I cross swords cordially and robustly with James Heartfield from time to
time.
This often malicious article (below), just published in the Guardian,
clearly contests with LM its entry into the public space of civil society.
As a member of Democratic Left I too believe very much that any marxism
that is living has to locate itself in civil society, and generally I
prefer a Gramscian view of this. I agree with some LM contributors that
analysis of the quality of late capitalist society is part of that struggle.
I do not object to James or Mick Hume getting articles in the Times and
similar organs so long as the compromises, and compromises are absolutely
necessary, are not ones of principle. I am not purist about this, but like
others I mistrust the warmth of the reception that LM writers have achieved
even though in a coded way it is a signal of an awareness that marxist
questions have to be taken up.
I was offended in the past by the RCP's opposition to sanctions against
apartheid South Africa, and as is well known I object to what I see as LM's
cover for what are in effect Serbian apartheid policies.
Overall it seems to me ideologically that LM has adopted nothing more than
a radical version of bourgeois democratic rights and by promoting this has
found a niche within capitalist society that does not fundamentally shift
the power relations in favour of the working people. That is why it has
become part of the acceptable search for alternative interesting
experiences, and a commodity in itself, (whatever may be said about past
sectarian methods of organisation of some of its members which is not so
relevant to its current appeal).
In copying this to the list I do not expect James Heartfield to feel under
pressure to refute what LM supporters may see as the many misreprestations
or perhaps downright falsehoods, but with the Guardian this morning it is
now part of wider British civil society, and I would be interested in his
response to what are the main *serious* political and ideological questions.
Chris Burford
London
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Licence to rile
Until 1996, Living Marxism was the organ of the Revolutionary Communist
Party, splinter group of a splinter group. Now, the magazine has renounced
the old party and re-emerged as LM, glossy opinion-former and sponsor of
high-brow celebrity seminars. But is the aim still the same - finely
calculated outrage? By Andy Beckett.
Saturday May 15, 1999
The Guardian
It was the water jug that did it. There it was, in the middle of the
panellists' table, at the very first session of the conference organised by
Living Marxism. The jug was large and thick-sided and stylish, not the
glassware you might expect at such a marginal-sounding gathering. The stage
lights made it sparkle; a Habitat window-dresser would have been proud.
What was most noticeable, though, was the large, blocky logo printed down
the side. Today's revolutionary vanguard recommend Absolut Vodka.
And Perrier, too, to judge by the panellists' tumblers. And Waterstone's,
which had a stand in the hall outside. And the Royal Shakespeare Company,
which was sponsoring a seminar. And the Times Literary Supplement, which
was giving away free copies. And a right-wing think tank called the
Education & Training Unit, which was sponsoring another seminar, to
"explore the part which markets can play in meeting educational needs".
Being a modern Marxist, it seemed, was a surprising business. The
magazine's conference was not about late capitalism or the Irish Question.
It was not held in some draughty meeting hall or tobacco-stained L-shape
above a pub. It was about "standards in
the arts, education and the media", and took place at the Riverside Studios
in Hammersmith, on an expensive stretch of the Thames, with Jeeps and the
odd Mercedes parked nearby. On the first day, a Friday, proceedings had to
wait for Chris Evans to
finish filming his weekly TV programme.
Outside in the street, there were no sellers of political newspapers or
rival radical factions or collectors of petitions for the usual causes.
Inside, nobody heckled. Nobody said the word "struggle" or "poverty" or
"injustice". Instead, one session was titled,
"What's wrong with cultural elitism?" Another was, "Is classical music
dead?" The invited speakers included Kate Adie and John Simpson from the
BBC, and Melvyn Bragg and David Starkey, and Janet Daley of the Daily
Telegraph. The first discussion panel
alone contained Nicholas Kenyon, the director of the Proms, John Tusa, the
head of the Barbican Centre, and Sir John Mortimer. John Humphrys of Radio
4's Today programme was chair. For his introductory remarks, Humphrys
leaned forward in his seat and
made a little joke.
Someone had written an article, he said, accusing the conference of being
"sinister". He read out a bit, mocking each word with his taunting,
tough-interviewer's vowels. Then, for his punchline, he looked up at the
audience, which rose in orderly ranks before him,
every seat taken: post-graduates and media professionals, professors
examining programmes, men in ostentatious black glasses, women in brisk
suits with trousers. "Of course," said Humphrys, "this is all a
Marxist-inspired show trial." The chuckles were loud and knowing.
In the lobby of the Riverside, there was a temporary display of the
magazine's covers. They looked strong: brash colours, big type,
boldly-tinted photographs and graphics. You could see why WH Smith, as well
as more esoteric newsagents, is happy to stock it.
Living Marxism, or LM, as it has recently renamed itself, is selling more
copies than ever: up to 15,000 a month, about two-thirds as many as the New
Statesman, and at least five times as many as Socialist Worker and the
other street- corner papers of the far left. In March, the former
Conservative MP George Walden wrote an article praising LM in the London
Evening Standard. The current LM advertisements include admiring quotes
from Fay Weldon and JG Ballard.
The magazine has begun to prosper by being calculatedly, divertingly
offensive.
It has supported the right of "racists" to publicly deny that the Holocaust
occurred, the disgraced MP Neil Hamilton (a "sacrificial lamb"), and a
"little lobby group" for British gun-owners called the Shooter's Rights
Association. Most notoriously, in February 1997,
the magazine published an eight-page article about what it called "the
picture that fooled the world": the much-seen still from ITN's footage of
Bosnian Muslims behind barbed wire in a Serbian camp. Far from actually
finding a concentration camp, the article
claimed, British journalists (including the Guardian's Ed Vulliamy) had
presented the image in such a way as to make the refugees look like
prisoners. ITN is suing Living Marxism for libel.
The controversy fits a pattern. These days, with mainstream politics
seemingly becalmed, any gusts of contrarian thought are highly marketable.
Whenever a radio phone-in or a TV discussion programme -or any other
promoter of pundits and chat - needs to froth
up a quarrel, LM obliges. It has called Tony Blair a "wanker". It has
compared environmentalists to the Nazis. It has backed the Millennium Dome,
and Rupert Murdoch's failed takeover of Manchester United. It will take any
view at all, it seems, which is likely to
rile.
All this has been done with an efficiency rare in extreme political groups.
At the Riverside, after the opening session, Waterstone's head of
sponsorship was alive with smiles. "LM are absolutely brilliant at putting
on these debates," she said. "Claire Fox [LM's conference director] is one
of the most organised people I know.
She is a very impressive individual." In a side room, Living Marxism was
holding a reception for the conference speakers and their partners. Claire
Fox, who was wearing a long scarlet jacket and black trousers, made a
smooth thank-you speech and then started
circulating. She might have been a management consultant at a client
evening. And all around the room, pouring wine for the panellists, offering
tiny pastries, and gently inquiring about everyone's careers and interests,
or simply posing, very upright, against
the shiny white walls, were the correct young staff of Living Marxism.
The men wore suits, or close-fitting shirts with pressed trousers. They had
disciplined hair: shaven, cropped or gelled back. Their shoes were gleaming
as tap dancers'. As they stood in twos and threes, clicking their heels,
coughing into their palms and clasping
their hands behind their backs, something else about them became apparent.
They were mostly wearing black: black shirts and black ties, black socks
and black polo necks, everything spotless.
The women were similar. They wore suits and tied-back hair, or short skirts
and tight tops. Few of them seemed older than 30. And, like their male
colleagues, who slightly outnumbered them, they asked lots of questions.
They always made eye contact. They
smiled a lot, and stood very close, and tried fleeting, flirty touches.
Near the end of the reception, at about midnight, a well-dressed couple in
their thirties walked across. They had, as the man put it, "a driving
situation". Could I drive? Would I drive them home? He did not say where
they lived. Their eyes shone pleadingly, but they seemed quite sober. We
had known each other for all of a minute.
Living Marxism is a mystery. The magazine's contents page lists a staff of
five, yet there were at least 40 people at the Riverside wearing LM badges.
The magazine says it is self-supporting, yet it carries barely any
advertising. Its website offers discounts on
books by Marx and Lenin, yet its writers never cite either. It is still
sold in left-wing bookshops, yet a recent editor's letter includes the
following sentiment: "Pain, suffering and offence are as much a part of
living among people as are love and friendship."
Ever since Living Marxism began publishing 11 years ago, it has drawn
rumours: that it is subsidised by the Serbs; that it is secretly funded by
a South African millionaire; that it is a front organisation for the
British security services; for right-wing think
tanks; for American corporations. The magazine is too well-run, these
theories usually go, too suddenly successful, too disconnected from the
Left, to be a genuine part of the political fringe. Instead, its accusers
say, Living Marxism is really an agent
provocateur, deliberately discrediting other radicals by its shrill,
erratic opinions. There is another school of thought, however. It notes
LM's pale young staff, and publicity-seeking, and po-faced offensiveness,
and concludes that the magazine is a joke, a complicated and long-sustained
prank to point up the exhaustion of the British Left. It's just that not
everyone gets it yet.
The LM offices are opposite a merchant bank. They occupy the ground floor
of a dirty brown block on the edge of the City of London. There is no
nameplate, just a scribble of black felt pen beside the intercom. It
doesn't read "LM magazine" or "Living Marxism", but "Informinc", the name
of LM's parent company. The Informinc premises are right at the back of the
building through three sets of doors. Inside, it might be a company making
computer software: pale, polished floorboards, the polite chatter of
keyboards and people sitting very upright beneath delicate ceiling
spotlights. Not a single political poster hangs on the walls. In a spotless
alcove off the main room, with his suit jacket still on, sits Mick Hume,
editor of Living Marxism.
His handshake is unenthusiastic. His eyes are small and fierce, and he has
parted his hair with extreme precision. On his desk lie proofs of an
article called "Why We Must Defend Vile Scum". He is a confident talker. In
his flat, precise voice, he declares early
on: "There is nothing innovative or challenging happening in the culture."
Later, by way of a soundbite, he offers: "The only people storming palaces
are the tourists looking for Lady Di souvenirs." In between, he rehearses
the LM worldview: the globe is "at the
end of a political cycle of left and right"; class, once the foundation of
all left-wing thinking, "is not a political factor"; there is "no
alternative to the market". Instead, the LM project has evolved into
"reclaiming the human subject".
The magazine now favours a rather Thatcherite brand of rugged
individualism. And Hume has gained some novel bed- fellows: "I went to this
right-wing libertarian conference last week," he says. "The political right
could learn from LM…
We are touching a lot of raw nerves." And serving a few vested interests?
Hume's voice rises: "We have no links with any party or government. This
rumour that we get financed by a white South African millionaire is just
fantasy. We've got no bloody money. Nobody gets paid for contributions. We
have a shortfall of £5,000 per issue. We've got a lot of medium-sized
benefactors." So where do all the rumours come from? He virtually snorts
out the words. "Sectarian animosities. There's a lot of bitter sectarian
people
around. I've done a lot over the years that's upset a lot of people."
What Hume is reluctant to mention is that, until three years ago, Living
Marxism was the official journal of a more obscure organisation: the
Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). After a long, uncharacteristic pause,
and a certain amount of looking at the floor, Hume admits that he "spent 10
years in the RCP". What about the other staff of LM? "The network of people
I live and work with contain lots of people who were members of the RCP…"
Hume tries to sound casual. "I didn't think you were going to write about
the RCP and all that."
This is a common LM tactic. At the Riverside, any mention of the RCP
brought mildly mocking smiles. Didn't I know the party had wound itself up
in 1996? Frank Furedi, the magazine's best-known contributor, who teaches
sociology at the University of Kent,
pushes a similar line. "The connection between LM and the RCP is
non-existent to minimal. Nobody says New Labour is like Old Labour. People
grow up. I haven't been involved in the RCP organisationally for nine
years." Then he adds: "I was involved in the RCP from the very beginning."
He stops himself: "I don't want to get into that…"
In truth, it has always been very hard to tell the RCP and the magazine
apart. The party was founded in the mid-70s, but with the same motivation
as today's LM: to be clever, self-contained, a bit contrarian and dangerous
- "a reaction against the Left", in
Furedi's words.
He was a refugee from Hungary, whose parents had been detained by the
Russians after the 1956 uprising. He had "always felt uncomfortable with
left-wing politics". In 1970, nevertheless, Furedi and his future comrades
were in the International Socialists (IS),
the precursor of the Socialist Workers' Party. They were ambitious and
impatient, so they did what a certain kind of activist does: they formed a
faction. Unlike all the other left-wing groups, then and now, they did not
have a set of ideas. Instead, as a
contemporary pamphlet called The British Left Explained described, they
watched and waited: "When asked to contribute to a discussion, faction
members would either remain silent or mutter . . . Any attempt to agree on
specific proposals would have split
the group."
By 1973, the other members of IS had tired of this posing. Furedi and his
allies were condemned as "the Right opposition" and expelled. They decided
to call themselves the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG). At first, the
RCG sought success through
theorising: in particular, about the precise rate by which profits would
fall as capitalism inevitably - they assumed - exhausted itself. David
Yaffe, an academic at Sussex University, unveiled a calculating machine,
called the velocitometer, which he had invented to measure this decay.
Claiming his device was accurate to five decimal points, he made a bid for
the RCG leadership.
Not everyone backed him. Furedi, in Yaffe's words, "began organising among
a clique of middle-class members, and became their self-styled guru". In
1976, after a cloud of disputes over Stalinism, South African policy and
Marxist mathematics, Furedi founded
the breakaway Revolutionary Communist Tendency. Two years later, that
fragmented as well (over the need, or otherwise, for "further study"). The
RCP emerged from the wreckage. A particular way of doing things emerged,
too. "The party was well-organised, very disciplined," says a member from
the time. There were only 30 to 50 people involved, but enough rules for an
organisation far grander: "One should dress well, to get respect. Positions
were taken from Lenin and Trotsky. History was interpreted as the history
of betrayals. Everyone else had got it wrong."
The RCP thought of itself as under siege. False names were adopted. "There
were fascists outside our meetings. There must have been some infiltration
by the security services. There were people from other Trotskyist
organisations infiltrating us. You would
always look around at people…" This paranoia proved an ideal motivator:
"Times were very exciting. You felt things were falling apart. You wanted
to be with the people who knew what they were doing."
Within the RCP, a central committee assumed almost priestly authority:
"They did a lot of reading of the texts. They had acolytes. It was
quasi-religious - that's the best way to understand it." Members were
required to give up between a tenth and a quarter of
their income, and between 20 and 30 hours of their weekly free time.
Headquarters, an office in south London, issued a stream of ideological
adjustments. "It was a sort of training or initiation for members to defend
these extreme positions, however bizarre." The RCP did not just want
British troops out of Ulster; it praised the IRA. It did not simply oppose
the Gulf War; it hailed Saddam. Its public meetings usually drew about 100
people.
The RCP sought clever recruits with unformed opinions. A cell of members
rented a house near Oxford railway station. Their methods were unsubtle but
persistent. "They'd come and sit in the university junior common rooms and
strike up conversations," says someone the RCP approached during the late
80s. "They'd come up to you if you were reading a paper on your own, point
at a story, and say, ‘What d'you think of that, then?' " The next stage was
more private. "They arranged a formal chat with you in your room. They
really emphasised how educational joining the RCP would be."
His lasted two hours. "They'd question you very closely about your
background, what you'd read, which demonstrations you'd been on." At the
end, the RCP recruiter would hand over a favoured text, something by Lenin
or Furedi, who had started writing books about imperialism under the name
Frank Richards, and tell their contact to read it, then to bring their
thoughts to a seminar. These also took place, very punctually, in students'
rooms: there would be half-a-dozen potential members, and an RCP tutor
leading discussions. "The party members were very articulate, but slightly
humourless. They'd explain things as if for a small child." Afterwards,
unusually for a left-wing gathering, there would be no flight to the pub.
The RCP discouraged contact with the outside world. Their Oxford terrace
was very clean and comfortable, "like a house for Rhodes Scholars". Only
occasionally would they let their guard down: "They used to love bragging
about their private supporters who they
would never name: sons of MPs, children of High Court judges." The RCP
recruiters themselves tended to be graduate students, always under 30; more
private details were never divulged.
At the Riverside, the Living Marxism personnel seemed shy as well. While
they sought out conversations about the conference or about politics, and
sat for many hours on the sofas in the bar, gesticulating busily,
attempting to secure converts, the young men in
suits would say little about themselves. One was studying English at
Oxford. Most of them had joined LM in the past year or two. "A bit of
writing" was as far as their commitment went. They spoke in middle-class
voices with a slight bureaucratic stiffness.
Personal questions "were not relevant". Over the weekend, the ones who had
come from outside London were staying with LM colleagues in the capital.
I asked another whether he lived in London. He said, "I do now I'm with the
magazine."
RCP members had many duties, too. Besides the recruiting and the reading,
they had to sell the party journal, first a newspaper called Next Step,
edited by Mick Hume, then Living Marxism. Meanwhile, from the late 70s on,
the RCP began to infiltrate more mainstream organisations. An early target
was student Irish societies.
A graduate of South Bank Polytechnic in London remembers: "We'd set up an
Irish Society, but it wasn't a ‘Troops Out' one. We had a conference on the
media and Northern Ireland. It was a Saturday; not many people turned up -
about 20 people during the morning. Then, all at once, about six or seven
more turned up: all men, white men . . . They proclaimed themselves as RCP,
and proceeded to take over the meeting. They were very heavy, physically
and intellectually. We went to the pub at lunchtime and said to each other,
‘Who are these fucking people?' "
The RCP's operations grew more ambitious. During the mid-80s, a few miles
up the road, another opportunity presented itself. Thanks to a dispute over
the attendance of a member of the National Front, North London Polytechnic
had become a testing-ground for every radical faction in the capital. RCP
activists noted the pickets and occupations and began arriving. "About 1986
or 1987, we found out that a lot of people were exploiting our special
access policy for working-class students," says one of the polytechnic's
former administrators. "A lot of them were using false names.
It became very obvious on their application forms." By signing up for
evening classes only, RCP members left themselves free to disrupt the
college all day. "They would turn up at Students' Union meetings, and
really push for confrontation. They would dominate every meeting. If there
was an occupation organised by someone else, and the administration went
into negotiations, the RCP would try to undermine them."
RCP activists never said what they wanted. They never fraternised with the
other factions. "They just popped out of the air," says a left-wing veteran
who was there. "They didn't seem part of the British Left, not even the
most extreme Maoist organisations from the
60s… It was almost an intellectual exercise."
At the same time, Roger Jinkinson, the polytechnic's deputy director,
sensed that some of the RCP "had been around… They would put up barricades
in doorways and stop me - and I'm a big lad - going through. I remember
them grabbing hold of me and physically pushing me." He pauses. "Their
agenda seemed to be Thatcherite: get the place closed down." (It wasn't .)
By the end of the 80s, the RCP had reached a dead end. All its occupations,
and hijacking of other groups' meetings, and attempts to disguise itself as
the Red Front or an Irish Republican or an anti-apartheid organisation, had
left it with a few hundred members
and an eccentric reputation. It lost 14 deposits at the 1987 general
election.
The following year, the party launched Living Marxism. "Our readers are
young, angry, thinking people," announced Hume, then a 29-year-old graduate
in American Studies from Manchester University.
"I think of myself as a communist who writes propaganda, rather than as a
journalist who happens to be left-wing."
At the same time, though, the RCP began to remodel itself in a more
capitalist direction. Small private companies, and the protection they
enjoy from prying eyes under British law, make attractive institutions for
a cagey political organisation. At first, Living Marxism was put out by
Junius Publications Ltd. In 1997, the magazine set up Informinc Ltd as
well. According to Companies House, neither has an annual turnover of more
than £300,000, so extremely sparse accounts can be filed. Last year, Junius
Publications listed the sort of assets you might expect of any small,
office-based company: £215,000 of property, £17,000 of computers, and
£6,500 of fixtures and fittings. Hardly a huge conspiracy.
Nor does Furedi seem terribly sinister. Hume does admit that, "the magazine
has always relied on him quite heavily to break new ground", and Furedi
does write at a zealot's pace, for his own frequent polemical volumes and
almost every national newspaper. But
he is slight and self-deprecating and given to small smiles. He shuffles
rather than walks, and wears two shirts at once. He keeps a picture of his
baby son behind his desk.
Furedi's narrow shared office is at the top of a concrete staircase in an
outlying building of the University of Kent campus. The porters downstairs
do not all seem to know him, but he has been teaching at Canterbury "since
the 70s". His main area of study is
"interpersonal relations", he says, in his quick, east European English,
"and the way they have become formalised, subject to outside pressures…" He
reaches for a catchphrase. "The growth of puritanism."
Furedi's preferred reading is American, mainly liberal-bashing or
libertarian magazines such as New Republic and Reason. The modern left, he
says, "has become very dumb… If anything, there are a few people on the
right who are asking questions."
He says state regulation is "even worse" than the free market. Instead, he
believes in "human potential" and "maximum freedom". But hasn't Living
Marxism perhaps abused the latter? "The magazine is a way of getting a
reaction," Furedi says. "All kinds of weird
people write for it." He clasps his hands, and looks out of the window.
"As long as LM is isolated and under attack, it's going to be a caricature
of itself. If you point the finger at me, I'm going to be more definite
about something I may not actually be so sure about."
For a moment, he sounds weary. "For years they've been looking for some
kind of financial link… I get really hurt that my character and integrity
is soiled by being called a prostitute for the Serbs or the far right. The
level of hatred . . ." Furedi sits in his squeezed-in armchair, surrounded
by shelves and computer disks and photocopied articles he would rather be
reading. "I feel like Adolf Hitler or something."
Maybe Furedi is misunderstood. Maybe he and Hume and Living Marxism are
just political and intellectual adventurers, a bit on the cheeky side, a
bit abrasive, but doing no more than any open society should allow. Holding
secretive meetings and wearing black on Saturdays hardly constitutes
fascism. And plenty of other tiny factions have been heckling and jostling
for decades, without being pursued as foreign stooges.
But there is something alienating about Living Marxism. It could be the
coldness of the writing, the sense that the anger and irreverence on every
page has been calculated, as much as felt. It could be the over-familiar
trajectory of Furedi and Hume's opinions: from far left to libertarian to
somewhere well to the right (a recent book by Furedi praises corporate "fat
cats" for their "heroism"). For all their eclectic subject matter, and LM's
relentless defending of free speech, most contributors seem to share the
editor's world view.
At the Riverside conference, which was promoted as an open debate for all
comers, Hume was speaking or chairing a panel somewhere in the building,
without a break, every single day. He dropped in LM's current policy
declarations - "This is a culture of low expectations"; "We want a society
fit for adults" - with the tirelessness of a politician. His subordinates
fluently repeated them. And on the first evening, towards the end of the
opening reception, he forgot for a moment to be tolerant.
Hume approached the photographer for this article, who had been taking
pictures unmolested all evening, and read his name badge. "Have you got
what you want, then?" Hume asked.
"I'm not sure what I'm after," the photographer replied.
"I know what your editor wants," said Hume.
"What's that?", said the photographer.
"Why don't you just fuck off?" said Hume. And then, not terribly hard, he
shoved him in the chest.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
--- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
