#most liberal metropolitan serb

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Boardroom revolutionaries

By Nick Cohen, from the Observer, October 1998

When I was a student there was a popular caricature of an unbending Marxist who refused to give money to starving beggars because charity ameliorated the contradictions of capitalism and postponed the day when revolution would sweep the land. I thought the joke was just that, but now... 

We move to Trafalgar Square on 31 March 1990. Mark Steel, the comedian and writer, was watching the Metropolitan Police fail to contain tens of thousands of demonstrators. The anti-poll tax riot led to the biggest campaign of civil disobedience since the War, and the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Next to Steel was a commissar from the Revolutionary Communist Party which dismissed those who fought a tax that took from the poor and gave to the rich as wet liberals. 'There's nothing to be concerned about,' he sneered down a phone to head office, 'just a bunch of middle-class kids playing about.' 

The revolutionary party also despised Anti-Apartheid for 'helping capitalism' by supporting sanctions against South Africa and had nothing but contempt for the NHS. At about the time of the poll tax revolt, Yunus Baksh, secretary of a Unison branch in Newcastle upon Tyne, was organising protests against cuts in funding. At one, members of the RCP handed out leaflets denouncing the cause of better pay for miserable cleaners and porters. Nurses were jostled and abused when they questioned whether the NHS was really an instrument of the repressive state. After a second demo, Baksh and ambulance drivers worried about their jobs met members of the party in a Newcastle pub. The comrades shouted at Bakshand punched him in the face. 

You might think that a tiny group of cranks-so far gone it agreed with the Sunday Times that Aids was a 'gay plague' which could never be contracted by heterosexuals and opposed rallies against the British National Party-would be a footnote in political history. But today the RCP is the acme of fashion, all the rage. Join it, my dears, and see the doors of the media, big business and high culture open when you ring. 

Looking good was always a revolutionary priority for the RCP. A man, who asked to be called 'John' because he did not want to be troubled by his former friends, said supporters had to serve an apprenticeship with a handler who monitored their progress. They were allowed to become full members only when they had shown they had imbibed the correct ideology by sitting an exam on the party's theory. 'If you passed you got a clothing allowance, he said. 'You had to be attractive, trendy, so you would go down well when we tried to find wealthy recruits at the Edinburgh Festival and outside Sloane Square tube.' 

The party stopped active work in the early Nineties and adherents clustered on its magazine, Living Marxism, which was renamed LM. Last year Channel 4 broadcast Against Nature a three-hour series devoted to LM's theme that environmentalists are modem Nazis who throw fabricated concerns about global warming and the mass extinction of species in the way of progress. The green movement isn't sacred and should be able to answer hostile questions, but viewers would have known where Against Nature was coming from if they had been told that the assistant producer, Eve Kaye, was a co-ordinator of LM, and that the director Martin Durkin described himself as a Marxist. (He denied any link with LM but followed its line.) The documentaries quoted two 'independent experts' who praised human cloning and condemned sustainable development in the Third World as a western conspiracy against the wretched of the Earth. One was John Mott, LM's science correspondent; the other was Frank Furedi, LM's star columnist and all-round media don from Kent University. (Furedi used to be known as Frank Richards, incidentally. Like Lenin and Trotsky, many at LM fight under a nom de guerre.) 

LM continues the RCP tradition of striking reactionary postures. Last week a howling book was printed by Jonathan Hunt, a second-hand car salesman turned journalist, which accused my colleagues on the Guardian of framing Neil Hamilton. That mighty moralist and spanker Paul Johnson and the rest of the Spectator crowd hate the paper for having the impertinence to tell the truth about Jonathan Aitken, and abuse it weekly. Even they could not bring themselves to endorse Hunt. He was, however, able to cite support from LM in his defence. When I dropped into the LM office they gave me Hamilton's home number and urged me to phone the old brute. 'He calls us his friends,' said LM's James Heartfield whose real name is James Hughes.

Last year LM ran a story from a German engineer turned journalist who defends the Serbian leadership against all too clear charges of murder, systematic rape and ethnic cleansing. The magazine claimed ITN had fooled the world by forging its famous pictures of starving Bosnians herded behind barbed wire by the Serbs. ITN sued and the liberal aristocracy LM loathes came to its aid. Harold Evans, Doris Lessing, Fay Weldon and Paul Theroux reproached ITN for a 'deplorable attack on press freedom'. 

Decent journalists see the British libel laws as a menace. They know that powerful frauds, such as Aitken and Hamilton, can use them to suppress awkward inquiries. Doubtless Evans and the rest thought they were defending a plucky little magazine against an overbearing media conglomerate. As George Monbiot points out in an article in Prospect, global capital and living Marxists get on famously. Anti-imperialist LM runs pieces by Roger Bate of the far right Institute for Economic Affairs which believes that African countries would be better governed if they were sold to multinationals. This year it printed the theory of one Ron Arnold who claimed that the Unabomber was an environmentalist and QED! - environmentalists were therefore terrorists. Arnold is Vice President of the Centre of the Defence of Free Enterprise, which campaigns against restrictions on corporate America. Against Nature not only featured LM contributors, but Reaganite economists and members of the Cato Institute, another wellendowed American think-tank which works with the British Adam Smith Institute to promote the dismantling of the Chilean welfare state by the topical General Pinochet as a model for the US and UK. All agreed with LM that leftie greens were endangering human happiness. 

The Independent Television Commission forced Channel 4 to make a prime-time apology. The links with corporations are not merely ideological. A leaked memo is causing great hilarity in the consumer movement. It appears to show the radical Frank Furedi/Richards offering his services to the supermarket cartel. For £7,500 be will provide research which will 'educate' consumers towards a 'less emotive' consideration of food safety. 

Businessfriendly dismissals of 'panics' about BSE and genetically modified food feature strongly in LM's 'libertarian' philosophy. Furedi says that although he has received no money from supermarkets he would be willing to accept payments.I think it is it at this point that an obscure group becomes an authentic representative of the spirit of an age where corporate values undermine all others. The party leaders talk of 'UK plc', as if democracy were a business and the electorate were consumers to be swindled by advertising executives (or spin doctors, as Westminster journalists call them) and chivvied into snapping up bargain buys by the shop girls formerly known as politicians. 

Last week David Blunkett announced a new training college for head teachers would be set up at a business school. The Education Secretary said heads were like 4 managing directors of big companies' and showed no sign of knowing that managing directors do not have a duty to produce an educated public which appreciates learning for its own sake, and would be sacked in seconds if they said they did. I could quote examples for ever. I think, however, it is with LM that we see multinational triumphalism reaching an apotheosis. We can now gaze on the gorgeous spectacle of corporate Marxists: the boardroom's revolutionary arm.

If, that is, you can say that LM is revolutionary. Its spokeswoman, Clare Fox (I don't know if that's a real name), said in true Blairite fashion that differences between Left and Right didn't amount to a hill of beans these days and she is far more concerned with restraints on freedom. Yet there was one organisation that supported the poll tax, low pay for hospital workers, the lifting of sanctions against South Africa, Neil Hamilton and unlimited freedom for corporations: the Conservative Party. Most put it on the Right.The Conservatives had no time for drips who gave change to beggars. Nor does RCP/LM. 'John,' our former supporter, was out with his handler when he passed a beggar and dropped 50 pence into his hat. His minder exploded. 'Don't you realise you're helping capitalism?' he roared. 'Don't you realise you are subsidising poverty? All John realised was that he had had more than enough of 'middle-class kids playing about' and quit.