On Monday, I set up the web page and discussion group of my own conspiratorial organisation called the Foundation for PR-based Socialism. I hope that its members will infiltrate many different organisations in society, to popularise the idea of a particularly democratic form of socialism in which everybody is in control (in contrast to the Marxist idea that only the working class should be in power) and to try to ensure that revolutions take place around the world to bring about such societies.

I will be producing some copies of the contents of this new organisation's home page (www.PRsocialism.org) for distribution at a debate in Glasgow on Saturday organised by the Campaign for a Marxist Party, with speakers from the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity, as well as a speaker on Iran. I have publicised this event, as well as some upcoming anti-war events, on the web-based forum of my Revolutionary Platform Network (www.revolutionaryplatform.net). To visit the "Forthcoming Events" board, go to http://www.revolutionaryplatform.net/forum/index.php?board=3.0. I intend to update it regularly, and have created a link to it from the "News & Events" page of my socialist website (www.socialiststeve.me.uk). Feel free to post details of other events there, including those outside the UK. I have just added a fair number of new boards to the forum, inclduing a "Forum Organisation" board on which anybody can suggest improvements that could be made to it. [Note that I do not usually email out details of events because I don't want to bore people with lots of uninteresting emails. I am sending out quite a lot at the moment as it is, and apologise for those of you who have been bored by some of them!]

I've included below the contents of the Foundation's home page:

 

The Foundation for PR-based Socialism

 

Basis for the Foundation

I, Steve Wallis, recognise that conspiratorial organisations (some of which are part of the state like MI5 and the CIA but with others even more secretive and even less accountable) infiltrate left-wing political parties and other important organisations in society, not just to gather information but to undermine or help them from within. There is a complex web of such organisations, each of which has an aim (a particular kind of society it wants in the world, perhaps the status quo) and a strategy (how it hopes to achieve it), because capitalism has existed for a long time.

I set up my own conspiratorial infiltrating organisation, called the Foundation for PR-based Socialism in January 2007, initially just in hyperspace, with this website (www.PRsocialism.org) and a discussion forum (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PRsocialism). I live in Glasgow (Scotland) but want the Foundation to operate internationally. I favour the Foundation remaining solely in hyperspace rather than becoming a hierarchical organisation open to bureaucratisation and infiltration by hostile forces (a criticism I have of Marxist organisations and their conceptions of socialism). Its only membership is the list of discussion forum members. Polls can be organised on the forum if there are any disputes on the policies or strategy of the Foundation, for which I propose:

·         Our aim is a democratic socialist society, with a government based on proportional representation (PR) by single transferable vote (STV) and with some level of workers’ control of industry – a middle road between capitalism and a Marxist conception of socialism.

·         We are a revolutionary organisation, recognising that a sudden thorough change of society is necessary, not necessarily involving violence.

·         We are a non-party political organisation whose members will participate in a wide range of political parties/organisations.

·         We will cooperate with individuals and other organisations that share some or all of our ideas.

The discussion forum is open to all who agree with or want to debate those issues, and other issues of relevance to socialists can be debated there too. It has a publicly viewable archive. I haven’t got the time or inclination to vet potential members of a more secretive forum, and think there would be little point in setting up such a forum if no vetting takes place, but Foundation members may set one up or discuss issues with each other off-list if they so wish.

I have other views about the struggle for socialism and want the Foundation to be an arena in which I can put those views forward – on this website, on its discussion forum and in its leaflets/newsletters. Other members of the Foundation could have quite different views about achieving a PR-based form of socialism; some may want to join or stay in the Labour Party in order to encourage it to support PR or to try to get it to adopt socialist policies perhaps leading to a future split, others may be members of the Scottish National Party (SNP) to help the struggle for independence and prepare for a split (which is surely inevitable when independence is achieved). I want to encourage all genuine socialists with similar views on PR to get involved in the Foundation, whether they want to put forward their own ideas publicly and/or act secretly to help in the struggle for a democratic socialist world.

Arguments for proportional representation in a future socialist society

I have written a series of three letters for the Weekly Worker newspaper in a debate inititated by Nick Rogers (a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the London organiser of the Campaign for a Marxist Party). In those letters, I argued for the establishment of a form of socialism based on PR, in opposition to a Marxist conception of socialism based on hierarchies of committees (known as ‘soviets’ in the USSR). You can read the contents of those letters in full, in the first and second messages that I have sent to the Foundation’s discussion forum. The main points I made are as follows:

·         Nick pointed out that hierarchies of committees are “eminently open to bureaucratisation”. I expanded on that point by pointing out that the bureaucrats could be potential ruthless dictators like Stalin or infiltrators from conspiratorial organisations on the side of big business like many of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (a deeply hierarchical organisation) and suggesting the reason for that weakness of hierarchies – it is mainly only people on the same committees who know who the dodgy people are and what they are up to, facilitating their rise up the hierarchies and enabling them to stay in power once they have got there.

·         Marxists generally argue for a society in which the working class is in power, which denies a voice (or provides less of a voice) to middle class people. I argue for a society in which everybody is in power, irrespective of class, in contrast to a Marxist type of socialism or capitalist societies (in which big business is in power even if they are called ‘mixed economies’).

·         Because a PR-based form of socialism is a middle road (arguably the only middle road) between Marxist forms of socialism and capitalism, it would be popular and less likely to lead to a minority coming to power or stay in power by violent means (for example using a “workers’ militia” that many Marxists argue for).

·         The single transferable vote (STV) form of PR is preferable because it eliminates the need for tactical voting. A voter can specify who his or her vote would be transferred to if the voter’s prefered candidate fails to get elected, or gets more votes than necessary (in which case part of the vote would be transferred). I also made the point that there should be a fairly large number of representatives per constituency/ward, unlike with the local elections in Scotland that will be conducted for the first time using STV in 2007 but with only three or four councillors elected per ward, making the results less proportional and favouring the main parties.

·         I am in favour of a certain amount of workers’ control of industry, but in as non-hierarchical a way as practicable and not as the dominant form of organisation that determines the government.

·         I argued for the entire government to be subject to recall, using a petition signed by some proportion of the electorate, rather than giving the power to recall individual representatives to electors (which is not compatible with PR).

·         I argued against the Marxist idea that socialism cannot come to power electorally, pointing out that there have been many election victories for presidential candidates and parties calling themselves ‘socialist’ in Latin America in recent years. I also said that I am in favour of extra-parliamentary activity, using the example of the general strike movement in Bolivia led by Evo Morales who later became president with over 50% of the vote (unprecedented in that country’s history), with his supporters also receiving over 50% in elections to that country’s parliament.

A very important time in Scotland

The Scottish parliamentary elections that take place on Thursday the 3rd of May 2007 will be very important in the struggle for socialism. The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) won six seats in the last elections to that parliament, in 2003. In the aftermath of the defamation trial that Tommy Sheridan won against the News of the World, two socialist parties (the SSP and Sheridan’s new party Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement) will participate in those elections, competing against each other in the regional lists (which augment the constituency votes to make the results roughly proportional). I have decided to stay in the SSP, but want the Foundation to be neutral in the dispute between the two parties. It is much more important that the socialist parties together do well than that a particular one becomes dominant and I want to encourage others who agree with me on the issue of PR to get involved in either party.

The other thing that is very important about those elections is that the pro-independence parties – the Scottish National Party (SNP), the SSP, Solidarity and the Scottish Green Party – together get a majority of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). If that happens, there would soon be a referendum on Scottish independence, and that referendum would probably be won. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories are vehemently opposed to the idea of independence, so without such a majority, a referendum would be unlikely to take place until after the next elections in 2011.

A capitalist independent Scotland has some advantages in its own right, such as enabling Scotland to become nuclear-free and avoid sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the most important thing about it would be the considerably increased likelihood of a socialist transformation of society taking place. Such a change of society is much more likely in Scotland than the UK as a whole due to the electoral system (the form of PR for the Scottish parliament is far from ideal but far better than the first-past-the-post system used at Westminster), Scottish people tending to be more left-wing and the socialist parties being much stronger north of the border than in England or Wales.

Once a socialist revolution has taken place in a particular Western country, and Scotland is in my opinion most likely to be first, it could quickly spread around the world.

Socialists should not neglect the council elections that take place at the same time as the Scottish parliamentary elections. Despite the fact that only three or four candidates will be elected per ward, the SSP and/or Solidarity could make significant breakthroughs in those elections due to the STV electoral system.

I must issue a warning about those elections. The ballot papers will be counted by machines for the first time. As those who have investigated electoral fraud at US presidential elections will be aware, perhaps by coming across my ‘us-electoral fraud’ discussion forum which highlighted the fact that George W Bush did not really win in 2000 or 2004, the use of machines will present the powers-that-be with opportunities to defraud their enemies. Hopefully, parties will be able to subject the counting process to a reasonably high level of scrutiny to reduce the potential of such a fraud. Because the SSP’s and Solidarity’s policies are very similar, many socialist voters will leave it to the last minute to decide which party to vote for, leading to opinion polls underestimating the level of support those two parties have (so a low socialist vote may fail to raise suspicions). This situation was highlighted by an independent Solidarity opinion poll that found 6% quite likely but only 1% very likely to vote for them, even when people polled knew that Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne (their two current MSPs) are in that party. They plan to include Sheridan’s name, and Byrne’s in her region (the South of Scotland), on the ballot papers as a result of that poll.

Ideas for socialist unity

I have been arguing for what I have called ‘Revolutionary Platforms’ of broad socialist parties (or smaller organisations aspiring to become or launch parties) since 2004, with those platforms attempting to unite together all genuine revolutionary socialists who wish revolutionary views to be reflected within the broader parties, as the best form of organisation to lead the struggle for socialism. I have set up virtual organisations for Revolutionary Platforms of four different organisations – the SSP and Solidarity in Scotland, Respect in England and Wales, and the Democratic Socialist Alliance (based in England but its Revolutionary Platform has an international perspective). In May 2006, I launched a website, called the Revolutionary Platform Network, to bring those virtual platforms together. The website contains editions of a newsletter (Revolutionary Platform News) and a web-based forum with a substantial hierarchy of bulletin boards.

Until now, I have resisted the temptation to try to turn those virtual platforms into real organisations. I suspect that if I had called a meeting, I would not have received much interest and those who did turn up could have been very bad politically. Members of existing revolutionary socialist organisations would have been unlikely to take the proposal seriously, because they would consider who they were being asked to unite with and find out that the answer was one person – me! For me to act effectively within a real platform, I would need like-thinking allies and I hadn’t taken any steps to unite such allies together until the launch of this Foundation. There would therefore have been a serious likelihood of big business infiltrators wrecking one of my platforms before it had a chance to take off.

However, I am planning to get a large number of copies (probably 5,000) produced of the first newsletter of the Foundation, as well as putting it in HTML and PDF formats on this website so that on-line visitors can read it and print off copies, for the Scottish parliamentary election campaign (and publicising my call for a worldwide general strike at the time of the 2007 G8 summit, which takes place in Germany from the 6th to the 8th of June). Therefore, I will use this opportunity to arrange a launch meeting of the Revolutionary Platform of the SSP during the election campaign, publicised in the Foundation newsletter, at which there will hopefully be enough interest to establish a membership and elect a leadership for the platform.

In the near future, I will put draft versions of the initial newsletter as PDF files (readable and printable using Adobe Acrobat) on the Foundation’s discussion forum, so that participants can discuss the contents before large-scale production takes place.

Why ‘Foundation’?

When I was planning the launch of this organisation, I was thinking of calling it either a ‘Foundation’ or a ‘Network’.  What swung me behind the ‘Foundation’ term was the realisation that the organisation I was thinking of launching was a conspiratorial organisation that infiltrates many other organisations in society in the struggle for a revolution. That is very similar to the role of the (first) Foundation in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, when applied to a galactic revolution replacing an old crumbling empire by a new better one. I chose the name for my band Galaxia from that science fiction series, as the very left-wing ending of the galaxy at the end of the final books in the series, Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth. For more information about that series, go to the history page on the Galaxia website.

I realised later, after starting to publicise this Foundation, that the term ‘Foundation’ is often associated with a funding body. In fact, I had been thinking of establishing such a body to distribute funds raised by Galaxia, with band members receiving no more than a worker’s wage, called either the ‘Galaxia Foundation for a World Socialist Revolution’ or the ‘Galaxia Foundation for Socialist Change’. I wanted funding decisions to be made democratically, rather than simply chosen by me.  But why establish a separate organisation for that? Surely this organisation, the Foundation for PR-based Socialism, can fulfil that role too. Furthermore, it can also distribute proceeds from my forthcoming book, Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen? – which will partly be a manifesto for PR-based socialism.