Fw: The Guardian Life after Living Marxism : Fighting for freedom - to offend, outrage and question everything

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Subject: The Guardian  Life after Living Marxism : Fighting for freedom -
to offend, outrage and question everything
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Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Life after Living Marxism: Fighting
for
freedom - to offend, outrage and question
everythinghttp://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/344/farewellLM.html
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,341054,00.html
Life after Living Marxism: Fighting for freedom - to offend, outrage and
question everything

David Pallister, John Vidal and Kevin Maguire
Saturday July 8, 2000

Three months ago a high court libel jury forced the magazine LM, formerly
Living Marxism, into closure and bankruptcy. But that did not mean its
controversial views would go away. On the same day as the verdict was
delivered, LM's co-publisher Claire Fox, a 40-year-old former social
worker
and teacher, and two colleagues formed a plan for a month of "thought
provoking" conferences in London, Oxford, Manchester, Edinburgh, Paris
and
Frankfurt.
As the Institute of Ideas, Fox and her team have drawn into their project
many of the leading cultural institutions in the capital: the Tate
Modern,
the British Library, the British Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company,
the
Royal Institution, the RSA, and the Art's Council. An impressive array of
academics, scientists, journalists, lawyers and writers have agreed to
speak.
But critics, almost wholly from the left, argue that some of its more
extreme laissez-faire positions are risible nonsense or simply promote an
agenda pushed by big business. Should they be taken seriously?
"I believe," writer Mick Hume told 50 people at a libel seminar, "in the
right to be offensive." He exercised that right in his magazine LM
(formerly
Living Marxism) three years ago by publishing an article which claimed
that
ITN deliberately misrepresented that haunting picture of Fikret Alic, an
emaciated Bosnian Muslim at Trnopolje camp in 1992.
The result, this March, was a crushing and expensive libel case which
forced
the magazine's closure. Hume and his co-publisher defendant, Helene
Guldberg, are being personally pursued for £375,000 in damages.
But being offensive can have its own rewards as LM's progeny, the
Institute
of Ideas, basks in the success of organising - this month and last - a
series of conferences with the blessing and backing of some of Britain's
leading institutions. And there's more: events in Oxford, Frankfurt,
Paris,
Dublin, Manchester and, in August, a raft of debates at the Edinburgh
festival.
The institute's director, Claire Fox, a former social worker and teacher,
and her volunteers work out of a ground floor office formerly occupied by
LM
near Smithfield meat market.
Ms Fox proclaims her pride in the Institute of Ideas and maintains it has
no
political agenda other than to challenge the consensus agenda through the
power of debate. "It's the ideas that matter," she insists. "Why would I
be
doing this? I could be earning a lot of money as a consultant, or gone
higher in education."
For the spruce young(ish) controversialists who formed the core of LM's
friends and contributors, it has been a long and curious ideological
road.
The institute now has a slogan: Ban nothing - question everything. Yet
their
origins lie in a small Trotskyist sect within the International
Socialists
(now the Socialist Workers' Party), which used to spend most of its time
in
textual agonising over the third volume of Das Kapital.
After a monumentally unfathomable debate about the declining rate of
profit
and commodity fetishism, part of the faction split away from the
International Socialists in 1974 and formed the Revolutionary Communist
Group (RCG). Its central platform was to have no truck with political
activism, reformist and united fronts. An infantile disorder, Lenin would
have called it.
With a healthy respect for bourgeois ideology, it believed that the main
task was to formulate the correct Marxist programme and then train a
vanguard elite to storm the citadels of capitalism. The battle of ideas
and
the use of propaganda were all.
Horrified

The first law of Trotskyist sects is that, like amoebas, they have to
split
to survive. When the chief RCG theoretician, David Yaffe, decided that
the
time had come actively to engage with the Communist party and the
anti-apartheid movement, the purists were horrified.
And so was born, in 1976, the even smaller Revolutionary Communist
Tendency,
later to become the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) with its organ,
Living Marxism.
"They were skilful at organisation and publicity and had lots of energy,"
says one of their critics from the left. "But they were basically a cult
dealing in theoretical absolutes. They had no real ideas, just postures."
"Media pranksters and disco fascists," snorted one old International
Socialist hand.
To many observers there was a cultish flavour to the party. New recruits
were collared in fashionable places like Covent Garden, Sloane Square and
Oxford university. They were often approached with an invitation to take
part in a bogus survey on political events of the day. Once recruited,
they
had to go through a programme of political education - learning the party
line. It helped to look smart and good career moves in the media,
academia
and the professions were encouraged. Once in a job, they were expected to
donate a percentage of their salaries to the party - and its
publications.
Then the cold war ended, the party's eight candidates lost their deposits
at
the fourth Tory election win of 1992 and Living Marxism began another
transformation.
Conventional politics were declared exhausted and atrophied and in 1996
the
RCP was disbanded and Living Marxism was reborn as the even glossier LM.
The
new scriptures decree that the old labour movements has collapsed for
good.
Apathy rules. The division of left and right has become irrelevant. A new
crusade and new ideas for human emancipation are called for. The big buzz
word, to be reclaimed from Thatcherism, was freedom.
Freedom to say whatever you like; the freedom to be offensive and
contrary -
just like in the old days.
LM articulated its new philosophy and found new friends from surprising
places. "The RCP were always refreshingly different," said one admirer in
1997 after a visit to an LM fringe meeting at the Edinburgh festival.
"They
took issue with the 'no platform for fascists' policy that most of the
left
slavishly and unthinkingly sought to enforce." Thus Patrick Harrington,
former student organiser of the National Front, whose presence at North
London poly in the 1980s became a cause celebre for the SWP, now adopts
many
of the views of LM.
Ms Fox, now a regular on radio talk programmes, maintains that "everyone"
knows how LM and the institute emerged but is reluctant to talk about it.
"That's all history," she says dismissively. "The RCP ceased four years
ago.
That's that. It was the end of a revolutionary political party. The
question
then was whether it [LM] was worth doing," she said.
Fear of risk

Yet essentially LM and the institute believe that society, business and
science, especially biotechnology, are being held back by fear of risk
and
experimentation - the so-called precautionary principle as enuciated by
Prince Charles over GM food. The government, it argues, manufactures
panics
and anxiety - over child-rearing, crime and health. Citizens are
patronised,
mollycoddled and made to feel like powerless victims. Useless therapies
and
burgeoning litigation over political correctness are making victims of us
all. Ban nothing, question everything.
One inevitable - and conscious - result has been that many of the
institute's ideas have found sympathy among rightwing organisations and
think tanks.
It is a meeting of strange minds. Until its closure, LM more or less aped
the conservative rightwing political, economic and cultural libertarian
arguments being pushed heavily in the US by free market organisations a
like
the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and
the
Cato Institute. These are all funded by industry but are just the tip of
a
vast network of "freedom" groups all linked intellectually and
semi-formally
by the loose coalition known as the Freedom Network.
The meeting of minds in the libertarian zone in Britain allowed Forest,
the
pro-smoking group funded by the tobacco in dustry, to organise a debate
(Blair's Britain - The Tyranny of Political Correctness) in the Groucho
club
last month under the institute's umbrella with Dr Masden Pirie of the
free
market Adam Smith Institute in the chair."We get on very well with these
people," said Dr Pirie.
Another rightwing think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, helped
organise speakers for a debate last week on war crimes at University
College
London.
The source of the LM-institute's funding has always been a source of
wonderment. Living Marxism had 3,000 subscribers and LM rose to 10,000
but
the sums never seemed to add up. Fox says everyone worked for free and it
was always difficult to balance the books.
When LM attracted the libel writ from ITN, the free speech brigade
weighed
in with support. The ICA offered its premises for a debate. Now the
cultural
establishment has come on board en masse. Some of Britain's cultural
glitterati - Blake Morrison, Marina Warner, Linda Grant, Timberlake
Wertenberger, Lisa Jardine, Antony Gormley and Jon Snow - as well as a
number of Guardian writers, were invited. Not all accepted. Snow withdrew
from an event after being invited by the RSA. It was only later that he
realised the institute's connection and felt there was a lack of
transparency. "I didn't have a clear idea of who they were," he said.
Audiences at some of the conferences may be equally perplexed. From the
platforms and the floor, the LM line is assiduously promoted by the
magazine's supporters and contributors - often without clear attribution
of
their affiliations.
Although Ms Fox denies it operates "front" organisations, LM's thinking
has
remarkable similarities with that of the pro-new roads Transport Research
Group, and lobby groups like Families for Freedom, Freedom & Law, the
Association of British Drivers and Audacity.org, a body opposed to
restraints on devolopment. Members of these groups have been regular LM
contributors.
Leading the libertarian charge from the US, funding one of the debates
and
providing speakers for others, is the Reason Foundation. The institute's
programme does not say it, but this rightwing think tank/magazine, which
has
been promoting the corporate takeover of schools in the US, is pro-guns
and
pro-GM.
Both its founder and senior editor accepted invitations to talk at LM
events - and will be paying their own way to come. Their leading writer,
the
syndicated columnist Sandra Postrel, is author of the libertarian book
The
Enemies of Freedom and frequently talks at the Hudson Institute. This
body
is mainly run by former Reaganite cold war warriors and initiates much of
the "research" that attacks environmentalists and liberal governments.
The institute is now moving abroad and from Germany there is a debate
about
Expo 2000 in Frankfurt funded by Novo, the small "unaffiliated" magazine
whose editor, Thomas Diechman, wrote the pro-Serb piece that sunk LM.
Five
of the seven people "debating" in Frankfurt will be Novo contributors. In
Paris, there is a debate about whether globalisation is such a bad thing,
and in Italy the the director of the Progress Consultancy, a writer for
LM,
will tell how hard it is for business to operate in a risk-obsessed
society - the subject of several debates in London.
The links suggest a small world of LM activists, with individuals or
small
groups working inside both liberal and rightwing institutions, to promote
the LM agenda, especially in the media.
Discredited

In the past few years LM has effectively made five or more hours of prime
time environmentalist-bashing TV. C4's much discredited series Against
Nature was directed by Martin Durkin, a keen LM fan. The programmes
featured
LM contributors and followed the magazine's line that greens are not
radicals but doom-mongering "Hitler-loving imperialists".
Durkin and other LM writers have made several other similar films for the
C4's Equinox series to push the anti-GM, pro "scientific progress" line.
Durkin also made a virulently pro-GM film for C4 which was shown in
April.
LM's involvement at C4 extends beyond documentaries. Five out of six
recent
Zeitgeist programmes had LM contributors. Four LM "independent"
contributors
to LM/IoI also appeared on a BBC TV Counterblast programme which argued
that
organic foods were more dangerous than conventional foods. This idea was
first raised by the Hudson institute which is funded by Monsanto, among
others.
Also pushing the idea on the BBC programme was leading pro-GM scientist
Professor Anthony Trewavas, of Edinburgh university, who has several
articles on Monsanto's website and will be at one of the institute's
debates. The producer of the Counterblast series told the Guardian that
he
had no idea that most of the contributors had LM or other links.
LM has forged strong links with internet companies, including Cyberia -
the
company that set up the first internet cafe and has a place on the
Cabinet
Office websites policy group. Another of its backers is cSscape, a US
corporation whose British branch set up the full website for the Cabinet
Office and has worked for Monsanto's PR company, the giant Burson
Marsteller. Other hi-tech companies supporting LM/IoI include Gap21 -
which
calls itself a "21st century dialogue on globalisation and power",
Internet
Freedom, a radical free speech group, and Designagenda, an internet
design
operation set up by LM writer and academic Andrew Calcutt.
Mick Hume and his colleagues last month brought out Last Magazine,
another
expensively produced 124-page glossy using the LM initials. "So please,
no
flowers or memorial services for LM," wrote Hume. "There is life after a
libel trial. It starts here."












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