Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978)

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The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) started as a Trotskyist political organisation in 1978 and slowly metamorphosed into a libertarian group. It was disbanded in 1997 but its ex-members are still active in a network of think tanks and media pressure groups.

The party started life within the Revolutionary Communist Group, which had split from the International Socialists in the 1970s. Disagreements about the course the Revolutionary Communist Group should take led Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent to leave it and form its own group, the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, which later changed its name to the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The RCP believed that there was no such thing as an independent working class in the UK, but that this was contaminated by bourgeois ideology. As such any direct appeal to the working class was doomed to failure and the best that could be done was to prepare a vanguard for a world revolution.

A consequence of this belief was a growing disinclination to take part in traditional leftwing struggles and a growing tendency to oppose these as being "reformist". In the view of the RCP, reformism consolidated bourgeois ideology in the potential leadership layers of the working class.

At the end of the 1980s the RCP had moved away from its roots as a Trotskyist organisation, abandoning the notion of the class struggle and declaring the working class dead as a political force. Instead, the RCP would concentrate on making its voice heard within the media, allegedly practising a policy of entryism into the media establishment. This followed after the election of 1987, when RCP members stood as the Red Front and talked about the replacement of the Labour Party with the RCP. No Red Front candidates retained their deposits. (In UK general elections, a candidate is required to put up a monetary deposit in order to be named on the ballot. This deposit is returned to the candidate if he she wins 5% of the vote.)

The RCP's ideology had evolved into something closely approaching libertarianism, coupled with a strong belief in human domination of nature. It opposed any and all restrictions on science, technology and business, taking pro-corporate stances on issues like genetic modification of food, banning of tobacco advertisements and global warming.

In 1988, the RCP made its weekly tabloid newspaper The Next Step into a bulletin for its supporters. For the wider readership was a new glossy magazine called Living Marxism, which in 1997, at the same time as the party disbanded, became LM magazine. LM magazine courted controversy on all sort of issues, most notoriously about the British Independent Television News' (ITN) alleged falsification of evidence concerning Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia. This led to a libel suit by ITN against LM Magazine, which LM Magazine lost and which led to it ceasing publication.

The remainders of the RCP and LM Magazine regrouped around the think tank Institute of Ideas, led by Claire Fox as well as the online magazine Spiked Online, edited by Mick Hume. Both continue the contrarian stance of LM Magazine and the RCP.