04.07.1996

Fickle project

Around the left

Marxist and revolutionary publications, as we all know, are not always easy to find. If you live outside London, it can be near impossible. Instead, we are meant to be content with the same old ideas endlessly recycled. For the bourgeoisie this intellectual famine represents ‘the consensus’.

It should therefore be a source of near-rejoicing that a publication called Living Marxism, written by the impressive sounding Revolutionary Communist Party, manages to penetrate this blockade every month and smuggle its way onto the shelves of good old WH Smiths. Thanks to the audacious RCP, the workers now have an easily-accessible communist alternative to Marie Claire and The Face - right?

Unfortunately, the ‘Marxism’ of Living Marxism bears no relation to the Marxism of Karl Marx (or, for that matter, VI Lenin, Trotsky, etc). This is a Marxism which has been totally denuded of its revolutionary and scientific character, and then re-packaged so as to appeal to arrogant undergraduates from the suburbs.

The editorial in the latest issue (July/August) demands that we “forget poverty” and start talking about “the real issues”. Apparently, Living Marxism is “well aware of the exploitative character of capitalist economics” (thank heavens for that). However, the “hard facts about inner-city poverty” fail to animate or provoke people into action.

Therefore, “If poverty and related economic problems cannot move people today, then in political terms they do not really matter. There must be something else going on, some new problems that need to be understood if we are to alter the climate of thought and action.” The fickle, campus-based RCP clearly has no communist project of leading and inspiring the working class to revolution - quite the opposite.

So, what are “the real issues”? For Living Marxism, it is the “contemporary obsession with risks to personal health and safety” and the growth of “victim culture”. In all seriousness the editor, Mick Hume, states:

“Unlike the poor, who, as the old saying has it, are always with us, this atmosphere is entirely a product of the present. Understanding and addressing it is also the most pressing problem of our times”.

Unlike the thrusting, yuppie-type ‘communists’ in the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party, genuine communists realise that “the most pressing problem” facing us is the creation of a mass, working class party, not an eccentric middle class sect.

Don Preston