‘Preparing for Power’

This book employs a history of ideas approach connecting the RCP's origins in the late 1970s with its cadres' subsequent activism to the present day. Whilst the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) existed for only nineteen years, and had a membership that barely surpassed 200, it left an indelible imprint on British politics.

Formed as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in 1978, through the 1980s and 1990s, the RCP railed against the state, the Labour Party, the trade union movement, 'Stalinist' regimes worldwide, rival groups on the radical left, and environmentalism. The RCP dissolved in 1997 and former activists formed the influential internet magazine Spiked, and founded the prominent public forum the Institute of Ideas.

Engaging twenty-five life-history interviews with former RCP members, alongside vast primary research, this book provides the first scholarly account of the RCP. By drawing extensively on rare interviews, Jack Hepworth is able to shed a fascinating light on a network which has been the subject of much journalistic attention and several polemics, but little detailed research.