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Thanks again to John at Counago and Spaves and Reidski of Big Blowdown fame for the kind words in the comments section of my last blog. Muchos gracias, much appreciated and all that.

One of those blips that hit me every once in a while. The off the cuff remarks were sincere enough but it has always been the case that I have examined my politics afresh from time to time - even spent 18 months in exile in a vanguardist organisation back in the nineties as a consequence* - but the old 'what are you actually doing it for' blues kicked in big time after me sitting on it for far too many months and 'cos of personal matters unrelated to the politics that have brought a lot of things to a head.

I have met the occasional SPGB member whose politics seemed to consist of little more than having the Object and Declaration of Principles tattoed in the inside of their eyelids, happy to politically sleepwalk through life and events for the next forty years, but they are few and far between and I'd like to think I've never fallen into that category. ;-)

OK, mumbled apology over. The blog in future will be more of a combination of the political and the personal. If I take nothing else from the last post, it is that but in the meantime I may as well earn my keep by publicising a reprint of a the Socialist Party pamphlet, Marxism Revisited.

The pamphlet series of transcribed talks from the 1998 Socialist Party Summer School, and the lectures include:

• Who the hell was Karl Marx?
• Was Marx ever a Leninist? (Did Lenin really distort Marx?)
• Is The Socialist Party Marxist?

There are other lectures included in the pamphlet but the ones mentioned above are the best of the bunch in my humble opinion. Available from all good stockists** for the bargain price of £2, including postage and packaging. If you are too tight to stump up for a pamphlet that costs less than a pint of Murphys in Central London, then be patient and it will probably be included at some point in the download section of the Socialist Party Website.

*Aye, for a period I was a member of the AWL back in the mid-nineties. I guess I fell into the category of 'candidate member' for the duration of my membership. No, I didn't suddenly transform into a vanguardist overnight, just wrestled a bit with the whole reform/revolution bit, on wondering how to get from here to there. I thought in the circumstances that it was better to do something in the here and now. The motto of reformists down the ages. (On balance, I've always been more impressed by the minimum/maximum programme over the transitional programme, but that is another story.)

No cautionary tales from my time in the AWL. Of course, it's overly obsessed by what the SWP is doing at any given point, and by the machinations of student politics, but they all seemed to decent enough people. Even the ones I disagreed with.

I sort of realised that my politics hadn't really changed that fundamentally and I still considered myself an SPGBer ideologically when canvassing for an AWL member who had been selected as the Labour Party PPC in a parliamentary seat that even in the electoral meltdown of 1997 the Tories still retained. I found myself falling back on my old socialist positions when arguing on the doorstep with the local electorate. Strange but true, and Tony Blair has never spoken to me since as a consequence.

** "All good stockists" consists of: The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN. Cheques made payable to the 'Socialist Party of Great Britain'.