'No doubt,' Mum said, dryly. 'Meanwhile, I could really do with a cup of tea. And when you've done that, there's nettles out the back need cutting for this week's soup.'

I took the hint.

While working away with the pruning knife and my dad's leather gardening gloves with the holes at two fingertips that I had to be wary about, I found myself turning the revolutionaries' bulletin over in my head. I was at the age when you don't just dismiss anything you read that you disagree with or that questions your view of things. That's an adult skill, which most people find all too easy to acquire. No, I had to take it seriously, to try to fit it in with what I already knew about the world or a if that proved impossible a revise what I knew. All very scientific.

The very scientific hypothesis that I came up with was that, if the revolutionaries were right and the Big Deal really was a big deal, then I was right about the secret cabal of rational people inside the US Government and/or the global ruling class. The same people who had planted the rationalist message in my head had taken over a or at least (because, I told myself sternly, I had to be cautious here, and not let my imagination run away with me or anything like that) had their policies adopted. That they couldn't be all-powerful, I understood. I knew enough about the seductive nonsense of conspiracy theories to dismiss as ridiculous any thought of Bilderbergers or Illuminati or some such pulling the strings.

I took my bundle of nettles into the kitchen. My mother was by the cooker, minding a large pot of water coming to the boil while watching the news on her phone.

'Look at this,' she said.

In Monaco, French soldiers tramped along boulevards. Belgian tanks nosed through back streets in Luxembourg. US marines, laden with kit, splashed ashore on Bermudan beaches, parachuted into Panama. Royal Marines stormed St Kitts and blockaded St Vincent. The Russians had landed in Dubai.

'What's going on?' I asked, alarmed. 'Is it the war?'

Mum snorted. 'Not exactly. Just a crackdown on tax havens. Every last one, except Switzerland.'

'Why Switzerland?'

'Read up on Swiss defence policy,' she said, peering into the pot. She looked up as I reached for my phone. 'Not now. Give the nettles a rinse.'

A lot of things happened that summer. Some of them were connected, but I was too busy joining my own dots at the time to see the lines. I passed all my Highers, and was offered a place at Edinburgh University a on the BA course because, rather to my surprise, I did much better in English, History, French and Modern Studies than I did in Maths and Science. Calum applied for and got a place at Strathclyde, in Aerospace Engineering and Business Studies. In the meantime, I'd taken a summer job a several short-term openings had come up, for the first time in five years, in the local supermarket. Marie received a letter from the student loan company, informing her that her loan was suspended but that she should apply for a grant instead. She almost had to look the word 'grant' up in the dictionary. I applied to the new funding authority and got a student grant for my first year.

There was uproar, rising as far as riots in London, over the Golden Parachute scandal: the government had handed out billions to top banking and financial executives, by way of compensation for losing their jobs or taking a massive pay cut a an offer conspicuous by its non-occurrence in millions of earlier cases of rather less well-paid workers who'd had to make the same choice, when they'd had a choice in the matter at all. My mother came home early one Wednesday evening in August, to report that the soup kitchen and the refugee centre had almost run out of people to help. The old container port was about to re-open, and every able-bodied person, including illegals, had been offered a job clearing the place up, and the definite possibility of work at the port when it got going. My parents got a letter from the building society, informing them that the mortgage payments had been over-calculated for decades, and the loan had in fact been paid off five years earlier. The overpayments had been credited to their joint bank account.

The gigantic Firth of Clyde Tunnel construction project was announced, and the consortium began hiring immediately. The abandoned computer factory on Inverkip Road was retooled and reopened as a biotech plant, and required in the first instance hundreds of unskilled workers, all of whom had the prospect of training for technical work over the next couple of years as production came on stream. Thousands more got employment on what were called upgrade projects: the high school, for example, was refurbished entirely over the summer, a railway line reopened, and the parks regenerated. Retired, disabled, or part-time workers were in huge demand for information collection, machine supervision and auxiliary tasks. Those still on various doles and schemes suddenly found their money went further, as prices and rents unaccountably began to drop. Small businesses opened or re-opened all over the place. The smell of burning tyres left the air, to be replaced by that of fresh-poured concrete. And that was how it was in Greenock.

If you're old enough, you remember. It was much the same where you were.

At the Freshers' Fair I joined the Humanist Society, the SF Society, the Geology Society and the Archaeology Society, then wandered along the stalls. There were a lot of cultural societies for overseas students, and a slightly smaller number of wildly diverse religious societies among which the Union of Muslim Students and the Christian Union looked like voices of moderation. At each I helped myself to armfuls of free literature, nodded politely, and strolled on. I did the same at the stalls of the few political societies for the mainstream parties, and at those for two or three left-wing groups, whose stalls stocked Marxist literature that had long outlasted the states in which it had been printed and whose stall-keepers hawked tabloid newspapers with red mastheads and big black headlines like FIGHT THE CUTS! and GENERAL STRIKE NOW. The sellers looked as bemused as I felt. I picked up some dusty Marx pamphlets and a cheaper and more useful for my coursework a a shiny memory stick of the Marx and Engels Collected Works.

At the very end of the row of tables was one with a stack of copies of What Now? and a heap of memory sticks. A young guy in the now predictable smart suit and tie stood behind it, flicking through his phone with a bored expression. I looked down at the front page: GOODBYE, AND GOOD LUCK.

We failed.

The crisis is over. The revolutionary moment has passed. Power has shifted from financial to industrial capital. The working class, atomised by generations of neoliberalism, has turned down its fleeting but real chance to make a bid for power. Although the free market in labour power has not been restored, the decades-long campaign to do so has pushed down wages and social provisions to a level compatible with industrial profit. A new cycle of accumulation has begun, and with it a new upsurge of the capitalist economy, at the expense of further distortions of the market. The new boom may be expected to last one decade at least, probably more, before it in turn goes into crisis. Just as radioactive decay passes through a series of unstable isotopes, some of which may last some time, so does a declining system. We never claimed to know in advance the half-life of capital.

No revolutionary organisation can outlive the revolutionary situation. If it tries to do so, it becomes at best a caricature of itself, at worst counter-revolutionary. Almost all previous revolutionary organisations have made this mistake. We do not intend to repeat it.

This is the final edition of What Now? The question posed by the title remains, but the answer has to change. What the former revolutionaries can do now is learn the lessons of the past few years, and analyse, without illusions, the present as it unfolds in order to prepare the struggles of the future. To do that, they need full freedom of thought, discussion and action, not the discipline of the revolutionary organisation, which is hereby dissolved.

If you want to find us, don't come looking. We'll find you.

And so we say goodbye ...

UNTIL NEXT TIME.

I picked up a copy of the paper.

'Uh ...'

The guy transferred his attention from the phone to me. He still looked bored.

'Yes?'

'That's not true, is it?'

'What?'

'About the revolutionaries not being able to outlive the revolutionary situation. The Russian revolutionaries failed in 1905, and the Chinese revolutionaries were nearly wiped out in 1927, but they kept going, didn't they? And they won.'

If I'd expected this snippet of Higher-level Modern Studies wisdom to impress him, I'd have been disappointed.

'If you call them revolutionaries and that winning,' he said. 'Anyway, the conditions for revolution still existed in both cases. These societies remained in crisis. This one' a he waved a hand around a 'not so much.'

'You really think the Big Deal's going to work?'

'It's already working.' He made it sound like an answer to a very stupid question. 'It's what Gramsci called passive revolution. The revolutionaries failed to unite enough people around them to overthrow the system, but the crisis didn't go away. Society was at an impasse. The necessity for revolution didn't go away. So the ruling groups are going to carry out some of the necessary changes, which together add up to as much of a revolution as is compatible with their remaining in power. A revolution from above, that keeps the people at the top at the top. The reforms add up to what most people who said they wanted a revolution really hoped for from a revolution. Peace, jobs for all, green tech, saving the planet ... all that sort of thing. It's a lot less than what we wanted, but it'll stave off the revolution for another generation. We're snookered.'

'So you lot are a just going to go away?'

'No point hanging about, is there?'

'I guess not,' I said, still puzzled.

He nodded down at the stack of papers. 'I'm not kidding. This is my last gig for the revo. Take a copy while you can, because you won't see any again. Consider it a collectable.'

'How much is it?'

'It's free, as always.' He shrugged. 'The memory sticks have the complete run. Help yourself.'

'Thanks.' I stuck a stick in my pocket and the paper in my Student Union freebie bag.

'Have you read it before?' he asked, as I straightened.

'Once or twice.'

'What did you think of it?'

'Not a lot. It just seemed a bit, you know, negative.'

He snorted, but said nothing. His continuing bored expression goaded me.

'Still,' I said, 'it's something to admit the revolutionaries are going out of business.'

His expression changed from boredom to pity.

'"Out of business"?' he jeered. 'We're going into business.' He returned his attention to his phone.

'OK, well, bye,' I said.

He didn't look up. 'Until next time.'

I was down the stairs and out on the rain-wet cobbles of the Pleasance before I thought of the perfect parting shot. I played the dialogue in my head.

'So you're offski,' I would have said.

'What?' he'd have replied, still supercilious, but with a dawning suspicion.

'Offski. You know, the famous Russian revolutionary?'

Well, it made me laugh. You had to be there. Except I wasn't.

11.

I was sitting in the Library Bar, marking paragraphs of extracted Derrida in the Norton Theory on my phone, turning half the screen a provisional yellow between lunch and the 4 p.m. seminar. The room's furnishing was exactly what you'd expect from its name: old books on shelves behind glass around the walls; seats, benches and tables, niches and nooks, a big bar with carved posts and a fret-worked canopy. Mercy Fuck's 'Warriston Crematorium' on the PA, for like the hundredth time. Someone sat down beside me. I saw, out the corner of my eye, legs in black leggings visible through a thin pale pleated skirt that went down to the ankles of likewise visible long black boots.

'Oh, hi, Ryan.'

I looked sideways. A bonny lassie in a black leather jacket, half turning to face me, a glass of orange juice in her hand. Her hair was deep black, crinkly and long. Eye make-up. Musky perfume.

'Sophie! Oh, heck, I didn't recognise you for a sec.'

She smiled. 'It's been two years.'

'Aye. Jeez. How're you doing? What are you doing?'

'Fashion and Fabric Technology at the College of Arts,' she said.

'Hence the, uh ...'

'Stylish look? Yes.' She flicked her hair.

'I always thought maths was more your thing,' I said.

'Oh, I'm doing that too,' she said. 'I'm over at Informatics today.'

'Must be quite a disconnect.'

'Oh, they're connected,' she said. 'It's the new materials.'

'New materials?'

'Look.' She took out her phone and flicked to a catwalk show. Models did their bold bouncing stride in frocks so elaborately flounced, embroidered and embellished that they looked like those seahorses that mimic seaweed. Colours flashed from jewels, flowed through fabrics and glowed around edges. The music changed and suddenly the models did front-flips and cartwheels and rolls, then sprang up a ruffles, so to speak, unruffled a and sashayed off to applause.

'Hmm,' I said. 'Not very practical.'

Sophie plucked at a pleat. 'I made this with an offcut.'

She stuck out a foot and tipped a gulp's worth of orange juice on her skirt, splashing it down her shin. The fabric soaked it up, unstained. She wiped the glass on the side of her knee to mop the dribble, with the same result.

'Practical, yes?'

'Uh-huh.'

'This is going to be big. I'm thinking of going into the biz, maybe do an MBA after I graduate. And I'm fine. Enjoying uni. What about you?'

'English, Sociology and Philosophy,' I said. 'I did Geology as an extra last year.'

'I meant, how are you?'

I leaned forward and took a sip of cold black coffee to hide my reluctance to tell her the embarrassing truth. I was miserable, and I had no right to be. I knew I should be happy. The only rational reason I had for being unhappy was the dreams, the nightmares and false awakenings, and the occasional full-on alien abduction experience. I knew they were unreal but it wasn't helping my sleep. No amount of reading refutations and arguing about the paranormal and the supernatural with any of their proponents who crossed my path seemed to make any difference. Apart from that, I knew I had nothing to complain about.

'I'm fine,' I said. 'I'm sharing a decent wee flat near Tollcross with two engineering students who I don't see much of anyway, I go home about once a month, I get enough fresh air and exercise on excursions with the Geo Soc and the Archaeology Soc, and I go to the Humanist Soc sometimes and the SF Soc and Skeptics in the Pub for drinks and chat and that, and I've got plenty of time to study, so I'm doing all right in the assessments ...'

Sophie regarded me with amused, half-lidded eyes. 'That bad, huh?'

I had to laugh. 'I know it doesn't sound very exciting,' I said, 'but I'm doing what I want.'

She looked away, then back. Maybe she frowned a little in between. 'What do you want?'

'What do you mean?'

'You haven't said anything about your social life so, OK, you're busy studying a fine, I can see that, but what's also a bit revealing is you haven't said anything about what you're studying for.'

'Well, you didn't ask,' I said, trying not to sound as if she'd touched on a sore point. 'I'm studying for a humanities degree.'

'And then?'

I shrugged. 'Go for a PhD in philosophy, then further research if I can get a position and the funding. If all else fails, get a proper job.'

Sophie gave me an impatient look over the rim of her glass.

'What are your dreams, Ryan?'

'Dreams? Jesus!' I flailed. I had a moment of horrible suspicion that Calum had told her about my abduction experience. I could feel myself blushing, to my shame. 'I mean, what the fuck kind of question is that? A bit personal, isn't it?'

'I'm not asking about your wet dreams, Ryan,' she said, witheringly, not at all taken aback by my vehemence, unembarrassed and unamused by my embarrassment. 'I'm asking a what are your ambitions? What do you want to achieve in life?'

Aye, there was the rub.