Living Marxism
See: Michael Fitzpatrick Sense about Science
[Jan 2007] Article by Zac Goldsmith
Quotes
SAS is often described as an aggressively pro-GM lobby group.
But it's much, much more than that. It is born of a bizarre political network
that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched
over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched Living Marxism
magazine in the late eighties. LM advocated lifting restrictions on child
pornography, it opposed banning tobacco advertising, supported human cloning and
so on. In as much as it has a central philosophy, it is a fierce opposition to
the state attempting to protect citizens from the excesses of big business. But
its real goal, and the reason for its political zigzagging, may stem from a
long-held hatred of any kind of positive reform that might risk prolonging the
system they hate. They call it "revolutionary defeatism". By helping to
accelerate the contradictions of capitalism they believe they are hastening the
move to the 'next stage' of human development.
During the nineties, Living Marxism
was successful at influencing the British media coverage of science and
environment issues, particularly relating to GM food. But in 2000, it was sued
for claiming that ITN had falsified evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian
Muslims, and was forced to close. It soon reinvented itself as the Institute of
ideas, and the on-line magazine Spiked.
At each step in its evolution, it
has been largely the same people who have given life to this strange movement
and painstaking research by Jonathan Matthews of www.gmwatch.org shows it is
many of the same people who now put themselves forward as the faces of
respectable, and trustworthy science.
It's a dizzying network. The
director of Sense About Science, Tracey Brown, for instance has written for both
Living Marxism and Spiked and has even published a book with the Institute of
Ideas. Both she, and her Programme Director, Ellen Raphael studied under Frank
Furedi at the University of Kent, before working for a PR firm that defends
companies against consumer and environmental campaigners.
Raphael meanwhile was the contact
person for Global Futures, a publishing house that until recently shared a phone
number with SAS. One of Global Futures' trustees is former Revolutionary
Communist Party activist and LM contributor, Phil Mullan, and despite being a
publishing house, Global Futures seems only to have published two papers –- one
of them by Frank Furedi, the long-term figurehead of the LM movement.
[Jan 2007] Article by
Zac Goldsmith