When the world's Communist Parties were taken over by villains and psychopaths, millions of us who had tried faithfully to serve the working class found our status suddenly altered from bold Vanguard of the Proletariat who knew it all, to the honoured ranks of the Utopian Socialists who for more than 500 years have attempted to realise the Communist ideal and failed.

I am influenced greatly by the local Owenites who in the late 1830s built up a complete picture of what they thought Socialism would look like and thus I live constantly with my comrade 'W. M. A Very Poor Mechanic of Wednesbury' who was a member of Robert Owen's nobly named Association of All Classes of All Nations and who wrote to the New Moral World newspaper outlining such a picture of Socialism for the Black Country.

One must live as best one can within the morally bankrupt structures of world imperialism and arguments as to whether Socialism (like Christianity) begins with individuals or with organisations have little point today. Individuals it must be.

The Working Class Library and Bookshop was set up in January 2001. It stemmed from the example of Eddie and Ruth Frow and my having built up a collection of about 7,000 books in the course of a lifetime's work in the Labour movement. The question then arose of whether this Library can be kept intact after my death. The solution was that while Bilston Community College existed the books would go there. This was one of the very good reasons why reactionaries closed the place down. But with current proof of criminal activity and much skulduggery on the part of the closers, we are convinced that the College will be restored and the books find a natural home.

Being a long retired teacher my modest pension and savings leave a surplus which I believe should be expended for social purposes and not on riotous living, and the idea of a Free Communist Bookshop followed from the existence of the Working Class Library.
My social surplus allows me to add to the library with particular emphasis on multi-cultural material, local history and periodicals such as Searchlight, Liberty, CND, and important in an area of many Africans and African-Caribbeans, the Cuban paper Granma.

The Library is now engaged on its first major project which is to see what multi-cultural books and other material there is in our schools, university, libraries, teachers' centres and other institutions, and how this material is used. This is supported by all the authorities concerned.

The actual Free Communist Bookshop is housed in my house. At the front is an elongated porch which is unlocked all day with a few bookshelves installed. Thus people have access to the Free Bookshop without disturbing the occupants of the house, an important principle. Here, there is a small collection of books, mainly second-hand, but some new. It is largely renewed from the quite `high class' second hand shop of our local Hospice whose books are bought, read, and then put into the Free Communist Bookshop. The collection is eclectic; literary classics; Marxist classics of which I already possess a copy; books too vast to occupy space in the main library (a biography of Ted Heath); books the titles to which I have taken a violent dislike (Denis Healey's, The Time of my Life which is how he experienced the 2nd World War); spy fiction (the perpetrators of which were possibly the most potent purveyors of anti-Communist and Cold War ideas);. also other treasures to those who recognise them as such (works by Gordon Childe and Edward Upward); etc.

Strangely enough, this part of the Free Communist Bookshop does not flourish. Too few people read books; comrades active in the movement claim that they have so many books unread at home that they will not take another.

Inside the house is the part is the main part of the library. It is largely electronic, where the books are not for sale, but where people are welcome to peruse (by appointment) and material can be photocopied at cost, or downloaded from the website.

This brings us to other projects of the FREE BOOKSHOP which are flourishing. The Reports of the Library are free. There have been two to date and another is due shortly. Obviously only nominated projects can be free. The booklet The Great Indian Famine 1943-44 is the most successful to date. Nearly 300 copies have been delivered to the Socialist History Review at a cost of about £70. Such small scale Communism could be continued indefinitely. And if someone pinched all the books in my porch, an appeal to the local Labour movement would provide money or books to replace them.

So Communism is alive and well in Wolverhampton. Perhaps similar experiments, or different ones, might be tried in other parts of Britain. There is more than one way of skinning the cat of imperialism and this is one way which gives a great deal of pleasure, as well as satisfaction.