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I've included below two chapters of a book I am writing, entitled Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen? I will hopefully soon put it on the website www.revolutiondestroyed.net, but I am currently having problems transferring files to my websites (due to my phone line not working and not being able to find an internet cafe or library where I can do it). If you want to be informed when I publish more of the book or discuss issues I have raised, I suggest you go to the discussion group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/revolution-destroyed (which you can access via email or on the web) or access one of my blogs (see the signature of this message).
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
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
I have been active in left-wing politics since the anti-poll tax movement was launched in Manchester 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 certainly considered myself to be one. Indeed, I have 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, explored particularly in chapter 3 and describing the role that I have played so far attempting to bring such a revolution about in later chapters. 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
However, I came up with an outlandish hypothesis in a
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. As I’ll explain in chapters 2 and YYY, other overwhelmingly genuine revolutionary socialists including Karl Marx and Tommy Sheridan have gone to fairly extreme lengths to pretend that they were or still are on the side of big business. For Marx, I believe that this was necessary for him to avoid assassination, whereas for
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 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 I previously played them. 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.
Of course, sometimes conspiratorial software hinders rather than helps me, because some computer programmers are on the side of big business. On some occasions, 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 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 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 (myspace.com/galaxiamusic) and myself (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
I strongly believe that mind control techniques are utilised to influence me (and other people), either by technology (perhaps using genetically modified food 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 often comment that somebody has got to want to be hypnotised for it to work, and I think that when my subconscious is influenced by a form of mind control or interactions of a more orthodox kind, it is allowing itself to be influenced. After all, some conspiratorial organisations with more knowledge about the world than myself are acting for the benefit of ordinary people, and I want to cooperate with them (so that I help them and they help me).
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 been 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 two follow-up letters I wrote for 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, proposing a ‘workers’ militia’ in a country where guns are hated so much after atrocities such as in Dunblane is a policy hardly likely to win mass support; instead, it suggests that a minority would have to use force to stop a majority from overthrowing the ‘workers’ state’.] It 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 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
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
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 even with 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. Therefore, 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.
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
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 at that point, and for Trotsky when he brutally led the Red Army, I am convinced that they were not.]
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
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
There is a Marxist theory of how the world works called ‘dialectical materialism’ (and one called ‘historical materialism’ when that theory is applied to history). It claims that everything is a result of material conditions, rather than influenced by things outside matter like people’s souls or a god. In other words, the outputs of an individual person (what he or she says or does) are solely dependent on his or her current and past inputs (the results of the person’s senses). If the theory is correct, which I think it is, all important factors in society can be modelled completely on computers, including the precise behaviour of masses of people (by considering classes and important organisations) and important individuals. I believe that my mind is being modelled completely by at least one conspiratorial organisation, but that people who influence me are being modelled to a lesser extent.
I have sometimes felt that a relatively small number of individuals in the world (including myself) are different kinds of human beings with more advanced minds and some sort of external souls, with real (rather than apparent or simulated) free will. I have sometimes considered myself a human in a world of robots or an angel in a world of humans. I’ll explain the basis for these beliefs, which I have now rejected, in chapter YYY. The largest amount of evidence that I am just an ordinary human being, with my outputs being completely determined by my inputs, came through the experience of a game of Scrabble with myself 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, so the only rational conclusion is that it had all been programmed by a conspiratorial organisation – for the purpose of proving to me that my mind is completely predictable. I couldn’t have been exercising genuine free will, during that Scrabble experience or even for quite a long time beforehand, because they wouldn’t have been able to predict that I would have pulled out precisely the tiles I did. And if I am completely predictable, it makes sense that the entire world is, given enough computing power! I had believed that the world was being modelled to sufficient complexity to know that a world socialist revolution was bound to happen (sooner or later), but had thought that this was being done through modelling all possibilities (using logical AND/OR situations). I’ve now realised that that is not feasible; even if only I could make free will decisions that couldn’t be modelled, the number of possibilities would rapidly make predictions impossible – but there only being one possible outcome to any set of conditions means that a sufficiently detailed model of the world can predict anything!
I already knew that decision-making in people’s conscious minds was an illusion anyway, because it has been determined experimentally that people actually make decisions a fraction of a second (something like 0.2s or 0.4s) before we think we are making them in our conscious thoughts, as explained in a TV programme about how the brain works presented by Susan Greenfield. It is rational to make decisions in the subconscious, because it would take too long to consider all the factors involved in making decisions in our conscious minds; a successful species needs to be able to think more quickly and accurately than that. If conscious decision-making is an illusion, it is easy to dismiss the idea that genuine and unpredictable free will using some sort of soul outside matter is involved.
A complete model whereby precise events can be modelled a long time in advance, 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.
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 don’t advocate anything as extreme as Galaxia, but there is no mistaking the left-wing nature of the solution, and I chose Galaxia as the name of my band due to use of it by Asimov.
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 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
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
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 is to call for worldwide general strikes at the time of G8 summits. I have done this for previous summits (Gleneagles in
Chapter 2
A short socialist history of the world
I have not yet written this chapter...
Chapter 3
Why me?
This book is partly an autobiography, and later chapters will provide a lot of information about my life so far. This chapter briefly justifies my argument that I am the only person capable of leading a world socialist revolution, so that if I fail to lead such a revolution one will not happen.
So what makes me unique? I am by no means the only person with any of these attributes, but nobody else has all of them:
1. Certainly not unique but a vital prerequisite to be taken seriously as a socialist leader – I have a record of struggle. I made my first serious foray into politics when I saw the potential of a campaign making a real difference, and it certainly had a big impact – that campaign, which I joined when it started in Manchester in early 1989, was the mass non-payment campaign that defeated the poll tax (a flat rate charge for local services) and brought down British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. I have been involved in many other campaigns including ones against wars and sanctions (particularly on Iraq), deportations, police violence, racism and fascism, the Criminal Justice Act, ID fraud, the oppression of Palestinians and the closure of the hospital I was born in (Withington Hospital in
Manchester). I have taken a particular interest in anti-capitalist protesting – I have taken part in such protests in
2. I have a record of involvement in a serious revolutionary socialist organisation – the Militant Tendency that led the anti-poll tax campaign, which I joined during it (in June 1990) and stayed in for eight and a half years, as it became Militant Labour and then the Socialist Party. I was the only person from
3. I have a record of involvement in broad socialist organisations that have attempted to unite socialists of different hues together. The most significant of these organisations is the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and I have encouraged moves towards a similar party in
4. I have an analysis of capitalist society that expands on Marxist theory, by considering the presence of many conspiratorial organisations that infiltrate the left and other organisations in society.
5. I have a set of post-Marxist ideas of how to change the world and what sort of socialist society we should set up if we come to power.
6. I have musical talent at both singing and songwriting, which I intend to put to good use in a band called Galaxia that I’m setting up in
7. I am the main designer and only implementer of a computer simulation language, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, called SDML. This is useful partly because I suspect my language has been used (and may still be being used) for important modelling of the world by conspiratorial organisations and also because it gives me more insight into how such modelling can be done that my mind uses in order to think rationally. I believe that my mind has rewired itself on several occasions to incorporate a better model of the world and more logical thinking processes, partly based on my knowledge of SDML.
8. I have a large internet presence. In order to influence current and potential future activists nowadays, it is necessary to utilise the World Wide Web and discussion forums (some of which are web-based, some which use email, and some such as Yahoo! Groups that can be used either way). As well as having several websites, I have created dozens of forums myself, mainly at Yahoo! Groups so that anybody searching for sets of important political keywords at that website (groups.yahoo.com) has a good chance of coming across one of mine. Most other activists limit themselves to posting to a small number of forums, but I have regularly sent messages to hundreds. I have a long record of activity going back to the early days of the internet, pioneering the CWI’s use of that medium, running its internal mailing list for several years and providing it with an unofficial website for two or three years before an official one was set up.
9. I have been persecuted by the state.
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Steve Wallis (http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk, http://www.myspace.com/galaxiasteve).
Important emails: revolutionarysocialiststeve@....
Blogs: since January 2007 (http://blog.myspace.com/galaxiasteve), since March 2003 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manchesterism).
My revolutionary socialist band Galaxia (http://www.galaxiamusic.org).
Launch a general strike at the time of the next G8 summit (http://www.g8summitworldwidegeneralstrike.org).
Member of Glasgow Govan branch of the Scottish Socialist Party (http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org).
Initiators of the Revolutionary Platforms of the SSP (http://www.revolutionaryplatformofthessp.org), Respect (http://www.revolutionaryplatformofrespect.org), the Democratic Socialist Alliance (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/revolutionary-platform-of-democratic-socialist-alliance) and Solidarity (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/revolutionary-platform-of-solidarity) - these are linked together by the Revolutionary Platform Network (http://www.revolutionaryplatform.net).
Initiator of the Campaign for Democracy in the UK (http://www.democracycampaign.org.uk) and Campaign for Sanity in the NHS (http://www.health-service-sanity.org).
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