Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [183]
I didn’t agree with their ideas, but I’d found the Critique clique (as I privately called them) congenial, and stimulating. They were the Institute’s Young Turks, Left Opposition, Shadow Cabinet and Government-In-Exile. They regarded both mainstream and Marxist critical theories of the Soviet Union as all of a piece with the most starry-eyed, fellow-travelling naivety in their assumption that it was at least a new system, when it was hardly even a society.
The seminar was a lunchtime session. As always, it was crowded, not so much because of its popularity but because of a shrewd tactic of always booking a room just a little smaller than the expected attendance. In that ill-assorted congregation of exiles – from America, from Chile, from South Africa and from the Other Side itself – Reid, hunched in a new denim jacket, constantly relighting, puffing and forgetting his roll-up, his lank black hair falling around his young and good-looking but somehow weathered face, seemed entirely at home, and the question he’d asked the speaker afterwards showed at least that he knew what he was asking about. But none of us had seen him before, and in the pub later (these seminars had several features in common with socialist meetings, especially the pub afterwards) he’d admitted to being a Trotskyist, which was not surprising, and a computer science student, which was.
The woman sitting next to me was American and also a Trotskyist. Reid was getting up to buy a round and asked her, ‘What will you be having?’
‘Tomato juice,’ she said. He nodded, frowning.
‘How come you’ve not met him, Myra?’ I asked as he slouched off to the bar. ‘Aren’t you in the IMG too?’ I’d picked this up while chatting to her occasionally over coffee in the Institute – almost chatting her up, to be honest, because I was rather taken with her. She was tall and incredibly slim, with a blonde bob and a perky, peaky face, the concavities of her orbits and cheeks looking like they’d been delicately, lovingly smoothed into shape with broad thumbs, her grey eyes bright behind huge round glasses.
‘I don’t go much to meetings,’ she admitted with a shake of her head. ‘Like I got pissed with comrades urging me to do more in the fight against the fucking Leninist-Trotskyist Faction? I mean, what do these guys think I came to England to get away from?’
‘You mean Scotland, England?’ I drawled derisively, unable to comment on her – to me – utterly incomprehensible remark.
Myra laughed. ‘Go give the guy a hand. He seems to be having a problem.’
Reid turned to me with relief. ‘I’ve got everybody’s except Myra’s. What the hell are “tamadages”?’
‘And one tomato juice!’ I said to the bar-tender.
‘Oh, thanks,’ Reid said. He looked up at me. (He’d unconsciously pulled himself up to his full height, something folk often did around me, but he was still looking up.) ‘What you were saying back there about the market, that was interesting. The millions of equations stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, gathering up some of the drinks. ‘The millions of equations. And that’s not the half of it.’ I knew what was coming next, having been around the block several times already on this one.
‘Why can’t we just use computers?’
‘Because,’ I said over my shoulder as I threaded my way back to the table, ‘without a market, you won’t have the fucking computers!’
Myra was laughing as I put down the drinks. ‘Don’t worry about Jon’s bourgeois economics,’ she said to Dave Reid as we sat down. ‘Even the Soviet Union has computers.’ She waited for some sign of reassurance in his honestly puzzled face, and added: ‘The biggest in the world!’
Reid smiled but went on doggedly: ‘Look at IBM. Do they bother about market forces? Do they fuck! Friend of mine worked at their factory in Inverkip one summer. He