Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [184]
‘Yeah, that sounds just like the Soviet Union,’ I said, to general laughter. ‘And you sound just like my old man.’
‘Is he a socialist?’ Reid asked. He sounded incredulous.
‘Lifelong SPGB member,’ I said.
‘SPGB? Oh, brilliant!’ Reid said.
‘What’s the SPGB?’ Myra asked. Reid and I both began to say something, then Reid smiled, shrugged and deferred.
I took a long swallow, but it wasn’t the beer that I smelt but some strange remembered whiff of mown grass, dog-shit, and vanilla: Speaker’s Corner. ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain,’ I explained, falling almost automatically into the soapbox cadence of the autodidact agitator, ‘set out in 1904, with less than a hundred members, to win a majority of the workers of the world. They already have 800, so they’re well on their way. At that rate, the best projections put them on course for a clear majority by the twenty-fifth century.’
‘You gotta be kidding,’ Myra said.
‘He is,’ Reid said sternly. ‘It’s, well, not a bad caricature, I’ll give you that. But I’ve read some of their stuff, and I’ve never seen that calculation.’
‘OK,’ I admitted. ‘I made that part up. Well actually, my dad made it up. He’s a true believer, but he does have a sense of humour and he once wrote a wee program based on population growth and the Party’s growth, and ran it on a computer at work.’
‘He’s a programmer as well, is he?’
‘Oh yes. For the London Electricity Board. When he started, debugging meant cleaning the moths off the valves, and I am not making that up!’
Reid and Myra and several of the others around the table laughed. I’d never really held forth like this before, and I had the feeling that I’d made some kind of good impression on the clique.
‘The point being,’ I added, while everyone was still listening, ‘that I’ve heard all these arguments about how computers will make economic planning a doddle, and I don’t buy ’em.’
‘You’re missing several points here,’ Myra interjected, and went on to make them, her moral passion a mirror-image of mine. So I shifted my ground to another passion.
‘I don’t want a planned society anyway,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t fit in with my plans.’
That got a cheap laugh.
‘So what are you?’ Reid asked. ‘A right-winger?’
I sighed. ‘I’m an individualist anarchist, actually.’
‘“Ey’m en individualist enerchist, eckchelly”,’ Myra mimicked. ‘More like an anachronism. It’s a tragedy,’ she added with a flourish to the gallery. ‘The kid learns some kinda Marxism at his daddy’s knee, and he ends up a goddam Proudhonist!’
‘Yup,’ I said. ‘Though it’s your compatriot Tucker that I think got it all together.’
‘So who’s Tucker?’ somebody asked.
‘Well…’ I began.
We hadn’t got any work done that afternoon, but – looking back at it in an economic, calculating kind of way – it was worth it. Most of us ended up drinking cans and coffees back in a basement room of the Institute. Reid and I sat at opposite sides of Myra at the corner of the big table. Sometimes she talked to both of us, sometimes to other people, and again to one of us or the other. When she talked to Reid it was like overhearing the gossip of an extended family quarrel, and I tuned out or turned to other conversations. But she always brought me back into it, with some remark about Vietnam or Portugal or Angola: the real wars and revolutions over which the factions waged their intercontinental fight.
After some time I became aware that there were only the three of us left in the room. I remember Myra’s face, her elbows on the table, her thin hands moving as she talked about New York. I was thinking that it sounded just the place I wanted to go, when Reid’s chair scraped on the floorboards and he stood up.
‘I’ll have to be off,’ he said. He smiled at Myra for a moment then looked at me and said: ‘See you around then, Jon.’
‘Yeah, looks like we hang out in the same places,’ I said with a grin. ‘If I don’t bump into you in the next day