Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978)

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.

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.

[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".

[21]The party's Workers Against Racism campaign fought many deportation threats, like George Roucou's, on the grounds that British immigration law was racist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[4] 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.

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.

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.

[37] 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.

[38] 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.

[42] 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.

[43] 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'".

[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.

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".

[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.

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.

As the Northern Ireland peace process unfolded, the RCP increasingly turned from unconditional support for the IRA towards scorn at its gradualism and reformism.

[57][17]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.

[58] 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), 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.

[61] Some commentators, such as George Monbiot, have pointed to apparent entryist tactics of having jobs and lives used by former RCP members designed to influence mainstream public opinion.

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.