Socialism and Conspiracies

[stevewallis <stevewallis@supanet.com>]

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I came across this mailing list via a Guardian article on hactivism (http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,416954,00.html). I reckon that many of you will be on the same side as me (the working class) in fighting for a better society, so you may be interested in hearing what I have to say about some conspiracies involving infiltration by the state, and what we can do about it. I am not a hacker myself, but I hope that what I have to say can be some help to you in your activities. I came up with the following message following a discussion on two other internet mailing lists.

Best wishes,
    Steve.


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 crushing
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
purport to represent? They would have had the opportunity 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 if I remember correctly) 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 targetting Militant beforehand then it
certainly would have started to in the mid-1980s. Militant made some bad
mistakes, which may or may not have been influenced by state infiltration,
and they were very costly in terms of recruitment. However, the biggest
factor in the decline in membership (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 the dominant force in what is now the Socialist
Party. This, I think, explains the recent sectarian behaviour of the
Socialist Party. In contrast, I think that the recent moves away from
sectarianism of the SWP 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
ascendency 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 counclusion 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 be cautious while
awaiting 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 most powerful but
they are also most prone to inflitration 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 have been developing for 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 which 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.

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 sheet of paper - I probably threw it away
realising that keeping it would be dangerous. However, from that point on, 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 movements 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 6 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.
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 leadership of the Scottish comrades (then called Scottish
Militant Labour) and the British/International leaderships. The Scottish
comrades were proposing the setting up of the Scottish Socialist Party which
they would become a faction of. This was opposed by the British and
International leaderships, 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 important 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 annhilation is the future of the human
race.

But there are reasons to be cheerful. The Scottish Socialist Party is going
well, with about 2000 members and a member of the Scottish parliament (Tommy
Sheridan). The SSP has now adopted a position put forward by the CWI faction
(now called the International Socialist Movement) 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.




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