Revolution Destroyed?
Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen?
A book by Steve Wallis (www.socialiststeve.me.uk)
Chapter 1
Introduction
We are living at a crucial time in world history. The capitalist economic system under which virtually all of us live is failing to solve the world’s problems, such as poverty, unemployment, homelessness, discrimination, famines, deaths from preventable diseases, terrorism, war and environmental destruction. Some of these problems, specifically nuclear war and global warming, could potentially spell the end for the human race.
It is nearly 90 years since the working class first seized power in any country – the Russian Revolution in October 1917. Marxism, the theoretical basis for that revolution, was discredited by the Stalinist dictatorships that arose in the USSR and elsewhere, and seems to have been thoroughly defeated after the collapse of most of those dictatorships. Trotskyist organisations, which claim to be the real inheritors of that revolution’s legacy and Marxism generally while rejecting Stalinism, seem as weak, ineffectual and far from power as ever.
However, there has been a recent spate of election victories for the left in Latin America, with the coming to power of people like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz da Silva (Lula) in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The record of these leaders in power has been variable, with Lula (probably fairly) accused by many of selling out but remaining popular amongst many other working class people. Capitalism has not been abolished in any of these countries, but there have been big reforms in favour of the poor in Venezuela and Bolivia in particular.
I have been active in left-wing politics since the anti-poll tax movement in Manchester was launched in 1989, and a member of the Trotskyist organisation that led that movement from 1990-98 – the Militant Tendency, renamed in that time to Militant Labour and then the Socialist Party. From 1998 onwards, I have been developing alternative highly conspiratorial views of how the world works and how to change it, which I considered to be extensions to Marxist theory, incorporating elements of anarchism, for most of that time. However, my current views differ so much from Marxism that I think it is now more accurate to no longer consider myself a Marxist.
But have I really been and am I still a revolutionary socialist? I have not only considered myself to be one but often felt that I am the last serious hope for a world socialist revolution to take place! This book is in part a justification of this argument; chapter 3 will particularly explain why I believe I am so significant and later chapters will detail the role that I have played so far attempting to bring about such a revolution. If anybody else was capable of leading a revolution on a world scale, then surely I would have come across that person by now both on the internet and in real life. Due to the increasing powers of the state, including one closed circuit television (CCTV) camera for every 14 people in the UK and New Labour’s ID cards proposal, it simply would not be possible for somebody new to come to the fore in ten or twenty years time and lead a revolution then.
I cannot lead a revolution on my own, and after a long search I identified the person who I believe will be my strongest ally in February 2007 – a 23 year old gay Muslim (who converted from Catholicism in 2006) with dreadlocks called Joanne Simpson. She is a chef by trade, can sing and play guitar and keyboards, and knows seven languages (including the South African ones Xhosa and Afrikaans). Like me, Joanne did very well at school, but otherwise her abilities neatly complement my own (her language skills are particularly important because mine are very lacking).
However, I came up with an outlandish hypothesis in a Bristol police station cell in the autumn of 2005 – that I had fouled things up in various ways (a particular habit in recent years, some examples of which will be described in this book) due to subconsciously not really being in favour of a socialist revolution. Has my subconscious only really been in favour of gradual reforms to capitalism and therefore sabotaged some of the attempts by my conscious mind to encourage a revolution to take place? Or has my subconscious carried out such acts of sabotage from time to time merely to pretend to people on the side of big business that I am really on their side so that they cooperate with me to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case? Or, thirdly, have I been manipulated by more powerful conspiratorial forces into acting against my true wishes?
Answering those questions is the main topic of this book. In short, all three of those hypotheses are true to a certain extent.
I am a different sort of revolutionary socialist than most other active revolutionaries due to my rejection of many elements of Marxism, particularly its advocacy of hierarchies of committees based on workplaces (called “soviets” in the USSR, which stood for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) as the dominant form of government. It has therefore been necessary for me to betray Marxist conspirators at times, putting forward alternative theories and proposals; this book is intended as a sort of post-Marxist socialist manifesto that could reorientate existing revolutionary socialists around more democratic and practical positions as well as educating a new layer of activists who do not already consider themselves revolutionaries.
However, there is a certain element of subterfuge in my behaviour, sometimes due to my conscious thoughts and sometimes due to my subconscious. As I’ll explain in chapter 2, even Karl Marx went to fairly extreme lengths to pretend that he was on the side of big business. For Marx, I believe that this was necessary to allow him to develop and publicise Marxist theories without being assassinated. My life is not in danger; my role is to choose the future form of society for the human race (and animals) on this planet and collaborate with other like-minded people to ensure that it comes about. Conspirators on the side of big business are desperately trying to influence me so that I choose a form of society that maintains their wealth and/or power, or that I inadvertently allow world capitalism to continue by making mistakes.
I originally intended to title this book Revolution Destroyed: How I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen! At first, for a fairly brief period of time, I actually believed this – that reforms under capitalism were the best that working class people could look forward to. Despite my usual reluctance to tell lies, I thought that that could still be a good title despite getting more and more sceptical of the argument, because people reading the book would become radicalised by the experience with some becoming inspired to take up revolutionary socialist politics. However, maintaining such a deception even fairly consistently, on the internet and in discussions with people in real life, would have been well nigh impossible. Furthermore, it would have had a negative effect on people reading only part of the book and not sufficiently browsing my websites, and even if socialism was achieved in this manner that would not be good for the history of the world. Fortunately, I had the brainwave on the 1st of December 2006 of rephrasing the title as a question, which as well as allowing me to be honest would probably encourage more people to read the book in order to find out the answer to the question as well as its justification – both amongst those who, before reading it, wanted a revolution to occur and those who didn’t.
Although often I think about important decisions with my conscious mind before making them, that is not always feasible or desirable. It is sometimes important to act on the spur of the moment in order to be effective. In those circumstances, I have often thought that I was trusting my subconscious to ensure that I wasn’t making serious mistakes. But were such decisions well worked out by my subconscious or was I being manipulated as a result of interactions by other people and/or conspiratorial organisations?
I strongly believe that my subconscious mind contains a fairly sophisticated model of the world and has powerful reasoning capacities making it often capable of steering my conscious thoughts in positive directions. However, it is important to recognise that there are limits to my mind’s capacity (in terms of the number of brain cells), ability to locate information (because much knowledge is hidden deep in my mind and cannot always be found when it is needed) and speed. Additionally, there are a huge number of facts about the world that I have no way of knowing, as well as some false information that I thought was true when I added it to my memory (but may never have been true or may now be out-of-date). Obviously, correct decisions cannot always be made in the presence of incomplete or false information.
Therefore, I have to rely on others, both individuals and those involved in organisations (some more conspiratorial than others), to guide me. I have found that it is not just people, or even just living creatures, that can help in this way, but I am able to cooperate with technology. Conspirators write computer programs, some involving artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as natural language recognition (to understand human text and speech), in order to help them achieve their aims.
Errors with CD players, such as tracks refusing to play, jamming or with pauses in them when they are played, generally indicate that the song is in some sense dodgy, in terms of the messages that it gives off (usually due to lyrics that aid big business, sometimes deliberate propaganda but probably more often due to the songwriters failing to have sufficient grasp of the issues that they are commenting on). When this happens, I can usually work out what is wrong with the song. It is a more reliable guide for CDs that only I or other GOOD people have played; scratches and smudges on CDs (which most people think are always responsible for tracks misplaying) are sometimes factors, but they may have arisen due to flaws being detected in tracks when they were previously played. I have sometimes thought that AI programs used for some CD players could provide misinformation, but I have not found that to be the case – it seems that all players using CD technology contain similar software.
Occasionally there has been a lot of interference on telephone lines at important times or I have been disconnected, sometimes helpfully and sometimes as a hindrance.
I have often found when errors have occurred as I have been trying to do something on the internet, that they have been beneficial (for example stopping me from uploading a web page that I have subsequently realised contains serious errors to one of my websites) – this has proved very useful since I would be very hesitant in my use of the internet if I was continually worried about making a mistake.
Sometimes, of course, conspiratorial software hinders rather than helps me, because some computer programmers are on the side of big business. Occasionally, I have attempted to do something that would have caused a world socialist revolution to take place very quickly indeed if it wasn’t for internet censorship. I’ll give two examples of this now.
I have sent many messages to discussion groups (mailing lists that can optionally be browsed or searched using the web) at Yahoo! Groups (groups.yahoo.com) over the years, and set up a fair number of my own groups. I have generally found that facility extremely useful for publicising and debating my ideas and finding out what other people and organisations are up to. You can write a description of up to 2,000 characters for each group you create, as well as a short title, and a search engine at the website enables others to find your groups when they specify appropriate keywords. I sometimes get error messages stating that the description of a group is too long when I have used slightly fewer than 2,000 characters, prompting me to edit the description again – this is a positive feature that kicks in while the natural language recognition program at Yahoo! thinks that the description could be better phrased. I also publicise some of my groups on emails I send out, messages I send to other forums such as Google Groups (go to Google and click on “Groups”) and on leaflets and documents I produce printed copies of. Two of the groups I set up at Yahoo! were called ‘us-electoral-fraud’ (about how George W Bush did not really win the US presidential election in 2000 or 2004, which I believed was particularly important in 2004 due to Democrat challenger John Kerry revealing himself as a revolutionary socialist in disguise by pledging to tax the rich and close all tax loopholes in a live TV debate with Bush) and ‘uk-electoral-fraud’ (about how European elections in the North West of England in 2004 were conducted entirely by post and ballot papers were sent out before Respect’s party political broadcast, urging voters to return them immediately). I tried to set up a similar group called ‘ukraine-electoral-fraud’ entitled “Victory to the Orange Revolution!” at the time of that revolution, pointing out in the description that Colin Powell was a hypocrite in condemning the electoral fraud that occurred in that country due to Bush’s fraudulent election victories (providing links to the ‘us-electoral-fraud’ and ‘uk-electoral-fraud’ groups). When I pressed the button to create the group, there was a big delay that I reckoned would have gone on indefinitely due to the impact creating the group would have had (but I couldn’t wait for too long due to having a train to catch). That experience of mine shouldn’t put readers of this book off using Yahoo! Groups, because there is a relatively small amount of censorship there.
Much more recently, I created pages at MySpace for my band Galaxia (www.myspace.com/galaxiamusic) and myself (www.myspace.com/galaxiasteve). If you sign up as an artist, which I did for the band, you can put your own songs on the page, get one of them to play automatically when somebody accesses your page, and allow other people to put them on their own pages or download the MP3 files containing the songs. I attempted to upload the version of my Galaxia song The Revolution Starts Now!, as recorded just before the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005, to the band’s MySpace page. [I will describe the development of that song in chapter YYY.] I also uploaded improved lyrics, since there were some (relatively minor) political mistakes in the recording. I made so many important political points in that song, about world history, conspiracies and what to do to create a better world, that MySpace software had to censor it! If it hadn’t, the song may have spread around the world like wildfire, with many people adding it to their own pages, encouraging many more to do likewise, and so on like a chain letter. The censorship took many different forms – two different computers at an internet café rebooted themselves when trying to upload the file, trying to play the song yielded a “stream error”, a new copy failed to be displayed on the page after uploading again, the exclamation mark at the end of the song title was sometimes deleted automatically, the song title was abbreviated to “The Revolution Star…” despite plenty of space in the window to display it in full, and a window that could be opened to display the lyrics would not allow the end of those lyrics to be displayed. I’ve found that some of this censorship is intermittent, and that the area of the page containing the songs more often than not fails to be displayed, but sometimes it is displayed and the song does play – I think that MySpace programmers have implemented censorship this way so that they can disclaim responsibility and say that it is an internet connection problem. Somebody had told me that MySpace has been taken over by Fox, which is owned by the infamous union-busting boss Rupert Murdoch, so I wasn’t particularly surprised by the censorship, but my experience with Yahoo! Groups indicates that censorship would still be a factor with a more benign boss.
I’ve found alternative software on the internet, which seems to be reliable, and used it to put music on my personal MySpace page; I’ve provided some advice for others who want to put my song on their pages, but there is no automatic facility for others to do that so the song will not propagate across the internet to anything like the same extent. I have kept the song on the band’s MySpace page using the usual software, and it seems more reliable now (perhaps because good conspiratorial forces have got in a more dominant position or because the MySpace software, after having regarded it as a big threat for a while, has carried out further analysis and realised that it is not such a threat after all).
Note that I am thinking of renaming my band Red Day, as a more socialist equivalent of Green Day! The extreme communist nature of Galaxia in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is not something I now support, on the Earth at any rate.
Mind control techniques are utilised to influence us all, applied either by technology (perhaps using genetically modified food, drugs including those in food and drink, or mobile phone masts) or by people. I think that everybody has such abilities to some extent even if they are not aware of it, and that it is an extreme case of non-verbal communication where somebody’s subconscious (if not conscious) mind is aware of how they are trying to influence someone. I was hypnotised by a stage hypnotist as a student (remembering the whole experience unlike some other subjects of this art) so I know that hypnotism is not a hoax. Hypnotists sometimes comment that somebody has got to want to be hypnotised for it to work, but some experts can apply mind control techniques to large numbers of people at once, and there are bound to be some among them who do not want to be affected. Derren Brown demonstrates his ability to do this to entire theatre audiences, from which his subjects are chosen randomly (using multiple throws of a cuddly toy). In a show recently broadcast on Channel 4, Derren revealed at the end how he had performed one trick, by replaying videoed comments he had made in which he had inserted cues to influence audience members’ subconscious minds and thereby ensured a particular word was selected from a particular page of a particular newspaper. His demonstration also revealed that our minds do a lot of processing of spoken words before they come into our conscious thoughts, trying to make sense of them; by saying words that were close to making sense, listeners at the theatre and on TV at home heard a sensible variation of what he said and the subjects’ subconscious minds remembered the actual words, later using them to make the choices Derren wanted.
I believe that many drugs, including those used as additives to food and drink, have subtle mind control properties and are therefore used by big business deliberately to try to stop people from fighting back against the capitalist system. I strongly suspect that Coca-Cola, which got its name from the cocaine it initially contained, is one drug used in that way. However, some products contain antidotes to other drugs in society; a very effective antidote in my experience is Dr Pepper, particularly when drunk directly from two-litre bottles that have been kept cold standing upright in a fridge! Slightly varying this procedure, such as drinking it in a cup or glass, seems to lessen the positive role of the drink (perhaps due to tiny residues of washing up liquid or dishwasher tablets cancelling out positive drugs). This property of Dr Pepper is despite it being licensed by the Coca-Cola Corporation (but I have heard, rightly or wrong, that it is produced by Britvic). I have noticed that there is a correlation between the names of products and how they affect people; since a doctor is used as a term for somebody who is intelligent and pepper is a spice which can improve the taste of food, good people in the drinks industry are more likely to get involved in Dr Pepper’s production (than say Coca-Cola or Fanta) and ensure that it has a positive impact on those who drink it. However, beware that me recommending a product may result in the formula being changed and it having the opposite effect. I have also tried the new “Zero” variety of Dr Pepper, with zero sugar that is more suitable for those who want to lose or avoid gaining weight, and it seems to have a similar effect.
As you will have already gathered from reading up to this point, I have a deeply conspiratorial view of the capitalist world in which we live. I have reached such conclusions partly as a result of observation – although there is always a non-conspiratorial explanation for each of my experiences, the sheer weight of circumstantial evidence means that the chances of such conspiracies not existing are not just beyond reasonable doubt but infinitesimal.
I have also reached conspiratorial conclusions by thinking rationally about what people would do in particular circumstances. For example, some socialists would have noticed a long time ago that the secret services of capitalist states (such as MI5, MI6, the FBI, the CIA and Mossad) were infiltrating their political parties, not just to gather information but to try to wreck them from within. Obviously some of them would have come to the only rational conclusion apart from giving up trying to achieve socialism – setting up their own conspiratorial organisations that also infiltrate both left and right wing parties, and indeed all other important organisations in society including the secret services themselves. The only rational response of the forces of big business to this is for them to create even more sophisticated and secretive conspiratorial organisations infiltrating and recruiting from the infiltrators on both sides. Capitalism has been established so long that it is only rational for a massively complex web of infiltrating organisations to have been set up, operating below the surface of society, based on such reasoning.
There is a danger of simplifying the situation too much and considering all capitalist or socialist conspiratorial organisations as on the same side. I think the main reason why I have sometimes been guilty of this has been my previous adoption of a Marxist analysis – considering two sides of the class struggle (the working class and big business). Because different people have different ideas of the kind of world they want and/or how to achieve it, conspiratorial organisations have undoubtedly been created around many different sets of ideas. The class struggle is a useful guide – socialists of different varieties often unite together as do capitalists – but there are other circumstances under which groups of socialists oppose each other. I am in favour of a world in which everybody is in control, via governments elected by proportional representation (PR) using Single Transferable Vote (STV), rather than just the working class (or the working class and the peasantry with working class people having more power) as Marxists typically advocate, dubbed “the dictatorship of the proletariat” by Karl Marx with “dictatorship” meaning “rule” and “proletariat” meaning “working class”. I have therefore sometimes found myself acting in opposition to Marxist conspirators, particularly in recent years.
Marxists generally argue for a form of indirect democracy, based on the hierarchy of committees that took power in the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (where they were called “soviets”) – criticised as being “eminently open to bureaucratisation” by Nick Rogers in a Weekly Worker article (in the 23rd of November 2006 issue) whereby “workers elect their local factory committee, which then elects a district committee, which in turn elects a city-wide committee, all the way up to a supreme soviet”. The arguments presented on this subject here are based on three follow-up letters that I wrote for and were published in that newspaper.
A hierarchy of soviets is what the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) says it stands for in every issue of their paper Socialist Worker: “a workers’ state based upon councils of workers’ delegates and a workers’ militia”. [Incidentally, I used to oppose “workers’ militias” but now realise that it will be necessary for some socialists to be armed (I prefer the term “armed defence squads”) because the ruling class may attempt to use the armed police or army against a mass movement of working and middle class people launching a bid for power. The presence of such squads would hopefully put the police or army using guns against the movement, but they should be prepared to launch an insurrection in the event that one becomes necessary. I now have a very strong ally who was trained as a sniper by the British army and who will be able to train other socialists in the use of guns.] A hierarchy of soviets is also what the Socialist Party means by “workers’ democracy” – a term it uses fairly often but hardly ever elaborates in its publications.
I agree with Nick Rogers’ point that a hierarchy of workers’ committees is very open to bureaucratisation, in both allowing bureaucrats to rise up such a hierarchy and enabling them to stay in positions of power once they are there. Those bureaucrats may constitute a ruling class like in the USSR and Eastern Europe before the collapse of Stalinism (of whom the worst example was the ruthless dictator Joseph Stalin himself) or they may be infiltrators from conspiratorial organisations on the side of big business such as the majority of the leadership of the SWP. Incidentally, I disagree with both the SWP’s characterisation of Stalinist states (of which the only remaining examples are the horrendous North Korean regime and the relatively popular Cuban one that is acting as a beacon of hope for other left-wing governments in Latin America) as “state capitalist” and the Socialist Party’s term “deformed workers’ states” where a caste within the working class is in power; in my opinion the “bureaucratic collectivist” analysis of such states whereby the bureaucracy is a separate class describes them better. The main flaw with such hierarchies is that it is mainly only people on the same committees as the bureaucrats who know that they are not genuine and what they are up to, making those bureaucrats much more powerful than in less hierarchical organisations or societies.
I now call myself “a democratic revolutionary socialist” but used to describe myself as “a revolutionary socialist (a Marxist heavily influenced by anarchism)” and one of the attractions of anarchism was their dislike of hierarchies. Their less hierarchical organisations are often healthier politically than Marxist ones, generally with a lower proportion of members (particularly those in prominent positions) on the side of big business. My views on the problems of hierarchies largely stem from my experience, some of which is detailed in this book.
Most people recognise that an electoral system is fairest if the proportion of the vote a party gets is roughly reflected in the number of representatives in government (or in a local council). Most socialists argue for PR under capitalism because they recognise that it makes it easier for their parties to gain a foothold as well as it being fairer than the current system for the UK parliament, misleadingly called “first-past-the-post” (FPTP), where the candidate with the highest number of votes in his or her constituency gets elected. Therefore, it seems absurd to argue that after a socialist revolution the electoral system would be changed to one where ordinary voters have less of a say on who governs them and that is less proportional. Advocating that is a recipe for putting people off socialism or for the creation of a Stalinist dictatorship should one take place. One reason for me thinking that I wasn’t really a revolutionary socialist and had therefore destroyed the possibility of a world socialist revolution happening was the thought (bearing in mind the dominance of Marxists among active revolutionary socialists) that such hierarchical structures of government would result in some countries leading to Stalinist dictatorships with those in turn leading to counter-revolutions and maybe even nuclear war. One motivation for this book is to popularise my alternative views of revolutionary socialism, and therefore avert such a catastrophe by reorientating revolutionary socialists around more democratic ideas. I have also done so by creating a conspiratorial infiltrating organisation of my own, organised on the internet with a website (at www.PRsocialism.org) and discussion forum, called the Foundation for PR-based Socialism.
I advocate STV as generally the fairest form of PR, because it avoids the need for tactical voting – you can specify candidates who your vote would be transferred to if your first choice does not get elected or gets more votes than necessary. However, to be fair it is necessary to have a reasonably large number of candidates elected per constituency or council ward. The local elections in Scotland are being conducted using PR for the first time in May 2007, and STV is being used, but there will only be three or four candidates elected per ward, favouring the mainstream political parties.
Another flaw with elections in the UK, in common with every other capitalist country to the best of my knowledge, is that people have to put up with unpopular governments or councils for years before they get an opportunity to vote them out of office (unless the government loses a vote of “no confidence”). Infrequent elections are a deliberate policy to limit the pace of change, making the maintenance of the status quo much more likely. Socialists should demand (and implement when we come to power) annual elections at all levels of government. Furthermore, all representatives should be up for election each year, unlike how most councils in England (including in Manchester where I lived from 1984-2006) operate with just a third of councillors replaceable at each election (that take place three out of every four years). Under this arrangement, a party with less than a sixth of existing councillors has no chance of taking control, and with considerably more than this taking control may be very unlikely. This reinforces the apathy of many voters, encouraging them to think that voting won’t achieve anything.
One demand often made by Marxists is that representatives should be “subject to recall”, so that there is some mechanism to enable them to be replaced if they sell out. However, I don’t know how this could work under PR and annual elections would render the recall of the odd MP in the meantime pointless. Of course, even with annual elections, a mass movement could force an entire government (that breaks an important manifesto pledge for example) to resign, and it would be desirable to have some mechanism for the recall of the entire government and fresh elections without waiting for the year to be up, probably triggered by a petition signed by a fairly large proportion of the population.
Having more than one governing body or individual (usually called “president” or “mayor”) is another method utilised by the forces of big business to stay in power, since this tends to enforce compromises and gives parties an excuse for going back on their manifesto commitments. It is tempting to argue that the two main remaining relics of feudalism, the monarchy and House of Lords, should be abolished rather than replaced by an elected president and elected second chamber. However, having a president or mayor can actually be good for democracy, allowing the entire population to choose from a range of candidates who put themselves forward, and that person would tend to be very radical (but must be subject to recall in the event that he or she sells out). When I was writing a song called Kingston Quay, I found myself writing about myself possibly becoming President at some point in the future, an indication that my subconscious regards presidents as worth advocating.
Some argue that PR always results in coalitions, necessitating compromises and thereby allowing parties to ignore manifesto commitments. However, it is defeatist to assume that left-wing parties cannot achieve a majority, contradicted by many victories for such parties in Latin America in recent years. Candidates and parties can do particularly well if they have a reputation for leading struggles, as shown by Evo Morales getting over 50% of the vote to become Bolivian president in December 2005 – the first time that has happened in that country’s history – backed up by his supporters also getting over 50% in their parliament. Besides, if you cannot achieve a majority of the vote in parliamentary elections but gain a majority of seats due to a quirk of the electoral system, is there any reason to suppose that the minority imposing its will on the majority is a positive thing? Additionally, there is no middle road between socialism and capitalism, or the only middle road between a Marxist kind of socialism (with the working class in control) and capitalism (with big business in control) is the kind of socialism I advocate (with everybody in control). If socialist parties between them cannot achieve a majority of the vote, then there is no mandate for socialism and attempting to impose it would probably be disastrous.
One arena in which the STV form of PR is already used is the trade unions – elections to many if not most of their National Executive Committees (NECs) take place using STV. This has enabled some left-wingers to get on most union NECs and some NECs are dominated by the left (specifically the RMT, FBU and PCS). The fact that workers have chosen this form of PR for their own organisations is an indication that they consider it democratic and it obviously increases the likelihood that they would choose it for a future socialist society.
Some Marxists make the argument that soviets would work better if there was meticulous reporting of discussions that take place in them, and that would certainly help people identify who the dodgy delegates are and what they are up to. However, it is not particularly feasible to construct detailed reports of discussions in the huge number of intermediate-level soviets (and even if they were constructed few people would bother reading them). It is therefore more useful as a suggestion for less hierarchical structures that I would still advocate within industries or services, providing a limited amount of workers’ control – but not overriding the views of the government and users combined (I think the Socialist Party model of a third of representatives from workers, a third government representatives and the final third representatives of users is a good guide).
There is a parallel between today’s Marxists arguing for proportional representation under capitalism but advocating soviets under socialism, and the Bolsheviks in Russia calling for a Constituent Assembly when the capitalist Provisional Government that came to power after the February revolution in 1917 failed to hold such elections, but some Bolsheviks led by Lenin arguing for “all power to the soviets”.
The Constituent Assembly was more proportional than the soviets, since the latter were deliberately set up to give the working class more power than a much more numerous peasantry, and the abolition of that Assembly when the Bolsheviks lost the election has caused socialists and particularly those calling themselves “communists” to be widely regarded as undemocratic ever since. The result has been nearly 90 more years of world capitalism. I don’t regard that as a mistake, but a deliberate ploy by infiltrators within the Bolshevik Party on the side of big business such as Lenin and Trotsky. [At other points in their lives, one or both of them could have been overwhelmingly genuine, but they were not at that point, and Trotsky still wasn’t when he led the Red Army and it carried out atrocities such as at Kronstadt.]
Right-wing members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party won the Constituent Assembly election due to large landowners being better organised in the countryside. I have long argued that the Bolsheviks should have let them show themselves up in practice, and that the excuse that the Bolsheviks would suffer massive repression doesn’t stand up bearing in mind that the working class led two revolutions in one year and would surely defend them if repression was attempted. Even better, after the October revolution but before holding a Constituent Assembly election, the Bolsheviks should have gone into the countryside and formed a unified socialist party involving both workers and peasants who supported the October revolution, which could then have won that election. The very fact that the right-wingers elected to the Constituent Assembly called themselves “socialist revolutionaries” is an indication that the idea of revolutionary socialism was very popular among the peasantry, so a realignment of the left could well have brought about a party with overwhelming support among both workers and peasants, and encouraged poor left-wing peasants to come to the fore instead of the rich right-wing landowners.
Marxists often talk about the working class taking power, but in my view it is the entire population that should really take power. It is clearly massively undemocratic to deny middle class people a say in how society is run, or give them less of a say like the peasantry in Russia. In a pre-revolutionary situation (when a socialist revolution is possible) in Scotland for example, there would in my view be far more people who support the idea of socialism but agree with PR than those (mainly of a Marxist persuasion) who would advocate all power to the soviets. Marxists would then have a choice of trying to force, using “workers’ militias”, the will of a minority on the majority, or implementing a PR-based form of socialism.
Conspiratorial infiltrating organisations on any side in society need to make plans, building models of the world and individuals in it to some degree of complexity and using them to determine what they need to do to try to achieve their desired outcomes. That is something we all do with our brains for day-to-day problems or for trying to affect the future of the world, but is applied by those organisations to achieving their vision of world socialism or maintaining the capitalist world in which we live. In the past, they had to rely on the combined effect of the minds of people within those organisations, but nowadays a lot of this modelling can be done on computers utilising AI techniques. This is not just a hypothesis; I have developed an AI/simulation language called SDML (which stands for “Strictly Declarative Modelling Language”) that is capable of carrying out such modelling, but it needs some improvements to make it applicable to large-scale problems. I intend to get a job at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in Edinburgh to further develop SDML so that it could be used more effectively by conspiratorial organisations including my Foundation for PR-based Socialism.
A very significant experience in my life was a game of Scrabble I had on my own several years ago. I pulled out small groups of letters from the bag and always managed to put a word down on the board with some sort of relevance to conspiracies that I was thinking about at the time; this worked for the entire Scrabble set! I had thought that subconsciously I could have been feeling indentations on the tiles, but I wasn’t moving my hand around a lot in the bag, and it certainly couldn’t have been coincidence. I thought for a while (and said so in the first version of this introduction) that the only rational conclusion is that it had all been programmed by a conspiratorial organisation, which modelled the precise behaviour of masses of people (by considering classes and important organisations) and important individuals, to prove that there is nothing outside matter like people’s souls or a god. However, there is a massive flaw in that argument! An individual important enough to be modelled precisely could be influenced by a less important individual such as a friend or relative or a person he or she interacts with in a crowd. In fact, to model the world precisely, it is necessary to model everyone, all animals and all inanimate objects – which would require a computer with more atoms than there are on the Earth! Therefore, if it was modelled, there is either an advanced socialist society in outer space with an extremely large and complex computer or network of computers that is modelling the Earth as some sort of massive experiment or there is a god who is doing the modelling and influenced me into picking those precise Scrabble tiles. I thought for a while that it was indeed being modelled and that the motivation for the Scrabble experience must be to provide proof that one of those two possibilities is the case! However, I have twice recently started playing similar games of Scrabble with myself and also come up with interesting words – so it is most rational to think that it was indeed a coincidence. The problem with thinking that must either be a god or an advanced socialist society modelling us all and intervening where necessary is that we can become fatalistic. Even if there is a god or socialism in outer space, it is rational to think that the god or aliens would leave us to sort our own world out. I intend to launch a socialist church along with the person who is currently my strongest ally in the world, Joanne Simpson; issues around this will be discussed in chapter YYY.
An accurate model of all important events leading to a revolution is not a new idea. It was called “psychohistory” by Isaac Asimov, when applied to a revolution in a galaxy that was similarly being modelled, in his epic Foundation series (the first three books of which were written in the 1940s). Asimov based his psychohistory concept, which he developed in discussion with John Campbell, on the kinetic theory of gases considering huge numbers of people together acting in a predictable way. Two “Foundations” at opposite ends of the galaxy conspired to bring the revolution about – the first was relatively open (after pretending to be working on an encyclopaedia) but the second, composed of people with mind-reading and mind-controlling powers, was very secretive, influencing people to ensure that the computer-based model (called “the Seldon plan”) was adhered to and making small adjustments to it when necessary.
As I explained above, a model that can precisely predict events to the level of detail in my Scrabble experience is not feasible on the Earth. However, a model of important organisations and individuals to a level of detail sufficient to plan a revolution is entirely possible using a language like SDML. It would be necessary to adjust the model and interact with people in the world (using mind control or more orthodox methods) to ensure the revolution is carried out, in a similar manner to the Second Foundation in Asimov’s literature.
The original trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation) had quite right-wing plots, perhaps to get round the censors, and ended with a form of fascism, but he later added Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth to give the series a left-wing ending. In the last two books, somebody called Golan Trevize, who had a habit of always making correct decisions, had the role of choosing the future state of the galaxy – capitalism (a new empire like the crumbling old one that had been overthrown), fascism (with the mind-manipulators in the Second Foundation in control) or communism (involving a high degree of harmony with nature, based on a planet called Gaia, and called Galaxia when applied to the entire galaxy). Trevize chose Galaxia in Foundation’s Edge without knowing why, and discovered that it was the only way the galaxy would be strong enough to withstand a potential invasion from hostile aliens in another galaxy in Foundation and Earth. I chose Galaxia as the name of my band due to use of it by Asimov (but as mentioned above now want to call it Red Day).
My role is similar to Trevize’s, but it is not just my responsibility to choose the form of future society on the Earth but to take action in order to ensure that such a society is built. In chapter 3, I will justify myself being the person with such responsibility, and the remaining chapters will include details of my life so far as well as lessons for the future.
It is now a particularly important period of time for the future of the world. On the 3rd of May 2007 various elections will take place in the UK, with those to the Scottish Parliament being particularly important.
The SSP suffered a big setback in 2006 with the establishment of a split-off party known as “Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement”, launched by Tommy Sheridan (the former convenor of the SSP) in conjunction with other people formerly in the SSP (particularly those also in the SWP) in the wake of his successful defamation trial against the News of the World (a rag owned by Rupert Murdoch). Two of the SSP’s six current Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne, are in Solidarity and that party is planning to stand against the SSP in every region of Scotland in the May elections. This is a particular problem because it is only possible to vote for one party in a regional list (that augments constituencies in which MSPs are elected by FPTP making representation roughly proportional) and it is necessary to get around six percent of the vote in a particular region in order to get anyone elected. I am confident that the SSP can save some of their MSPs, and perhaps even get a higher representation than the last elections in 2003. Although I am still a member of the SSP, there is very little difference between the two parties’ policies and the SSP and Solidarity doing well between them is far more important in my opinion than one of those parties triumphing over the other. An appeal by the News of the World won’t take place until December 2007, but, in the meantime, the police are conducting a perjury investigation that may bring Sheridan back to court before the elections and thereby dent Solidarity’s hopes. I’ll talk about the defamation trial and subsequent split in the SSP in chapter YYY.
The Scottish parliamentary elections are also important because the pro-independence parties – the Scottish National Party (SNP), the SSP, Solidarity and the Greens – are fairly likely to achieve a majority between them, leading to a referendum which would almost certainly result in an independent Scotland. Although a capitalist independent Scotland would have some benefits in its own right (such as enabling Scotland to become nuclear-free and avoid sending troops to Iraq or Afghanistan), the most important advantage of independence would be it being a step towards achieving socialism. Due to people being generally more left-wing in Scotland than the rest of the UK, socialist parties being much stronger and less divided (despite the SSP-Solidarity split) and a fairer electoral system (with a form of PR, albeit far from ideal, in the Scottish Parliament compared to FPTP at Westminster), socialism in Scotland is much more likely than in the UK as a whole, which could then rapidly spread across Europe and the rest of the world. In my opinion, socialism is more likely in Scotland than in any other Western country. If the opportunity for independence is not grasped at the 2007 Scottish parliamentary elections, independence and progress towards socialism could be delayed another four years since further Scottish parliamentary elections are not due until 2011.
Solidarity also intends to stand in every council ward in Glasgow on the same day as the Scottish parliamentary elections, which is less of a problem because STV is being used for council elections and voters can specify alternative candidates to whom their votes will be transferred if their preferred candidate fails to get elected (or their votes will be partially transferred if their preferred candidate gets more votes than necessary). Not everyone will transfer their votes between the socialist parties, partly because some voters will not understand the electoral system since it is being used for the first time in 2007, so it would still be desirable for the SSP and Solidarity to reach agreement not to stand against each other. This is perhaps feasible because the council elections are much less important, but unlikely due to the hostility between the parties.
Despite my advocacy of democratic means for achieving socialism and a democratic electoral system once socialism is established, I certainly do not rule out extra-parliamentary activity in order to achieve change. On the contrary, one of my big initiatives was to call for worldwide general strikes at the time of G8 summits (Gleneagles in Scotland in 2005 and St Petersburg in Russia in 2006) through leaflets, use of the internet including a website (www.g8summitworldwidegeneralstrike.org) and through music. The first incarnation of my band Galaxia, consisting of a guitarist called Adam who does not want to be involved any more and myself on vocals, did some recordings in Manchester just before the 2005 summit, and I moved up to Glasgow in April 2006 with the intention of creating the band proper in this city. However, I was incarcerated as a political prisoner in May (as I’ll explain in chapter YYY) and development of the band and the call for a general strike was aborted. I want the Foundation for PR-based socialism to discuss what action to propose for the summit that takes place in Germany in June 2007. Calling for a general strike is serious because workers could get victimised if it fails to take off, so there needs to be a mood for such action around an appropriate issue – as there was in 2005 due to the Make Poverty History campaign and Live 8 concerts demanding change in Africa. I think that concentrating on global warming, and issuing a demand for investment in tidal power as the best option, could mobilise many across the world. A partial general strike could lead to a socialist revolution somewhere in the world, which could then spread across the entire globe!
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