I have done a new home page for my
www.g8summitworldwidegeneralstrike.org website,
containing the following text:


I, Steve Wallis, am calling for a worldwide general
strike (and strike of school, college and university
students) during the G8 summit – which takes place
between Wednesday the 6th and Friday the 8th of July
in Gleneagles, Scotland. You can read the initial
double-sided colour leaflet I produced to publicise
and give reasons for my call by clicking here.

I am particularly calling for strike action on the
first day of the summit (Wednesday the 6th of July),
because a European conference of People’s Global
Action called for a “global day of action” on that
day, and due to “Live 8” concert organiser Bob
Geldof’s call for school students and teachers to take
two days off school to go to Edinburgh for the start
of the summit.


What is the real agenda of the G8 leaders –
privatisation or genetically modified food/drink?

The leaders of the eight most powerful countries in
the world (the seven richest plus Russia) are getting
together at the G8 summit, with “making poverty
history” supposedly on the agenda. Campaigners are
calling for more aid, cancellation of debt and trade
justice, and New Labour in Britain (in particular
Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the
Exchequer Gordon Brown) are supposedly in favour of
all three of these demands. Indeed, Brown will be a
speaker at the Make Poverty History demonstration (in
Edinburgh on Saturday the 2nd of July).

However, different people have different conceptions
of what these demands mean, and the G8 leaders will
try to impose strings. The G8 leaders will not help
the so-called Third World without getting something in
return. Aid and debt relief can be tied to cooperation
with the agenda of the large capitalist governments,
particularly enforced privatisation of essential
services such as water or buying goods from the same
countries (most US aid is tied in this way). Only 18
African countries are currently being considered for
debt relief, and these are countries that have
complied with the demands of Western institutions (the
G8, World Bank and International Monetary Fund). They
have had to agree to “poverty reduction strategies”
(in World Bank terminology, that should really be
called “poverty intensification strategies”) involving
privatisation, deregulation and flexible labour
markets. Even then, New Labour is not calling for debt
cancellation but merely eliminating the need for
interest payments over the next ten years. The tiny
amount of money they are asking capitalist governments
to fork out for this (the figure of £1.7 billion has
been mooted) suggests that something fishy is going
on. Backhanders from some corporations, perhaps, that
would benefit from such debt relief. In particular, I
suspect that the genetically modified (GM) food
company Monsanto is involved, and that “feeding the
world” (as Band Aid called for) would be done with GM
food, not merely for profit motives but as a way of
preventing ordinary people from fighting back. Trials
which supposedly prove that GM food is safe are
scientifically ridiculous; there are an infinite
number of ways in which food or drink can be
genetically tampered with and even though some ways
will not have any undesirable consequences, many
others would. Indeed, computer modelling could be used
to predict how it would affect people’s minds.

Privatisation has been the main tool of the West in
controlling African and Latin American countries in
the past, but recent revolutionary movements in
Bolivia (general strikes, occupations, demonstrations
and blockades, which called for renationalisation of
the gas industry and forced the resignation of the
President and new elections to be called) have shown
the limits to which privatisation can be applied.
Sooner or later, ordinary people are going to fight
back.

Real trade justice will not arise out of concessions
from capitalist governments. Even if they remove
subsidies on Western produce (such as via the European
Union’s Common Agricultural Policy) that make it
impossible for underdeveloped countries to compete,
the fact that Western goods are comparatively
expensive puts these countries at an enormous
disadvantage when it comes to competition in this
globalised world, and companies will employ workers in
countries with low wages and low protection for
workers such as trade union rights. Only a democratic
socialist world can achieve trade justice, and this
can only happen through a socialist revolution. The G8
summit is the best opportunity to launch such a
revolution!


How can my call for a worldwide general strike reach a
massive worldwide audience?

Galaxia – my revolutionary socialist band

I am going to set up a new revolutionary socialist
band, called Galaxia after the very left-wing future
of the galaxy at the end of science fiction author
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, in the run-up to the
G8 summit. I have written the start of a song called
The Revolution Starts Now! (which is appropriate since
the world socialist revolution will truly start at the
time of the G8 summit if there is serious strike
action then) and modified the lyrics of Band Aid’s Do
They Know It’s Christmas? to yield a song called Do
They Know It’s G8 Time?

All Galaxia’s tracks will be downloadable for free
from the downloads page of the Galaxia website
(www.galaxiamusic.org). We will put them elsewhere on
the internet, including at file-sharing sites and as
files at discussion groups (including the one
dedicated to Galaxia: galaxiamusic). We will not have
time to produce many CDs in time for the G8 summit so
we will rely on internet distribution on this
occasion. In the future, we will produce CDs for
distribution amongst left-wing organisations and in
shops. Proceeds from Galaxia will be distributed to
campaigns, socialist and autonomous organisations, and
charities (especially those which campaign as well as
alleviate some of the problems of capitalism) by a
non-profit making organisation called the Galaxia
Foundation for the World Socialist Revolution.

Of course, the best songs in the world have no impact
at all unless they are publicised. We cannot of course
rely on record companies or chain stores to push
revolutionary socialist music; therefore we will
utilise internet discussion groups (at
groups.yahoo.com and groups.google.co.uk) and
websites, leaflets and word of mouth to publicise
Galaxia.

My leaflet with the lyrics of Do They Know It’s G8
Time? on (accessible by clicking here) can be
downloaded, printed out and distributed around the
world. It specifically suggests that readers photocopy
it and distribute it at G8 events and at airports.
This could play a large role in publicising Galaxia,
and the issues involved at the G8 summit including GM
food/drink and privatisation, around the world.

Internet discussion groups

I am a member of over 230 discussion groups at
groups.yahoo.com, about 60 of which I created myself,
and a further 20 or so at lists.riseup.net. They are
mostly devoted to politics or music, but I send my
important political messages to all of them (sending
some relevant messages to each, especially at first).
Therefore, if you search for interesting keywords at
one of those addresses, you will stand a good chance
of coming across one of my groups or one that I send
my messages to. I have no way of knowing how many
people are reading my messages, because all my groups
have archives that are readable by everybody, without
needing to join. This is vitally important, because
astute readers of my messages will realise their
significance and that therefore joining the groups
would entail allowing their email address to be known
by many conspiratorial organisations. However, joining
one of my groups (and receiving messages in individual
emails) does yield the advantage of finding out about
others, since I send messages to many groups at once.
By duplicating windows and with a bit of copying and
pasting, I can send an important message to many
groups and important individuals in a few minutes
(however, I am constrained by a limit on the number of
emails that I am allowed to send out per hour by
Yahoo!)

The search facility at groups.yahoo.com is very good,
and it is possible to take advantage of it by setting
up groups appropriately. When I set up a Manchester
United group, I called it manchester-united-fans, gave
it the title “Manchester United Football Club fans”,
put it in the Manchester United section of the
hierarchical structure called the Directory and
mentioned “Manchester United” once in the description
of the group. This meant that anybody searching for
“Manchester United” found my group above all others.
Since this must have been one of the most common
searches used by anybody in the world at the time when
Glazer was attempting to take over the club in
particular, it obviously brought my views on a wide
range of issues (including the G8) to a large
worldwide audience.


Will there be a general strike or school students’
strike in Britain?

In my opinion, the prospects of large numbers of
students, especially those at school, striking on the
first day of the G8 summit (Wednesday the 6th of July)
are very good, whereas significant strike action is
unlikely. This is partly because of Bob Geldof’s call
mentioned above, and partly because the consequences
of students striking are much less severe than those
that could be faced by workers. With anti-union laws
in this country that make industrial action deemed
“political” illegal, and without left-wing political
parties, specifically the Scottish Socialist Party
which unites virtually the entire left in Scotland or
the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) which is by far the
biggest in England (or Respect in which the SWP plays
a leading role), supporting the call for a general
strike, it is clearly unrealistic to expect it to take
off in this country during this G8 summit.
Nevertheless, if we are ever to achieve socialism,
such action will probably need to take place some
time, since the big business parties are not going to
introduce a fair enough electoral system to give us a
chance to take power that way – without a big struggle
at least. Part of my role in calling for a worldwide
general strike is indicating how the working class can
take power; I will keep this website going and perhaps
it will become feasible at a later G8 summit. However,
we should not rule out general strikes elsewhere in
the world, where it is more apparent to the general
population that capitalism needs to be overthrown,
during this summit.

A big factor holding political parties back from
supporting a general strike call in this country is
that many of the best activists will be travelling to
Gleneagles – or will try to get there (police
roadblocks or limited space on trains could be a
problem). This means that they are concentrating their
efforts in that direction, and indeed that some could
be worried about possible transport problems arising
from a general strike situation. This argument a
general strike is false because:

• the best activists should relish disruption to their
travel plans since serious industrial action would be
much more of a threat to the system than a larger
number of people congregating in one place;

• workers for train and coach companies could of
course avoid disruption in plans of people travelling
to or coming back from Gleneagles and merely apply
industrial action elsewhere;

• the call for strike action could be taken up by the
police, making action at Gleneagles more effective.

I have concluded because of the above factors that
calling for a school students strike, and organising
demonstrations in towns and cities starting at
lunchtime so that those not on strike can attend,
would be the most effective strategy in Britain during
this G8 summit. I am trying to persuade
anti-capitalist activists to support this call in
Manchester specifically, since I would be able to
achieve more in this city if they do take it up than
travelling to Gleneagles.


Other pages on this website:

• Initial leaflet calling for a worldwide general
strike at the time of the G8 summit (under the banners
of the Revolutionary Platforms of the Scottish
Socialist Party and Democratic Socialist Alliance)

• Links

--
Steve Wallis (http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk).
My mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manchesterism).
My revolutionary socialist band Galaxia (http://www.galaxiamusic.org;
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/galaxiamusic).
Launch a general strike at the time of the G8 summit in July
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/g8-summit-worldwide-general-strike).

Proposer of Revolutionary Platform of the Democratic Socialist Alliance
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/revolutionary-platform-of-democratic-socialist-al\
liance).
Member of Glasgow Shettleston branch of the Scottish Socialist Party
(http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org) and initiator of the Revolutionary
Platform of the SSP (http://www.revolutionaryplatformofthessp.org,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/revolutionary-platform-of-the-ssp).

Initiator of the Campaign for Democracy in the UK
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/campaign-for-democracy-in-the-uk) and Campaign
for Sanity in the NHS (http://www.health-service-sanity.org).