Green Shoots

About once a month or so, as I go to work, there’s a man with a collecting tin hanging around outside the station from which I catch my train. He’s an inoffensively polite, beardy, sandal-wearing sort with a collecting tin who represents an organization with a name along the lines of Revolutionary Workers against Top-Hatted Plutocrats. Now, given that I’ve devoted a large chunk of my adult life to becoming a Top-Hatted Plutocrat (I remember when I was little reading 1984 for the first time and coming across the description of the bosses still wearing their Top Hats on the barricades and thinking “That’s the life for me!”) you’d think that I’d not donate to this chap, but you’d be wrong. I’m a genuine sucker for a good cause and when he rattles his tin at me and shouts something like “Help bring down the government!” or “Get rid of Gordon Brown!”, I’m usually good for ten bob or so.
He was there this morning, asking for donations. He’s actually quite good at this; given that he is in fact a Marxist, none of his exhortations indicate anything to do with actual Marxism – I suppose he thinks they’d put the punters off – and instead they tend to be general desires to do something unobjectionable like pop Alastair Darling’s severed head on a spike on London Bridge or similar. So, as usual, I put my hand in my pocket for some loose change and, quite without noticing in it, pulled out a fiver at the same time and dropped it on the ground. I genuinely didn’t notice my mistake but he pointed it out for me. I thought this impressively honest, and said so.
“That’s impressively honest”, I said, retrieving the note and tossing it into his collecting tin. “Here. You can keep it.”
The expression on his face suggested that he doesn’t get many fivers donated (and looking at the meagre collection of coppers huddled together for warmth in the bottom of his tin, I think I’m probably right) and he obviously took me for a convert to the cause* and pressed a large selection of literature into my hands including a copy of the Marxist newspaper The News Line and also a copy of the Marxist Review magazine.

Now some people might expect me simply to give my merriest laugh and pop this collection into the nearest recycling bin, but they’d be wrong. In the same way that I’m an enthusiastic supporter of unlimited free speech, I’m also a fan of engagement and debate and I think it important to understand other standpoints and opinions in order to better relate to them and, perhaps more importantly, let them colour my thinking whenever I discover a relevant point of view I hadn’t previously considered. As such, I took these papers away to read on the train.

The downside of commuting in London is that the papers you pick up on the train have tended to be utterly miserable for about the last year. Full of doom, gloom, war, the economy, political dishonesty. It’s enough to really bring you down for your day at work. However, much to my delight, The News Line turned out to be absolutely crammed with good news. Headlines like New legislation will cripple unions and Banks still paying “six figure bonuses” positively put a spring in my step and when I got onto Marxist Review and found it to be filled with hand-wringing articles about how the editorial team had crossed their fingers and wished really hard but capitalism hadn’t collapsed and the global proletariat hadn’t risen in revolution and put them in charge of a new world order it was all I could do to restrain myself from leaping to my feet and dancing a bit of a jig there and then.

Now, where did I put my top hat?

^{* I probably look the part as well, given them my usual dress sense can be described best as ‘vagrant’.}