Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978)
Revolutionary Communist Party | |
---|---|
Founded | 1978 |
Dissolved | 1997 |
Split from | Revolutionary Communist Group |
Newspaper | The Next Step Living Marxism |
Ideology | 1978–1991 Communism Trotskyism 1991–1997 Libertarianism |
Political position | 1978–1991 Far-left 1991–1997 Syncretic |
Colors | Red |
The Revolutionary Communist Party, known as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency until 1981, claimed to be a
After 1991, the party abandoned Trotskyism and mainstream leftism before publicly taking a libertarian position. It was disbanded in 1997, although a number of former members maintain a loose political network to promote its ideas.
Beginnings
The party originated as a tendency in the
Disagreements about the course the Revolutionary Communist Group should take in relation to support for the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the African National Congress 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 in 1978. The Revolutionary Communist Tendency (RCT) 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.[2][3][5] The RCT renamed itself the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1981.[5]
Stance
Taking a strong line which it considered to be inspired by
- The rejection of all controls on immigration.[8]
- Opposition to any import controls, which aimed to pit British workers against those overseas.[9]
- Free abortion and contraception on demand.[10]
- Decriminalisation of homosexuality[11] and complete equality under the law.[12]
- 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".[13]
- A claim that the police occupied Brixton: "We have to organise on the streets and housing estates to keep the police out".[14]
- Opposition to
The party'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).
Historian Evan Smith suggests that there has been a debate about whether the RCP was part of the left.[3] Frank Furedi later described the party's approach: “We tried to transcend the left-right divide. Lots of left-wingers said we were not really left-wing because we did not speak their language. We wanted to have an experimental approach and not repeat the problems of the past.”[17] Andy Beckett of The Guardian wrote:
Despite its name, most of its stances were not communist or revolutionary but contrarian: it supported free speech for racists, and nuclear power; it attacked environmentalism and the NHS. Its most consistent impulse was to invoke an idealised working class, and claim it was actually being harmed by the supposed elites of the liberal left.[18]
Front groups and campaigns
According to historian Evan Smith,
The RCT/RCP formed several
front groups around single issues during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the most prominent being the Irish Freedom Movement (which had begun as the Smash the Prevention of Terrorism Act Campaign) and Workers Against Racism (originally East London Workers Against Racism). SPTAC and ELWAR were both set up to rival the alleged chauvinism of the British left and larger campaign organisations around the issues of Irish solidarity and anti-racism, such as the Troops Out Movement and the Anti-Nazi League. From the beginning, it seemed that the RCT/RCP was more comfortable directing its own single-issue groups than joining other larger campaign groups.[3]
Workers Against Racism
Beginning as East London Workers Against Racism (ELWAR) before it was launched as a national campaign, Workers Against Racism campaigned against state racism. Protests were organised against deportations and passport checks at hospitals and unemployment benefit offices. ELWAR also organised patrols and vigils to defend immigrants against racist attacks.[19] In Parliament, Conservative MP Nicholas Winterton demanded of the Home Secretary "if he will seek to proscribe the East London Workers against Racism vigilante group".[20] Workers Against Racism was criticised in the press for its activities during the 1981 Brixton riots. An internal Home Office report to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed:
[T]he Revolutionary Communist Party set up a Lambeth Unemployed Workers' Group shortly before the Riots, and has since formed a South London Workers Against Racism group, similar to the East London Workers Against Racism which attracted some notoriety for organising vigilante patrols.[21]
Anti-deportation campaigns
The party'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
Supporting Irish republicanism
Supporting Irish republicanism was central to the work of the party. According to historian Jack Hepworth, "Advocating ‘unconditional support’ [for the IRA] enabled the RCP to challenge reformism on the British left and nationalism in the labour movement."[4]
In 1978, the RCP organised the Smash the Prevention of Terrorism Act Campaign and held protests outside police stations where suspects were held. The party 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 thirteen trades councils that sponsored the conference threatening them with disaffiliation if they attended.[24] RCP Political Committee member Mick Hume, who edited The Next Step, recalls that the IFM were accused of complicity in the 1984 bombing of the Conservative Party conference.[25] 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 the Brighton bombing, an RCP editorial in the next step said:
We support unconditionally the right of the Irish people to carry out their struggle for national liberation in whatever way they choose. We neither support nor condemn any particular tactic the republican movement pursues, whether it is an electoral campaign or a bombing campaign.[17]
Similarly, after the
By the end of the 1980s, according to historian Jack Hepworth, "the IFM was the largest radical solidarity movement in Britain, with an annual August march in London typically attracting an estimated 3,000 demonstrators" and an activist base beyond the party faithful; by 1990 it had twenty branches in the UK.[4]
Student politics
The party primarily recruited amongst students. By 1984, it had 45 university and polytechnic branches.[4]
Electoral involvement
The RCP stood candidates in the May 1981 local elections, under its own name and that of ELWAR. It stood a candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, its campaign mainly consisting of heckling Labour candidate Peter Tatchell, who lost the seat to the Liberal Party; the RCP candidate received 38 votes. It fielded four candidates in the 1983 United Kingdom general election, who achieved a total vote of nearly 1000. In 1983, the party began its annual "Preparing for Power" public conferences. In 1986, it launched a new theoretical journal, Confrontation. In the 1986 United Kingdom local elections, the RCP stood 38 candidates, including Claire Fox (under the name Claire Foster), who received a total of just under 2300 votes, with an average of 60 votes each. In the 1986 Knowsley North by-election, its candidate was also backed by the Workers Revolutionary Party and received 664 votes, its highest so far. In the 1987 Greenwich by-election, its candidate received 91 votes.[3]
In 1987, it launched the
Campaign Against Militarism
In 1993, the party 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,[26] 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 the military strikes on Yugoslavia in 1994.[citation needed]
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 Labour rallied to support the
Controversial positions
The 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".[29] The pamphlet argued that the government campaign warning of a heterosexual aids epidemic was a moral panic that would worsen prejudice against gay people.
- When British miners struck against redundancies in 1984, the party 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".[30]
- In the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, the party 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 blocking South African imports at docks.[31]
When the organisation re-thought its outlook in 1991, it adopted a number of positions that put it at odds with the New Labour milieu:
- 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.[32]
- The party opposed the increase in judicial[33] and other kinds of non-majoritarian overriding of parliament as well as the subordination of parliament to the European Convention on Human Rights.[34]
Criticism
In 1981,
The party's stance on AIDS was widely criticised by the gay rights movement.
Nick Cohen,[39] Marko Attila Hoare[40] and Oliver Kamm[41] strongly criticised the party and its former members after the dissolution for opposing the military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. Hoare, Cohen and Kamm also rejected Noam Chomsky's defence of Living Marxism and its coverage of the Bosnian war.[42]
In 1997, environmental journalist
Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Information Network criticised the party for championing genetic engineering.[45] Andy Rowell and Bob Burton[46] along with Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Information Network charged Living Marxism with a history of attacking the environmental movement.
Re-orientation and disbandment
At the end of the 1980s, the party had moved away from its roots as a
In the 1987 general election, party members stood as part of the Red Front, arguing that working people needed to break with the Labour Party, but no Red Front candidate retained their election deposit.
In 1988, the party made The Next Step into a bulletin for its supporters. Later that year, a monthly magazine called Living Marxism was set up 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 by Furedi, "Midnight in the Century", 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".[48]
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.[49]
Between 1990 and 1997, the party 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.[50] Prefacing a 1996 Living Marxism manifesto, Mick Hume argued:
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.[51]
In 1994, the Irish Freedom Movement was dissolved. As the Northern Ireland peace process unfolded, the RCP increasingly turned from unconditional support for the IRA towards scorn at its gradualism and reformism.[4]
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.[52]
- Against "humanitarian interventions" in the Balkans, East Timor and Iraq.[53]
- For freedom of speech and the "right to be offensive".[54]
- Against the "new authoritarianism" of CCTV cameras, anti-social behaviour orders and anti-harassment laws.[55]
- Against the demonisation of the white working class.[56]
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 by Fiona Fox from 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.[57][17]
LM continued to create controversy on a variety of issues, most notably on the British
Later organisations
Many former members of the party and some of the people who contributed to LM magazine continue to be politically active, most notably in the Academy of Ideas (formerly the
One party member from the 1990s explained in an article in Spiked:
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.[63]
In April 2019, three former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party,
References
- ISBN 9781526113658.
- ^ a b 'Our Tasks and Methods,' Revolutionary Communist, no 1
- ^ S2CID 253791729.
- ^ ISSN 1361-9462.
- ^ a b c "A radical life - Frank Furedi in conversation with Tom Slater". spiked. 28 July 2017. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
- ^ Revolutionary Communist Party, The Red Front: A platform for working class unity, London: Junius, 1987: 7
- ^ Mike Freeman and Kate Marshall Who Needs the Labour Party? London: Junius, September 1978
- ^ The Red Front, A Platform for Working Class Unity, London, Junius, 1987, p.37
- ^ Under a National Flag, London: Junius, 1978, p.17
- ^ Joan Phillips, Policing the Family, 1988, p.104
- ^ James Heartfield, 'The Tyranny of Identity Politics' Archived 2009-07-01 at the Wayback Machine Spiked-online, January 2008
- ^ Joan Phillips, Policing the Family, 1988, p. 104
- ^ Mary Masters Workers against Imperialism, 1979, p. 35
- ^ Pat Roberts and Christine Drury Police out of Brixton, London: Junius, 1981, p. 13
- ^ East London Workers Against Racism, Our Flag Stays Red, London: Junius, April 1981
- ^ Evan Smith (5 February 2022). "Anti-statism and the trajectory from the Revolutionary Communist Party to Spiked [paper at Historical Materialism conference, 2021]". New Historical Express. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
- ^ a b c LeBor, Adam (26 November 2020). "The Marxist cell in Number 10". The Critic Magazine. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
- ^ a b Beckett, Andy (1 August 2020). "Why Boris Johnson's Tories fell for a tiny sect of libertarian provocateurs". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
- ^ S. Glynn ,East End immigrants and the battle for housing,, Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) pp.528-545, p 542
- ^ 'Vigilante Groups', HC Deb 29 January 1982 vol 16 c451W https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1982/jan/29/vigilante-groups#S6CV0016P0_19820129_CWA_65
- ^ 'Civil Disorder', Records of the Prime Minister's Office, 1980 Apr 02 - 1981 Oct 29, PREM 19/484http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/details-result.asp?Edoc_Id=8759386
- ^ Under Siege: Racial Violence in Britain Today, Keith Teare, Penguin, 1988, page 145
- ^ Under Siege: Racial Violence in Britain Today, Keith Teare, Penguin, 1988, page 150
- ^ David Pallister, 'Ulster Conference Ban', Guardian, 4 February 1982
- ^ Mick Hume, Brighton bomb memories Archived 2010-06-15 at the Wayback Machine Spiked, 13 October 2009
- ^ The Guardian, 11 September 1993, p. 14; Daily Telegraph, 11 September 1993, p 9
- ^ Mike Freeman, The Empire Strikes Back: Why we need a new Anti-War Movement, London, Junius, 1993, p 46
- ^ Linda Ryan, 'Narcissus' Empire,' LM, December 1999, issue 126
- ^ London, Junius, 1988, p. 8
- ^ Mike Freeman, Our Day Will Come: The Miners' Fight for Jobs, London, Junius, 1985, p. 36
- ^ Charles Longford, Black Blood on British Hands, London, Junius, 1985, p. 59, p. 67
- ^ James Heartfield, 'The Victim Support State', Living Marxism, December 1993, issue 62
- ^ 'James Heartfield, 'Judges Rule,' Living Marxism, April 1996, issue 89
- ^ James Heartfield, 'Getting it Wrong on Human Rights,' Living Marxism, December 1997, issue 106
- ^ 'Politics or Abstract Propagandism', International Socialism no.11, 1981, pp.121-2
- ^ Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain: How the Personal Got Political (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2007) p. 161
- ^ Ian Lucas Outrage! an oral history, London: Cassell, 1998, p.26
- ^ Ian Lucas Outrage! an oral history, London: Cassell, 1998, pp.43-5
- ^ What's Left?, London: Harper, 2007
- ^ The Left Revisionist November 2003
- ^ '"LM was probably correct" - Chomsky', 31 October 2005
- ^ Marko Attila Hoare "The Guardian, Noam Chomsky and the Milosevic Lobby" Archived 2009-02-14 at the Wayback Machine, Henry Jackson Society, 4 February 2006
- ^ George Monbiot, "Marxists found alive in C4", The Guardian, 18 December 1997. Monbiot's online version of the article has had its headline changed from the print version, to "The Revolution has been Televised"
- ^ Far Left or Far Right? Prospect, November 1998
- ^ [1] Rowell and Matthews, 'Strange Bedfellows,' The Ecologist, 19 March 2003
- ^ Rising Rhetoric on Genetically Modified Crops, PRWatch, First Quarter 2003, Volume 10, No. 1
- ^ 'The Problem of Political Leadership', the next step, 3 June 1988, pp. 8-9
- ^ Frank Furedi (as Frank Richards). "Midnight in the Century", Living Marxism, December 1990
- ^ Frank Furedi "Class politics cannot be rebuilt or regenerated today", LM, May 1997
- ^ James Heartfield, The 'Death of the Subject' Explained, Sheffield, 2002
- ^ The Point is to Change It: A Manifesto for a World Fit for People, London: Junius (1996), p.x-xiii.
- ^ 'Nightmare on Downing Street,' LM, May 1997, issue 100
- ^ Linda Ryan "Narcissus' Empire", LM, December 1999, issue 126
- ^ James Heartfield 'Why hate speech?' LM, February 1998, issue 107
- ^ Charlotte Reynolds 'Hard Labour', LM,, May 1997, issue 100
- ^ Michael Fitzpatrick 'Yob culture clash', Living Marxism, November 1994, issue 73
- ^ "Massacring the truth in Rwanda", LM, December 1995, issue 85
- ^ Hume, Mick (2005-03-07). "The day I faced being a £1m bankrupt". The Times. Archived from the original on 2011-05-23. Retrieved 2007-04-14.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ "Sky executive among Johnson's first appointments". The Guardian. 23 July 2019. Retrieved 25 July 2019.
- ISSN 1361-9462.
Subsequently, maintaining an informal network, activists formed the influential internet magazine spiked in 2000 and founded the Institute of Ideas
- ISSN 0260-9592. Retrieved 24 November 2020.
- ^ George Monbiot Invasion of the entryists, The Guardian, 9 December 2003
- ^ Dolan Cummings, 'In defence of "radicalisation"' Archived 2011-06-22 at the Wayback Machine, sp!ked review of books, No. 5 (September 2007).
- ^ correspondent, Peter Walker Political (23 April 2019). "Former communist standing as MEP for Farage's Brexit party". The Guardian – via www.theguardian.com.
- ^ JamesHeartfield (26 April 2019). "Glad to announce that I am contesting the Yorkshire and Humber constituency for the @brexitparty_uk in the European elections".
- ^ "Former Revolutionary Communist Party's Spiked: Alka Sehgal Cuthbert Candidate for Farage's Brexit Party". 13 April 2019.
- ^ "Dundee West parliamentary constituency - Election 2019". BBC News. Retrieved 2020-09-15.
Further reading
- Beckett, Andy. "Licence to rile", The Guardian, 15 May 1999 (Retrieved 17 October 2006).
- Fitzpatrick, Michael (28 February 2018). "The point is to change it". Waiting for the Revolution. Manchester University Press. ISBN 9781526113658.
- Morgan Jones (30 June 2022). "Culture war 'Marxism': The Revolutionary Communist Party diaspora and the Conservative Party". Renewal. Retrieved 29 December 2022.
- Heartfield, James."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 Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, Reflections of a Renegade, January 8, 2008.
- Small, Mike. The Faction That Fools The World, Variant #24 (Winter 2005).
- Turner, Jenny. Who Are They?, London Review of Books Vol 32 no 13, 8 July 2010.
- Walker, Dave. "The Demise of the Revolutionary Communist Party" Archived 2006-06-16 at the Wayback Machine. What Next Journal Archived 2005-08-22 at the Wayback Machine. (Retrieved 16 June 2006).
External links
- Archive of scanned RCT and RCP Publications
- Archive.org archive of LM website
- Spiked Online
- Institute of Ideas
- Lobby Watch - LM & Institute of Idea IoI
- LM group Archived 2007-03-24 at the SourceWatch
- Living Marxism at SourceWatch