Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978)

The Revolutionary Communist Party, known as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency until 1981, was a Trotskyist political organisation formed in 1978. From 1988 it published the journal Living Marxism.

Not to be confused with Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1944) or Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist–Leninist).
Revolutionary Communist Party
Founded1978 (1978)
Dissolved1997 (1997)
Split fromRevolutionary Communist Group
NewspaperThe Next Step
Living Marxism
Ideology1978–1991
Communism
Marxism-Leninism
Trotskyism
1991–1997
Libertarianism
Economic liberalism
Humanism
Political position1978–1991
Far-left
1991–1997
Right-wing
Colors  Red

After 1991, the party abandoned Trotskyism and publicly took a libertarian humanist position. It was disbanded in 1997, although a number of former members maintain a loose political network to promote its ideas.

Beginnings
The "Workers March for Irish Freedom", taking the cause of Irish hunger strikers to the Trades Union Congress conference in 1981, was a turning point for the party

The party originated as a tendency in the Revolutionary Communist Group which had split from the International Socialists 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.[1] 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 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.[1]

Stance

Taking a strong line which it considered to be inspired by Vladimir Lenin's work on the relationship between imperialism and reformism, the party originally held that the "only hope of securing any decent sort of life - or even guaranteeing survival - lies in the working class taking control over society".[2] It further argued that traditional Stalinist and social-democratic appeals to the bourgeois state had undermined working-class independence and that as a result 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".[3] 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 which included:

  • The rejection of all controls on immigration.[4]
  • Opposition to any national economic recovery strategies, such as import controls, which aimed to pit British workers against those overseas.[5]
  • Free abortion and contraception on demand.[6]
  • Decriminalisation of homosexuality[7] and complete equality under the law.[8]
  • 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".[9]
  • A claim that the police occupied Brixton: "We have to organise on the streets and housing estates to keep the police out".[10]
  • The party's campaign Workers Against Racism aimed to organise physical defence against racist attacks.[11]

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).

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.[12] 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".[13] 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.[14]

Anti-deportation campaigns
George Roucou, marching to freedom, with his wife Kay and Workers Against Racism organiser Charles Longford

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 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.[15] 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.[16]

Supporting Irish republicanism

Supporting Irish republicanism was central to the work of the party. In 1978, it 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.[17] Mick Hume, who edited The Next Step, recalls that the IFM were accused of complicity in the 1984 bombing of the Conservative Party conference.[18] 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.

Campaign Against Militarism
Campaign Against Militarism protest in 1994

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,[19] 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.

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 First Iraq War.[20] Later, this trend was called "humanitarian imperialism" in Living Marxism. The party opposed Western military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq and East Timor.[21]

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".[22] 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".[23]
  • 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.[24]

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.[25]
  • The party opposed the increase in judicial[26] and other kinds of non-majoritarian overriding of parliament as well as the subordination of parliament to the European Convention on Human Rights.[27]

Criticism

In 1981, Alex Callinicos of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) took issue with the party'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", then that was less important than that they were fighting over pay and conditions. Callinicos also called into question the party's stress on "the connection between reformism and nationalism", saying they were "paleo-marxists".[28] In 1984, the SWP denounced the party 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 party's stall at the Gay Pride march.[29] 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. However, OutRage! was divided over the attack.[30] 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".[31] 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".[32]

Nick Cohen,[33] Marko Attila Hoare[34] and Oliver Kamm[35] strongly criticised the party 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's defence of Living Marxism and its coverage of the Bosnian war.[36]

In 1997, environmental journalist George Monbiot argued that the party 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.[37] 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'".[38]

Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Information Network criticised the party for championing genetic engineering.[39] Andy Rowell and Bob Burton[40] along with Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Information Network charged Living Marxism with a history of attacking the environmental movement.

Disbandment

At the end of the 1980s, the party had moved away from its roots as a Trotskyist organisation, leading some critics to argue that they had abandoned the notion of the 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".[41]

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 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".[42] 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.[43]

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.[44] 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.[45]

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.[46]
  • Against "humanitarian interventions" in the Balkans, East Timor and Iraq.[47]
  • For freedom of speech and the "right to be offensive".[48]
  • Against the "new authoritarianism" of CCTV cameras, anti-social behaviour orders and anti-harassment laws.[49]
  • Against the demonisation of the white working class.[50]

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:

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.[51]

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 in which he 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 arising from legal action by the ITN against LM were estimated to total around £1 million. The action bankrupted the magazine and its publishers.[52]

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 Institute of Ideas[53]), a think tank led by Claire Fox; the online magazine Spiked, initially edited by Mick Hume and later by Brendan O'Neill; and the Manifesto Club in which a leading figure is Munira Mirza, appointed by Boris Johnson as London's Director of Policy for culture, the arts and creative industries, and subsequently as his head of Number 10 policy unit.[54] Other groups produced by former members include Debating Matters, the Young Journalists' Academy, WorldWrite, Audacity.org, the Modern Movement, and Parents with Attitude. The Battle of Ideas has also been held annually since 2005 by the Academy of Ideas, which has been described as a "refuge" for former RCP members.[55] Some commentators, such as George Monbiot, have pointed to apparent entryist tactics used by former RCP members designed to influence mainstream public opinion.[56]

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.[57]

In April 2019, three former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Claire Fox, James Heartfield and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert were selected as candidates for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party in the 2019 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom.[58][59][60] Stuart Waiton stood in Dundee West at the 2019 general election.[61]

Articles

References
  1. 'Our Tasks and Methods,' Revolutionary Communist, no 1
  2. Revolutionary Communist Party, The Red Front: A platform for working class unity, London: Junius, 1987: 7
  3. Mike Freeman and Kate Marshall Who Needs the Labour Party? London: Junius, September 1978
  4. The Red Front, A Platform for Working Class Unity, London, Junius, 1987, p.37
  5. Under a National Flag, London: Junius, 1978, p.17
  6. Joan Phillips, Policing the Family, 1988, p.104
  7. James Heartfield, 'The Tyranny of Identity Politics' Spiked-online, January 2008
  8. Joan Phillips, Policing the Family, 1988, p. 104
  9. Mary Masters Workers against Imperialism, 1979, p. 35
  10. Pat Roberts and Christine Drury Police out of Brixton, London: Junius, 1981, p. 13
  11. East London Workers Against Racism, Our Flag Stays Red, London: Junius, April 1981
  12. S. Glynn ,East End immigrants and the battle for housing,, Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) pp.528-545, p 542
  13. 'Vigilante Groups', HC Deb 29 January 1982 vol 16 c451W http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1982/jan/29/vigilante-groups#S6CV0016P0_19820129_CWA_65
  14. '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
  15. Under Siege: Racial Violence in Britain Today, Keith Teare, Penguin, 1988, page 145
  16. Under Siege: Racial Violence in Britain Today, Keith Teare, Penguin, 1988, page 150
  17. David Pallister, 'Ulster Conference Ban', Guardian, 4 February 1982
  18. Mick Hume, Brighton bomb memories Spiked, 13 October 2009
  19. The Guardian, 11 September 1993, p. 14; Daily Telegraph, 11 September 1993, p 9
  20. Mike Freeman, The Empire Strikes Back: Why we need a new Anti-War Movement, London, Junius, 1993, p 46
  21. Linda Ryan, 'Narcissus' Empire,' LM, December 1999, issue 126
  22. London, Junius, 1988, p. 8
  23. Mike Freeman, Our Day Will Come: The Miners' Fight for Jobs, London, Junius, 1985, p. 36
  24. Charles Longford, Black Blood on British Hands, London, Junius, 1985, p. 59, p. 67
  25. James Heartfield, 'The Victim Support State', Living Marxism, December 1993, issue 62
  26. 'James Heartfield, 'Judges Rule,' Living Marxism, April 1996, issue 89
  27. James Heartfield, 'Getting it Wrong on Human Rights,' Living Marxism, December 1997, issue 106
  28. 'Politics or Abstract Propagandism', International Socialism no.11, 1981, pp.121-2
  29. Ian Lucas Outrage! an oral history, London: Cassell, 1998, p.26
  30. Ian Lucas Outrage! an oral history, London: Cassell, 1998, pp.43-5
  31. Simon Watney Imagine Hope: Aids and Gay Identity, London: Routledge, 2000, p.235
  32. Edward King Safety in Numbers: Safer Sex and Gay Men, London: Routledge, 1994, p.247
  33. What's Left?, London: Harper, 2007
  34. The Left Revisionist November 2003
  35. '"LM was probably correct" - Chomsky', 31 October 2005
  36. 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
  37. 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"
  38. Far Left or Far Right? Prospect, November 1998
  39. Rowell and Matthews, 'Strange Bedfellows,' The Ecologist, 19 March 2003
  40. Rising Rhetoric on Genetically Modified Crops, PRWatch, First Quarter 2003, Volume 10, No. 1
  41. 'The Problem of Political Leadership', the next step, 3 June 1988, pp. 8-9
  42. Frank Furedi "Midnight in the Century", Living Marxism, December 1990
  43. Frank Furedi "Class politics cannot be rebuilt or regenerated today", LM, May 1997
  44. James Heartfield, The 'Death of the Subject' Explained, Sheffield, 2002
  45. The Point is to Change It: A Manifesto for a World Fit for People, London: Junius (1996), p.x-xiii.
  46. 'Nightmare on Downing Street,' LM, May 1997, issue 100
  47. Linda Ryan "Narcissus' Empire", LM, December 1999, issue 126
  48. James Heartfield 'Why hate speech?' LM, February 1998, issue 107
  49. Charlotte Reynolds 'Hard Labour', LM,, May 1997, issue 100
  50. Michael Fitzpatrick 'Yob culture clash', Living Marxism, November 1994, issue 73
  51. "Massacring the truth in Rwanda", LM, December 1995, issue 85
  52. 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.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  53. Beckett, Andy (1 August 2020). "Why Boris Johnson's Tories fell for a tiny sect of libertarian provocateurs". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 November 2020.
  54. "Sky executive among Johnson's first appointments". The Guardian. 23 July 2019. Retrieved 25 July 2019.
  55. Turner, Jenny (8 July 2010). "Who Are They?". London Review of Books. 32 (13). ISSN 0260-9592. Retrieved 24 November 2020.
  56. George Monbiot Invasion of the entryists, The Guardian, 9 December 2003
  57. Dolan Cummings, 'In defence of "radicalisation"', sp!ked review of books, No. 5 (September 2007).
  58. correspondent, Peter Walker Political (23 April 2019). "Former communist standing as MEP for Farage's Brexit party" – via www.theguardian.com.
  59. JamesHeartfield (26 April 2019). "Glad to announce that I am contesting the Yorkshire and Humber constituency for the @brexitparty_uk in the European elections".
  60. "Former Revolutionary Communist Party's Spiked: Alka Sehgal Cuthbert Candidate for Farage's Brexit Party". 13 April 2019.
  61. "Dundee West parliamentary constituency - Election 2019". BBC News. Retrieved 2020-09-15.
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