‘Preparing for Power’ - Dr Jack Hepworth

‘Preparing for Power’

The Revolutionary Communist Party and its Curious Afterlives, 1976-2020
Buch | Hardcover
288 Seiten
2023
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-24237-1 (ISBN)
105,95 inkl. MwSt
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.

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

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

Erscheinungsdatum
Zusatzinfo 10 bw illus
Verlagsort London
Sprache englisch
Maße 156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt Geschichte Allgemeine Geschichte Zeitgeschichte
ISBN-10 1-350-24237-3 / 1350242373
ISBN-13 978-1-350-24237-1 / 9781350242371
Zustand Neuware
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