Some points I've made in the text below are so important that I've added it as a preamble to the home page of my socialist website (http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk) and some of my other pages. There are demonstrations outside the Northern Rock branch in Albert Square, Manchester tomorrow (4-6pm) and on Saturday (11am-12noon), so I'm planning to do a new Foundation for PR-based Socialism newsletter before then. Comments would be welcome on my new strategy, by email or on the Foundation's forum.

 

 

Until recently, I have carried out the duel role of radicalising people and sabotaging Marxism, sometimes consciously (by putting out leaflets arguing against the Marxist idea of hierarchies of committees based on workplaces for example) and sometimes subconsciously. I have thus helped engineer a situation whereby there is a massive financial crisis which exposes the failings of the capitalist economic system but socialists are too weak (in the West at any rate) to take advantage of the crisis and overthrow this system in a socialist revolution. Due to the lack of a viable socialist alternative, British prime minister Gordon Brown is getting away with subsidising the banks with a massive £500 billion of borrowed money (equivalent to £16,500 for every taxpayer in the country) to try to buy capitalism out of the hole it has got itself into. Such measures are being replicated internationally, and he is being portrayed as the saviour of capitalism, ironically for a Labour prime minister!

 

I feel my influence on society has been overwhelmingly positive, despite my sabotage of Marxism. The forces of big business, including conspiratorial organisations like the CIA and those outside the realm of the state, had a great deal of control over society, using complex computer models to predict the future and determine what they needed to do to maintain their dominant position (and try to ensure that dominance continues forever with the US Republican Party enacting legislation such as the Patriot Act and New Labour in Britain planning ID cards with a centralised database containing a lot of information about us). [I was the main designer and sole implementer of an artificial intelligence/simulation language called SDML which could be used to do such modelling, so I know that it is possible.] A sign that this dominance has gone and that the free will of individuals is becoming more significant was the false reports in the early editions of British newspapers (including the Daily Mirror's "Phew! US saves world economy" headline on the 26th of September, with similar ones in the Times and Independent, reported on in a BBC Northern Ireland review of the papers) that the $700 billion bailout of the US banks had been agreed, before the talks collapsed. [As most readers of this will be aware, a modified deal was later agreed which has indeed averted complete financial meltdown.] This strongly suggests that the computer models of big business, which were used for those premature news reports, are failing. If their predictions are wrong, then their ability to control society is also diminishing. Weather forecasts are now much less accurate than they have been in the past; if you can predict weather accurately you can also control it, to some extent, by adjusting factors that influence it, and the forces of big business are certainly less able to do that now.

 

I have now recognised that it is time to take sides in the class struggle and unite with Marxists, particularly those in the largest Marxist organisation in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). I had argued that it is generally only people on the same committees who know who the dodgy people (such as infiltrators on the side of big business) are and what they are up to, but the overthrow of John Rees as leader of the Left Alternative (the SWP-led splinter from Respect), via a resolution passed by the SWP's central committee, has demonstrated that such people can be removed from positions of power (partly due to the role of people like Rees being publicised by other activists particularly in the Weekly Worker newspaper which specialises on debates within and between left-wing organisations).

 

Despite my decision to regard Marxists as allies in the struggle for a better world, I am not abandoning my call for socialist governments elected by proportional representation, as promoted by my Foundation for PR-based Socialism. I still do not want a socialist society in which middle class people are denied a say, as Marxists tend to argue for. However, control from below, in local communities as well as workplaces, sometimes known as "participatory democracy", is essential for a genuine democratic socialist society as well as PR, and I am dropping my objection to such structures being hierarchical.

 

Perhaps the biggest mistake in my approach, as far as uniting revolutionary socialists is concerned, was my Good Intentions Manifesto which argued for unity between "good" people who want some sort of better world, irrespective of their politics, against "bad" people who want to preserve the status quo or want an even worse world (and may not even care if the human race is annihilated via a nuclear war). By adopting this analysis, I tried to identify well-intentioned people in right-wing organisations, and suggested that Condoleezza Rice, David Cameron, Margaret Thatcher and even Nick Griffin (leader of the fascist British National Party) might be well-intentioned and therefore sabotaging their own organisations. [I am still tempted to post the lyrics of my musical poem "The Master Race", which makes some very important points against fascism as well as suggesting that Griffin may be "a nice bloke", to fascist/racist discussion forums and help to destabilise such organisations!] I now realise that most members of right-wing parties are dedicated to such parties and tend to adopt their comrades' points of view. Even if they are in a left-wing conspiratorial organisation that is deliberately trying to sabotage that party, they have to cooperate with fellow members of the party to a large extent to avoid being found out. Similar arguments apply to left-wing parties infiltrated by right-wing organisations. Whereas I think publicising my views on infiltration via my Good Intentions Manifesto played a positive role by helping left-wingers identify right-wingers in their midst, the idea of uniting well-intentioned individuals was massively flawed, largely because nobody is completely well-intentioned (or completely poorly-intentioned) - my realisation that even I am selfish to a certain extent helped me avoid making what could have been a very bad mistake of properly setting up a forum for the Good Intentions Network.

 

I did make some very good points in my Good Intentions Manifesto about recognising whether people are mainly good or mainly bad, largely based on their demeanour and appearance, and I am therefore keeping it on the web but with the text you are currently reading as a preamble. In particular, I pointed out that men who come across as hard/tough/rough-and-ready, particularly those with short-cropped hair or particularly shaven heads, often are right-wing. The exposure of the two neo-Nazis who planned to assassinate Barack Obama as "skinheads" (in all five British newspapers reporting on it that I read as well as almost exactly half the reports around the world according to Google News) was brilliant in helping the masses recognising fascists in their midst. If you look like a fascist, you either are one, are pretending to be one, or did not realise what effect your appearance has on others' attitude towards you (perhaps because you are young or experimenting). The big exceptions to this rule about skinheads are black people (since fascists are almost always white) and those who look gay (and therefore do not come across as "hard"), but they may be inadvertently hindering the struggle for a better world by encouraging their straight white friends to adopt a similar hairstyle.

 

My new approach of recognising that most Marxists are allies is partly motivated by the fact that I am now in a position of greater influence within the socialist movement, particularly after moving to Manchester in September where the left is uniting to a greater extent than anywhere else in Britain. Left-wingers inside and outside the Labour Party united in the Convention of the Left at the time of Labour's conference, and we are continuing to meet in Manchester - on the third Monday of every month at the Friends' Meeting House (on Mount Street, off Albert Square, behind Manchester Central Library) at 7pm, probably booked under the name "Socialist Unity". There is also a national recall conference in Manchester on Saturday the 29th of November. Visit the Convention of the Left website for more details.

 

I am arguing that the Convention should argue for a sudden thorough change of society (a "revolution" even if some don't want to use that word) rather than adopt a charter of reformist demands, requiring even greater borrowing than that of the New Labour government with the Tories and Liberal Democrats proposing similar levels. The problems of capitalism are too great for reforms to be sufficient and we are never going to achieve a socialist revolution if we refuse to talk about it! If we do argue for reforms, as we should do while simultaneously arguing for socialism, then I am proposing we promote the idea of democratisation of the banks that have already been or are about to be nationalised, with the majority of the say in the hands of borrowers and savers in addition to representatives of the government and workers via the trade unions on their boards. As well as planning for the recall conference, we will discuss such proposals at the November meeting.

 

I am planning to submit a resolution to the recall conference proposing that the organisation coming out of the Convention of the Left calls itself the Anti-Capitalist Network, which clearly indicates the need for a change of society without being too narrow to put off genuine socialists who don't necessarily regard themselves as revolutionaries. It could be similar to a revolutionary anti-capitalist party being launched in France, but should be a network/alliance rather than a party at present, since I think a break from Labour would be premature at present. Whereas there is a need to unite those opposed to capitalism but with a wide range of views at present, I think that the need to argue for a particular form of socialism can be carried out by organisations within the network, including the Foundation for PR-based Socialism (which will from now on advocate "participatory democracy" as well as proportional representation).