Revolutionary Communist Group (UK) - History - Early Years: 1970-1976

Early Years: 1970-1976

In January 1975 the RCG began publishing a theoretical journal called Revolutionary Communist in which it espoused an ultra-orthodox view of crisis theory, a theme they had already addressed in the IS when challenging the work of the theoreticians of that group. They developed Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin's analysis of the labour aristocracy, and showed its relevance for politics in the period after the Second World War. Their conclusions led them to call for no vote for the Labour Party. In so doing they broke totally from Trotskyism.

The early years of the RCG saw the group lose a large part of its initial membership. For example in September 1975 the Birmingham branch decamped in order to join the Workers' Socialist League.

A few years after the RCG's foundation, disagreements emerged amongst its members regarding such topics as Stalinism and the South African government. One group, dominated by Frank Furedi (1947-), a sociologist at the University of Kent who used the pseudonym of "Frank Richards", began to argue against the views put forward by David Yaffe and his supporters. Yaffe himself later remarked that Furedi had been "organising among a clique of middle-class members, and became their self-styled guru". In November 1976, Furedi and his followers were expelled from the RCG, following which they went on to form their own rival organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Tendency (RCT). Soon, the RTC itself splintered, with a group calling itself the Committee for a Communist Programme (CPP) being founded by several dissenting members. Following this, the RCT went on to change its name to the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1981, and would publish the magazine Living Marxism from 1988 to 2000, in which their political position moved from Leninism to Libertarian Marxism.

The RCG recognised the progressive role played by some of the traditional communist parties such as the South African Communist Party and from that position developed into a more orthodox communist grouping supporting the socialist revolution in Cuba.

Whilst other far-left parties, especially those regarding themselves as Trotskyist, in the UK welcomed the demise of the Eastern Bloc and then of the Soviet Union the RCG argued that these events were counterrevolutionary and constituted a setback in the class struggle internationally because many national liberation movements and socialist states in the Third World were supported by the Soviet Union and the Comecon. The RCG believed that while the Soviet Union was a socialist state, as a result of both internal developments in the Soviet Union itself and the reactionary role of working class parties (social democratic and communist) in the imperialist countries, the revolution degenerated and the communist party became an elite party separate from the working class. These developments laid the foundation for the counterrevolution between 1989-91.