Once Upon A Time In Communism

Why I abandoned the left like the thalidomide baby that it is

The concussion was discombobulating. I couldn't understand why people got upset when they looked at me.

I was monstrous. I looked like I'd passed through a combine harvester. My features had been rearranged into a swollen, distended medley of purple and blue. My teeth were shattered, ribs broken and my left hand crushed. The thick summer heat crashed like a lead blanket while my open wounds festered and closed like plasticine.

I had survived an attempted murder, stripped naked, left in a dumpster and arrested for the privilege. It would take me fifteen years to recognize that I was burdened with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet, amidst all that turmoil, I managed to maintain a terrific head of hair.

Looking back, there should have been an intervention. I should have been shot with a tranquiliser dart and dragged into the sort of electrified paddock where one might keep velociraptors. Instead, I drank myself into an acerbic stupor and fell down a concrete staircase and died.

Witnesses turned pale and later went into therapy. Almost as soon as I was revived I turned to Socialism, like most people with brain damage.

I knew my history. I knew all about Stalin’s Holodomor. About the atrocities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Millions of deaths under regimes that forged their beginnings under sentiments of working-class solidarity. But I was happy to overlook it all due to my overwhelming urge to wear a beret and wage a romantic guerrilla war in the rainforest outside Cardiff.

I read the works of Marx and started frequenting Socialist Party meetings in old pubs populated by old trade unionists that invariably stunk of piss. I attended every protest that I could and haunted university lectures full of anaemic vegans and angry lesbians with undercuts.

In a retarded act of judgment, someone in the Socialist Party made me a student liaison to the combined universities of Leeds. It became my job to recruit as many students as possible and shepherd them onto coaches so that they could be transported around the country to make a nuisance of themselves.

The Occupy Movement was in full swing and I was asked to site manage a tent village in Leeds city centre. There the destitute could receive medical support as well as food and shelter there from the unseasonably cold winter of 2011.

Immediately the biggest problem we had was keeping the homeless from sniffing glue and fucking each other. One guy stripped off, covered himself in dog shit and begun to climb a Christmas tree. Luckily one day Billy Bragg showed up and the tramps fucked off never to return.

A month later the site was demolished so that it would not ruin the solemnity of Jimmy Savile’s funeral.

In addition to the tent village several buildings across Leeds were seized by Marxist sects, drum circles, and histrionic feminists dying their armpit hair and singing about their knickers. I kept to myself most of the time and didn’t often see many of the squat collective unless they were going through the bins behind Morrisons.

Only a rave and the promise of unspecified narcotics could lure me there. I will never wash the smell from my memory. Nothing healthy smells like that. Deep within, muffled alarm bells were ringing. Unvaccinated babies crawled across floors strewn with broken glass and puddles of dog piss as junkies jacked up in moody corners far from the prying eyes of any god that care to judge.

That’s when I started to become disenchanted. I wasn’t having fun anymore. After all there are only so many riots one can attend before it gets boring. I was growing weary of the pervasive self-loathing among my Comrades who distanced themselves from the rowdy, football-chanting Working Class that they supposedly wished to empower.

Pride, ambition, and self-preservation were qualities of which to be ashamed. Everything was seen as problematic, harmful, and demanding correction.

Solidarity generally meant living like a Cistercian monk in an unspoken vow of poverty in penance for the part you played in the slave trade three hundred years ago.

Margaret Thatcher wasn’t yet dead and there was the consensus view that if you weren’t humble enough she might come and get you in the night.

Women despised men, while men hated themselves, having been persuaded that they were guilty of a rape that they hadn’t yet committed.

The overall effect of this mentality left vacuous voids where there should have been people. A small price to pay perhaps, for moral superiority and an awareness of social injustice.

The milk of human kindness was turning sour and my time in the left was coming to a close. But on my way out I was going to have a little fun.

At first I would say outlandish things just to watch their eyes twitch. I started translating Hitlers speeches into English and changed the word Jew to Tory before delivering them at meetings to a standing ovation.

When the Socialist Party recreated the famous Jarrow March of 1936, I didn’t participate because I considered walking the length of the country in aid of jobs a fucking stupid thing to do. The march arrived in London to a hero’s welcome during the Socialist Party conference despite half a dozen participants being injured with a militant form of chlamydia.

Their arrival coincided with the Socialist Party conference and all members were dutifully lodged in flea-bitten hostel on the outskirts of Camden that befitted the modesty of its creed. I however went back to a five star hotel and spent the duration smoking cigars in a hot tub with all the cocaine I could eat and all the steak I could snort.

I had missed much of the three-day conference and walked into the auditorium that Sunday evening as proceedings came to a close. As hundreds in attendance rose to sing The Internationale. A dozen heads turned in judgement. The eyes were upon me. Right then I knew I had become the Lord of the Flies.

Several days later I was summoned to a disciplinary hearing where I would be dishonourably discharged. Instead, I resigned my position, tore up my membership card and advised the committee to suck my balls.

The riots of the preceding summer had proven disillusioning. Dozens followed me out the door, finding themselves guests in Yorkshire’s mental health institutions. One guy travelled to Bolivia and was never heard from again. Another died from cancer only to turn up in a cult years later. Socialism had taken casualties in a slew of suicide attempts and eating disorders.

As for me, I vanished into heroin, relegating the word 'solidarity' to the confines of greeting cards, where it rightfully belongs.