Will socialist revolution start in one country then spread, or start simultaneously (e.g. a #MayDay or credit crunch)

Different revolutionary socialist organisations have two distinct theories about how to achieve socialism, which is reflected by their differing strategies on all sorts of issues including defeating austerity (cuts, the public sector pay cap and other attacks on the living standards of the masses):

• Revolution happens (or starts) in one country first, which inspires the masses in other countries to rise up and overthrow their ruling classes too. This was the model pursued in Russia flowing from the October 1917 revolution, but a combination of factors meant it didn’t work – Russia being a semi-feudal country at the time, about 20 foreign armies invading to try to restore capitalism, naivety of the German Communist Party combined with the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht preventing the revolution spreading, and the disastrous decision to abolish the Constituent Assembly (after campaigning for it when the capitalist Provisional Government that came to power in February 1917 refused to call any sort of elections). Some argue that it is necessary to wait until election time before changing governments, but many countries (including the USA and UK) have very undemocratic electoral systems (I advocate proportional representation under capitalism or in a future socialist society as explained in my About Steve Wallis page) and the mood of the masses may dissipate if forced to wait for months or years (with many suffering and even dying in the meantime).
• Revolutionary movements happen more or less simultaneously, either due to a concerted mass movement initiated by the masses across the world (at a time of our choosing, such as International Workers’ Day aka May Day (1 May) or a summit of world leaders) – with the ability of workers to withdraw their labour, via general strikes or particularly mass strikes from below as advocated by Rosa Luxemburg, key (notwithstanding the power and courage of activists occupying public spaces, demonstrations and direct action) – or due to another massive global financial crisis (such as in the eurozone or a repeat of the 2007-8 credit crunch which led to many banks across the world being bailed out by capitalist governments). Nowadays, the high level of globalisation with interconnected multinationals cause economic crises to quickly spread, and activists using social media are able to cut across big business propaganda to quite a large extent (in countries where there is a reasonably low level of censorship at least).

#Budget2014: Alan Turing Institute for big data & algorithm research, towards fascism forever (Turing stopped in WW2)

The announcement in the 2014 Budget by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne of an institute for big data and algorithm research named after Alan Turing is outrageous. He did more than anybody else to defeat the Nazis and the possibility of world fascism forever, and his name is being associated with an institute which could (collaborating with PRISM used by the National Security Agency in the USA) actually bring about world fascism forever – with computers, mobile phones, CCTV cameras, etc., taking the role of human spies as used by the Nazis.

[For quite a lot of useful information on avoiding being spied upon/listened to, including via a mobile phone (cellphone) that is switched off (make sure you buy one with a removable battery, which are less common these days partly to boost phone companies’ profits, and remove it at important times), go to this entry on Washington’s Blog (quoting ABC News from 2006 and commenting on Edward Snowden’s revelations): The SINGLE Most Important Step to Protect Yourself from Government Spying.]

The idea is to gather huge amounts of information about us and try to use computer software (algorithms) to analyse it, in order to model organisations and individuals in the world, predict what we are going to do (particularly if it involves trying to change society) and interact in various ways to bring about some sort of police state so that socialist change is impossible. Algorithms would virtually remove the need for human intervention, so there wouldn’t be whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.

I am an artificial intelligence expert who was the main designer and sole implementer of an AI/simulation language called SDML, so know this in theory is possible (although my language did it on a small scale, some of the ideas and code could be used in a serious attempt to maintain capitalism or indeed conspire to ensure socialist change is brought about – perhaps the latter is the meaning of the dialectics.org website drawing on ideas described in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, which I will review in the near future).

Check out my blog entry #copsoffcampus demos against police clampdown on student protests – infiltration, PRISM & possible UK police state for more information about moves towards a police state in the UK, PRISM, AI algorithms capable of analysing big data and infiltration of the left – another major method of trying to stop socialist revolution, about which home secretary Theresa May has been forced to launch a public inquiry (also about friends and family of racist murder victim Stephen Lawrence).

Incidentally, the position taken by Trotskyists about the second world war being between rival imperialisms was wrong, due to the threat of world fascism mentioned above (unlike the first world war for which that analysis was correct – see The Big Questions: Is war ever just? Stop glorification of First World War by Michael Gove: Keep showing Blackadder Goes Forth in schools! #bbctbq).

The Big Questions: Is war ever just? Stop glorification of First World War by Michael Gove: Keep showing Blackadder Goes Forth in schools! #bbctbq

I was in the audience for the BBC TV programme The Big Questions (produced by the private company Mentorn Scotland), that has debates from a moral/religious viewpoint, often but not always on political issues, last Sunday in Salford for a pre-recorded special on the subject of “Is war ever just?”

It will be shown tomorrow (Sunday 26 January at 10am) – probably on BBC1 (possibly switched to BBC2). Nicky Campbell didn’t select me from the audience to make a point (or ask a question to the panel on the front row who dominated the show) but I’m writing this blog post to make some points I could have raised (and I will tweet links to this blog entry when the programme is aired).

My newly founded party, Left Unity (which I admitted to being a member of when asked by a woman who rang me before inviting me onto the show, perhaps influencing me not being picked to speak), has a position of opposition to glorification of war (throughout 2014 which is the 100th anniversary, i.e. centenary, of the start of what was then called “The Great War” and “The war to end all wars”, and is now known as “The First World War” or “World War I”).

Doesn’t Gove look a nasty piece of work?

The extremely annoying and incompetent Tory toff and ConDem Education Secretary Michael Gove has argued against teachers in school showing “Oh! What a Lovely War”, “The Monocled Mutineer” and “Blackadder Goes Forth” because they put across left-wing viewpoints, in an article in the Daily Mail. That “newspaper” (very right-wing rag) incidentally supported the fascist Blackshirts in Britain and the Nazis in Germany before the World War II – see my blog post Ed & Ralph Miliband v Daily Mail (who said “Hurrah for Blackshirts”) – David Cameron’s father Ian was a tax dodger!

My obituary of Nelson Mandela (edited), still big wealth gap, ANC ordered Marikana massacre, new party (WASP)

I posted an item on this blog entitled Nelson Mandela obituary, state of ANC today (supporting Marikana massacre) and new Workers and Socialist Party on Monday, but subsequently improved it quite considerably before submitting it to the Weekly Worker newspaper, on which it appeared today entitled “Wealth gap” on the letters page. I include below my obituary as edited firstly by me and secondly by editors of that newspaper.

[I will post the entire letter that I submitted to that paper as a comment, since the Communist Party of Great Britain (PCC) that produces the Weekly Worker does edit my letters (usually quite considerably), not just due to reasons of space but due to their particular political agenda – most noticeably in opposing proportional representation under socialism (although I have won them round to supporting PR under capitalism with several letters over the years on that subject). It is an aside that I included at the end of the letter, but an important aside if a mass revolutionary movement in South Africa is not going to repeat the dreadful mistake of the Bolsheviks in Russia of implementing “the dictatorship of the proletariat” (power only in the hands of the working class). If majority support cannot be achieved for a socialist society then the revolution would not last anyway and it is much better to run society in the interests of “the 99%” rather than disenfranchising the middle class. Amandla!]

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Nelson Mandela was a very inspirational and courageous figure. He suffered so much in jail on Robben Island, enduring decades of hard labour, but refused to be broken by the evil apartheid regime. He did so much to force the regime to introduce democracy in South Africa.

The regime didn’t concede defeat out of the goodness of their hearts – it cannot be denied (whatever the mainstream media will say) that it was due to the actions of ordinary (mainly working class) people in South Africa and their allies around the world.

Obvious factors were the extremely courageous actions of black youths in Sharpeville and Soweto, brutally massacred by the regime, and the effect those massacres had on mobilising international opinion into boycotting South African goods and companies like Barclays Bank, which were propping up apartheid.

Less obvious, except perhaps to people in South Africa itself, was black, white and ‘coloured’ workers uniting in trade unions, with perhaps the possibility of general strikes (via ‘dual power’) leading to socialist revolution, forcing the regime to release Mandela and end apartheid. Their prime motive was to preserve capitalism and their own wealth, and so far that has been successful.

#copsoffcampus demos against police clampdown on student protests – infiltration, PRISM & possible UK police state

In an event on Facebook, entitled #copsoffcampus: NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION (mobilising students and their supporters for protests across Britain today, Wednesday 11 December 2013), the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts points out:

In the past month universities across the country have been subject to unprecedented levels of violence from the police, targeting a resurgent wave of activism against the privatisation of the university system.

Across the country, students are initiating a vibrant, popular, winnable fight for democratic and public universities, free from exploitation and repression. We cannot be beaten if we stand together.

In the past week, police have violently evicted, beaten, and arrested students from peaceful occupations in London and sent undercover police officers to spy on students, arresting 3/4s of the union sabbatical team. They have attempted to recruit students to act as informers against fellow student activists in Cambridge, and attacked protests against outsourcing in Sussex. Across the country, managements are using injunctions and violence to suppress dissent; at Birmingham, students were threatened with
£25,000 court costs.

This attack on students is part of a concerted attempt by the British state – partly the police (including the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) within Special Branch that has taken over from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in infiltrating mainly left-wing organisations) but also MI5 and MI6 (otherwise known as the Special Intelligence Service (SIS)) and the government’s spy centre known as GCHQ – to clamp down on protests by spying, infiltrating, collecting massive amounts of data at GCHQ, and analysing that data.

For information about infiltration by the SDS/NPOIU, see my blog post  My role (perhaps) in alleged rapist Martin Smith’s resignation from the SWP or Infiltration of the left, attempts to smear Stephen Lawrence family and call for a public inquiry. [My knowledge of this is partly based on a Guardian/Channel 4 Dispatches investigation out of which came a book by two Guardian journalists, Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, called “Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police”.]

As whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed (amongst many details of encroaching surveillance states around the world), the US National Security Agency (NSA) is using PRISM (a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining programme) to collect a huge amount of data (including emails, Facebook posts, web searches and phone call information) and analyse it, partly by computer software but with many human operators too.

Nelson Mandela obituary, state of ANC today (ordering Marikana massacre) and new Workers and Socialist Party

Nelson Mandela was a very inspirational and courageous figure. He suffered so much in jail on Robben Island, enduring decades of hard labour, but refused to be broken by the evil apartheid regime. He did so much to force the regime to introduce democracy in South Africa. The regime didn’t concede defeat out of their goodness of their hearts – it was largely due to black, white and “coloured” workers uniting in trade unions (with the possibility of general strikes leading to socialist revolution) and of course international sanctions that played big roles. Their prime motive was to preserve capitalism and their own wealth, and so far that has been successful.

It should not be forgotten that Margaret Thatcher called Nelson Mandela, when he was languishing in jail, a “terrorist”. One report on British TV said that in an opinion poll within South Africa, 9 out of 10 white people said the same thing about him. The racist mainstream media in that country didn’t want to acknowledge that he was actually a lawyer (perhaps they didn’t want the idea that black people could be intelligent enough to qualify in that field!)

Unfortunately, for many of the poor masses in South Africa, little has changed since apartheid (there are still shanty towns) and disillusionment in the African National Congress (ANC) is rampant – particularly after their support for the massacre of 44 striking Marikana miners last year. The ANC is mired in corruption and big business still runs the country, albeit with some black bosses rather than them all being white as in the apartheid era.

We had a minute’s silence for Nelson Mandela and for others fighting (or had fought) injustice around the world at an anti-fracking protest (in Barton Moss, Irlam, Salford, Greater Manchester) yesterday. Whereas some of our political views may differ, we quite often (at least) recognise when someone with quite different views is an ally in our fight against mutual enemies.

The purpose of PRISM – stopping worldwide socialist revolution forever with Orwellian 1984-style society

The revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden of the (previously) top secret PRISM programme, run by the National Security Agency in the USA, gathering and analysing massive amounts of data gathered about everyone on the planet (except for US citizens) including the contents of phone calls, emails, Facebook activities, web searches (using all the major search engines including Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo!), and their collaboration with “national security” centres like GCHQ in Britain is unsurprisingly causing a huge storm amongst people concerned about civil liberties.

[And yes, the companies involved have denied knowledge of PRISM, saying they only cooperate with law enforcement/security services when there are court orders, so I perhaps should qualify the above with “allegedly”, but there has been a lot of circumstantial evidence in my life that a high level of surveillance (to model the world to a high degree of accuracy, predict what is likely to happen, and interfere in subtle and not so subtle ways to try to ensure events go their way) has been going on for over a decade, and that the PRISM software is far more sophisticated than checking for keywords but uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to understand our communications. And I’m an AI expert by profession, who has developed an AI/simulation language called SDML capable in a much more limited way of doing the same sort of modelling, so I should know roughly what’s possible.]

The usual excuse is that if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear. The capitalist ruling class tries to justify programmes like PRISM as the most effective way of stopping terrorism (but of course attacks on civil liberties like PRISM and Guantánamo Bay are a cause of anger amongst potential terrorists).

So what should we be worried about? Unfortunately, most commentators on civil liberties make general points without mentioning the fact that programmes like PRISM can be used to try to stop a genuine democratic socialist society (probably in one country at first, quickly spreading around the world, rather than simultaneously) from taking place. This is not wild speculation – PRISM (and possibly less sophisticated predecessors) has been used to try to thwart me in my revolutionary activities.

WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning’s case finally comes to trial on Monday 3 June

After 3 years in prison (during his first year of incarceration the conditions Bradley was kept in amounted to torture and were condemned by the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez), WikiLeaks whistleblower finally comes to trial on Monday (3 June).

In any sane society, Bradley’s revelations about the misdeeds of the US military should make him a hero – and indeed, he is a hero to socialists and anti-war activists – but the US state wants to keep him incarcerated for the rest of his life (and some nasty pieces of work want him to face the death penalty).

9/11 was (in part) the “inside job” to end all inside jobs (literally)

There are a lot of people who believe in conspiracy theories, particularly that 9/11 was an inside job orchestrated by the Bush administration. For those who don’t, or those who do and want to educate themselves and others, I strongly recommend watching the BBC Conspiracy Files TV programme on the Third Tower (WTC7), aired in July 2008 – either click here (or search YouTube for “BBC Conspiracy Files Third Tower” if that copy has been removed due to copyright issues).

The programme provided the following evidence of a conspiracy:

• The third tower collapsed without a plane hitting it, supposedly due to fire. On no other occasion in history has a building with steel support collapsed due to fire (unless you count the twin towers that collapsed earlier that day with the planes hitting them starting fires before they collapsed, or a later Madrid fire that took hours and didn’t completely collapse).
• There were other buildings between the twin towers and the Third Tower, which collapsed 8 hours later.

Scandal of Guantánamo Bay prisoners still held despite being cleared for release, and timing of Boston terror

The timing could hardly have been worse: The Boston bombings occurred the day after an Independent on Sunday exposé of “President Obama’s shame” in not releasing 86 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay cleared for release (that itself was the day after most prisoners clashed with guards) which has led to a mass hunger strike – never mind the plight of others stuck there deemed “too dangerous to release”. It is too early to jump to conclusions about the instigator(s) of the Boston atrocities but Chechens are being blamed in some of the US media. As the IoS article says:

“Today, 166 inmates remain. Three have been convicted, while a further 30 will face trial. Fifty or so are in a legal no-man’s-land, deemed by the authorities too dangerous to release but against whom there is not enough evidence to prosecute. And then there are 86 who have been cleared for release, but who instead rot in a hell from which there is no escape. No wonder yesterday more than 160 of them were involved in clashes with guards that led to what the US said were “less than lethal” rounds being fired.”