Monbiot on RCP

The RCP tried to recruit me as a member in the late 1980’s/90s, but I was always suspicious of them and never wanted to join the cult. They were very persuasive and sent me on a series of ‘educationals’ up and down the country with a series of attractive young women. There was a very tough upper tier (The Political Committee) that held a priestly-like authority; this was Frank Furedi (Chief Theoretician), Mick Hume (Editor of The Next Step/Living Marxism) and Dr Mike Fitzpatrick. Then a second tier was Ann Furedi, Clare Fox, her sister Fiona, and a bunch of contributors to Living Marxism.
I found most of them to be quite vile in person, avowed Humanists who had a very low opinion of other people. They turned on me, en masse, at a ‘conference’ in London, when I started to question why they went along with Furedi’s increasingly bonkers theoretical positions. But any dissent would be a disciplinary matter for a member, who by the way, surrendered a third of their wages to the RCP as a condition of membership.
The final straw for me was when I couldn’t attend one of their events because of a work commitment, and a 20 year old Joanna Williams, now a regular on the media as an educational and parenting ‘expert’ and currently a leading light in the SDP, gave me a bollocking over the phone. I told them to get stuffed.
I would now place them in the same category as the myriad of think tanks that operate out of 55 Tufton Street. They began as an outcrop of the International Socialists and ended up as a right wing think tank for hire.

Here’s a BBC report from 2000 on the libel case against Living Marxism http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/677481.stm . The articles about Living Marxism and the RCP on Wikipedia give an account of their demise, and it reminded me that their most prominent derivation is now the online magazine Spiked. I read Living Marxism magazine for a while in the mid-90s, and it was always slickly presented, although I don’t remember much in the way of Marxism…

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Mike Foster.

I am more interested in what Monbiot has to say about the way this set of tossers helped to spread erroneous and totally unscientific views about ME.
One of our daughters, a mother of two in her early forties, has this condition, which has been getting steadily worse over the last decade. She is now virtually bedbound, can’t tolerate normal daylight or noises, has to be spoken to in a whisper and can only whisper back. For years ignoramuses like these helped to spread the belief that it was all in the mind and the sufferer’s own fault, and that totally inappropriate treatments were the answer, whereas in severe cases they make it worse. My daughter and others like her know different. As if she would willingly withdraw from everyday life and avoid experiencing her children growing up.
As Monbiot pointed out, it’s a physical illness and much more should have been done over the years to find the cause and a possible cure. I’ve written to both Tory and Labour governments about it and had a dialogue with Sean O’Neill, the father of the girl who died. Since her death there are now promises from the government that it will be taken more seriously but there’s always the chance that as long as it doesn’t affect business as usual, and mainly affects women, and long covid recedes, it will be swept under the carpet again.

ME sounds something like neurasthenia which was fashionable from the middle of the 19th century until the late Edwardian period. Nietzsche described it as a feeling of ‘fedupness’. Lenin mentions it somewhere. It only affected middle-class women who did no work ( imagine a proletarian going to her boss and telling him she was feeling a bit ‘fragile’today -down the road for you my girl!).
It wasn’t ‘cured’ as their was nothing physically wrong with these women. It just became unfashionable.
As Dave Perrin recognised, Furedi does have some pertinent things to say about the wackiness of modern capitalist social relations.
Monbiot, and the paper he writes for, are a prime example of this oddness.

A common reaction, is it not, even in the medical profession, to say that any illness that isn’t understood must be all in the mind.
I am sure the family of Maeve Boothby O’Neill would be relieved to know their daughter died of nothing but, as Chelmsford puts it, a feeling of ‘fedupness’. And the inquest could have been saved a lot of time too.
Such views rightly belong in a previous era, as do the ignoramuses who hold them.

This is an interesting long read from the London Review of Books from 2010 on the evolution of the RCP. I know the article is nearly 15 years old but it does give a lot of interesting background on them:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n13/jenny-turner/who-are-they