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Revolutionary Communist Party (Furedi)
Encyclopedia
The Revolutionary Communist Tendency (RCT), which emerged in 1978, began as a Trotskyist
political organisation in Britain in 1978, becoming the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1981, in the tradition of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party. After 1991, the party slowly metamorphosed into what might be characterised as a Libertarian group rather than a Bolshevik
or Trotskyist one as traditionally conceived. The Party was disbanded in 1997, although a number of former members maintain a loose political network which promotes some of its core ideas.
in the 1970s. This group had concluded that there was no living Marxist tradition in the left, and Marxism would have to be re-established. Disagreements about the course the Revolutionary Communist Group should take in relation to support for the Anti-Apartheid Movement
led Frank Furedi
, a sociologist at the University of Kent
(better known then by his cadre name Frank Richards), to break off and form his own group: the Revolutionary Communist Tendency - which became the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The Revolutionary Communist Tendency hoped to draw together those militant working class leaders who were disappointed by the limitations of reformism to help to build a new working class leadership and develop an independent working class programme.
's work on the relationship between imperialism
and reformism
, the early ideas of the RCP had it that the "only hope of securing any decent sort of life - or even guaranteeing survival - lies in the working class taking control over society". It argued that traditional Stalinist and social-democratic appeals to the bourgeois state undermined working-class independence. Instead an independent vanguard party
should be organized to campaign for a distinctly working-class politics. In 1978, for example, when the left was strong within the Labour Party, the RCP argued that "Labour is the party which attempts to resolve the crisis by integrating militant working class resistance into the capitalist system". This position included a rejection of support for the Labour Party and one that questioned the allegiances of the trade union movement. A consequence of this belief was a growing distrust of traditional statist left-wing struggles as 'reformist
'. According to some, the RCP took a view that reformism consolidated bourgeois ideology in the potential leadership layers of the working class.
The RCP took a number of positions coined to distinguish independent working-class politics from statist reformism. These included
The RCP's programme can be traced through the publications "Our Tasks and Methods" (a reprint of the Revolutionary Communist Group's founding document), the 1983 general election manifesto Preparing for Power and the article "The Road to Power" in the theoretical journal Confrontation (1986).
was central to the work of the RCP. In 1978 the RCT organised the Smash the Prevention of Terrorism Act Campaign, and held protests outside police stations where suspects were held. The RCT organised a conference of trade unionists opposed to Northern Ireland
being part of the United Kingdom
in Coventry in 1981, and later that year, held a march to the TUC conference, the Workers March for Irish Freedom. On Saturday 6 February 1982 the Irish Freedom Movement (IFM) was founded at a meeting in Caxton House, Archway - and TUC general secretary Len Murray
wrote to the 13 trades councils that sponsored the conference threatening them with disaffiliation if they attended. Mick Hume
, who edited the next step recalls that the IFM were accused of complicity in the 1984 bombing of the Conservative Party conference. The IFM published a quarterly bulletin Irish Freedom and organised an annual march on the anniversary of internment. When the voices of Sinn Féin
supporters were banned from the British broadcast media, Living Marxism carried a front page interview with its leader Gerry Adams
, and the IFM picketed Broadcasting House
.
After 1991, when the organisation re-thought its outlook, it adopted a number of positions that put it at odds with the 'New Labour' milieu:
of the British Socialist Workers Party
took issue with the RCP's argument that 'such issues as racism and Ireland form ... a vital component of revolutionary propaganda'. Callinicos claimed instead that "if most of the workers involved have reactionary views on questions such as race, the position of women, and so on" that was less important than that they were fighting over pay and conditions. Callinicos also called into question the RCP's stress on "the connection between reformism and nationalism", saying they were 'paleo-marxists'. In 1984, the Socialist Workers Party denounced the RCP for calling for a national ballot in the miners' strike
.
On 30 June 1990 Simon Watney and Edward King of the group OutRage!
kicked over the RCP's stall at the Gay Pride
march. Watney criticised Michael Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan for giving credence to the idea that AIDS was a 'gay plague' by their insistence that there would be no epidemic amongst heterosexuals in the west. But Outrage! was divided over the attack. In the 1990s, along with Edward King, Watney back-tracked on the point at issue, arguing instead that the 'everyone is at risk' approach misdirected public attention away from gay victims of the disease, which they said, should be 're-gayed'. Agreeing with Fitzpatrick and Milligan on the epidemiology, King in particular was much more critical on the political approach, which he said amounted to 'hostility to any form of autonomous lesbian and gay self-organizing'.
Nick Cohen
, Marko Attila Hoare
and Oliver Kamm
strongly criticised the RCP, and its former members after the dissolution, for opposing the humanitarian interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. Hoare, Cohen and Kamm also rejected Noam Chomsky
defence of Living Marxism and its coverage of the Bosnian war.
In 1997, environmental journalist George Monbiot
argued that the RCP had undue influence at Channel 4 in an article titled "Marxists found alive in C4", after two of its members contributed to the Against Nature television programme, whose director, Martin Durkin
is also connected to the group. Elsewhere Monbiot took issue with Living Marxism for putting too much stress on freedom, as if "there should be no limits to human action, least of all those imposed by 'official and semi-official agencies … from the police and the courts to social services, counsellors and censors.'"
Andy Rowell and Bob Burton along with Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Information Network criticised the RCP for championing genetic engineering.
. In 1988, its weekly tabloid newspaper the next step carried an article arguing that "the disintegration of the official labour movement, and the apparent lack of a left-wing alternative, has consolidated an overwhelmingly defensive mood in the working class".
In the election of 1987
, RCP members stood as the Red Front and talked arguing that working people needed to break with the Labour Party, but no Red Front candidates retained their general election deposits (currently set at £500).
In 1988, the RCP made the next step into a bulletin for its supporters. Later, a monthly magazine called Living Marxism
was set up which was intended for a wider readership. Despite its beginnings as a far-left outlet, the politics espoused by the magazine developed a pronounced libertarianism
. In December 1990, Living Marxism ran an article which argued that the corrosive effect of the collapse of both Stalinism and Reformism on the working class meant that "for the time being at least, the working class has no political existence". In 1997, the point was put more forcefully:
Between 1990 and 1997 the RCP developed the view that, more than capitalism itself, the danger facing humanity was the absence of a force for social change (in philosophical language, a "subject" of history), and the culture of low expectations that suppressed it. Prefacing a 1996 Living Marxism manifesto, Mick Hume
argued that:
In February 1997, shortly after the party disbanded, Living Marxism re-branded as LM, possibly to further distance itself from its leftist origins. Articles in LM argued
This magazine ran at least two articles in which the authors argued that the mass murder
carried out in Rwanda in 1994 should not be described as genocide
. In December 1995, LM carried a report from an aid worker in Rwanda which argued:
LM continued to create controversy on a variety of issues - most notably on the British Independent Television News'
(ITN) coverage of the Balkan conflict in the 1990s. The controversy centred on LM featuring an article by Thomas Deichmann which alleged that the ITN coverage of a refugee detention centre in Trnopolje
during the conflict gave the false impression that the Bosnian Muslims were being held against their will in Serbian
concentration camps. The ensuing libel award and costs, brought in legal action by ITN against LM, was estimated to be around £1 million. It bankrupted the magazine and its publishers.
), led by Claire Fox
, the online magazine Spiked magazine
, initially edited by Mick Hume
and later by Brendan O'Neill, and the Manifesto Club, in which a leading figure is Munira Mirza, recently appointed by Boris Johnson
as London's Director of Policy for culture, the arts and creative industries. These organisations continue, in their different ways, the adversarial politics of LM magazine and the RCP, leading some commentators , such as George Monbiot
have pointed to apparent entryist tactics used by former RCP members designed to influence mainstream public opinion.
One party member from the 1990s explained in an article in sp!ked:
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
political organisation in Britain in 1978, becoming the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1981, in the tradition of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party. After 1991, the party slowly metamorphosed into what might be characterised as a Libertarian group rather than a Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
or Trotskyist one as traditionally conceived. The Party was disbanded in 1997, although a number of former members maintain a loose political network which promotes some of its core ideas.
Beginnings
The party originated as a tendency within the Revolutionary Communist Group, which had split from the International SocialistsInternational Socialists
International Socialists is the name of a number of Trotskyist organizations.Most organisations using this name are in the International Socialist Tendency...
in the 1970s. This group had concluded that there was no living Marxist tradition in the left, and Marxism would have to be re-established. Disagreements about the course the Revolutionary Communist Group should take in relation to support for the Anti-Apartheid Movement
Anti-Apartheid Movement
Anti-Apartheid Movement , originally known as the Boycott Movement, was a British organization that was at the center of the international movement opposing South Africa's system of apartheid and supporting South Africa's Blacks....
led Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He is well known for his work on sociology of fear, therapy culture, paranoid parenting and sociology of knowledge....
, a sociologist at the University of Kent
University of Kent
The University of Kent, previously the University of Kent at Canterbury, is a public research university based in Kent, United Kingdom...
(better known then by his cadre name Frank Richards), to break off and form his own group: the Revolutionary Communist Tendency - which became the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The Revolutionary Communist Tendency hoped to draw together those militant working class leaders who were disappointed by the limitations of reformism to help to build a new working class leadership and develop an independent working class programme.
Stance
Taking a strong line which it considered to be inspired by Vladimir LeninVladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
's work on the relationship between imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
and reformism
Reformism
Reformism is the belief that gradual democratic changes in a society can ultimately change a society's fundamental economic relations and political structures...
, the early ideas of the RCP had it that the "only hope of securing any decent sort of life - or even guaranteeing survival - lies in the working class taking control over society". It argued that traditional Stalinist and social-democratic appeals to the bourgeois state undermined working-class independence. Instead an independent vanguard party
Vanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party has its origins in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
should be organized to campaign for a distinctly working-class politics. In 1978, for example, when the left was strong within the Labour Party, the RCP argued that "Labour is the party which attempts to resolve the crisis by integrating militant working class resistance into the capitalist system". This position included a rejection of support for the Labour Party and one that questioned the allegiances of the trade union movement. A consequence of this belief was a growing distrust of traditional statist left-wing struggles as 'reformist
Reformism
Reformism is the belief that gradual democratic changes in a society can ultimately change a society's fundamental economic relations and political structures...
'. According to some, the RCP took a view that reformism consolidated bourgeois ideology in the potential leadership layers of the working class.
The RCP took a number of positions coined to distinguish independent working-class politics from statist reformism. These included
- The rejection of all controls on immigration.
- Opposition to any national economic recovery strategies, such as import controls, which aimed to pit British workers against those overseas.
- Free abortion and contraception on demand.
- Decriminalisation of homosexuality. and complete equality under the law.
- Unconditional support for the struggle against British imperialism in northern Ireland, on the grounds that "British workers cannot ignore the cause of Irish liberation without renouncing their own class interests".
- A claim that the police occupied Brixton: "We have to organise on the streets and housing estates to keep the police out."
- The party's campaign Workers Against Racism aimed to organise physical defence against racist attacks.
The RCP's programme can be traced through the publications "Our Tasks and Methods" (a reprint of the Revolutionary Communist Group's founding document), the 1983 general election manifesto Preparing for Power and the article "The Road to Power" in the theoretical journal Confrontation (1986).
Anti-deportation campaigns
The RCP's 'Workers Against Racism' campaign fought many deportation threats, like George Roucou's, on the grounds that British immigration law was racist. Roucou was a shop steward in the building workers' union UCATT in Manchester. Workers Against Racism helped to organise a campaign culminating in a one-day strike and demonstration by his fellow council workers on 6 February 1987. On 13 March 1987, with 500 protesting outside, the Home Office appeal panel reversed Roucou's deportation order. On 11 June 1985 Metso Moncrieffe was arrested and held by police pending a deportation order. Workers Against Racism campaigners raised the case - disrupting a test match at the Edgbaston cricket ground in July 1985 with a 'Metso Must Stay' banner - and helping to build a 1,000-strong march for him in December 1986. In September 1987, Moncrieffe's deportation order was overturned.Supporting Irish republicanism
Supporting Irish republicanismIrish Republicanism
Irish republicanism is an ideology based on the belief that all of Ireland should be an independent republic.In 1801, under the Act of Union, the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...
was central to the work of the RCP. In 1978 the RCT organised the Smash the Prevention of Terrorism Act Campaign, and held protests outside police stations where suspects were held. The RCT organised a conference of trade unionists opposed to Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
being part of the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
in Coventry in 1981, and later that year, held a march to the TUC conference, the Workers March for Irish Freedom. On Saturday 6 February 1982 the Irish Freedom Movement (IFM) was founded at a meeting in Caxton House, Archway - and TUC general secretary Len Murray
Len Murray
Lionel Murray, Baron Murray of Epping Forest, OBE PC, known as Len Murray was a British Labour politician and union leader.-Early life:...
wrote to the 13 trades councils that sponsored the conference threatening them with disaffiliation if they attended. Mick Hume
Mick Hume
Mick Hume is a British journalist and former organiser of the defunct Revolutionary Communist Party. He was raised in Woking and educated at Manchester University where he read American Studies...
, who edited the next step recalls that the IFM were accused of complicity in the 1984 bombing of the Conservative Party conference. The IFM published a quarterly bulletin Irish Freedom and organised an annual march on the anniversary of internment. When the voices of Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin is a left wing, Irish republican political party in Ireland. The name is Irish for "ourselves" or "we ourselves", although it is frequently mistranslated as "ourselves alone". Originating in the Sinn Féin organisation founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, it took its current form in 1970...
supporters were banned from the British broadcast media, Living Marxism carried a front page interview with its leader Gerry Adams
Gerry Adams
Gerry Adams is an Irish republican politician and Teachta Dála for the constituency of Louth. From 1983 to 1992 and from 1997 to 2011, he was an abstentionist Westminster Member of Parliament for Belfast West. He is the president of Sinn Féin, the second largest political party in Northern...
, and the IFM picketed Broadcasting House
Broadcasting House
Broadcasting House is the headquarters and registered office of the BBC in Portland Place and Langham Place, London.The building includes the BBC Radio Theatre from where music and speech programmes are recorded in front of a studio audience...
.
Campaign Against Militarism
In 1993 the RCP helped launch the Campaign Against Militarism (CAM), to fight against western military intervention. CAM organised protests against the military interventions in Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. On 10 September 1993 seventy Somalis and CAM supporters occupied the United States embassy after an alleged massacre of civilians in Mogadishu - the only time it has happened. After they were evicted by armed marines, eleven were convicted under the as yet untested 'criminal trespass' laws, but charges were dropped after lawyer Mike Fisher sought to have the case tried in the United States, arguing that the offence, if any, was committed on American soil. CAM was the only left-wing group that joined British Serbs in their demonstrations over military strikes on Yugoslavia.Controversial positions
The Revolutionary Communist Party took a number of positions that were strongly criticised by others on the left:- In The Truth About the AIDS Panic, Michael Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan wrote that there is 'no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly among heterosexuals in the West'. The pamphlet argued that the government campaign warning of a heterosexual aids epidemic was a moral panic that would worsen prejudice against gay people.
- In 1984, when British miners struck against redundancies the RCP argued that the union's refusal to hold a national ballot was a major problem: 'The only way to win the passive majority for the strike was to launch an aggressive campaign around a national ballot.'
- In the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, the RCP argued that 'sanctions don't make sense', because it was wrong to call on the governments that had supported Apartheid to overthrow it. Rather, workers ought to 'take direct action', like blacking South African imports at docks
After 1991, when the organisation re-thought its outlook, it adopted a number of positions that put it at odds with the 'New Labour' milieu:
- In The Empire Strikes Back, Mike Freeman identified 'the metamorphosis of what had long regarded itself as a peace movement into a war movement', after much of the left rallied to support the first Iraq War. Later this trend was called 'humanitarian imperialism' in Living Marxism. The RCP opposed western military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq and East Timor.
- Living Marxism argued against what it called the 'new authoritarianism', the greater official interference and surveillance of ordinary people by the state. The growth in 'at-risk' registers and CCTV were examples.
- The RCP opposed the increase in judicial and other kinds of non-majoritarian overriding of parliament, and opposed the subordination of parliament to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Criticisms
In 1981 Alex CallinicosAlex Callinicos
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Trotskyist political theorist, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party and its International Secretary, and is Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London...
of the British Socialist Workers Party
Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
The Socialist Workers Party is a far left party in Britain founded by Tony Cliff. The SWP's student section has groups at a number of universities...
took issue with the RCP's argument that 'such issues as racism and Ireland form ... a vital component of revolutionary propaganda'. Callinicos claimed instead that "if most of the workers involved have reactionary views on questions such as race, the position of women, and so on" that was less important than that they were fighting over pay and conditions. Callinicos also called into question the RCP's stress on "the connection between reformism and nationalism", saying they were 'paleo-marxists'. In 1984, the Socialist Workers Party denounced the RCP for calling for a national ballot in the miners' strike
UK miners' strike (1984–1985)
The UK miners' strike was a major industrial action affecting the British coal industry. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and its defeat significantly weakened the British trades union movement...
.
On 30 June 1990 Simon Watney and Edward King of the group OutRage!
OutRage!
OutRage! is a British LGBT rights group that was formed to fight for equal rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in comparison to heterosexual people. It is a group which has at times been criticised for outing individuals who wanted to keep their homosexuality secret and for being...
kicked over the RCP's stall at the Gay Pride
Gay pride
LGBT pride or gay pride is the concept that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people should be proud of their sexual orientation and gender identity...
march. Watney criticised Michael Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan for giving credence to the idea that AIDS was a 'gay plague' by their insistence that there would be no epidemic amongst heterosexuals in the west. But Outrage! was divided over the attack. In the 1990s, along with Edward King, Watney back-tracked on the point at issue, arguing instead that the 'everyone is at risk' approach misdirected public attention away from gay victims of the disease, which they said, should be 're-gayed'. Agreeing with Fitzpatrick and Milligan on the epidemiology, King in particular was much more critical on the political approach, which he said amounted to 'hostility to any form of autonomous lesbian and gay self-organizing'.
Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen is a British journalist, author and political commentator. He is currently a columnist for The Observer, a blogger for The Spectator and TV critic for Standpoint magazine. He formerly wrote for the London Evening Standard and the New Statesman...
, Marko Attila Hoare
Marko Attila Hoare
Marko Attila Hoare is a British historian of the former Yugoslavia who also writes about the current affairs of Southeast Europe, especially the Balkans including Turkey and the Caucasus.-Biography:...
and Oliver Kamm
Oliver Kamm
Oliver Kamm is a British writer and journalist. He wrote Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy , an advocacy of interventionism in foreign policy....
strongly criticised the RCP, and its former members after the dissolution, for opposing the humanitarian interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. Hoare, Cohen and Kamm also rejected Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
defence of Living Marxism and its coverage of the Bosnian war.
In 1997, environmental journalist George Monbiot
George Monbiot
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain and Bring on the...
argued that the RCP had undue influence at Channel 4 in an article titled "Marxists found alive in C4", after two of its members contributed to the Against Nature television programme, whose director, Martin Durkin
Martin Durkin (television director)
Martin Durkin is a television producer and director, most prominently of television documentaries for Channel 4 in Britain. He is managing director of WAG TV, a London-based independent TV production company. He has produced, directed and executive-produced a wide variety of programmes covering...
is also connected to the group. Elsewhere Monbiot took issue with Living Marxism for putting too much stress on freedom, as if "there should be no limits to human action, least of all those imposed by 'official and semi-official agencies … from the police and the courts to social services, counsellors and censors.'"
Andy Rowell and Bob Burton along with Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Information Network criticised the RCP for championing genetic engineering.
Life and closure
At the end of the 1980s, the RCP had moved away from its roots as a Trotskyist organisation, leading some critics to argue that they had abandoned the notion of the class struggleClass struggle
Class struggle is the active expression of a class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"....
. In 1988, its weekly tabloid newspaper the next step carried an article arguing that "the disintegration of the official labour movement, and the apparent lack of a left-wing alternative, has consolidated an overwhelmingly defensive mood in the working class".
In the election of 1987
United Kingdom general election, 1987
The United Kingdom general election of 1987 was held on 11 June 1987, to elect 650 members to the British House of Commons. The election was the third consecutive election victory for the Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, who became the first Prime Minister since the 2nd...
, RCP members stood as the Red Front and talked arguing that working people needed to break with the Labour Party, but no Red Front candidates retained their general election deposits (currently set at £500).
In 1988, the RCP made the next step into a bulletin for its supporters. Later, a monthly magazine called Living Marxism
Living Marxism
Living Marxism was a British magazine, originally launched in 1988 as the journal of the British Revolutionary Communist Party . It was later rebranded as LM and folded in March 2000 following an adverse ruling in a libel lawsuit brought by the British news corporation, Independent Television News...
was set up which was intended for a wider readership. Despite its beginnings as a far-left outlet, the politics espoused by the magazine developed a pronounced libertarianism
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
. In December 1990, Living Marxism ran an article which argued that the corrosive effect of the collapse of both Stalinism and Reformism on the working class meant that "for the time being at least, the working class has no political existence". In 1997, the point was put more forcefully:
In today's circumstances class politics cannot be reinvented, rebuilt, reinvigorated or rescued. Why? Because any dynamic political outlook needs to exist in an interaction with existing individual consciousness. And contemporary forms of consciousness in our atomised societies cannot be used as the foundation for a more developed politics of solidarity.
Between 1990 and 1997 the RCP developed the view that, more than capitalism itself, the danger facing humanity was the absence of a force for social change (in philosophical language, a "subject" of history), and the culture of low expectations that suppressed it. Prefacing a 1996 Living Marxism manifesto, Mick Hume
Mick Hume
Mick Hume is a British journalist and former organiser of the defunct Revolutionary Communist Party. He was raised in Woking and educated at Manchester University where he read American Studies...
argued that:
Of course ... we could have produced a familiar list of left-wing slogans complaining about problems like unemployment, exploitation and poverty which continue to scar our society. But that would be to ignore the transformation which has taken place in the political climate ... At different times, different issues matter most. Each era has thrown up its own great questions which define which side you are on ... [A]t Living Marxism, we see our job today as doing much more than criticising capitalism. That is the easy bit. There is a more pressing need to criticise the fatalistic critics, to counter the doom-mongers and put a positive case for human action in pursuit of social liberation. ... [D]ealing with ... unconventional questions, and puncturing the anti-human prejudices which surround them, is the precondition for making political action possible in our time.
In February 1997, shortly after the party disbanded, Living Marxism re-branded as LM, possibly to further distance itself from its leftist origins. Articles in LM argued
- against support for Tony Blair's New Labour project in 1997
- against "humanitarian interventions" in the Balkans, East Timor and Iraq.
- for freedom of speech and the "right to be offensive"
- against what they called the "new authoritarianism" of CCTV cameras, Anti-Social Behaviour OrderAnti-Social Behaviour OrderAn Anti-Social Behaviour Order or ASBO is a civil order made against a person who has been shown, on the balance of evidence, to have engaged in anti-social behaviour. The orders, introduced in the United Kingdom by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998, were designed to correct minor incidents that...
s, and anti-Harassment Laws. - against the demonisation of the white working class
This magazine ran at least two articles in which the authors argued that the mass murder
Rwandan Genocide
The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people in the small East African nation of Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days through mid-July, over 500,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate...
carried out in Rwanda in 1994 should not be described as genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
. In December 1995, LM carried a report from an aid worker in Rwanda which argued:
The lesson I would draw from my visit is that we must reject the term 'genocide' in Rwanda. It has been used inside and outside Rwanda to criminalise the majority of ordinary Rwandan people, to justify outside interference in the country's affairs, and to lend legitimacy to a minority military government imposed on Rwanda by Western powers.
LM continued to create controversy on a variety of issues - most notably on the British Independent Television News'
Independent Television News
ITN is a news and content provider with headquarters in the United Kingdom. It is made up of four key businesses: ITN News, ITN Source, ITN Productions and ITN Consulting. The ITN logotype can be displayed in any of 4 different colours, each of which represents a business unit. This is the...
(ITN) coverage of the Balkan conflict in the 1990s. The controversy centred on LM featuring an article by Thomas Deichmann which alleged that the ITN coverage of a refugee detention centre in Trnopolje
Trnopolje camp
Trnopolje camp was a concentration camp established in the village of Trnopolje near the city of Prijedor in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first months of the Bosnian War.-History:...
during the conflict gave the false impression that the Bosnian Muslims were being held against their will in Serbian
Serbia
Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...
concentration camps. The ensuing libel award and costs, brought in legal action by ITN against LM, was estimated to be around £1 million. It bankrupted the magazine and its publishers.
RCP and later organisations
Many former members of the RCP and some of the people who contributed to LM magazine continue to be politically active, most notably in the Institute of Ideas (a think tankThink tank
A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...
), led by Claire Fox
Claire Fox
Claire Fox , also known as Claire Foster, is a British writer. She is the director and founder of the British think tank, the Institute of Ideas, and a prominent former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party....
, the online magazine Spiked magazine
Spiked (magazine)
Spiked is a British Internet magazine focusing on politics, culture and society from a humanist and libertarian viewpoint.- Editors and contributors :...
, initially edited by Mick Hume
Mick Hume
Mick Hume is a British journalist and former organiser of the defunct Revolutionary Communist Party. He was raised in Woking and educated at Manchester University where he read American Studies...
and later by Brendan O'Neill, and the Manifesto Club, in which a leading figure is Munira Mirza, recently appointed by Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a British journalist and Conservative Party politician, who has been the elected Mayor of London since 2008...
as London's Director of Policy for culture, the arts and creative industries. These organisations continue, in their different ways, the adversarial politics of LM magazine and the RCP, leading some commentators , such as George Monbiot
George Monbiot
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain and Bring on the...
have pointed to apparent entryist tactics used by former RCP members designed to influence mainstream public opinion.
One party member from the 1990s explained in an article in sp!ked:
I never left the RCP: the organisation folded in the mid-Nineties, but few of us actually 'recanted' our ideas. Instead we resolved to support one another more informally as we pursued our political tradition as individuals, or launched new projects with more general aims that have also engaged people from different traditions, or none. These include spiked and the Institute of Ideas, where I now work. It must be said that this development annoyed our political opponents immensely, and a cursory Google search (try 'LM network' if you have time to kill) will return a plethora of exposés purporting to show that former members of the RCP are involved in various sinister conspiracies. ... [T]he impossibility of simply doing away with a school of thought that is no longer attached to an organisation is perhaps what annoys our opponents most of all.
Articles
- Beckett, Andy. "Licence to rile", The Guardian, 15 May 1999 (Retrieved 17 October 2006)
- Heartfield, JamesJames HeartfieldJames Heartfield is a British journalist who writes and lectures on economic regeneration. Heartfield is director of the think-tank Audacity.org, and a former member and theoretician of the Revolutionary Communist Party....
."Dave Hallsworth" Obituary, Guardian, 20 December 2007 (Retrieved 28 October 2009) - McVicar, John. The Scoop that Folded a Magazine Punch, 29 May 2000 (Retrieved 28 October 2009)
- Milligan, Don. Radical Amnesia and the RCP, Reflections of a Renegade, January 8, 2008.
- Walker, Dave. "The Demise of the Revolutionary Communist Party". What Next Journal. (Retrieved 16 June 2006)
- Turner, Jenny. Who Are They?, London Review of BooksLondon Review of BooksThe London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
Vol 32 no 13, 8 July 2010