27.10.2022

Follow the leader

How did the original adherents of a fierce critic of capitalism end up praising rightwing nationalism? Paul Flewers gives the lowdown on a strange journey

The remarkable odyssey of Frank Furedi from the lively revolutionary Marxist of yore to the weary rightwing curmudgeon of today brings forth variously brays of ill-mannered laughter, gasps of amazement, knowing nods of ‘I told you so’ and, with former Revolutionary Communist Party supporters who remain true to Marxism (such as this writer), a certain sense of sadness at the political drift of someone whose writings, speeches and leadership they once appreciated and respected. In this respect I would like to add a few words to what Paul Demarty wrote in the Weekly Worker (‘Original takester’, September 29).

Frank, of course, is not the first leader of a leftwing group who has gone seriously astray. One thinks of Jacques Doriot, tipped by many to become leader of the French Communist Party, who lost out to Maurice Thorez in the early 1930s, and went off in a huff to form his own group, which rapidly became an outright fascist organisation. More recently, in the mid-1960s, we had Lyndon LaRouche, who led a split from the main US Trotskyist group which before too long entered the murky world of rightwing conspiracy theories and ended up quite insane. Doriot went to his death fighting against ‘Judeo-Marxism’ on the Eastern Front; LaRouche believed to the end that the British royal family was a front for an international drug-running cartel.

Of course, we are all entitled to change our ideas and, if we so desire, to reinvent ourselves. But what about those people who looked to Doriot and LaRouche: yes, what happened to them? What is perhaps even more disturbing than the political journeys taken by Doriot and LaRouche is that they both carried with them all the way rather more than a few of their original adherents.

Why do people uncritically follow leaders? Why do people - often very intelligent people - seemingly suspend their critical faculties when it comes to the ideas and actions of their leader, even when he veers off on a very strange course? How is it that Doriot and LaRouche each managed to draw along a retinue of doting admirers to the very end? It is a pertinent question, as it seems that Frank Furedi has done precisely the same with the remnants of his old organisation.

How did we get here? Looking back, I mark the turning-point with Frank’s article, ‘Midnight in the century’, published as the 1980s were drawing to a close. Boiled down, it argued that the working class had suffered a qualitative defeat and, although the RCP called for the “reconstitution of the working class”, the writing was on the wall, as it were. Although I did not realise it at the time, Frank was saying, if a little obliquely, that the working class was not up to the job which Karl Marx had assigned to it. This, of course, meant that he was calling into question the very raison d’être of his group, and in the process threatening to do himself out of a job.

As if subconsciously to deny such dire implications, the party leapt into a brief but manic binge of activity, as the 1990s took off. But this was really whistling past the graveyard, as it gradually became clear that it was losing any sense of direction, ending up basically annoying liberals with contrived provocations and (not unrelatedly) acting as unpaid attorneys for Serb nationalism in the Yugoslav civil wars. The Campaign Against Militarism was launched, but it had none of the flair of previous party campaigns: for many in and around the RCP, our hearts just weren’t in it (or in much else, for that matter).

The party had lost its sense of purpose. It was difficult to work out precisely what it was trying to say. Its manifesto, The point is to change it, published in 1996, spent a profligate 200 pages saying what could have been expressed in two or three. It is clear that this aimlessness reflected Frank’s loss of political direction. Members and supporters responded with their feet. The former fell away hand over fist: the South London branch, to which I was attached, lost five of its six members overnight - no explanation, nothing … Many of the latter drifted off or fell into inactivity. There was a brief flurry of open discontent amongst long-term supporters, but no evidence of any concerns being expressed amongst the party’s cadres. By the time the party dissolved itself in 1997 and the remnants set up Spiked, there really was not much left: the bulk of the final political committee and journal editorial board, the headquarters boys and girls, their respective other halves, and a few strays with nowhere else to go.

By the end, the RCP was whittled down to the true believers - but believers in what? It is hard to tell. In that strange, politically vague interregnum between ‘Midnight in the century’ and the emergence of Spiked as the distinct rightwing current that we know today, they followed Frank in his aimlessness. What better indication of fealty to a leader can there be than that, when he loses his way, the faithful dutifully tag behind him into the wilderness?

Expectations

It must be conceded that within this period, Frank nonetheless did come up with a novel concept: the ‘culture of low expectations’: that is, the predilection of people to avoid risk and to prefer the safe and mundane to adventure and experimentation. It seemed to some of us that Frank’s new invention was indeed drawn from experience. Not least in that it fitted in well with the transmutation of the dying RCP into Spiked: from wanting to change the world, Frank’s lads and lasses were now more content to whinge about it in, to cite Demarty, “an endless ratchet of malice without the possibility of catharsis”. Or, to be less charitable, we had Julie Burchill with a sociology degree.

After a couple more years of vagueness, Spiked found its feet. It soon was aligning with the most rapacious end of big business, winning the jackpot by schnorring $300,000 from the Koch Brothers - no mean feat. This metamorphosis bemused some folk, but it can be quite easily explained. If one concludes that, pace Marx, the working class is congenitally incapable of seizing power and introducing a new, cooperative form of society, then communism is impossible and you are left with capitalism. But if, as Spiked believes, the bulk of the capitalist class, much of the state machine and the entire liberal intelligentsia are averse to risk, then the only people remaining who can get things done are the ‘let it rip’ school of capitalists, who sneer at government regulations, laugh at health and safety requirements, and blithely ignore the reality of the climate crisis. This is a fairly unusual course for those abandoning Marxism to take, but, as the RCP was fundamentally hostile to anything vaguely liberal and poured scorn on social reforms, this not merely closed to it the usual bolt-holes of liberalism and social democracy, but made the orientation it took all the more likely.

Spiked’s more recent turn to nationalism and its new-found worship of the nation-state and borders have similarly perplexed some observers. But, if one rejects class politics, then what is there but the nation-state - especially if, as is the case, the section of society one has chosen as the active agent is too numerically slight and too unpopular with the general public to serve as a feasible social base?

So here we are, with Spiked marking its 25th anniversary. What is noticeable is the continuity of personnel. A handful have dropped out, no longer registering on Spiked’s index of authors, while a few new names have appeared. But Spiked is largely made up of the same people who wound up the RCP a quarter of a century ago. This raises a key question: how is it that the same people who hung off every word that Frank uttered when he was a revolutionary communist do the same now that he is, with no slight intended, a thoroughgoing reactionary?

We know that, with a charismatic leader, the adherents become infatuated with him. The truly devoted will follow the leader wherever he goes, whatever he says, whatever he does - even to the death, as in the case of the Reverend Jim Jones of Guyana’s ‘Jonestown’ infamy. Every word he writes or utters is accepted without question and is hailed as the work of a veritable genius. Heretics are purged with fire and sword, or at least a stern denunciation in the organisation’s press. There is a book or two awaiting for any study of the relationship between the charismatic leader and his true believers, especially one written ‘from the inside’, as it were.

And what better than to have one written by the leader himself? It is tempting to consider Spiked as Frank’s latest research project. After all, his academic field is sociology, and a project involving real live subjects would undoubtedly produce some fascinating results. So, rather than just letting the RCP expire, why not put failure to good use? Why not use the opportunity to run an experiment by seemingly reinventing yourself and your organisation, and then seeing how far your adherents will go in following you, as you repudiate each and every idea that attracted them to your organisation in the first place? Here, the dramatic shrinkage of the RCP down to a few dozen true believers would actually work to Frank’s advantage, as it means that not only are there fewer subjects to monitor, but that they are also of the purest content, unsullied by any impurities or dross remaining from the past.

There is plenty of raw material for a concentrated study. There have been so many opportunities for former RCPers to cavil at the repudiation of their erstwhile beliefs, but one has to admit that they have proven remarkably loyal, accepting all of Frank’s new ideas and new pals with equanimity. To take one recent example, it is somewhat incongruous that someone of his background should be hobnobbing with Hungary’s Fidesz, when one takes into consideration that this hard-right governing party has rehabilitated both the deeply anti-Jewish pre-war ‘Hungarian Christian’ tradition, which made life so miserable for Frank’s forefathers, and Miklós Horthy, the hard-right dictator who ended up as the wartime quisling ruler in Budapest. Fidesz resorts to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, when dealing with its liberal bête noire George Soros, yet our Spiked chums have taken it all in their stride - one feels that a lack of familiarity with central European affairs can only be partially to blame for this.

The idea of Spiked as a research project is, of course, purely a figment of my cynical imagination, and what we have here is another example of a leftwing leader who loses confidence in his ideas and goes off in an entirely different direction - and the phenomenon of adherents following the leader, irrespective of his evolution. There are on the way a couple of book-length accounts of the RCP and its transmutation into Spiked. We wait to see how they deal with the process by which a fierce critic of capitalism now praises its most rapacious elements, and a staunch internationalist became a die-hard defender of the nation-state - and how Frank Furedi managed to maintain the undying loyalty of a group of followers all the way through this strange transformation.