Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978)
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Revolutionary Communist Party
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| Founded | 1978 |
| Dissolved | 1997 |
| Split from | Revolutionary Communist Group |
| Newspaper | Living Marxism/LM magazine |
| Ideology | Trotskyist (later Libertarian) |
| Political position | Far-left (disputed, see text) |
The Revolutionary Communist Party, known as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency until 1981, was a Trotskyist organisation formed in 1978. After 1991, the party metamorphosed from a self-professed Trotskyist group into one which publicly took a libertarian humanist position. It was disbanded in 1997, although a number of former members maintain a loose political network to promote its ideas.
The party originated as a tendency in the Revolutionary Communist Group, which had split from the International Socialists in the 1970s. This group had concluded that there was no living Marxist tradition in the left, and Marxism would have to be re-established. Disagreements about the course the Revolutionary Communist Group should take in relation to support for the Anti-Apartheid Movement led Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent (better known then by his cadre name Frank Richards), to break off and form his own group. The Revolutionary Communist Tendency hoped to draw together those militant working class leaders who were disappointed by the limitations of reformism to help to build a new working class leadership and develop an independent working class programme.
Taking a strong line which it considered to be inspired by Vladimir Lenin's work on the relationship between imperialism and reformism, the RCP originally held that the "only hope of securing any decent sort of life - or even guaranteeing survival - lies in the working class taking control over society". It further argued that traditional Stalinist and social-democratic appeals to the bourgeois state had undermined working-class independence and that, as a result, an independent vanguard party should be organized to campaign for a distinctly working-class politics. In 1978, for example, when the left was strong within the Labour Party, the RCP argued that "Labour is the party which attempts to resolve the crisis by integrating militant working class resistance into the capitalist system". This position included a rejection of support for the Labour Party and one that questioned the allegiances of the trade union movement. A consequence of this belief was a growing distrust of traditional statist left-wing struggles as 'reformist'. According to some, the RCP took a view that reformism consolidated bourgeois ideology in the potential leadership layers of the working class.
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