Monbiot on RCP
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For the leftist trainspotters among us. George Monbiot’s article is on ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when he writes this:
… The story harks back to one of the strangest political groups ever to have emerged in the UK.
The Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) was one of many leftist groupuscules to emerge in the 1970s. But it distinguished itself with a cruel and brutal libertarianism. It campaigned against bans on tobacco advertising, child sexual abuse images, landmines and the ownership of handguns. It claimed that animals have no rights, that global heating is a good thing, that environmentalists are like Nazis. It attacked strikers and gay rights campaigners. By taking extreme right-wing positions while calling itself left, it wrongfooted almost everyone.
Its members railed against the development of a “therapeutic culture”, in which people’s states of mind are “medicalised”. The RCP’s magazine, LM (previously Living Marxism), claimed, “It is those who have suffered the most who should be listened to the least.”
Its leading figure, Frank Furedi, now runs the Brussels arm of the hard right Mathias Corvinus Collegium, funded by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. Two stalwarts of LM were the sisters Claire and Fiona Fox.
Claire Fox became one of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party MEPs, before Boris Johnson made her a peer. Fiona Fox was one of several RCP alumni who, in the early 2000s, founded or took key roles in science communication groups. She became the first director of the Science Media Centre (SMC). This positioning at the interface between science and the media of members of the group was not easy to explain. Most, including Fox, appeared to have no background in science. But she had written an article for the RCP’s journal appearing to suggest that ME is caused by losing your “framework for understanding the world”.
These organisations came to dominate the media’s understanding of certain scientific issues. Science is huge, complex and confusing. They offered simplicity: these are the big stories, this is how to understand them, these are the scientists to talk to…
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.I didn’t realise they were that ‘right-wing’ when they called themselves the RCP, since ooriginally I think they were Trotskyists. Didn’t they fold when court action was taken against them for something (defamation?) and they couldn’t pay the amount awareded against them and so declated bankruptcy? And didn’t they then reconstitute themsleves as ‘The Institute of Ideas’?
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…
We have discussed them here before, in 2017:
We also reviewed a couple of Furedi’s books:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/10/defending-modernism-2005.html?m=1
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-nature-of-russian-capitalism-1986.html?m=1
I remember we used to call Living Marxism “Dead Leninism” but they were a phenomenon and the other Trots didn’t like them because they often took up a different position from them on current issues.
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.Chelmsford – “ME sounds something like neurasthenia which was fashionable from the middle of the 19th century until the late Edwardian period.”
Not like you, Chelmsford, to come up with a crass, ill informed comment, displaying a complete lack of understanding and empathy.
It might not have occurred to our from our correspondent from the paleogenic period that members of the working class (and sometimes not even women!) may have experienced similar symptoms but not have been reported as no one gave a stuff about them and that they were left to wither and die unacknowledged.
Relying on those world renowned physicians Lenin and Nietzsche might have been a bit of a mistake, methinks.
Back in a world which has moved on from anaglypta, wood chip and chicken in a basket, researchers at Oxford University have developed a blood test which can distinguished between healthy individuals, disease controls, and ME/CFS patients with a 91 percent accuracy. The test was so sensitive it was even able to differentiate between mild, moderate, and severe ME/CFS patients.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202302146
But hey Chelmsford, lets not rely on made up stuff like science, eh?
Rodshaw, I hope your daughter gets some degree of relief, my sister had 10 years of being told her pain was psychosomatic until they finally found out she had Trigeminal neuralgia and my partner was also told that her long term pain was in her head until her doctors finally believed her and found out she had rheumatoid arthritis
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.An interesting read from a researcher in the area.
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
A good article, YMS. The inquest and long covid have certainly made people prick up their ears and the dire situation with ME may now be too embarrassing for the govt to ignore.
It was as recently as three months ago that my daughter’s GP, sympathetic though he was, and admittedly clutching at straws, was still suggesting CBT.
We can only speculate how much resource a socialist society would put into ME research but somehow I think it would have a lot more priority than it’s getting now.
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