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History of Galaxia/Red Day
This page is considerably out-of-date; please look again at this page soon...
My name is Steve Wallis, a revolutionary socialist now living in Glasgow as a member of the Scottish Socialist Party.
I had been planning to set up a socialist band, which I hope will play a leading role in the world socialist revolution, for about two years before I did anything about it, because it is possible to influence people greatly through music and I have acquired sufficiently strong singing abilities through karaoke to convince myself that I would be capable of singing in a band.
I decided to name the band “Galaxia” after the very left-wing future of the galaxy at the end of Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation series, voted the most influential science fiction series of all-time.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series
The following text is taken from the introduction to Galaxia on the front page of the first Galaxia songbook. I use colour coding in the text – socialist red meaning good, Liberal Democrat orange meaning medium, Tory blue meaning evil, and pink meaning scary!
In that series of books, a mathematician called Hari Seldon comes up with a method of analysing the galaxy called “psychohistory”. Models of the past and present state of the galaxy were used to predict the future and decide what needed to be done to achieve a desired outcome – applied to a galactic revolution (taking rather longer than the one on the earth will take – 1000 years). Hari set up two conspiratorial organisations, which infiltrated other organisations in society, at opposite ends of the galaxy. These were called “Foundations”, the First Foundation being fairly open and the Second Foundation being an extremely secret one composed of people with the power to read emotions in people’s minds and nudge them into making decisions that they would otherwise have been less inclined to make. The Second Foundation tried to ensure that the Seldon plan for the revolution was adhered to and made minor corrections to take recent developments into account. They were frustrated by an individual evil mutant called the Mule, who had far greater mind control powers than anybody else in the galaxy, but eventually defeated him.
However, if the Second Foundation had ultimately got its way, the galaxy would have ended up with a fascist regime in which the “master race” consisted of those with mind reading/control powers. Fortunately, a Councillor in the First Foundation called Golan Trevize and his friend Janov Pelorat discovered a planet called “Gaia” on which lived aliens with telepathic powers living in extreme harmony with nature in a very left-wing society. They continued on their travels with a very attractive female Gaian called Bliss (who had a relationship with Janov) and discovered that a telepathic humaniform robot (looking like a human but never ageing) called R. Daneel Olivaw had been controlling the entire galaxy for thousands of years, and even manipulated Hari into inventing psychohistory. However, no good robot would decide the future of humanity!
Daneel therefore picked a human being who was so intelligent that he had never made a wrong decision in his life to make the decision; he chose Golan – who was repelled by the Gaian society, due to the lack of individuality, but nevertheless chose that form of society (called “Galaxia” when expanded to the galaxy) in preference to capitalism or fascism. In the final book in the series, he discovered the reason for the decision he had already made – it was the only way that the human race could defend itself against invasion by a more powerful alien race from a different galaxy.
Preparing for the 2005 G8 summit
My first attempt at songwriting was a combination of snippets from existing songs, original lyrics and speeches (some of which were quite long), which I called The Revolution Starts Now!, inspired by the Steve Earle & the Dukes song and album entitled The Revolution Starts...Now. I originally intended it as a B-side for our first single (which I wanted to be a cover version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody).
However, I came up with an initiative for a worldwide general strike at the time of the G8 summit (in Gleneagles, Scotland, during the first week in July 2005), which I publicised via the internet and by handing out leaflets in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and London. I reckoned that the G8 summit would be the best time to start a world socialist revolution, so I improved The Revolution Starts Now! (eliminating the speeches) in time for that summit.
I have a portable karaoke machine and quite a lot of CD-Gs (CDs with graphics for display on its screen), and I experimented with varying the lyrics while singing along to Do They Know It’s Christmas? on the 14th of June 2005. I then modified lyrics to (the Band Aid 20 version of) the song which I downloaded from the internet, in order to come up with my first version of Do They Know It’s G8 Time? I distributed some photocopies in the Hulme and Moss Side areas of Manchester, and was such a threat to the state that the police arrested me outside Moss Side Leisure Centre! [I was a part time political prisoner in a psychiatric ward at the time, and was taken back to the ward by the police.]
I put out a call far and wide on the internet for anybody who wanted to participate in Galaxia, either as a full band member or as a guest participant in one or more of our songs, to turn up to a recording studio (the Cutting Rooms, Abraham Moss Centre, City College, Manchester) on Thursday the 30th of June 2005.
Mine was an extremely unorthodox way of getting a band together, and unsurprisingly nobody turned up. However, I already knew that a guitarist (called Adam) who works there and turned out to be very good could help out with the recordings, and he accompanied me on an acoustic guitar when we recorded two of the tracks. Adam told me that he does not want to be part of Galaxia in the future.
As well as those two tracks, I performed a version of the international song of the working class: The Internationale. I changed the lyrics and come up with (what I think is) a better tune; because my version uses the final line in French I call it L’internationale (I originally got the spelling wrong and called it L’internaçionale). [I have subsequently decided that I am in favour of a world controlled by everyone rather than just the working class, with a government elected by proportional representation, and want other band members to be committed to the struggle for this kind of socialism (which is advocated by my Foundation for PR-based Socialism). A song of the working class is therefore not appropriate for the band and it is no longer accessible on this website.]
I had to go AWOL to do the recordings (and do important things on the internet beforehand) and I was locked up as a political prisoner once again on the 1st of July, preventing me from putting the tracks on this website until after the G8 summit. I escaped the following day and went up to Edinburgh – too late for the Make Poverty History demonstration but in time for the G8 Alternatives Summit on the 3rd of July (at which I spoke in the debate on Africa putting forward ideas expressed in my songs about using genetically modified food as a form of mind control). I did something more useful than putting the recordings on-line – putting improved lyrics for Do They Know It’s G8 Time? on discussion groups, correcting the odd minor mistake and clarifying certain things. An explanation for those improvements, plus later changes I made to the lyrics, is provided here.
Unfortunately, serious general strikes (which could have led to a revolution) did not take off anywhere in the world to my knowledge at the time of that G8 summit. This was probably mainly because my call wasn’t backed up by any sizeable organisation (although School Students Against War were trying to get school students to strike). This lack of action could also have been influenced by the violence that occurred at the Carnival for Full Enjoyment on Monday the 4th of July in Edinburgh (that I tried to alleviate by joining the protesters naked) and/or the terrorist attacks on Thursday the 7th of July in London. In my opinion, both violent events were instigated by people on the side of big business (whether in the police force, agent provocateurs among the Edinburgh protesters or terrorists) to divert the world’s attention at such an important time from doing something constructive to defeat the G8.
My move from Manchester to Glasgow
I moved from Manchester to Glasgow on the 20th of April 2006, since this is where I expect the world socialist revolution to start, it is where I can have the greatest influence politically due to the strength of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), and it will be a better area for finding good political people to recruit to Galaxia. The SSP received over 15% of the vote in Glasgow in the Scottish parliamentary elections on May Day 2003, getting two members (Tommy Sheridan and Rosie Kane) elected, out of six across Scotland.
I was locked up as a political prisoner again shortly after moving to Glasgow (on the 12th of May 2006). I had been asking around in the Glasgow area and putting messages on the internet to try to find people who are interested in joining Galaxia before this happened. I received some interest but nothing came of my leads.
Sheridan, the former SSP convenor, set up a new party called Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement in September 2006 after winning his defamation trial against the News of the World; the new party is standing against the SSP in the Scottish parliamentary elections on the 3rd of May 2007. This makes the SSP’s task much harder and makes it even more important for me to intervene effectively.
A particularly important idea I had in January 2007 was establishing the Foundation for PR-based Socialism, as a conspiratorial infiltrating organisation on the internet. I want all other band members to agree with that kind of socialist society (based on proportional representation by single transferable vote), and want the Foundation to take responsibility for distributing proceeds from Galaxia, with band members paid no more than an average worker’s wage.
I have written some new songs, including political love songs, while locked up as a political prisoner. I have finally met a very strong ally called Jo Sims (a psuedonym), who like me is a political prisoner at Leverndale Hospital (with both of us having varying amounts of leave and with me now on ward 1 with her still on ward 3). Joanne can sing and play guitar or keyboards (with much more experience with guitar). I have written the song Prisoners Political about Joanne.
On the 24th of February 2007, I went AWOL from my psychiatric ward to attend an anti-Trident anti-war demo in Glasgow, at which I handed out copies of the first newsletter of the Foundation for PR-based Socialism. On the demo, I talked for a while to an extremely attractive Pakistani woman/girl (who looked about 18 years old) called Hira. She told me that she can play bass guitar and she seems ideal for the band. She was very keen to get involved but when I restarted handing out the newsletter to other people on the demo she drifted away (presumably to encourage me to influence other people). I had handed Hira a copy of version 4 of my document on how our brains help or hinder the struggle for socialism (available from the Documents & Leaflets page of my socialist website), which I had intended to give to a Dutch student with Indonesian ancestry called Jonika who is probably in her second year of university having joined the Scottish Socialist Party in about September 2005. I had thought that Jonika was the ideal other person to be in Galaxia, without having established whether she can sing or play an instrument, largely based on a lot of mutual flirting at the social at the end of the first day of the SSP’s conference in October 2006! I now think that the level of attraction between Jonika and myself could produce some tension in the band and I am not sure that she is serious enough politically to play such a key role in the struggle for socialism. Having come across Hira, I no longer need Jonika as a non-white member of the band (although I like many all-white bands, I feel I could not be in one myself unless it was a duo). I did not get Hira’s contact details, but I am confident that she will be in touch at some point in the near future. I got picked up at the demo by the police, who had been advised that I would probably be there and heard me talking to my mum on my mobile phone (I provoked getting picked up by them at that point because it was better than getting picked up when nobody else serious was around after spotting me on a CCTV camera for example).
I am not sure at the moment whether there is likely to be sufficient mood and focus for a worldwide general strike to be practicable at the next G8 summit (in Germany in June 2007). To a large extent this depends on whether I can get free of the mental health system and tour the world with my band; the most likely way I will do this is by winning a tribunal (probably in mid-March). I am inviting Rosie Kane MSP and Cath Bann (my strongest collaborator and main person I was attracted towards between 1998 and 2003 – a very effective non-violent anarchist) to help me at the tribunal. If a worldwide general strike is practicable, then I think the main issue will be global warming, with me putting forward tidal power as the solution to the world’s environmental crisis. For my views on this position, visit my G8 summit worldwide general strike website or debate them on the Foundation for PR-based Socialism discussion group. Rosie can sing songs with a lot of humour and has written some humorous poems so it would be good to have her as a part-time member of the band (or a full member if she fails to get re-elected to the Scottish parliament which is very unlikely); Cath could not sing or play an instrument when I asked her in early 2003 but hopefully she has been practicing and I want to invite her to move to Glasgow to be in the band (partly because I fell in love with her in Manchester). Ideally Cath would play keyboards or piano, because Joanne is better at playing a guitar.
My mention of the above people should not put you off if you are good musician and/or singer and are committed to similar enough politics to me. There are some other people who I am also keen to join the band, particularly those mentioned in my song (or musical poem as I am now considering it) called Couldn’t Wait Until Sunday.
Some people may wonder why I am so interested in having so many women in my band; one reason is that I am mainly heterosexual and some degree of mutual attraction is necessary to collaborate strongly politically, but also the best women tend to be kinder than the best men in society (with me being the main exception to this rule, possibly because I am a woman trapped in a man’s body). However, I did have a very good friend in May 2006 called Thomas Branagan who can play the harp and was quite keen to join the band; I have lost his contact details, so if he reads this it would be great if he could get in touch.
If you are interested in participating in the band, or want to discuss anything else with me, please contact me by phoning 07725 735255 or 0141-882 4785, or emailing me at warcrysteve@yahoo.co.uk.
Important note: One of my main contacts for the band, Alana Murray, died in suspicious circumstances (according to her friend Igor) in December 2006. I believe she was assassinated due to her potential role in Galaxia (playing an instrument/singing/helping me learn the drums). I am setting up an assassination-of-alana-murray discussion group to discuss the circumstances around her death.
