19.09.1996

New old ideas

Around the left

Every other left group is engaged in some process of rapprochement, regroupment, reorientation and so on. This is quite understandable, of course, as we start to really feel the reverberations from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Blairism. Socialism is in retreat, so what now?

This seems perfect terrain for the dynamic trendsetters of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Its journal, Living Marxism, likes to prides itself on its iconoclasm and readiness to overthrow all taboos. In fact, if you had spent the last few years reading nothing else but Living Marxism, you could be forgiven for thinking that this journal had a monopoly over ‘new’ thinking.

Mick Hume, editor and longstanding RCP veteran, proudly announces in the latest edition that the RCP’s manifesto - The point is to change it - was unveiled at the organisation’s summer school held at the end of July. Sounding unfortunately a bit like Tony Blair in full flight, Hume writes, “We had to tear up many of the longstanding assumptions of leftwing politics and look at things afresh” (September).

Fair enough. All leftwing groups and organisations should constantly question and critically examine everything that passes itself off as leftwing or Marxist. In this vein, Hume continues: “The world has changed almost beyond recognition over the past few years ... and the traditional manifestos of left and right alike are as much use as yesterday’s newspapers.” A large degree of truth there - depending on how you define left and right, of course.

However, you cannot but help get the impression that in this desire to “tear up” old shibboleths, the RCP is philistinely rejecting the history of the workers’ movement - which means, in effect, arrogantly turning its back on the best our history and tradition has to offer. Thus, there is much dismissing of the “old left” (never defined, of course) - which sees Hume ridiculing those who seek “contemporary relevance in the work of socialist monuments like William Morris”. More alarmingly, he tells us: “We cannot begin from what was said by somebody years ago, whether it be Adam Smith, Adam and Eve or even Karl Marx.”

Ironically, even though Hume fancies himself as quite a ‘young’ hipster, he sounds unnervingly like a certain ageing miners’ leader, who recently declared that he was “not interested in what one dead Russian revolutionary said to another”.

Sometimes the ‘new’ is not very new at all - remember the Eurocommunists?

Don Preston