1) LM Magazine published Ron Arnold, shortly after Doug Henwood connected them with him: The Unabomber took his cue from the anti-technology rants of the US environmental lobby, suggests RON ARNOLD A darker shade of green It was over before it began. At the last minute, Theodore Kaczynski admitted he was the anti-technology Unabomber who terrorised the USA for two decades, killing three and injuring 29 others. His plea bargain averted the death penalty, but he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. By avoiding trial, the Unabomber left many haunting questions unanswered. But court documents reveal an astonishing fact that did not make the headlines: Kaczynski's anti-technology rage was fed and even inspired by the anti-technology philosophy of environmentalism. Reproduced from LM issue 108, March 1998 2) How David Helvarg views Ron Arnold and the "wise use" movement: The Wise Use/Property Rights response to the crisis has been to argue that environmental protection is costing jobs and undermining the economy. This appealingly simple argument doesn't always hold up in the face of complex economic realities, but for out-of-work loggers in dying timber towns, workers in polluting factories being challenged by vocal community activists, or struggling farmers unable to fill or sell off wetland acreage, it answers the question of why the American dream seems to be slipping from their grasp. For people in desperate circumstances whose needs are not being met by the system, Wise Use has provided an identifiable enemy, "the preservationist," on which to focus their anger and vent their rage. If, as Ron Arnold has put it, Wise Use is engaged in a "holy war against the new pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people," it's the pagans who have suffered most of the casualties. "We were told if we killed any of them there was $40,000 that was there to defend us in court or to help us get away," says Ed Knight, an ex-logger and Hell's Angel describing how he was hired to lie in ambush with an Uzi, waiting to shoot Earth Firsters in the California woods. "I was driving home from a concert and saw a glow in the mist. By the time I got to my house a mile and a half in from the highway it was burned to the ground," recalls Greenpeace USA's toxics coordinator Pat Costner of the arson fire that destroyed her Arkansas home of almost twenty years. Maine antilogging activist Michael Vernon recalls another arson fire, which destroyed his house and almost cost him his life. "I'm not sure if it was the smoke alarm that woke me up or if it was just light in the house," says Vernon, "but I jumped in my boots and threw my coveralls on and I opened the door and the flames were starting to come up the stairs. There was a porch right outside the door, so I ran out and jumped off the porch into the snow." 3) The Guardian report on LM magazine: 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. 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. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
