The relevance of the following message for the music groups I am sending it to
is that I am setting up a revolutionary socialist band called Galaxia. You can
find out about it and listen to one of my songs by going to
www.myspace.com/galaxiasteve...

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).
Since I wrote and first sent out these chapters, I have decided to switch my
main allegiance from the Scottish Socialist Party to Solidarity. If you want to
find out why, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manchesterism/message/267.

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 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 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.
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. 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 Sheridan , getting the big business-controlled mass media to report his and
his organisations’ activities was more of a factor. My life is not in danger
either; 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 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 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 could 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 MySpace pages; 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.
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 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 (which augments constituencies in which MSPs are
elected by FPTP making representation roughly proportional) and it is necessary
to get several 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. It is important that the SSP and Solidarity do well between
them, and one of my motivations with this book is to encourage Scottish readers
to vote SSP in those elections. The formation of Solidarity is based on a
falsehood – it is clear that Sheridan did some of the things he was accused of
doing by the News of the World, which has launched an appeal. That won’t take
place until the summer of 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 (which do not seem particularly
strong anyway with only 1% support in an opinion poll). 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 a fairer electoral system (with a form
of PR, albeit not being 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 is to call for worldwide general strikes at the time of G8
summits. I have done this for previous 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, composed of a guitarist 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. Unfortunately, I
have suffered repression from the state (as I’ll explain in chapter YYY) and
development of the band and the call for a
general strike was aborted. Hopefully there will be serious action at the time
of the summit in Germany in June 2007 – it may even be possible for a general
strike to lead to a socialist revolution somewhere in the world at that time,
and for the revolution to spread across the world!


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 Genoa ,
Barcelona and Edinburgh , and launched the
initiative of a worldwide general strike at the time of a G8 summit (a call
that could finally lead to revolutionary movements at the 2007 summit in Germany
in June).
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 England or Wales to speak during the debate at the 1998 European School of
the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI, which linked that organisation
to similar ones around the world) in support of the formation of the Scottish
Socialist Party.
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 Manchester via the Socialist
Alliance, Respect and the Democratic Socialist Alliance (which I helped launch
out of the old Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform).
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 Glasgow . An
early incarnation of the band performed a version of a song of mine called “The
Revolution Starts Now!” in 2005, which contains so many important political
points that I’ve written a chapter of this book on it (chapter YYY).
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.


--
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).
Initiator 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-al\
liance) 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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