Living Marxism

Living Marxism was a British magazine, originally launched in 1988 as the journal of the British Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). It was later rebranded as LM and ceased publication in March 2000 following a successful libel lawsuit brought by the British Independent Television News (ITN). It was promptly resurrected as Spiked, an Internet magazine.

Living Marxism's introduction summarised its outlook as:

We live in an age of caution and conformism, when critical opinions can be outlawed as 'extremism' and anything new can be rubbished as 'too risky'. Ours is an age of low expectations, when we are always being told what is bad for us, and life seems limited on all sides by restrictions, guidelines and regulations.

The spirit of LM is to go against the grain: to oppose all censorship, bans and codes of conduct; to stand up for social and scientific experimentation; to insist that we have the right to live as autonomous adults who take responsibility for our own affairs. These are basic human values that cannot be compromised if we are ever going to create a world fit for people.

Views expounded with regularity in LM included 'Fear Culture', for example by questioning the then media coverage of AIDS as a predominantly homosexual disease in the West. Its critique covered media coverage in Africa and the developing world in the context of Western intervention, underdevelopment and poverty. It also debated environmentalist claims that limiting consumption was a progressive view. The magazine also raised concerns about the Left's rejection of scientific thought and critique, especially of medicine, biotechnology and nuclear physics. LM writers also critiqued the media portrayal of the civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia by questioning the use of the term "genocide" to describe the conflicts.

It has been stated by environmentalists such as George Monbiot and Peter Melchett that the group of writers associated with LM continue to constitute a 'LM Network' pursuing an ideologically motivated 'anti-environmentalist' agenda under the guise of promoting Humanism. Writers who used to write for Living Marxism reject this as a 'McCarthyite' conspiracy theory.

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