[I've had problems posting messages, since most newsgroup servers seem
to be infiltrated by the forces of big business. Hence I have set up a
new email address. Visit my website (address below) and click on the
do***ent "Isaac Asimov and Conspiracies" if you want to know why I
have chosen this email address and pseudonym.]
The following is the latest version of my Socialism and Conspiracies
do***ent,
which is on my website at: http://www.stevewallis.org
The conspiracies date back at least as far as the wake of the Russian
Revolution in October 1917. 18 countries sent their armies to Russia to
try to crush that revolution and failed. So they (the ruling class) were
naturally very frightened about the possibility of the revolution
spreading. If you can't crush them from the outside then you have to
resort to cru****ng them from the inside.
The conspiracies could well go further back in time. It is fairly well
known that the leader of the Bolsheviks in the Duma (Russian parliament)
was a police spy.
So what would the rational response of the ruling class in Britain be to
the Russian Revolution? Well, they obviously wouldn't want the fledgling
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to get off the ground. And when
it did, they'd want it to hold workers back rather than letting it lead
workers to a successful revolution. And it is well known that it did
hold workers back, most spectacularly and disastrously in the General
Strike. The usual Marxist explanation for the failures of the Communist
parties in the West is to blame inexperience and the influence of Stalin
(who was afraid of losing his own power if a genuine revolution were to
take place elsewhere). However, why would the international ruling class
(i.e. big business) be so naive as to rely on such factors when they can
utilise the strategy of long-term entrism to try to ensure that the CPs
betray the workers they pur****t to represent? They would have had the
op****tunity to ensure that most of the trade union leaders in the CPGB
at the time of the General Strike were state agents or heavily
influenced by them.
It is only to be expected that the state would particularly target the
largest socialist/communist party in the country. This was the CPGB for
many years and is now the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Most genuine
socialists who want to fight for a better society join the party that
seems most serious and this is usually the biggest. The party for which
there is most evidence of state infiltration is the US SWP (no relation
to the SWP in Britain) – the infiltration by the US state (to a
considerable degree) was revealed in a court case (which the SWP won)
and I believe that that infiltration was a major reason why that party
collapsed to the pathetic party it is today (of maybe a few hundred in
the whole of the USA). There have also been allegations (including in a
book by the journalist Stephen Dorril) of state infiltration playing a
significant role in the collapse of the Workers' Revolutionary Party
(WRP) in Britain.
By far the most influential socialist organisation in Britain in recent
years has been the Militant Tendency. It had three Labour MPs, led the
Liverpool council struggle (which inflicted the first defeat on Thatcher
in winning extra money for the city, but was ultimately defeated due to
the betrayals of councillors elsewhere) and led the poll tax non-payment
campaign which defeated the tax and led to the fall of Thatcher. If the
state was not already significantly targeting Militant beforehand then
it certainly would have started to in the mid-1980s. Militant made some
bad mistakes, which were sometimes (at least) largely caused by state
infiltration, and were very costly in terms of recruitment. However, the
biggest factor in the decline in member****p (from about 8000 at its
height to about 400 today) was the collapse of Stalinism and the
capitalist triumphalism which resulted.
There remains the question of what the state did as Militant declined in
size. Did it withdraw most of its agents and allow the organisation to
regain its strength? That would be extremely foolish! No, I suspect that
most stayed in and are now a strong force in what is now the Socialist
Party. This, I think, explains the recent sectarian behaviour of the
Socialist Party (such as pulling out of the socialist alliances). In
contrast, I think that the recent moves away from sectarianism of the
SWP (although the situation is far from brilliant in some places
including London), with their involvement in the socialist alliances in
England and Wales and their application to join the Scottish Socialist
Party, is a sign that those opposed to state infiltration are in the
ascendancy within the SWP. The last thing the state wants is for the
left to unite at last in the pursuit of its common goal.
So how do the conspiracies work? Well, everybody builds models, to
varying levels of detail, of other people's minds inside their own
minds. This is necessary in order to conduct a meaningful conversation,
never mind doing something to change the world for the better! We also
build models of organisations and parts of organisations to enable us to
deal with them in our everyday lives. Some of us come to the conclusion
that there are big conspiracies going on and decide to take one side –
maybe just in our subconscious without our conscious thoughts becoming
aware of it. From that point on, we cooperate with those who we think
are on the same side, compete with those who we think are on a different
side, and are cautious while waiting further input with those who we're
not sure about or who we think are neutral. Some of us (including
myself) act alone on this basis, others form together in small groups,
and still others join larger groups with some sort of organisational
structure. The larger groups are generally most powerful but they are
also most prone to infiltration by people with different agendas.
Some groups rely entirely on the combined effect of the models in their
own minds to model other people and organisations and to develop
strategies and tactics based on these models. However anything a brain
can do, a computer can do, so it is only rational for the most powerful
groups to utilise fast powerful computers to help in their modelling.
Computer languages like SDML, which I developed over a period of about 8
years (see http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/sdml),
can be used for this task.
There is probably one dominant group on every side at any particular
moment in time, which has a strategy about how that side can achieve its
aims. Other groups on the same side will generally go along with this
strategy although sometimes in-fighting takes place that may result in
some other group becoming dominant. The dominant group on each side is
probably not the obvious one – such as MI5 in the case of the ruling
class – a much more secret multinational organisation is more likely.
There are various sides representing different vested interests such as
Liberal Democrats, fascists, Scientologists, Jehovah's Witnesses, the
Catholic Church and Islamic fundamentalism, but Marxists recognise that
there are two key sides in society – the working class and the ruling
class (big business). Since the ruling class is the dominant class, the
other vested interests are largely being manipulated by that class, but
they can be manipulated by the working class or smashed as the balance
of class forces changes.
Some of those vested interests indulge in infiltration themselves. For
example, the fascist organisation the National Revolutionary Faction
have on their website
(http://www.nationalbolshevik.com/nrf/nrfadviceforcadres.html)
advice
for their cadres who are infiltrating socialist organisations and other
organisations in society such as the National Health Service and the
police.
I think I first became aware that big conspiracies were going on
involving state infiltration when I read the Morning Star (the daily
paper that was then the organ of the CPGB) regularly as a child. Why was
the paper of a ‘revolutionary' party so bad? I remember at one point
wondering what I could do to make the world a better place and writing
some suggestions down. I don't know what happened to that book of paper
– I probably threw it away realising that keeping it could be dangerous.
However, from that point on (if not before), I believe my subconscious
has been working on the problem.
I didn't significantly get involved in politics until 1989, when the
anti-poll tax movement was getting started in Manchester. I could tell
that this campaign had great potential to make a difference. However, I
didn't join Militant until the 6th of June, 1990. I went on the People's
March Against the Poll Tax from Liverpool to London later that year but
was fairly low profile in most of my time in Militant/Militant
Labour/the Socialist Party. I did however do quite a lot of work on the
internet, putting forward socialist views on various newsgroups and
setting up a mailing list for the CWI (the international organisation
that Militant/the Socialist Party is affiliated to). I also had the CWI
website on my work computer for a couple of years or so. However, it
wasn't until 1998 that I attained any significant positions outside
cyberspace, getting on the Steering Committee of the Greater Manchester
Socialist Alliance and the Regional Committee of the Socialist Party. I
think not becoming too prominent too soon helped me avoid too much state
interference too soon in my political ‘career'.
It was at the 1998 European School of the CWI in Gent, Belgium, that I
first became a significant threat to the ruling class. There was a big
debate between the leader****p of the Scottish comrades (then called
Scottish Militant Labour) and the British/International leader****ps. The
Scottish comrades were proposing the setting up of the Scottish
Socialist Party which they would become a faction of (called a
‘platform'). This was opposed by the British and International
leader****ps, and they had convinced the other sections of the CWI except
for France to go along with their opposition. I was the only comrade
from England or Wales to speak in the debate in favour of the Scots. As
a result I came under quite a lot of pressure not to speak in the debate
and I was moved later in the schedule until finally being slotted in
first thing in the morning before most of the comrades had arrived. I
reordered my speech to move the most im****tant bits to the end, but the
Chair cut me off and took the microphone off me just before I could make
those points. I ended up storming off the platform! Others had been
allowed to massively overrun their allocated time but not me!
I spent much of that week discussing with comrades from around the world
trying to convince them of the Scottish case and I was fairly
successful. I went round them again after my speech in a damage
limitation exercise reassuring them that I hadn't gone mad, but that I
hadn't slept the night before my speech and that as a fairly
inexperienced comrade the pressure got to me. It seemed to work!
The conclusions I finally came to with my conscious mind, about state
infiltration of socialist organisations, arose as a result of that week
in Belgium. This was supposed to be a gathering of 200 of the best
revolutionaries on the planet and at times most of them behaved like
sheep. There were clearly some processes going on below the surface that
could only be explained by infiltration.
After coming to these conclusions, I thought of setting up a
counter-network to act against the state infiltrators. This is the only
rational course of action apart from giving up. Therefore it is not
surprising that such networks already exist! The ruling class
infiltrates our organisations so we have to infiltrate their
organisations – and our own to defeat the enemy within.
Of course infiltration is not limited to socialist organisations and the
‘security services'. Campaigning organisations, the NHS, the police, the
internet, companies, trade unions, etc., are also infiltrated. I hope
that the US military is sufficiently infiltrated so that if George W
Bush gets trigger-happy and presses the nuclear button nothing will
happen. This is not a game – socialism or nuclear annihilation is the
future of the human race.
But there are reasons to be cheerful. The Scottish Socialist Party is
going well, with about 3000 members and a member of the Scottish
parliament (Tommy Sheridan). More significantly, the SSP now has about
9% sup****t in opinion polls for the pro****tional representation vote for
the Scottish parliament. The SSP has now adopted a position put forward
by the International Socialist Movement (the leading platform in the SSP
which Scottish Militant Labour evolved into but that has now left the
CWI) calling for international socialist alliances. Socialist alliances
around the world would be a very positive step for unity of the left and
against attempts by the infiltrators to divide us. The socialist
alliances in the Republic of Ireland unfortunately collapsed, but the
socialist alliances in Australia seem to be going very well (and
therefore the leader****p of the largest socialist organisation there,
the Democratic Socialist Party, is proposing a similar move to Scottish
Militant Labour and ceasing operating as a public organisation) and
there are moves to establish socialist alliances in France.
--
Steve Wallis, a member of South Manchester Socialist Alliance
My socialist web page - http://www.stevewallis.org
Also involved in the Coalition Against Sanctions and War on Iraq
(http://www.stevewallis.org/iraq)
The start of my autobiography, 'Transition', is now available on the web
at: http://www.stevewallis.org/transition.htm
|
