IT was September 10, 2014, and among the enthusiasm of Piershill, Edinburgh, I felt a little uneasy. The crowd of Yes campaigners were lining the pathway in anticipation for First Minister Alex Salmond to walk by in a made-for-TV moment. It wasn’t the celebration of the act of walking that struck me as odd – elections bring out such entertaining over-reactions – but the preparation.

To pass the time before the procession, supporters took to singing Flower of Scotland on loop. Round and round and round. No karaoke host would put up with such a lack of diversity. Thankfully, Cailean Gallagher, a young socialist, struck up Hamish Henderson’s classic Freedom Come-All-Ye. That day he was one voice railing against the wind and the louder nationalist tide of the moment.

That song has become a slogan of intent for Gallagher and his two accomplices Rory Scothorne and Amy Westwell. The three, who were all heavily influenced by the trials and tribulations of the referendum, have this week published a response: Roch Winds: A Treacherous Guide to the State of Scotland (Luath Press).

A brief glance of the previous “reviews” proudly published by the trio on their own website is insightful: A threat to the “Labour establishment”, “a load of mince”, “useless”, “mad as a box of frogs”, “irredeemably soaked in … petit-bourgeois waffling”, and the more understated “very interesting” are all there.

The group also republished the view of Wings Over Scotland on their work: “[They] advocated independence as a means of destroying the SNP and bringing about a worldwide revolution of the proletariat.” A perfectly fair assessment.

If you feel challenged by that prospect, then they’ve fulfilled their purpose already. Scott Hames, who wrote the book’s forward, described it as an attempt to offend every section of Scottish political society. They take shots at social democrats, nationalists, unionists, the Labour party, trade union leaders, and basically everyone that hasn’t embraced a politics of revolutionary class war.

It makes a refreshing change from the tentative, polite understatements of mainstream political debate. Piercing egos, at they do, is an undervalued task. “Scotland’s political history tells the tale of a bunch of trumped-up administrators and entrepreneurs” rather than of power and struggle, they say.

The walking dead of the Labour Party are subjected to gory metaphors – from Gordon Brown and the collective decapitation of Labour stooges to Johann Lamont presenting herself as a ritual sacrifice outside the local Asda.

Social democrats, meanwhile, are presented naively drinking away with a “piss-up in a brewery”, only for the edifice to collapse under the winds of global capital.

Whatever your politics, the text’s creativity is undeniable. The three Marxist musketeers have amassed a mountain of literary allusions. This is no turgid textbook.

They make a few wise insights, too. One is that Labour devolved Blairism to Holyrood. Social service management and education-for-employment came north – but the minimum wage and trade union rights were left to the big boys in London. No wonder, they conclude, that Labourite second-rate managers were swept aside by the gleaming eyes of the SNP project.

But those hopeful nation builders – multiplied by the Yes campaign – don’t escape the venom of these disloyal radicals. All three supported independence in various guises, but they never conformed to the idea of Scotland as a harmonious social democracy.

They want anger, rebellion, confrontation; and those excluded from power to build power themselves in unions and movements to challenge capital. These are foreign words to the consensus-building project of a new Scotland. What they call “The Scottish Ideology” is a belief in a state that bucks the trend of austerity-ravaged Europe, managed by benevolent leaders from politics, academia and charities. They don’t buy it.

Their book launch did practice what they preach. Beyond the standard Q&A, activist Stella Rooney spoke of how campaign group Better than Zero has organised young people in Glasgow to target the wage exploitation of G1 Group in Glasgow. Dave Moxham, deputy general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, challenged the authors on whether they were blind to the realities of political compromise. “What should I say this week when I meet Nicola Sturgeon?”, he asked.

“It’s not much point leveraging politicians. It’s better leveraging capital itself,” was their reply. So, yes, a call to revolution beyond the narrow horizons of political leaders. While I await the barricades, this is what I want to read: writers that have thrown off the old deference to all institutions, even if it places them in the tracks of an oncoming Flying Scotsman.

Some of the treasonous writers they quote were criminalised for their sedition. While Roch Winds is not inflammatory enough to be banned, its authors still have time to aim for those higher heights. The brazenness in which they have said and printed what they believe is an achievement I can only jealously admire.

Michael Gray @GrayInGlasgow is a journalist with CommonSpace.scot