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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