Comments on: Rememberance of Things Past…ish

By: Scott McLemee

Scott McLemee — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 19:36:23 +0000

Actually, Chairman Meow is only the cat’s nickname. And Chairman Bob seems no longer to be in exile, though his actual whereabouts are a closely guarded secret.

Slavoj Zizek blurbed Chairman Bob’s latest book, though it’s clear from the introduction that he didn’t actually read it.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:24:20 +0000

The British RCP were stupid in a way you have to be pretty smart to be. The American RCP were (are?) just stupid. In that sense, they were true to their Trotskyist and Maoist roots, respectively.

By: harry b

harry b — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:23:31 +0000

Bob—that’s a very ungenerous and wrong way of reading it. I was pleased because I had finally forgotten the name of the paper of a cultish organisation I regarded as irrelevant to politics at the time. Only…I hadn’t. No, I’m a very left wing social democrat, which is not much different from what I was 20 years ago. It feels different, of course, because it is lonelier out here than it was then.
Oh, and by the way, I’m not a boomer (too young).

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:18:09 +0000

“The deep joy came when, for a brief moment, I believed that it had completely left my mind for good.”

The details and distance from center may escape me, but if this post is about how youthful idealism becomes a calcified resignation about war, corruption, and economic injustice, it strikes me as insufficient grounds for celebration.

Boomers (on both the right & the left) selling out and saying didn’t really want it anyway, I have put away the childish things, is why several succeeding generations have grown to hate us.

By: Harry

Harry — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:50:25 +0000

matt—different RCP entirely—yours is still around, and Scott M’s cat is named after its exiled leader, Chairman Bob (Avakian). The Brits were creepier (as you can tell from mfp’s comment) but probably not nuttier…

By: David T

David T — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 14:11:13 +0000

You should have asked me, mate. I could have told you!

My best friend used to call them “the 664 Graphic Designers living in Merseyside” because that had been their result in the constituency in which they’d stood in 1986.

A quick check of David Boothroyd’s book reminds me that – along with President Mbeke – they also used to support the argument that HIV did not cause AIDS. They thought that the AIDS campaign was all a plot to boster the “risk obsessed society”, or some other similar nonsense.

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:08:37 +0000

…granted, as you said, that was the American RCP, which seems to have been more clownish than the British one.

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:07:36 +0000

The RCP was pretty active around American college campuses in the 1980s, too. It may just be the general difference in American political attitudes, but I remember thinking of them as a bunch of ridiculous clowns (their big thing was trying to convince people not to vote, and their reps handing out newspapers often proudly identified themselves as Maoists). It was funny but somehow not entirely surprising to learn that they had all transmogrified into extreme libertarians.

By: MFB

MFB — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 10:06:05 +0000

Second Ray. Apparently there were various levels of membership; you had to sell so many copies of Living Marxism before you could rise up a level, and eventually you reached the level at which you were entitled to attend the Annual Conference.

Which was called, I kid you not, “Preparing for Power”.

My wife visited Britain in 1990 to stay with some old anti-apartheid lefties who’d emigrated and joined the RCP, and she said it was like living with Moonies. Eventually, desperate for someone to talk to, she went out with another old anti-apartheid leftie who’d emigrated, and sobbed in horror about how awful the RCP was, how dull, how dreary, how mindless . . .

You guessed it, he was the local RCP coordinator. Conversation went downhill from there.

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 08:47:22 +0000

I knew a guy who was in the RCP at one point, and they were insanely cultlike. They’d own the lives of their members, filling every moment with meetings and activities. I mean every moment, 12 hours of meetings in a week would not be unusual.

By: Tim Lambert

Tim Lambert — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:54:40 +0000

Spiked "science" published the claim that A bicycle is less efficient than walking. I reckon they will end up promoting Creationism.

By: Deltoid » Spiked = Stupid

Deltoid » Spiked = Stupid — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:46:33 +0000

[...] Update: Harry Brighouse writes about the history of Spiked — it seems they started as the Revolutionary Communist Party! [...]

By: vivian

vivian — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 23:59:31 +0000

The Royal College of Physicians?

Odd, all I could think was “Royal Communist Party” – it didn’t make a lot of sense, but had serious snark potential that could be associated with cool clothes.

By: Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 20:05:05 +0000

Between Frank Furedi and Ian Williams and company, I’d say that the former was much closer to the truth on the topic of Yugoslavia. British libel laws favor the prosecutors, as should be obvious from the Roman Polanski trial.

By: harry b

harry b — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 19:36:14 +0000

john kozak—I need some sort of wierd way to sign that I am being ironic but not really ironic. All you say is true. And of course, I thought they were ridiculous, prancing around in their fancy clothes and preening themselves… but, I don’t know, they looked cool, and they certainly thought they were too cool to speak to scruffs like me…