|
I, Steve Wallis, am a revolutionary socialist who has lived in Glasgow since April 2006 (but I am planning to move to Wales soon). For more information about me, visit my socialist home page.
I opposed the launch on the 3rd of September 2006, by Tommy Sheridan in alliance with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and CWI platforms of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), of the split-off party called Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement. The new party stood against the SSP at the Scottish parliamentary elections in May 2007, splitting the socialist vote, resulting in neither party getting a candidate elected to the Scottish parliament. Solidarity mobilised a sizeable number of activists and I felt it important to try to influence the new party and make the split less damaging than it would otherwise be. I joined Solidarity at its launch rally but I let my membership elapse when the SSP banned members from having joint membership (understandably due to SWP members planning to retain SSP membership to damage the party).
The SSP has a number of different platforms, mainly Marxist ones, with small disagreements and based on historically distinct organisations. The International Socialist Movement (ISM) platform, formerly Scottish Militant Labour (which took the initiative to launch the SSP and its predecessor, the Scottish Socialist Alliance), voted to dissolve itself in 2006. Nick McKerrill, who in the ISM’s Frontline magazine had previously proposed a “Marxist platform” put forward the dissolution resolution (see www.redflag.org.uk). Many former ISM members were later involved in the SSP United Left platform, which avoided distinguishing between revolutionaries and reformists and was mainly formed to counter Tommy Sheridan, but it dissolved itself too before the 2007 elections. With Marxist ideas being re-evaluated, the distinction should be whether you are a revolutionary and therefore advocate sudden change or whether you are a reformist and advocate gradual change through a series of reforms, which is somehow supposed to lead to a socialist society despite the fact that reforms granted during a boom are taken back during a slump.
I have set up, initially in cyberspace, Revolutionary Platforms of the Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity, Respect (which has now split into two separate parties, the original Unity Coalition dominated by the SWP, and Respect Renewal led by George Galloway MP), Plaid Cymru (a mainstream party which describes itself as socialist despite also being Welsh nationalist) and the Democratic Socialist Alliance. The plethora of left-wing organisations in Brtiain, of which these are perhaps the most important of many, needs to be solved by some sort of realignment/reunification. Different left-wing activists have different ideas about how this should happen, but I advocate the formation of an ethical capitalist party (for which I have set up the Ethical Capitalism Network) and an openly revolutionary socialist party (perhaps as a platform of the ethical capitalist party). Perhaps such a realignment will be triggered by an economic crisis and splits in mainstream parties, but it may be better to prepare for such a crisis by setting up such parties beforehand...
I have also set up websites and discussion groups (which you can access via email or the web) for the following Revolutionary Platforms:
These Revolutionary Platforms may be the nuclei of new organisations capable of uniting genuine revolutionary socialists with different views and from different traditions within broad left-wing parties.
This is a newsletter for the Revolutionary Platforms. All editions are available on this website in HTML format, complete with hypertext links, and I have also put them in Micro$oft Word and PDF format on the website so that anyone around the world who is inspired enough after reading them can produce copies for distribution. I have so far produced two editions (May 2006 and September 2006). Note that I have not produced any newsletters after those two, but instead produced some for the Foundation for PR-based Socialism (a non-party political virtual revolutionary socialist organisation I set up that argues for a form of socialism based on proportional representation by single transferable vote); if/when the Revolutionary Platforms get more support, we will probably produce further Revolutionary Platform News newsletters.
There are a wide range of boards on the discussion forum on this website, in which you can debate issues on any subject under the sun, post information on current events or publicise activities or organisations that you are involved in. Feel free to browse, search or contribute; Most of the important emails I send out to discussion groups also appear on at least one of the boards (at the top level as well as a child board if appropriate, so that they can easily be spotted). Browsing and searching the forum is therefore a good way to keep up with my views.
[Note that there some minor bugs in the forum software, but I am not currently able to update to a newer version to remove them. In particular, there is an error on some computers if you leave the www. bit out of the web address www.revolutionaryplatform.net/forum, and logging in often takes two attempts (but always succeeds the second time for some reason).]
I send my most important messages by email, including to a large number of discussion forums at Yahoo!, usually before I put them on web-based forums including this one. There is sometimes a long delay before I put the messages on the web and some messages sent by email never appear here. You can read messages that I (and other people) have sent to the forums at Yahoo! (at groups.yahoo.com) by email or on the web, and messages are searchable. To read messages from me, I particularly recommend my socialist blog (which is my only moderated forum) and the Foundation for PR-based Socialism Yahoo! group (which is the best forum on which to debate my views).
Note that some programs on the internet (at both mail servers and routers between computers) read the contents of emails (probably based on keyword scanning and then natural language recognition using Artificial Intelligence for those with sufficient interesting keywords) to decide whether to treat them as spam, let them pass along the internet, bounce them back (so that the sender gets an error message in an email) or make them vanish into thin air! These programs were initially developed to deal with real spam (commercial emails, messages sent by criminals to capture usernames and passwords or banking details, emails containing viruses and pornography) but the US Department of Homeland Security has extended the practice to political messages. Note that Micro$oft Hotmail is more likely to treat my messages as spam than Yahoo! (and messages in the spam folder are deleted automatically much more quickly) and that using an email server based in the United States (where both official secret services like the FBI and unofficial more secretive ones also on the side of big business are in a strong position) is more problematic than one in the UK or another country where the balance of forces is more in favour of ordinary people. However, hotmail is clearly much more reliable now than it was when this new form of censorship was introduced, so it may not be worth switching email provider.
I have my main email addresses at yahoo.co.uk (revolutionarysocialiststeve@yahoo.co.uk and warcrysteve@yahoo.co.uk, the latter of which receives far fewer messages so is recommended for those who wish to send me an important or urgent email).
To discuss or find out more about internet censorship, go to my ‘stop-internet-censorship’ discussion group.