Re: [Marxism] Spiked online's latest on "anti-Semitism"

["Paul Flewers" <rfls12802@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re Lüko W's comments and Lou P's reply re Spiked. Actually, it's more
important than what Lou wrote. Spiked had its origins in the remaining core
of the now-disbanded Revolutionary Communist Party, the last left-wing group
in Britain to go through any real growth -- from about 20 members when I
first met it in 1978 (it was called a Tendency then, it only became a Party
in 1981) -- to around 500 members and about as many supporters in the
mid-1980s. It could organise sizeable conferences, and its publications were
always well-written and produced, and often were thought provoking and
novel. After then it went into a decline, which became terminal by the early
1990s (the branch to which I was attached by then in South London
practically fell apart, most of the members suddenly and without saying why
resigned, leaving behind mostly inactive and cynical supporters like me). On
the negative side, it never managed to get even a foothold in the labour
movement, it was hopelessly mired in stunt politics (mostly unsuccessful),
and had a disturbing habit of being controversial for the sake of it (not
that it was the only group to do this).

By the mid-1990s, with increasing numbers of members and supporters falling
away, and with very little to show for all his hard work, I reckon that the
group's ganzer macher Frank Füredi had a total collapse of confidence in his
politics, leaving in effect just the core, the group's Political Committee
(or most of them) and a few others to suffer the same collapse of political
confidence -- there's dedication for you, or perhaps good discipline, or
maybe having nowhere else to go because the group was very unpopular on the
left -- and to follow him into an ill-defined libertarianism which at times
bears some fragmentary resemblance to the old party's outlook, at other
times read like sections of the right-wing press, and other times besides is
just rehashed third-rate sociology.

The fact that they can't get anyone half-way worthwhile to discuss the
question of anti-Semitism in Britain today, rather than nonentities and
Zionist hacks, shows that their influence can be overestimated. Nonetheless,
the group had a not inconsiderable part to play on the British left over
nearly 20 years, and one that was not, in my estimation, a totally barren
one.

Paul F





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