Kmflett's Blog

Frank Furedi: from revolutionary communism to national conservatism

In 2023 Frank Furedi was scheduled to be one of the speakers at a hard to far right National Conservatives Conference in Brussels.

It was supported by the internationally focused Edmund Burke Foundation which has organised events across the globe often with far right speakers such as Meloni and Orban.

Furedi was in the 1980s the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party which published the monthly magazine Living Marxism. I had a personal interest there because while a socialist I was certainly no enthusiast for the RCP. However the Guardian published a front page article where it named me as the Editor of LM. Fortunately a correction was promptly printed.

Even in the 1980s the RCP had contrarian policies. It supported a ballot in the 1984/5 miners strike, was against no platforming fascists and its view on AIDS does not bear repetition.

Since then many of the leading figures in the RCP- long since defunct- have appeared on Spiked with their political positions moving steadily rightwards. Furedi is now a mouthpiece for Hungarian leader Orban and at the 2023 National Conservatism conference he moaned about people who say things are outdated, claiming that they are culture warriors. No actual evidence for this rather odd point was provided such as who had said it.

He rightly pointed out that thinkers like Aristotle and Plato are not outdated and nor of course is Marx, though Furedi didn’t mention his name..

Of course moves from left to right are far from unknown. The God That Failed genre has its historical place and in more recent times some of the radicals of 1968 have turned up as neocons, often proving that social being determines consciousness.

Furedi does not seem to find a contradiction between his views now and those of 40 years ago. Perhaps this is because he actually was and still is never a Marxist but always a contrarian.