A note Spiked Online, the Institute of Ideas, Living Marxism and RCP.

RDN's letter on Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas, to the New Statesman, 19 August, 2002

The story so far. As told by Nick Cohen (New Statesman, 12 August 2002), David Webb (Salisbury Review, June 2003) and George Monbiot (The Guardian, 9 December, 2003), a small, well-led group styling itself the Revolutionary Communist Party has relaunched itself over the years as the lively Living Marxism, and more recently (successively) Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas and Sense on Science. (See also disinfopedia's account and www.gmwatch.com's.)

As Spiked etc, they have been canny and brilliantly successful as "alongsiders" (RDN's neologism to catch the way they are not quite entry-ists) to London's scientific and cultural Establishments. My feeling is that these Establishments were so glad of the energy and intelligence of these new arrivals - and their capacity to field numbers of highly-motivated young people - that they overlooked the possibility that the group had an agenda which was unpalatable. They might have cared less, anyway (scientists and culture apparatchiks are pretty lefty anyway, mostly.)

My own take, as the group also became close to "free market" institutes close to my own heart, was that any agenda the erstwhile (?) revolutionary cell (if that is what it was) hardly mattered anyway. Still, I am not entirely convinced that the Spiked thinking is very rich, nor that it is free-thinking. Indeed, I incline to the view that it is narrow in focus, as dictated, perhaps, by its being a) strongly led, and b) directed by a narrow agenda. This doesn't strike me as intellectual life at anything like its best.

Cohen and Monbiot come from very different points of view, neither of which I share. Monbiot seems to have got some of his facts wrong. Still, their analyses are both highly pertinent.

Not to be outdone, I publish here a letter of mine which appeared in the New Statesman, the week after Cohen's piece.

RDN to the NS, 19 August 2002

"Dear New Statesman

Nick Cohen is right, the re-branded Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) matter. Noting their success, he believes they are opportunist and contrarian. Maybe even turncoat.

A graver charge is that they are dissemblers. They seem to disguise the degree to which they are a group, with leaders and foot-soldiers, and a shared analysis and aims.

I hazard a guess that these factors help them do their excellent work as they bring vitality and coherence to their take on the "green" and "Risk Society" debates. On playgrounds, third world development, chemicals, GMOs and much more, Furedi & Co expose folly, and argue for excitement and progress. They do so, Nick Cohen is right to point out, in a way which appeals to some of us who are associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The Furedi reasoning may go like this. Most campaigners protect the status quo. They would like picturesque poverty abroad and luddite anti-materialism at home. NGOs are run by people who are already beneficiaries of progress and are pulling up the ladder behind them. They are, in short, a new backward bourgeois.

There are bits of that analysis I share. But that's not the point. Audiences have a right to ordinary frankness in those who seek to influence affairs.

Sincerely
Richard D North"

ends