Back in 2017, the Spiked website treated us to a retrospective on former
Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) leader Frank Furedi’s ‘radical
life’. This offered a refreshingly innovative take on his previous
organisation’s history. Furedi said: “For a lot of people, freedom and
democracy were means to something else, to realise some other objective.
Whereas, for [the RCP], freedom and democracy were seen as things that
were good in and of themselves.”[1] Good that is, unless you were a
rank-and-file member or supporter of the RCP, starved of information by
a self-selecting and insular ‘elite’ around Furedi at the top of the
organisation. This blog has recently documented how the old leadership
positively trumpeted the closed nature of its inner sanctum against RCP
critics.[2] Call me old-fashioned but it doesn’t exactly reek of Thomas
Paine.
Of more lasting interest perhaps is Furedi’s rendering of the background
to ‘Midnight in the century’ (1990), an extraordinarily thin article by
Frank Richards (Furedi) that informed the RCP’s ideological death
spiral.[3] Furedi argued of this period: “You had the Soviet Union being
destroyed, which I thought was a really good thing. But the trouble was
that if there was no alternative, people would see it as being yet
another confirmation that any kind of radical politics wasn’t really on.
Under those circumstances, I felt that it really was important to
rethink.”[4] This eventually led to Furedi ditching the notion that the
working class was a progressive force for change and questioning the
relevance of Marxism for the 21st century. Instead, Furedi and his RCP
leadership coterie set their sights on a renewed class-neutral
‘Enlightenment’ that stressed rational thought and an unfettered pursuit
of human reason to solve society’s woes.
https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2021/01/12/rcp-1989-90/
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