The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), called the Revolutionary Communist Tendency (RCT) until 1981, was a British political organisation that existed from 1977 to 1996. It was nominally a Trotskyist communist party until 1991, when it abandoned Trotskyism and publicly switched to a libertarian position. It began with only a few dozen supporters and grew to a peak membership of 200 in the early 1990s. RCP was distinguished by its contrarianism; among its positions were support for IRA and Saddam Hussein.Speakers' biographies, Communicating the war on terror conference website, 5 June 2003Licence to rile, Andy Beckett, The Guardian, 15 May 1999

From 1988 it published the journal Living Marxism, whose writers were criticised for denying the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides.

History

The party originated as a tendency within the Revolutionary Communist Group. The RCG had been formed in March 1974 after members of the International Socialists were expelled the previous year, including Frank Furedi.

This group had concluded that there was no living Marxist tradition in the left due to them not building upon the developments of Marxism since the Second World War, so therefore a revolutionary program would have to be developed to win over the working class. They saw the British working class and especially the labour movement as dominated by bourgeois ideology and chauvinist nationalism, and the IS as pandering to its low-level trade union consciousness and economism; they asserted that a purer vanguard party was needed, focusing on international solidarity and propaganda rather than trade unionism.

In November 1976, a group of individuals led by Furedi were expelled from the RCG due to disagreements relating to the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Communist Party of Great Britain. The RCT wanted to be able to criticise the African National Congress, which led to their expulsion. This group founded the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in 1977.

The Revolutionary Communist Tendency (RCT) 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.

The RCT was officially formed as the Revolutionary Communist Party in May 1981. The method of growth adopted by the RCP was for members to move to other places in order to set up branches, seen as different to other parties emerging from a merging of far-left factions or from calls made by the labour movement.

Organisation The RCP operated using front organisations which revolved around single issues and were set up to combat leftism chauvinism. These front organisations were also created for the purposes of recruiting people.

Workers Against Racism Beginning as East London Workers Against Racism (ELWAR) before it was launched as a national campaign, Workers Against Racism campaigned against state racism. Protests were organised against deportations and passport checks at hospitals and unemployment benefit offices. ELWAR also organised patrols and vigils to defend immigrants against racist attacks, however their organisation was not large enough to use these tactics effectively. In Parliament, Conservative MP Nicholas Winterton demanded of the Home Secretary "if he will seek to proscribe the East London Workers against Racism vigilante group". Workers Against Racism was criticised in the press for its activities during the 1981 Brixton riots. An internal Home Office report to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed: [T]he Revolutionary Communist Party set up a Lambeth Unemployed Workers' Group shortly before the Riots, and has since formed a South London Workers Against Racism group, similar to the East London Workers Against Racism which attracted some notoriety for organising vigilante patrols.'Civil Disorder', Records of the Prime Minister's Office, 1980 Apr 02 – 1981 Oct 29, PREM 19/484http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/details-result.asp?Edoc_Id=8759386

Anti-deportation campaigns

The party's Workers Against Racism campaign fought many deportation threats, like George Roucou's, on the grounds that British immigration law was racist. Roucou was a shop steward in the building workers' union UCATT in Manchester. Workers Against Racism helped to organise a campaign culminating in a one-day strike and demonstration by his fellow council workers on 6 February 1987. On 13 March 1987, with 500 protesting outside, the Home Office appeal panel reversed Roucou's deportation order. On 11 June 1985, Metso Moncrieffe was arrested and held by police pending a deportation order. Workers Against Racism campaigners raised the case, disrupting a test match at the Edgbaston cricket ground in July 1985 with a Metso Must Stay banner and helping to build a 1,000-strong march for him in December 1986. In September 1987, Moncrieffe's deportation order was overturned.

Supporting Irish republicanism Supporting Irish republicanism was central to the work of the party. According to historian Jack Hepworth, "Advocating ‘unconditional support’ enabled the RCP to challenge reformism on the British left and nationalism in the labour movement."

In 1978, the RCP organised the Smash the Prevention of Terrorism Act Campaign and held protests outside police stations where suspects were held. The party organised a conference of trade unionists opposed to Northern Ireland being part of the United Kingdom in Coventry in 1981 and later that year held a march to the TUC conference, the Workers March for Irish Freedom. On Saturday 6 February 1982, the Irish Freedom Movement (IFM) was founded at a meeting in Caxton House, Archway and TUC general secretary Len Murray wrote to the thirteen trades councils that sponsored the conference threatening them with disaffiliation if they attended. RCP Political Committee member Mick Hume, who edited The Next Step, recalls that the IFM were accused of complicity and involvement in the 1984 bombing of the Conservative Party conference by the media. The IFM had protested the conference on the previous day, along with an event organised by the Monday Club.

The IFM published a quarterly bulletin Irish Freedom and organised an annual march on the anniversary of internment. When the voices of Sinn Féin supporters were banned from the British broadcast media, Living Marxism carried a front page interview with its leader Gerry Adams and the IFM picketed Broadcasting House. After the Brighton bombing, an RCP editorial in the next step said:We support unconditionally the right of the Irish people to carry out their struggle for national liberation in whatever way they choose. We neither support nor condemn any particular tactic the republican movement pursues, whether it is an electoral campaign or a bombing campaign. Similarly, after the Enniskillen bombing in 1987, Hume reiterated that British radicals’ responses could "not be based on emotional revulsion at particular incidents of violence or terror".

By the end of the 1980s, according to historian Jack Hepworth, "the IFM was the largest radical solidarity movement in Britain, with an annual August march in London typically attracting an estimated 3,000 demonstrators" and an activist base beyond the party faithful; by 1990 it had twenty branches in the UK.

Student politics The party primarily recruited amongst students. By 1984, it had 45 university and polytechnic branches.

Electoral involvement The RCP stood candidates in the May 1981 local elections, under its own name and that of ELWAR. It stood a candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, its campaign mainly consisting of heckling Labour candidate Peter Tatchell, who lost the seat to the Liberal Party; the RCP candidate received 38 votes. It fielded four candidates in the 1983 United Kingdom general election, who achieved a total vote of nearly 1000. In 1983, the party began its annual "Preparing for Power" public conferences. In 1986, it launched a new theoretical journal, Confrontation. In the 1986 United Kingdom local elections, the RCP stood 38 candidates, including Claire Fox (under the name Claire Foster), who received a total of just under 2300 votes, with an average of 60 votes each. In the 1986 Knowsley North by-election, its candidate was also backed by the Workers Revolutionary Party and received 664 votes, its highest so far. In the 1987 Greenwich by-election, its candidate received 91 votes.

In 1987, it launched the Red Front electoral coalition, appealing to other anti-Labour groups to join it. Its manifesto demanded work or full pay, the defence of trade union rights, equal rights for all, and opposition to war. It had a libertarian flavour and also argued that "The dangers from Aids have in fact been grossly exaggerated. The principal threat to homosexuals in Britain today is not from Aids, but from the safe sex campaign." Two other groups joined the campaign: Red Action and the Revolutionary Democratic Group. The Front stood 14 candidates, including Kenan Malik. The candidate in Knowsley North achieved 538 vote (1.37%); the others between 111 and 300. It stood its own candidates in the 1989 Glasgow Central by-election and 1989 Vauxhall by-election, receiving 141 and 171 votes respectively.

Campaign Against Militarism

In 1993, the party helped launch the Campaign Against Militarism (CAM) to fight against western military intervention. CAM organised protests against the military interventions in Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. On 10 September 1993, seventy Somalis and CAM supporters occupied the United States embassy after an alleged massacre of civilians in Mogadishu,The Guardian, 11 September 1993, p. 14; Daily Telegraph, 11 September 1993, p 9 the only time it has happened. After they were evicted by armed marines, eleven were convicted under the as yet untested criminal trespass laws, but charges were dropped after lawyer Mike Fisher sought to have the case tried in the United States, arguing that the offence, if any, was committed on American soil. CAM was the only left-wing group that joined British Serbs in their demonstrations over the military strikes on Yugoslavia in 1994.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Mike Freeman identified "the metamorphosis of what had long regarded itself as a peace movement into a war movement" after Labour rallied to support the First Iraq War.Mike Freeman, The Empire Strikes Back: Why we need a new Anti-War Movement, London, Junius, 1993, p 46 Later, this trend was called "humanitarian imperialism" in Living Marxism. The party opposed Western military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq and East Timor.Linda Ryan, 'Narcissus' Empire,' LM, December 1999, issue 126

Ideology Taking a line inspired by Vladimir Lenin's work on the relationship between imperialism and reformism, the party 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 and establishing a system of planned production."