Marxist Tradition Libertarians

[Marko]

The Wikipedia entry for the Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978) states:

The Revolutionary Communist Tendency (RCT), which emerged in 1978, began as a Trotskyist political organisation in Britain in 1978, becoming the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1981, in the tradition of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party. After 1991, the party slowly metamorphosed into what might be characterised as a Libertarian group rather than a Bolshevik or Trotskyist one as traditionally conceived. The Party was disbanded in 1997, although a number of former members maintain a loose political network which promotes some of its core ideas.

This sounds very interesting. Further:

Taking a strong line which it considered to be inspired by Vladimir Lenin’s work on the relationship between imperialism and reformism, the early ideas of the RCP had it that the “only hope of securing any decent sort of life - or even guaranteeing survival - lies in the working class taking control over society”. It argued that traditional Stalinist and social-democratic appeals to the bourgeois state undermined working-class independence. Instead an independent vanguard party should be organized to campaign for a distinctly working-class politics. In 1978, for example, when the left was strong within the Labour Party, the RCP argued that “Labour is the party which attempts to resolve the crisis by integrating militant working class resistance into the capitalist system”. This position included a rejection of support for the Labour Party and one that questioned the allegiances of the trade union movement. A consequence of this belief was a growing distrust of traditional statist left-wing struggles as ‘reformist’.

The RCP took a number of positions coined to distinguish independent working-class politics from statist reformism. These included:

• The rejection of all controls on immigration.
• Opposition to any national economic recovery strategies, such as import controls, which aimed to pit British workers against those overseas.
• A claim that the police occupied Brixton: “We have to organise on the streets and housing estates to keep the police out.”

The Revolutionary Communist Party took a number of positions that were strongly criticised by others on the left:

• In The Truth About the AIDS Panic, Michael Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan wrote that there is ‘no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly among heterosexuals in the West’.The pamphlet argued that the government campaign warning of a heterosexual aids epidemic was a moral panic that would worsen prejudice against gay people.
• In the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, the RCP argued that ‘sanctions don’t make sense’, because it was wrong to call on the governments that had supported Apartheid to overthrow it. Rather, workers ought to ‘take direct action’, like blacking South African imports at docks.
• In The Empire Strikes Back, Mike Freeman identified ‘the metamorphosis of what had long regarded itself as a peace movement into a war movement’, after much of the left rallied to support the first Iraq War. Later this trend was called ‘humanitarian imperialism’ in Living Marxism. The RCP opposed western military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq and East Timor.
• Living Marxism argued against what it called the ‘new authoritarianism’, the greater official interference and surveillance of ordinary people by the state. The growth in ‘at-risk’ registers and CCTV were examples.
• The RCP opposed the increase in judicial and other kinds of non-majoritarian overriding of parliament, and opposed the subordination of parliament to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Between 1990 and 1997 the RCP developed the view that, more than capitalism itself, the danger facing humanity was the absence of a force for social change (in philosophical language, a “subject” of history), and the culture of low expectations that suppressed it.

Apparently you have a very radical, ideological, principled and idealistic group of Marxists who over time, basically on their own came to very courageous and very libertarian stances.

This party published Living Marxism Magazine, which later became LM Magazine, which is more or less the precursor to Spiked. I’ve been reading Spiked for quite a bit now (found them through periodic links by antiwar.com) and they are absolutely excellent. Very courageous and very original. Also very libertarian, the authors claim Spiked would be endorsed by “the free-thinker” Karl Marx and explicitly oppose Capitalism, but nonetheless their content is actually a joy for a libertarian to lay his eyes on. Absolutely for free speech, against all imperial wars, for Steve Jobs, against government in nutrition, against climate change alarmism, tirelessly exposing the neo-Malthusians, and just generally poking the enviromentalist Luddites praising progress and civilization instead…

So any thoughts on this development of some hardcore British Communists into pretty decent and radical libertarians (albeit not of a Rothbardian brand)? Sounds like something fascinating, wish I knew more about it.

[tunk]

lol

@The definitive guide to modern-day Malthusians

This year the human population will reach seven billion. And probably the same number of newspaper column inches will be filled with Malthusian cant.

Malthusians are multiplying like rabbits. They’re everywhere. In respectable Western society you can’t swing a bat without hitting a Malthus-inspired misery guts.

[Unreconstructed Malthusians] are the easiest to spot. Usually white-haired and posh, and ironically based in bits of Britain that have more sheep than human beings, they are not averse to quoting from Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. They have sleepless nights thinking about people in Nigeria having sex.

As to your question, I remember Christopher Hitchens, a “booze-soaked ex-Trotskyite popinjay” journalist (as George Galloway once called him) saying that he couldn’t honestly call himself a socialist anymore, since the world now lacks a coherent socialist alternative (as if we ever had one; these are his words) and a dedicated support base to undergird it. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, it takes an extreme kind of crankishness nowadays to maintain that markets (to the extent that we actually have a market system) are more bad than good. Most veterans of the radical left have probably realized this, but are loathe to convert to convential social democrat-statism since they’ve spent their whole lives maintaining that liberals are soppy compromisers.

[Birthday_Pony]

As someone who has run into the RCP on numerous occasions, I can say they are most definitely not libertarian by any standard. They’re fans of closed-door meetings, top down structure, and the state (yuh-duh). Plus, they tend to be assholes. I don’t think arguing for political independence = libertarianism.

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

I think this is a different RCP than the one in the US. I don’t really know much about either though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party,_USA