I’ve sort of been following the group that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party, then morphed into Living Marxism and is now known as Spiked online/The Institute of Ideas. They’re a classic example of how a group of extreme leftwing nutcases can metamorphose into a group of rightwing nutcases.
Yesterday they turned up on George Monbiot’s radar:
One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The “neo-cons” pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics – entering organisations and taking them over – appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment.
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
When I first started getting interested in socialism and politics in general, Spiked Online looked interesting and modern, but it soon seemed to be more glitz than substance: establishment dogma with a fashionable cyberlibertarian sauce. Plenty of opinions on everything, but few ideas of their own…
Earlier posts on the Spiked crew:
Brendan O’Neill doesn’t get it
one man’s journey into sectarianism