Louis, thanks for this. What kind of group is spiked-online? (I get their stuff automatically. Should I put them on my auto-trash list? I remember some good stuff in the past...)
I actually think that PEN-L'ers should monitor spiked-online carefully. This is a fairly influential group in Great Britain that sponsors conferences with the infamous Hill-Knowlton PR firm responsible for the campaign that helped the first Gulf War get started. They cooked up the lie about Kuwaiti babies being plucked from their incubators by Iraqi troops. People like Francis Fukuyama have spoken at these events, as well as British members of parliament.
Just a word or two on where they come from. In the 1980s, they launched the Revolutionary Communist Party as a split from Tony Cliff's group. As befits their name, they held to a kind of virulent sectarianism.
Their magazine was called Living Marxism, which blended typical sectarianism with a curious predisposition to "productivism", which meant embracing technology for the sake of technology. They stood apart from the anti-nuclear movement on both a sectarian and procapitalist basis, assuming that the risks around Chernobyl were worth taking.
As Living Marxism turned into LM, the business about risk-taking became more pronounced. They soon began to drop references to Marx and Lenin and libertarian ideology crept in. Eventually the cult leader, Frank Furedi--a sociology professor--told the Guardian that he was no longer a socialist but a libertarian. The rest of his posse went with him. James Heartfield is one of the few that still has Marxist pretensions.
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The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
