Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [186]
Reid was a communist, I a libertarian; but he had a prickly independence of mind, a dogged tendency to worry at difficulties in the doctrines his sect espoused. I sometimes suspected I had too easy a scepticism, too catholic a confidence that my shaky pile of books by Proudhon and Tucker, Herbert and Spencer, Robert Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson was building up to a reliable launch-tower of the mind.
Another thing I liked about Reid was that I got drunk faster with him than with anyone else; hence, the Friday evenings.
Reid and I talked some more about ‘the computers taking over’ (which was how people talked back then about the Singularity), then moved on to the current New Scientist article on catastrophe theory, about which Reid was sceptical (‘like a bourgeois version of dialectics’, was how he put it). After science, politics: the hot topic was Portugal, where the far left had just over-reached itself in what looked like a cack-handed attempt at a military coup.
‘There’s a good article here about it,’ Reid said, digging out from inside his jacket a copy of Red Weekly, the newspaper of the International Marxist Group. ‘Slagging off what Socialist Worker has to say. Well, I haven’t read it myself yet, but it looks good.’
‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy it. Sectarian polemic is one thing you guys are good at.’
‘We’ll get you in the end,’ Reid grinned as I bought the paper.
‘Or I’ll get you,’ I said.
Reid shrugged. ‘That’s not how it works,’ he said. He started rolling a cigarette, talking in a tired voice. ‘People don’t stop being socialists and become something else. They just become nothing, or join the Labour Party – same difference.’
‘I stopped being a socialist,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah, but that’s different, come on. It’d be like me saying I stopped being a Christian. It was just something I was brought up to, and as soon as I started thinking for myself I dropped it. Same with you, right?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Mind you, it was never shoved down my throat every Sunday.’ But I uneasily remembered how little it had taken – some anarchist summary of Tucker, I think – to precipitate every doubt I’d ever had about my inherited faith.
‘I hope I always understand things the way I do now,’ Reid went on, ‘because it makes sense, it’s ahead of anything else on offer. But if I ever forget, or you know, lose the place –’
‘Or realise you’ve been wrong all along.’
‘– all right, that’s how it’ll seem, that’s what I’ll tell myself –’
He grinned sourly, his tongue out to lick his Rizla, giving himself a momentary diabolic, gargoyle appearance. ‘But if that ever happens,’ he finished, rolling the cigarette up and lighting it, ‘I’ll be damned if I become an idealistic fighter for the other side. I’ll just look out for myself, one way or another.’
‘But that’s what I believe in right now!’ I said cheerfully. ‘Look out for number one. I’m not an idealistic fighter for anything.’
‘That’s what you think,’ Reid said. ‘You’re an anarchist out of pure, innocent self-interest? Oh, sure. Face it, man, you care. You’re a socialist at heart.’
I liked him enough, and he said it lightly enough, for me not to be offended.
‘Nah, that’s not how it is at all,’ I said. ‘I really do have a selfish reason for wanting a world without states: I want to live forever. Seriously. I want to make it to the ships. A planet occupied by organised gangs of nuclear-armed nutters is not my idea of a safe environment.’
Most people laughed at me when I said this, but Reid didn’t. One of the things we had in common was an interest in science fiction and technological possibilities, which fitted right in with the rest of what I believed. In theory it fitted in with Marxism too, but I knew that Reid’s comrades regarded it as ideologically unsound, as if the only far-out futuristic speculation allowed was the IMG’s latest perspectives document. His stacks of Galaxy and