Preparing for Power: The Revolutionary Communist Party and its Curious Afterli [Hardcover]

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 Powerexamines 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.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the Revolutionary Communist Party and its successor organisations and networks.Jack Hepworthis Canon Murray Fellow in Irish History at the University of Oxford, UK.Based on extensive documentary and archival research as well as detailed interviews with key activists, the book is a compelling account of one of the far left's most unusual organizations & I would thoroughly recommend it. Socialist History

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, Al3*