One ex-leading member of this strange group -who were neither revolutionary, nor communist nor indeed a party- now writes for the pro-establishment rag the Times I believe!!!!!

I remember them being known as 'The SWP with hairgel' for their extreme poshness. They gave up being the RCP to do living marxism which became just LM when they gave up marxism. They used to say anything to be controversial aids isnt caused by hiv, sanctions against apartheid were bad, cots deaths were caused by mums killing their kids - complete wankers.

They got their asses sued for denying ethnic cleansing was going on in yugoslavia and calling people who photographed it liars. Then they set up the institute of ideas and one of them - a very loud northern lass - appears on random tv/radio discussions about social issues when they want someone to say something 'controversial'.

Pretty sad knowing all this really - better watch myself.

Mick Hume, erstwhile guru of the RCP, now edits internet magazine Spiked. Kind of post-modern post-Marxist libertarian stuff. Still basically comes across as "I am clever and you are all stupid"!

Are the Revolutionary Communist Party the same as the Revolutionary Communist Group? They used to do a lot about South Africa and Ireland.

The Revolutionairy Communist Group are different from the Revolutionairy Communist Party and have their own paper Fight Racism! Fight Communism! Obsessed with Cuba but do good stuff on prisoners and are up for a bit of direct action rather than just flogging papers and get you to sign petitions and going on endless marches listening to Tony Benn.

I got involved with Living Marxism when I arived at university, naive and curious. They were a bright-eyed bunch of clever gits, out to recruit other clever gits - only they weren't as cleveras they thought they were. I went to a conference they organised - lots of shiny eighties suits and Thatcherite smiles and trendy types trying to get laid while snorting coke. It was pathetic. They went on about how Thatcher was cool because she was enterprising and that the main problem in the world was not poverty but that everyone was too scared of being greedy and that opposing the BNP was being Nazi.

They were a bunch of tossers and I was delighted when the journalists won their case against LM after it accused them of lying about Serbian war crimes. Still, they bang on about it, although I've seen with my own eyes what the Serb militias and the Yugoslav military did to Croatia and Bosnia. They won't accept that they might be wrong, that there is such a thing as objective truth that can stare you in the face.

Didn't they just kind of appear around the time of the miners strike.

Stella Rimington has already admitted in her memoirs that the NUM official who made the high profile visit to Libya to meet Gaddafi at the time was an MI5 agent, just "not in the normal sense". The RCP actively agitated against Scargill throughout.

They either got rumbled or started becoming counter-productive so they stopped getting funded.

As for the metamorphosis into some kind of lifestyle/PR outfit/thinktank, who the fuck knows what all that's about.

I think Mandy is now their leader.

As I recall, a lot of self proclaimed greenie type anarchists joined them after being demoralised by the failure of the miners strike. They all capitulated to some very strange guru type from the RCP who appeared one day ...
I was physically attacked by him for refusing to accede to his homegrown socialism, which i knew perfectly well wasnt authentic 'marxism' and with which i disagreed anyway.
the biggest blow to the RCP came quite recently when their magazine "Living Marxism" was prosecuted by ITN for alleging irregularities in reporting the conflict in Jugoslavia.

wasn't Frank Furedi, who still gets on the radio/tv occasionally with books etc saying we're all too obsessed with the risks of environmental destruction, child abductions etc, part of the RCP? I'm sure I remember George Monbiot having a go at them in the Guardian a few years ago....

also, my recollection of a chat with one of the rcp lipstick ladies (they went round sussex university in the late 1980s trying, sometimes literally, to seduce new young student boys into joining the party) is that they supported Thatcher, nuclear power, running down the health service etc largely because everything had to get a lot worse before the proletariat would be provoked into a revolution.

which may be a crap way to go about leftish politics, but it is interesting to look at current radical/reformist debates about 'globalisation' (aka the glob) in the same light, with some anarchists condemning NGOs for messing about on the edges of a corrupt system and putting off the day of its inevitable collapse/overturning ....

just a thought...

>>>

The SPGB; the Socialist Party of Great Britain (who are different to the old militant tendancy SP) think along similar lines, they even went to the extent of 'activley' opposed (which isn't alot since they believe that all forms of protest are ultimatly pointless because of the force of the state) the minimum wage because it would create false conciousness in the proleteriat and thus _set back_ the revolution!! crazy days. Question: If the sparts and the RCP were really funded by the CIA or MI5 then why didn't they try alot harder to actually mis*lead* the 'movement' and not just sit back and talk bollocks....

S

Why oppose the Tories in print in the 1980s, as the next step and Living Marxism did, but go around verbally supporting them? Doesn't make sense...


Handily for the critics of the old RCP, most of the points listed above rely on annecdote/gossip and don't refer to anything written down. The same low evidence threshold applies to the various claims of MI5/CIA funding. At least the judge who bankrupted LM pointed to something that actually existed (even if only to say that the article 'The Picture That Fooled the World' was factually correct, but still libellous)...

It still rankles with some sad people that a group was able to come from nowhere and build the what was then the third biggest organisation on the British far left in a short space of time. It's called hard work, you lazy dossers...

the rcp came about from a split with some other mob, somewhere along the line. it might even have been the swp.

i think the rcg originated in a split from the rcp.

mick hume founded 'living marxism' in 1988, it became 'lm' in 1997. he now runs spiked-online.com with former 'lm' publisher helene guldberg. hume is also a 'times' contributer.

former 'living marxism' publisher claire fox is now running a think tank by the name of 'the institute of ideas', and is a panellist on radio 4's 'the moral maze'.

both spiked and the ioi are based in the same building, signet house on farringdon road in london.

frank furedi, the rcp's guru, is still an academic and author based at the university of kent.

the rcp used to run a bookshop called 'the edge' in a sidestreet near kings cross in london, and a gallery called 'the angle' in birmingham.

as well as 'living marxism'/'lm' the rcp also published a weekly newssheet called 'the next step', and rcp people may later have been behind a tabloid culture/politics publication called 'caffeine', which had a bristol book shop po box.

the rcp recruited at big leftie demos, and on campus. it also recruited through front groups, such as ifm (irish freedom movement), war (workers against racism) and elwar (east london workers against racism), cam (campaign against miltiarism) and scam (schools campaign against militarism), sun (school student union network?), and its anti-cjb campaign.

potential recruits were picked out at big demos, interrogated on why the person was there, and if they gave their details were invited along to a meeting soon after. if they attended, a lot of effort was put into getting that person into book classes. potential recruits were assigned a personal contact, who essentially was responsible for the indoctrination of the recruit. recruits would be harassed into attending as many meetings as possible, on a variety of topics. there were also regular conferences, where frank furedi and mick hume would be among the keynote speakers.

there was no democracy within the organisation, certainly not for recruits, and all strategy was top-down. dissent was crushed, and dissidents - or just people who did not show enough enthusiasm - were humiliated.

there is an interesting (it'll be a first for him!) article by george monbiot, with details of some key players and other rcp-limked organisations, originally published in 'prospect', posted up on urban75:

 http://www.urban75.org/archive/news028.html

disinfopedia claims the institute of ideas and/or spiked receive funding from the following:

saatchi & saatchi, novartis, adam smith institute, relate, british council.

see  http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Institute_of_Ideas for context, and interesting notes on prominent rcp/lm figures.

The RCP was a faction that canme out of the International Socialists (who in tern turned into the SWP). In about 1990 they started Living marxism which turned into LM. LM became very popular with many different types of people - for instance BBC journo John Simpson, faye Weldon, etc. LM had to close down after ITN sued for libel after LM accused ITN of misleading broadcast about prisoners of war in Serbia. LM's doubts about the news piece had some grounds to them but they stil lost the case. (libel laws are gagging laws and no freind of the left.) Since then LM has turned into spiked online and the Institute of Ideas. They have become libertarian. Much of what they is interesting and alot more radical than any crap coming out of the drippy left these days. In fact, the left has nop politics at all - apart from being scared of the 21st century. So why berate spiked and others for trying to stir up some debate in radical political circles?

In response to the half-appropriately named 'Wankerwatch': Following this link ( http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA3D8.htm) takes you to a detailed commentary on cot death, penned by the same GP who also co-wrote the RCP-published book 'The Truth about the AIDS Panic'.

Once again this shows that those dishing out smears never let the facts get in the way of a bit of low-life polemic. Generally it's not worth replying to all these on-line eyewitness accounts of RCP-quartermasters dispensing hairgel, emitted by the likes of George Monbiot (who himself spent the Thatcher years hiding out in BBC Bristol's natural history section). This is because it's preferable to be debating the actual ideas held by individuals or organisations, rather than ones made up by confused kids.

I was involved for a while with the RCP/LM, in Manchester. I might have some doubts about their politics now, but one thing they said stuck with me as valuable: the left's greatest enemy is its own traditionalism. If they were heterodox, and sometimes posturing, at least the RCP refused to bang on about 'the Marxist tradition' like it was some deadweight stopping us from responding to a very rapidly changing world in new ways.

IMC, do your job! RCP is currently stealing as much money as possible from Bradley Manning Defense Donations!