Overview

This book employs a history of ideas approach to trace the complex journey of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and its afterlives. Although the RCP existed for barely two decades, it left a curiously lasting impact on British politics, and its legacies have provoked bewilderment, suspicion, and animosity. Formed as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in 1978, the RCP represented a distinct and often controversial offshoot of the Trotskyist left. Campaigning principally around ‘unconditional support for Irish freedom’ and anti-racism, RCP cadres expounded an independent revolutionary politics to supersede capitalism. In the 1990s, however, the RCP leadership ruefully declared that the working class had suffered an historic defeat, and the party dissolved in 1996. Combining wide-ranging archival research and twenty-four life-history interviews with former activists, Preparing for Power examines ideological continuity and change among the ex-RCP milieu. Explaining the party’s key ideas, their evolution, and their retrospective contestation, Jack Hepworth analyses the RCP’s trajectory in a broader political context. In doing so, Hepworth illuminates a network which has been the subject of considerable media sensation and polemical attention.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dr Jack Hepworth (University of Oxford, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:  

9781350242371

ISBN 10:   1350242373
Pages:   288
Publication Date:   07 September 2023
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Introduction 1. 'We Take the Very Unpopular Position of Giving Unconditional Support’: The Revolutionary Communist Party, the Labour movement, and Irish Republicanism, 1981-1986 2. ‘Fight Back with the Party of the Future’: Anti-Racism, Anti-Apartheid, and the Miners’ Strike, 1983-1986 3. Challenging ‘The State’s Repressive Apparatus’ and ‘Modern Malthusians’: AIDS, Moral Authoritarianism, and Environmentalism, 1986-1989 4. ‘The Empire Strikes Back’: The Collapse of the USSR, the Gulf War, Yugoslavia, and Ireland, 1989-1997 5. ‘Class Politics Cannot be Rebuilt, Regenerated or Rescued’: Reorientation, Dissolving the RCP, and Renewal, 1994-2000 6. ‘Encouraging the Unsayable to be said’ and the ‘Edgeless Blancmange of Modern Politics’: The Academy of Ideas and Spiked, 2000-2010 7. ‘We Need More Courage’: Condemning Censorship and Critiquing Identity Politics, 2010-2016 8. ‘Democracy: The Unfinished Revolution’: Brexit, Covid-19, and Black Lives Matter, 2016-2020 Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Author Information

Jack Hepworth is Canon Murray Fellow in Irish History at the University of Oxford, UK.

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