshevik sense. Trotsky may be there in the quotations; he is not there in the method.

What broke: historic mission and strategic seriousness

Two great demolitions reshaped the FI and its British fragments.

First, the collapse of the “historic mission” story. For decades, the Ernest Mandel FI lived on the thesis that Trotskyism was the rightful heir to the classical Marxist tradition, temporarily overshadowed by Stalinism, but destined to come into its own once “actually existing socialism” collapsed under its contradictions. The workers would reassess; the Fourth International would stand revealed; history would resume its proper course under the leadership of sections of the FI.

Then the Eastern Bloc fell - and no Trotskyist current became the organising centre of anything. Instead, we got neoliberal restoration, gangster-capitalism, and a demoralised proletariat. That wasn’t in the script.

At that point, Trotskyism ceased to be the heir apparent and became, at best, one tradition among many revisionist Marxisms. The FI bent towards the surviving currents that still seemed alive – environmentalism, feminism, various identity movements – in order to avoid total irrelevance. In doing so it shed much of its doctrinal paradigm, energy and focus.

Second, the intellectualisation of impotence. As the practical horizon of revolution receded, the new FI became, in effect, a think-tank for radical critical theory: eco-Marxism, feminist Marxism, queer Marxism, decolonial discourse. This colonised the mental space once occupied by close study of the state, class struggle dynamics, and revolutionary strategy.

The result is a politics of moralism. The organisation proclaims the need for rupture; it does not seriously address the mechanics of taking and wielding power. Revolutionary politics without a theory of victory is mere performance, not preparation.

Would Lenin or Trotsky recognise their supposed heirs?

They would see an “International” in which:

– The proletariat has dissolved into a soup of movements and identities, each with its own discourse, none clearly primus inter pares.

– “Seizure of power” appears, if at all, as a distant eschatological symbol rather than a concrete strategic objective one might plan for in pragmatic, logistical detail.

– Political questions are approached primarily in ethical and cultural terms – will this stance make us more inclusive, more intersectional, more attuned to X oppression? – rather than in terms of changing the relation of forces at state level.

– The old transitional method – demands which pose the question of power – has been largely replaced by programmatic-maximalism and movementist-minimalism, with very little in between. Back to the old Second International.

Three exits from Trotskyism

The Trotskyist diaspora has generally taken one of three available exits:

1. Sectarian petrification - preserve the 1970s schema in aspic and insist that nothing fundamental has changed. This is the path of the hardened sects, still doing paper sales as if Wilson were in Downing Street and factories still employed thousands of horny-handed blue-collar workers. Hello SWP.

2. NGO-ification – dissolve into the movements, rebadge as “ecosocialist” or “radical left”, retain some Marxist language but operate in practice as a campaigning network with an intellectual journal attached. This is more or less where the FI and A*CR have ended up.

3. Labourist absorption – accept that the only serious arena is the broad workers’ party and become, in effect, a pressure group on its left wing. Variants of Militant and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty live here, endlessly reconciling themselves to the rhythms of Labourism.

From militants to curators

So yes, my younger IMG self would barely recognise today’s A*CR as comrades in the old sense. They occupy a different niche in the ecosystem. We were trying, in our hapless way, to train cadres for a future insurrection that never arrived. They are curating a moral and intellectual discourse – ecosocialist, intersectional, movementist – in a world which has largely given up on the idea of revolution altogether.

It's humbling to read the declassified papers of the old Special Branch in the early 1970s, when the IMG (and other Trotskyist organisations) were written off as earnest talking shops: zero threat to the state. But then the objective situation never unwrapped into that October uprising: if it had, we would have known - at least intellectually - what to do and been up for it. Would the comrades today denounce such a mass popular revolt against the state as - 'Populism'?

I rather think Your Party would.

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An IMG Militant

Slightly photoshopped - Peter with Tariq

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When I moved to London in the early 1970s - after being kicked out of Warwick University - I ended up in a flat near Clapham South tube station shared with Phil and Peter Cooper. Peter was the posh one of us.

At that time we were unemployed and basically working full-time for the International Marxist Group. I had some adventures with Peter, notably our smuggling trip into the former Czechoslovakia when it was a decadent Stalinist police state (but still able to bite). I documented that episode here.

Later, he slightly mysteriously moved away to Manchester. Then I left the IMG and Peter got his fifteen minutes of fame, as documented in the image above. Here is more:

Peter Cooper 

27 year old Peter Cooper, a left wing law advisor, admitted last night that he was the spy at the dinner table who bugged the controversial "Wogs' speech by Sir Richard Dobson, which led to Sir Richard's resignation as Chairman of British Leyland, last Friday.

He was invited to the dinner for members of the Twenty Club at the Dorchester, by his father Mr. John Cooper, who after the speech was published in the Socialist Challenge whose editor is Tariq Ali - a friend of Peter Cooper, has resigned from the club.

Photo Shows: Peter Cooper seen during his press conference today watch by Mr. Tariq Ali, Editor of the Socialist Challenge who published the story of Sir Richard Dobson's speech, which can be seen on the wall in the background.

After that, Peter seems to vanish from history. It took me an afternoon, flailing around with my fading memories, to put this post together.

Unusual Reasons

This post is about people who undertake significant life changes, but for unusual reasons.

1. Programming

Dr Hamid Lesan escaped to England from Iran, where, as a dissident, he was under the scrutiny of the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK. He worked as a colleague of mine at STL in the mid-1980s on formal methods research and AI. I asked him once how he had gotten into programming; he replied that he had first engaged with programming as an interesting application of the lambda calculus.

[Dr Hamid Lesan received his Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic from the Department of Mathematics of the University of Manchester in 1978. After a brief period of teaching, he joined STL in 1980, where his work has been mainly concerned with Formal Methods and Natural Language Processing. He is currently working on tools for supporting the formal specification and development of software in the context of the ESPRIT project RAISE. (ICL Technical Journal, Volume 7 Issue 1 - May 1990). He died in August 2006 - I’m not aware of the circumstances.]

2. Joining the revolutionary left

In the early 1970s, when I was at Warwick University, there was a plethora of far-left organisations looking to recruit: the International Socialists (IS, later SWP); the Socialist Labour League (SLL); the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party; and the International Marxist Group (IMG), British Section of the Fourth International.

It was a time of unrest, and we talked big. Our perspective was becoming a mass revolutionary party as the Bolsheviks had achieved in 1917. Once, one of our leaders, Peter Gowan, came to Warwick to speak. He looked forward to the future mass party, but mentioned that today, most of the leading cadres had elected to join the IMG - rather than other bigger, higher profile organisations - specifically because of its link with the International.

Probably not one in one hundred thousand workers and students had ever heard of the Fourth International: I certainly hadn’t before I was recruited…

3. Being received into the Catholic Church

People join religious organisations for many, often prosaic reasons. But JD Vance joined after an intense study of St. Augustine’s massive City of God. In this fifth century work, Augustine condemns Rome, the City of Men, devoted to present excess, hedonism, selfish ambition and heedless individualism. Vance had no problem identifying those ancient Roman pagans with contemporary American coastal elites with their mindless hedonism; their secular, patronising arrogance.

Augustine counterposes the City of God, the community of those who love God and live according to His will. The Catholic Church is a visible manifestation of the City of God on earth, and promotes the virtues of humility, communitarianism and morality.

JD Vance considered the Catholic Church as the right organisation of resistance: he decided to join.

[St. Augustine wrote "The City of God" over a span of several years, beginning in 413 AD and completing it around 426 AD. This period was during a time of great turmoil in the Roman Empire, particularly marked by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD, which partly inspired Augustine to write the work. The full title of the work is "De Civitate Dei contra Paganos" (The City of God against the Pagans), and it addresses the decline of Rome and defends Christianity against the accusations that it was responsible for the fall of the Empire. (ChatGPT).]

Formal Logic in SF: 'Foundation'

Below is the extract from "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov that I’m mulling over. As a young teenager it first got me interested in Predicate Calculus, which much later I studied in my AI research.

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

Here's the extract.

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"Said Yate Fulham: "And just how do you arrive at that remarkable conclusion, Mr. Mayor?"

"In a rather simple way. It merely required the use of that much-neglected commodity – common sense. You see, there is a branch of human knowledge known as symbolic logic, which can be used to prune away all sorts of clogging deadwood that clutters up human language."

"What about it?" said Fulham.

"I applied it. Among other things, I applied it to this document here. I didn't really need to for myself because I knew what it was all about, but I think I can explain it more easily to five physical scientists by symbols rather than by words."

Hardin removed a few sheets of paper from the pad under his arm and spread them out. "I didn't do this myself, by the way," he said. "Muller Holk of the Division of Logic has his name signed to the analyses, as you can see."

Pirenne leaned over the table to get a better view and Hardin continued:

"The message from Anacreon was a simple problem, naturally, for the men who wrote it were men of action rather than men of words. It boils down easily and straightforwardly to the unqualified statement, when in symbols is what you see, and which in words, roughly translated, is, 'You give us what we want in a week, or we take it by force.'"

There was silence as the five members of the Board ran down the line of symbols, and then Pirenne sat down and coughed uneasily.

Hardin said, "No loophole, is there, Dr. Pirenne?"

"Doesn't seem to be."

"All right." Hardin replaced the sheets. "Before you now you see a copy of the treaty between the Empire and Anacreon – a treaty, incidentally, which is signed on the Emperor's behalf by the same Lord Dorwin who was here last week – and with it a symbolic analysis."

The treaty ran through five pages of fine print and the analysis was scrawled out in just under half a page.

"As you see, gentlemen, something like ninety percent of the treaty boiled right out of the analysis as being meaningless, and what we end up with can be described in the following interesting manner:

"Obligations of Anacreon to the Empire: None!

"Powers of the Empire over Anacreon: None!"

Again the five followed the reasoning anxiously, checking carefully back to the treaty, and when they were finished, Pirenne said in a worried fashion, "That seems to be correct."

"You admit, then, that the treaty is nothing but a declaration of total independence on the part of Anacreon and a recognition of that status by the Empire?"

"It seems so."

"And do you suppose that Anacreon doesn't realize that, and is not anxious to emphasize the position of independence – so that it would naturally tend to resent any appearance of threats from the Empire? Particularly when it is evident that the Empire is powerless to fulfill any such threats, or it would never have allowed independence."

"But then," interposed Sutt, "how would Mayor Hardin account for Lord Dorwin's assurances of Empire support? They seemed –" He shrugged. "Well, they seemed satisfactory."

Hardin threw himself back in the chair. "You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole business. I'll admit I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he was actually an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements."

There was a flurry, and Pirenne opened his mouth in horror.

"What of it?" demanded Hardin. "I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no so-called gentleman would do. Also, that if his lordship had caught on, things might have been unpleasant; but he didn't, and I have the record, and that's that. I took that record, had it copied out and sent that to Holk for analysis, also."

Lundin Crast said, "And where is the analysis?"

"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications – in short, all the goo and dribble – he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."

Hardin might have placed an actively working stench bomb on the table and created no more confusion than existed after his last statement."

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Many people - mostly economists, it seems - have cited psychohistory as the reason they entered their profession. For me it prepared the way for the International Marxist Group.

But today I'm more interested in what ‘symbolic logic’ did for Salvor Hardin.

Within the paradigm of formal logic, the natural language texts Hardin gave to the ‘Division of Logic’ would most likely have been mapped to Richard Montague's baroque fusion of higher-order predicate calculus, lambda calculus and multi-modal logics. Computationally intractable, as it turns out.

Translating English into Montague's formal logic

But a suitable LLM in summarisation mode could do the job in seconds.

'The Girl From IS' - a short story by Adam Carlton

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The Girl from IS

She remembers when she was ten. She'd written that essay for school. She had populated all the rooms of her home with little animals, each of them with their own personality suited to where they lived. The upstairs squirrels; the downstairs foxes. Each with their own separate characters. And they had had very serious adventures - without their parents’ oversight.

She'd had to be careful with the story because, after all, her house was very large, and she didn't want to boast about it, or even draw attention to it with the other children. Still, the teacher had liked it, and she had gotten a gold star. And now she was home, so proud and ready to show her parents.

Of course, her father would not be there. He was always busy: something in the city which seemed to occupy all his time. And not just during the week, but weekends too. No, she was used to going to places without her father.

Her mother was somewhere in the house. She ran to her mother’s study and waved at her, showing her little book with its bright gold star on the essay page, burbling with excitement. Her mother shushed her: eyes glazed, distracted, dragged away from her files.

And this also was no surprise because her mother was always very busy too. How else could such a nice house be afforded?

Ten years later. She’s twenty. She’s joined the International Socialists, a revolutionary left organization dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. Dedicated to the overthrow of all the things that are making her mummy and her daddy quite rich.

She thought she would find a sense of belonging here. A sense of comradeship; a sense of caring and compassion.

But strangely, it was not to be.

The organization is certainly busy. There’s plenty of busywork: selling newspapers, going to meetings. There’s plenty of discussion if you like reading Lenin and Trotsky and Tony Cliff. And other kinds of political tract. Perhaps Gramsci?

But it’s curiously transactional. She never feels that anybody really cares much about her.

And now she’s been sent by her local party group, her party branch down to this midlands town, where there’s a conference on women’s rights. A medium-sized conference, not too important, and it’s being organized by another organization on the left: the International Marxist Group, the IMG.

She’ll be staying at the house where the IMG comrades live. It's down on Friday afternoon; conference on Saturday. She’s going with a friend, Audrey.

She’s quite jealous of Audrey. Audrey is five foot four, ginger hair, freckles. Very cute, everyone says. Whereas she is five foot ten. Curvaceous, for sure but perhaps a little on the large side for many of the male comrades in the International Socialists. And also, they seem to find her rather earnest. Perhaps there are some other problems there? Ones she doesn’t want to look too closely at?

They find the place. It’s just a walk away from the bus station. They’re welcomed in. There are three of them there: Paul and Will, and another guy.

They sit around and talk a little bit about this and that: the conference, what they’re doing, the university where they all play at studying. And then they show the two of them around the house.

It’s a decaying structure, scheduled for demolition. They got it cheap because it won’t be there much longer. In the back pantry, there are piles and piles of boxes of cheese that they bought for an earlier meeting that nobody ever consumed. They’ve been living on cheese for months now, apparently.

They go into the back garden. There’s a shed there. The guy points to it: that’s where he lives. He lives in a shed.

They look inside. It’s furnished. There’s a double bed, a light, a table, a chair, a heater. A cardboard box used for storing clothes.

They go back inside and the evening progresses.

It’s unspoken, but somehow they’re going to pair up. It’s hard to know where the boys’ fancies lie, because each of them is rather nervously eyeing the two girls, as if trying to decide. But in the end it won’t be their decision.

It’s clear to her that Audrey has her eyes set on Paul: the quiet, earnest Australian with his handsome curls and round glasses, who seems very bluff and honest and has a certain rough charm.

There’s Will, of course: slim, very long hair, rather round face, rather baby-faced really. Seems quite quiet and withdrawn; underpowered.

She’s rather more taken with the third guy. Also slim and long-haired; wears glasses. But he’s much more forthright. Quite calm, quite talkative, quite intellectual, quite wry, quite funny, really. She rather likes that; she finds it endearing.

It becomes later and darker even; the boys start looking around. It’s time to retire. Audrey goes off with Paul and sort of pushes him a little, as if to say: where’s your room?

And she goes off with the confident one. Says: show me your shed.

They walk out to the back garden. It’s quite chilly. There’s even a little frost beginning to settle on the vegetable stumps. A shed is perhaps not the ideal place to spend the night.

They go inside, close the door, the light goes on, the heater is warm - he’s already prepared, he put it on before. It’s not so bad inside the shed. The mattress is on the floor; there’s a duvet on top.

She does not see why any time must be wasted here.

She’s already feeling all the angst she normally has: the loneliness that is her long-term companion. A certain quiet desperation, a hunger for companionship, a hunger for human contact, a connection.

Directly, studiously, without any drama, she takes off her clothes. Takes off her top. Takes off her dress. Shrugs out of her underwear. Throws the duvet to one side. Lies down on the bed, her legs slightly spread. Looks at him.

Looks intently. And waits.

It does not take long in these situations - the very strangeness of it.

A few minutes later she holds him tightly. She needs him. Again. And then once again, before finally...

The light goes out. And they sleep.

And next morning? All that passion - all that excitement, all that closeness, all that completion - it has receded into history; that visceral need surges within her again: it always does.

He’s half asleep. She kneels over him. Straddles him. Her breasts hang heavy over his head. It doesn’t take much.

And they do it twice more.

And he doesn’t know what has happened except that probably he’s been taken over the edge of what he’s physically capable of doing.

About two weeks later, there’s an event in London.

The IMG people, along with many others, are invited to stay at her parents’ mansion.

Her parents are progressive, left-leaning. Not actually members of the International Socialists, but certainly adjacent. And they have no problem at all putting up ten, twenty, thirty comrades - with their sleeping bags - on a Friday night before the event on Saturday.

She has specifically arranged for him to have one of the spare rooms. And so she goes there after dark to invite him to her room. She’s wearing a flimsy nightie. Nothing else.

She takes him by the hand and directs him through the dark corridors of the first floor, stepping over sleeping comrades in their sleeping bags, carefully, quietly, in the gloom, until they get to her room.

And there they make love. Again. And again.

And she feels, for a moment, that connection. The sense of oneness. She’s with another human being in the most tactile way possible. She touches more than herself. She is momentarily comforted. Her inner pain is back in its box - but only during the actual moments of passion.

And now he’s shaking his head in disbelief.

She wants him to stay. But he won’t. He shakes his head again. He gets up. He leaves her. He walks back: back to his own bed.

He looked at her in the gloom, as if he could hardly believe that he’s doing this: rejecting such an opportunity. But he did.

And she? Hurt. Like someone’s taken away a banquet when she’s still hungry, starving. And she doesn’t know what that feeling is, or how it can be stopped, except by making love again.

And that isn’t going to happen.

So she lies there alone and lonely and disappointed in her bed. And he’s gone.

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There is a strange postscript.

A long time later, maybe six months, maybe a year, she’s in a demonstration, talking to a male friend, walking through London.

And a familiar face. A somewhat familiar face.

He comes across. And she recognizes that young man from the midlands.

And she has no idea what to do about that. She’s moved on. It was an episode. It assuaged her hunger for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days.

But it was another cul-de-sac.

What can he bring to her now?

She blanks. She doesn’t know the language to deal with this. She doesn’t know him, really. She doesn’t know him for the purposes of today.

She looks away.

He looks rueful.

She watches from the corner of her eye; he’s like: what’s that about?

And then he walks away.

And she never sees him again.

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"International Trotskyism 1929–1985"

Robert J. Alexander wrote this magisterial tome in 1991: "International Trotskyism 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement".

At 1,141 pages and out of print, it is a labour which will surely never be repeated. However, the PDF exists on the Internet and you can download it here.

The history of the International Marxist Group, the IMG is covered in pages 492-496. The quote from my previous post, on the occasion of Martin McGuinness's death, is on page 493.

There is a detailed and somewhat critical review of the book here (1993).

"Victory for the IRA"

In 1972 I was a member of the International Marxist Group as we marched through London in support of the Irish struggle.

Martin McGuinness: 23 May 1950 – 21 March 2017

The IMG became rather notorious for its slogan: "Victory for the IRA"*. I was present at the leadership committee where this was discussed. Tariq Ali was the main proponent, arguing in his typical romantic-revolutionary way that the IRA were so vilified by the British establishment that we revolutionaries - in the belly of the beast - were morally obligated to stand against the current and show our full solidarity for the national liberation struggle.

John Ross, who I supported, argued mildly that we thoroughly disapproved of the IRA's campaign of voluntarist violence and bombings. Nevertheless we were duty bound to be in solidarity with their anti-imperialist struggle, and that the correct, Marxist slogan was "Solidarity with the IRA".

He was undoubtedly correct, but Tariq's élan won the day.

I remember marching on the streets, braving the hostility of the watching crowds and the contempt of the stewarding police, chanting "Victory .. to .... the IRA!" and feeling proud of my party discipline even as I compounded its error. It was not clear to any of us what a 'victory' for the IRA would even look like.

Interestingly​, on the occasion of  Martin McGuinness's death, we've not moved on that much.

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* The quote is from this book.

Failures fortuitously avoided

It is said that all political careers end in failure (the quote has some caveats that are generally ignored).

When I reflect on my own career, I see some failures rather fortuitously avoided.

As a child, I wanted to become a theoretical physicist. I went to Warwick University in 1969 determined to study the subject. For various reasons that all went wrong, but today I read at Backreaction Sabine Hossenfelder's experience:

"I finished high school in 1995. It was the year the top quark was discovered, a prediction dating back to 1973. As I read the articles in the news, I was fascinated by the mathematics that allowed physicists to reconstruct the structure of elementary matter. It wouldn’t have been difficult to predict in 1995 that I’d go on to make a PhD in theoretical high energy physics.

"Little did I realize that for more than 20 years the so provisional looking standard model would remain undefeated world-champion of accuracy, irritatingly successful in its arbitrariness and yet impossible to surpass.

"We added neutrino masses in the late 1990s, but this idea dates back to the 1950s. The prediction of the Higgs, discovered 2012, originated in the early 1960s. And while the poor standard model has been discounted as “ugly” by everyone from Stephen Hawking to Michio Kaku to Paul Davies, it’s still the best we can do.

...

"During my professional career, all I have seen is failure. A failure of particle physicists to uncover a more powerful mathematical framework to improve upon the theories we already have. ... "

---

In my early twenties I was a reasonably-successful member of the International Marxist Group - I was on the National Committee. Just a few years later, I became disillusioned - just a gut feeling that something was wrong with Trotskyism and that the revolution was not going to happen. Most of my comrades of the time remained in left politics their entire lives.

I mention John Ross, the IMG leader and latterly Ken Livingstone aide on the GLC, and Kate Hoey, now a Labour MP, amongst many others.

Still, the revolution never happened, nor are we any nearer to it.

---

In my thirties, at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, Essex, I worked on my PhD in artificial intelligence. By 1990 that funded research had terminated with the takeover by Canadian telecoms giant Northern Telecom (Nortel).

I briefly considered a career in academia as an AI researcher but there was no obvious possibility, so I bit the bullet and retrained as a telecoms network architect. It proved both interesting and lucrative over the next 25 years.

Had I stayed with AI, I would have entered the twilight of the classical AI research programme known as GOFAI. The field became moribund until the recent explosion of 'deep learning' in the quite-variant neural net tradition.

---

So looking back, I had an opportunity to dedicate my life to changing the world in a political tradition which has proven ineffectual plus two opportunities to push the boundaries of knowledge forward .. in areas where history shows that nothing of great worth emerged.

Instead I got to design a lot of state-of-the-art networks, some of which even got built.

Engineering may be less ethically-challenged than many other professions - but I'd still rather have done the science.

"What Is Orthodox Marxism?"

Amazon link

I first wrestled with "History and Class Consciousness" in my early twenties; it remains my favourite book of Marxist theory.

Georg Lukács was

"... a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also the philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

"As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).

"Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed to both support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism."

This morning I re-read "What Is Orthodox Marxism?", the first essay in the collection - and marvelled at the abstraction, erudition and sophistication of Lukács's thought.

It's slightly jolting to be reminded of just how conceptually deep Marxist theory actually is - not that you would know it from most professed 'Marxists'.

I considered writing a summary but found Phil Burton-Cartledge had done the job already- and much more diligently.

One feels that criticising Lukács without having immersed oneself in decades of study of the Western Marxism tradition would be like an arts journalist debating General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory with Stephen Hawking as a self-presumed equal (although that's happened).

Look, I buy into all this totality stuff, I like dialectical materialism and can accept that 'the proletariat is at one and the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge'. But once we've done all that, destroyed capitalism and removed capitalist reification and alienation, what next? Lukács sees the full liberation of mankind.

For me, on a bad day, it's dramatically relaxed selection.

Tribes are the thing in the atomised West

Scott Alexander considers the power of ideologies (warning: long but interesting essay including American-themed topics):

"Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide?

"I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there’s no more caliphate. You’d think maybe they’d let the matter rest.

"Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how many Muslims even know which school of jurisprudence they’re supposed to be following? It seems like a pretty minor thing to have centuries of animus over."

We can say the same thing about other apparently-religious conflicts, such as the Protestant-Catholic divide in northern Ireland and some parts of Scotland. But Alexander probes more deeply:

"Nations, religions, cults, gangs, subcultures, fraternal societies, internet communities, political parties, social movements – these are all really different, but they also have some deep similarities.

"They’re all groups of people. They all combine comradery within the group with a tendency to dislike other groups of the same type. They all tend to have a stated purpose, like electing a candidate or worshipping a deity, but also serve a very important role as impromptu social clubs whose members mostly interact with one another instead of outsiders. They all develop an internal culture such that members of the groups often like the same foods, wear the same clothing, play the same sports, and have the same philosophical beliefs as other members of the group – even when there are only tenuous links or no links at all to the stated purpose.

"They all tend to develop sort of legendary histories, where they celebrate and exaggerate the deeds of the groups’ founders and past champions. And they all tend to inspire something like patriotism, where people are proud of their group membership and express that pride through conspicuous use of group symbols, group songs, et cetera. For better or worse, the standard way to refer to this category of thing is “tribe”."

It doesn't take much to generate a sense of tribal camaraderie. I've previously remarked about the benefits of membership of the International Marxist Group in my early twenties: a shared culture of mostly-fun activities .. and guaranteed weekend parties.

Scott Alexander applies this insight to the Shia-Sunni conflict:

"I know very little about early Islam and am relying on sources that might be biased, so don’t declare a fatwa against me if I turn out to be wrong, but it looks like from the beginning there were big pre-existing differences between proto-Shia and proto-Sunni. A lot of Ali’s earliest supporters were original Muslims who had known Mohammed personally, and a lot of Abu Bakr’s earliest supporters were later Muslims high up in the Meccan/Medinan political establishment who’d converted only after it became convenient to do so.

"It’s really easy to imagine cultural, social, and personality differences between these two groups. Probably members in each group already knew one another pretty well, and already had ill feelings towards members of the other, without necessarily being able to draw the group borders clearly or put their exact differences into words. Maybe it was “those goody-goodies who are always going on about how close to Mohammed they were but have no practical governing ability” versus “those sellouts who don’t really believe in Islam and just want to keep playing their political games”.

Then came the rallying flag: a political disagreement over the succession. One group called themselves “the party of Ali”, whose Arabic translation “Shiatu Ali” eventually ended up as just “Shia”. The other group won and called itself “the traditional orthodox group”, in Arabic “Sunni”.

"Instead of a vague sense of “I wonder whether that guy there is one of those goody-goodies always talking about Mohammed, or whether he’s a practical type interested in good governance”, people could just ask “Are you for Abu Bakr or Ali?” and later “Are you Sunni or Shia?” Also at some point, I’m not exactly sure how, most of the Sunni ended up in Arabia and most of the Shia ended up in Iraq and Iran, after which I think some pre-existing Iraqi/Iranian vs. Arab cultural differences got absorbed into the Sunni/Shia mix too.

"Then came development. Both groups developed elaborate mythologies lionizing their founders. The Sunni got the history of the “rightly-guided caliphs”, the Shia exaggerated the first few imams to legendary proportions. They developed grievances against each other; according to Shia history, the Sunnis killed eleven of their twelve leaders, with the twelfth escaping only when God directly plucked him out of the world to serve as a future Messiah.

"They developed different schools of hadith interpretation and jurisprudence and debated the differences ad nauseum with each other for hundreds of years. A lot of Shia theology is in Farsi; Sunni theology is entirely in Arabic. Sunni clergy usually dress in white; Shia clergy usually dress in black and green. Not all of these were deliberately done in opposition to one another; most were just a consequence of the two camps being walled off from one another and so allowed to develop cultures independently.

"Obviously the split hasn’t dissolved yet, but it’s worth looking at similar splits that have. Catholicism vs. Protestantism is still a going concern in a few places like Ireland, but it’s nowhere near the total wars of the 17th century [...]."

Like I said, it's a long essay which, with the comments, covers atheism, evangelical christianity, rationalism, science-fiction and video gaming subcultures, and cultural appropriation (some good points about that).

Alexander's take home message?

"My title for this post is also my preferred summary: the ideology is not the movement. Or, more jargonishly – the rallying flag is not the tribe. People are just trying to find a tribe for themselves and keep it intact. This often involves defending an ideology they might not be tempted to defend for any other reason. This doesn’t make them bad, and it may not even necessarily mean their tribe deserves to go extinct. I’m reluctant to say for sure whether I think it’s okay to maintain a tribe based on a faulty ideology, but I think it’s at least important to understand that these people are in a crappy situation with no good choices, and they deserve some pity.

"Some vital aspects of modern society – freedom of speech, freedom of criticism, access to multiple viewpoints, the existence of entryist tribes with explicit goals of invading and destroying competing tribes as problematic, and the overwhelming pressure to dissolve into the Generic Identity Of Modern Secular Consumerism – make maintaining tribal identities really hard these days. I think some of the most interesting sociological questions revolve around whether there are any ways around the practical and moral difficulties with tribalism, what social phenomena are explicable as the struggle of tribes to maintain themselves in the face of pressure, and whether tribalism continues to be a worthwhile or even a possible project at all."

Read the whole thing there.

Red Lion Square

In 1974, aged 23, I finished my teacher training course and had already decided that no way was I going to take a job in a secondary school. Two maths teaching practices with the recalcitrant kids of London had seen to that. That summer found me instead working for London Underground at the southern terminus of the Northern Line, cleaning tube trains.

This job was more enjoyable than it sounds. I would turn up around 11 pm and spend some hours dusting and mopping the allotted number of carriages; later I graduated to washing down the outsides of trains, rubber booted in a long protective gown, scraping with a spiky brush dipped in a bucket of acid.

By 2.30 am we had done enough and then we kipped on the trains before clocking off at dawn. With all day free, a complimentary bus & tube pass, and real money I was delighted. My workmates were also interesting: the dispossessed of the world washed up in Morden. I remember a Nigerian teacher - unable to work as such due to unrecognised qualifications – with whom I shared many erudite conversations in our small tea-room at night.

So it was as a proletarian that I participated in the infamous Red Lion Square demonstration of Saturday 15 June 1974. Here is how Wikipedia describes it:

"The British far-right organisation, the National Front booked Conway Hall in Red Lion Square for a meeting to take place on 15 June 1974. A counter-demonstration was called by the London Area Council of Liberation (formerly the Movement for Colonial Freedom). This counter-demonstration attracted support from groups not directly under the control of Liberation, including the International Marxist Group (IMG), the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) and the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers Party).
...
"The front of the Liberation march came westwards along Theobald's Road and entered Red Lion Square by Old North Street before turning right where a platform was set up for the meeting. A police cordon blocked the square to the left of Old North Street.
...
"The cordon was then charged by the larger contingent from the IMG who were closely followed by the smaller CPE(M-L) contingent . Several minutes of pushing and scuffling followed. There were several charges and countercharges. The police cordon was reinforced by members of the Special Patrol Group and by mounted police who eventually succeeded in forcing the demonstrators back.

"Photos show the use of truncheons by some police officers. At least one demonstrator reported being knocked to the ground and trampled by a police horse.
...
"A large number of demonstrators were arrested. Photos show that many who were arrested had their hair pulled or were otherwise treated with what appeared to be excessive force by police."

Picture us as we marched into the square. The IMG was a large contingent, marching in order about eight abreast. IMG stewards including myself, walked outside the crocodile moving up and down the ranks giving directions. Outside of us the police also marched, but as we came towards Conway Hall the side roads and the hall itself were blocked by cordons of police reinforced with horses.

The IMG intended to stop the National Front from using Conway Hall and charged the police cordon. I was close to the action but was rapidly ejected from the mêlée and found myself fifty yards away, wondering what to do next. As I could see my comrades struggling with the police, some being arrested, I figured I needed to return to the fray and had soon locked arms with the front line, pushing and shoving with the police not twenty yards from the hall entrance itself.

In my opinion, the police did not abide by middle-class demo-etiquette. I was grabbed by the hair and ‘private parts’ and dragged to the ground, where I was immobilised by a couple of extremely large constables. The IMG surged back and I was dragged into a police van with other, equally disoriented demonstrators.

As we were driven off, the supervising policeman in the back revealed he was from Norfolk, drafted in as extra manpower. He seemed genuinely baffled to be dealing with us: “”What are people like you doing mixed up in all this?” – We were far from his staple diet of low-lifes.

I gave a stock answer, “Those who ignored fascism in the past were overrun by it,” which even at the time seem less than totally compelling as a narrative about the rather marginalised National Front. The real answer was that most Saturdays I was doing a demo, it was one of the main ways the IMG recruited, so I was there as part of the road to revolution. But that argument seemed too cynically utilitarian to use.

Things were busy at the police station where I was banged up in a narrow cell which looked like a toilet, white porcelain tiles and a single bench. I was bailed by one of the ‘red lawyers’ who always attend demos.

My trial came a few months later. I was charged with assault on the police, a stock indictment. Several officers stood up in court and gave bored recitals about how I had stood there, punching them until they had managed to restrain me and lead me away. My lawyer carefully cross-examined them to ensure their version of events was minutely described. I was looking at six months.

During the police evidence I remember shouting in exasperation that none of this was true – I was genuinely shocked at the idea that policemen might calmly stand up in a court of law and just lie – but was shushed by my lawyer for my naivety. Only later did I understand that everyone knew this was a tedious charade and they all just wanted to get through the script.

We had a secret. I am now embarrassed to talk about it, but at the time I had an intense attachment to what can only be described as thick, woollen, diamond-patterned, Rupert Bear trousers. These were exceptionally distinctive. I had steered a bee-line to where the action was, but so had half the press and their photographers. My defence team had their pictures, many of which featured a young man in Rupert Bear trousers being wrestled to the floor and then squashed by burly cops.

Press photographers hate to be subpoenaed in these circumstances for all the obvious reasons. Nevertheless we had the guy there and the photographs were duly shown to the magistrate. Let us say there was plainly discordance between the official version of events and what the photographic record actually showed: with great reluctance, the magistrate acquitted me.

I was very lucky; most of the arrested had no such compelling defence and went down.

---

While I was having my mini-drama of being arrested, a student in our contingent from my old university (Warwick), Kevin Gately, was actually killed. The IMG view was that he had been hit over the head by a police baton from the Special Patrol Group but this was never definitively proved.

My story merited a few column inches in the papers: “London tube worker acquitted of police assault”.

My parents were mortified.

---

IMG-related:  Occupying the Embassy and A Mission to Prague.

Occupying the Embassy

The Chilean Embassy in London

In the early 1970s, the International Marxist Group had a serious crush on our cousins across the channel, the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (French Section of the Fourth International). Initially just another French groupuscule, the Ligue had surfed les événements de mai 1968 to become a formidable Trotskyist force in left-wing politics, with perhaps 10,000 members.

The IMG had around 450.

The Ligue did serious stuff. It allegedly smuggled guns to the FLN in Algeria and occupied Embassies. Wanting a piece of the action, the IMG restructured its prosaic demo stewarding organisation to form the ‘Red Defence Force’ (RDF), and I was asked to head it.

Soon afterwards I'm enjoying a pint in a pub at King’s Cross, near the IMG headquarters in Pentonville Road. What's that I hear? It's the veteran working-class activist and IMG leader Bob Pennington referring to me derisively as the IMG’s Che Guevara.

In an uncharacteristic moment of moral courage I walk across to his table and confront him:

“It was the IMG leadership’s idea to set up the RDF, not mine. If you think it’s so stupid, take it up with them, not me.”

I like to think that’s when he first took a shine to me.

---

In 1973 the Chilean military overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, which was then in the process of wrecking the Chilean economy. What was probably in hindsight the least bad option was nevertheless a messy and thoroughly cruel and repressive event. Naturally the IMG was signed up to all the London demonstrations against the Chilean coup.

So we have this enormous demo coming up on Chile, and an IMG leader takes me aside (was it Peter Gowan? I think it might have been) and tells me it has been decided we should occupy the Chilean Embassy on the morning of the demonstration. The demo will pass the Embassy and the IMG contingent will break through the police cordon and rescue us.

I have never heard of a more unlikely proposal in all my life: the police are quite used to our demos and we never manage to break their cordons.

Nevertheless, I have my instructions. Clearly someone has to reconnoitre the Embassy, to plan our incursion, and that person has to be me. At this time I'm a teacher-training student at Furzedown College in south-west London. I therefore concoct a story that I'm doing a project on education in Latin America, and specifically Chile. I call the Embassy and make an appointment.

I turn up - dishevelled clothes and long hair - and a security-goon escorts me up wide curving stairs into the sumptuous office of the junta's cultural attaché. We discuss Chilean secondary education, and somehow in the conversation it comes up that the whole Embassy is Chilean territory, that the guards possess guns and that they're authorised to use them.

I file this useful information away.

On the Saturday I brief my RDF team, carefully explaining about the guns, and we arrange to meet at a location about half a mile away from the Embassy at 8.30 the following morning. We all experience a rather troubled night’s sleep.

Sunday morning arrives, as it is wont to do, and I turn up a little early to check out the Embassy. I don’t get too close, just stroll in its general direction from the tube station until I have it in view. To my gathering unease there are way too many vans of the Special Patrol Group cruising the otherwise deserted streets while a large body of burly policemen block the Embassy entrance.

Returning to the rendezvous point, I gather my team together and tell them the operation is cancelled as we have no chance of getting in. We retire to the students union at UCL to debrief. I share my opinion that the police must have been forewarned about our mission; probably by an informer. Strangely, no-one seems that disappointed. I say that with one exception: when I inform Peter Gowan later that morning, he clearly expresses his view that I have messed up big-time.

We join the rest of the IMG contingent for the demo that afternoon. As we approach the Chilean Embassy we see phalanxes of police and mounted officers guarding it. Not in a million years would the IMG have got through that.

So I save the bacon of my fellow RDF comrades and myself - at the cost of showing yet again that we can't play in the league of the Ligue.

---

I once said to a senior comrade, “I don’t understand why they put me in charge of the RDF. I have no combat skills and I’m not at all aggressive. In fact I’m much more of a thinker than a doer.” The comrade smiled and replied, “Did you ever consider that that might actually have been the reason?”

The RDF didn't last long and performed adequately in its comfort zone of marshalling street processions and the odd agitprop street theatre. No more direct confrontations with the forces of the state!

---

IMG-related: A Mission to Prague and Red Lion Square.

A Mission to Prague

Hradčany Castle, Prague

It’s London in the early nineteen seventies. I’m 22 years old and a senior member of the International Marxist Group. I’ve been invited to an unexpected meeting with a leader of the IMG, a member of the Political Committee.

I have no idea why.

We’re a Trotskyist organisation, as opposed to the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe as to the capitalist West. It turns out that the IMG has been running a secret project with the Czech opposition in exile; ‘subversive’ books are being smuggled to groups within the country. They need volunteer drivers – would I be interested?

The IMG’s part in all this is to provide a team of two to share the driving. I’m given the impression that my co-conspirator will be the blond, vivacious Anna, so I’m pretty keen. It later transpires that I’m to be paired up with a bespectacled, public school educated comrade called Peter. I know Peter well because we shared a flat.

I reflect: what happens if the secret police catch you? How would the interrogation go? How many years would you spend in jail?

Our mission starts with a visit to a Czech dissident’s mansion in Hampstead. The émigré organisation supports several groups with different political orientations in-country. Each group has its own tailored bundle which must be delivered correctly. On no account must any of the groups get the idea that other organisations are also being supported – each apparently believes they are the unique, chosen ones.

We’re shown the white transit van we’ll be driving. The rear has two benches along the sides: the packages will be hidden in secret compartments beneath them. There are boards and mattresses to assemble beds in the back. At the border this will create additional barriers to a thorough search. We practice assembling and disassembling the back of the transit, and commit to memory which package is going to which group, the rendezvous locations, procedures and codes. A cover story for colleagues and parents is concocted, as we’ll be away for two or three weeks (hopefully!).

A few days later we’re off, driving the transit from London to a ferry port, and then along the motorways of northern Europe towards the safe house in Vienna. Only two moments of drama occur in this initial phase of the mission.

Driving at speed along a motorway in the fast lane the bonnet of the van, which hadn’t been fastened properly, suddenly flips up under the force of the airflow, blocking my view (I’m driving). I don’t panic, use the wing mirrors to steer across the lanes and stop on the hard shoulder.

The second incident is much more serious. Peter and I realise we’ve forgotten which package goes to which group – as per instructions, we never wrote anything down. We find a phone box and make a call to the Hampstead house. A man answers and has to repeat – in clear – the detailed delivery instructions. He is deeply unamused. Whatever security this mission might have had, it is surely compromised. We proceed regardless.

A day or two later, we arrive at the safe house in Vienna in the late afternoon. The plan is that we drive north to cross the Czech border shortly before dawn, just before the shift changes. The concentration of the border guards should be minimal at this time (but don’t border guards ever see through this ploy?). Both Peter and I are making frequent visits to the toilet – we’re rather ‘apprehensive’.

We leave in the small hours of the morning. Peter is driving, we have the bed down and I’m in it – more cover. It’s been decided that Peter will be the one who deals with the security police while I pretend to be asleep. I think the mission organisers are placing a lot of trust in Peter’s accent and general breeding; it may help that Peter’s public persona is that of an upper class bumbling idiot. I am not wholly aware that Peter is carrying on his person a bunch of letters which need to be posted in-country: we are not privy to their contents.

The guards do what guards do. They come out of their warm control room – it’s winter and very cold – and open up the back of the transit. I do a convincing rubbing of the eyes, stretch and yawn. They poke around and consider our story – we’re students taking a vacation, en route to Prague. Bored, they let us proceed.

Peter, back in the driving seat, tells me that he’d put the secret letters in his underpants, thinking they’d be safest there. Unfortunately, while he was being questioned by the border guards, the letters had slipped out and fallen down his trouser leg. He’d been terrified they’d fall onto the floor but somehow the top of a sock had halted their progress.

We continue through the snowy wilderness of southern Czechoslovakia. Soon we have a problem: there is something very wrong with the engine. We have to stop in a small town and in some combination of English and German find a garage. We sip at sweet black coffees while the mechanics fix the gasket or whatever. We worry about the time, mindful of our rendezvous timetable.

Once we’re on the road again, we find a quiet spot. Peter keeps watch while I disassemble the back of the van, restoring the two bench seats and contorting myself to reach into the hidden compartments to retrieve the packages. They’re placed on the floor and covered with spare bedding. From now on, even the most cursory search will find them. Finally we reach Prague, where we have been told to check into a certain hotel. We’ll be rooming together, writing notes to forestall eavesdroppers.

Our immediate assignment is to meet with a teacher who is the first group's contact. She lives in a high-rise apartment a few miles west of the centre of town. We drive out early next day, well before the working day starts. Everything goes well: we find her and deliver the goods. Then she says, “It’s getting late and I have classes. Could you give me a lift?”

Having grown up with a juvenile fascination for tradecraft, I do a double-take at this. She joins the two of us in the front of the transit and we navigate the rush-hour traffic back into town. We drop her a block away from her school, just around the corner - very casual.

The next part of the mission is more complex because we have to split up. Peter has to take a train to meet his contact in a cafe-bar at the end of the line, far out in the suburbs. At the same time, I have a brush contact with someone at Hradčany Castle which overlooks the centre of Prague. We will meet back at the hotel (everything is timed).

I drop Peter off at the station and wend my way through the dense, narrow, inner city streets to park near the castle entrance. I have studied the layout: there is a cobblestone square near the castle walls. I am to sit on a bench with the bag. There is a recognition phrase and a required response.

I sit on the bench with the bag at my feet and shiver. It’s early and the square is deserted – no sign of surveillance. I see a man, mid-thirties, bearded and dressed against the cold shuffling towards me. He stops and says “Is that it?” I nod helplessly; no one had explained what to do if the person doesn’t use the right codes. He continues, laughing dismissively, “Sure it’s the one for me, not one for the other lot?” (So much for the groups being in ignorance of each other).

Without more ado he picks up the bag and walks off. I return to the transit and drive back to the hotel, relieved that the mission is almost over. I sit alone in the hotel room. The time allocated for Peter to return comes and goes. The clock measures out the slow hours; I’m in an agony of indecision. Surely Peter has been picked up? Again, no one had told us what to do in this eventuality but surely it’s madness to just sit here, just wait for the arrival of the secret police?

At last I hear footsteps in the corridor and the door opens. I fear the worst, curse myself for being an idiot, nothing like the resourceful heroes of espionage fiction. But it’s Peter. He was held up, he says, by his contact, who wanted to drink with him and regale him with stories. He just couldn’t get away. We have seen so much atrocious security that this seems far from impossible.

So now we’re done. Next day we leave Prague and eventually cross the western border into Germany. Peter turns to me and says something which strikes me as odd: “What a relief to be back in bourgeois democracy.”

It's like he's stating the obvious.

---

IMG-related: Occupying the Embassy and Red Lion Square.