Lenin in Brussels
When MCC isn't cricket
It’s autumn 2018. Pandemics and European land wars are the stuff of dystopian science fiction. The glorious nationalist wave started by British and American voters two years earlier is cresting in Italy and promising to engulf the EU’s integrationist project at the spring 2019 elections to the European Parliament.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive but to be an American national-conservative pyromaniac in his mid-sixties was very heaven. Drunk with counter-revolutionary fervour and unemployed after eight anarchic months in Donald Trump’s White House, Steve Bannon was in the union’s capital to launch The Movement. “The beating heart of the globalist project is in Brussels,” he rejoiced in trolling The Guardian. “If I drive the stake through the vampire, the whole thing will start to dissipate.”
Sadly for this self-styled reactionary “Leninist”, the stake never made it out of the tree. His part think tank, part organisational hub for national conservatives (“natcons”) found nothing more than an elegant home in Watermael-Boitsfort. By 2019, the political tide was already turning against Bannonism in the Netherlands, France, and Italy while, back home, the House of Representatives had fallen to the Democrats. The European Parliament elections were – as they were always going to be – a low-turnout means to reward or punish domestic majorities and not Bannon’s longed-for “continent-wide referendum on the EU”. A year later, The Movement folded.
Yet all was not lost. The groundwork done by the Prophet of A-Street-Northeast hasn’t gone to waste. His jerry-built Movement has been replaced by a home-grown and well-funded intellectual hub to project the “illiberal” national and traditional conservatism (“tradcon”) pioneered by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán into the 2024 election cycle. MCC Brussels is an outpost of Mathias Corvinus Collegium – a Budapest-based private educational institution that acts as an incubator for new cadre loyal to Orbán’s ruling party, Fidesz. Chairing MCC’s board is the prime minister’s political director Balázs Orbán (no relation). Generously endowed by the government with equity in major Hungarian firms and an attractive real-estate portfolio, MCC is turning into the soft-power arm of Orbánism.
So far, so normal. What makes MCC Brussels special is that it went one step further than Bannon and put actual Leninists in charge. As their first executive director, the Orbáns chose Frank Füredi, a Hungarian-born retired sociologist best known for leading the now-defunct Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the UK.
Where we go one, we go all
Even among British far-left parties, the RCP was always a strange beast. It started life as a dissident faction inside the International Socialists – the local wing of global Trotskyism’s Fourth International – led by Yigael Glückstein (nom de guerre “Tony Cliff”). As they do, the dissident faction itself split over Marx’s theory on the falling profit rate and over how to approach South African apartheid. Füredi (nom de guerre “Frank Richards”) led his loyalists into the Revolutionary Communist Tendency and eventually rebranded as the RCP.
Contrarians even then, the RCP opposed the 1984-85 coal miners’ strike, quibbled over protests against the introduction of a national poll tax, set up a Red Front to compete against the Labour Party at the 1987 election, and provided unequivocal support for the Provisional IRA. Füredi wound up the RCP in 1988 and founded the slick Living Marxism magazine. This mixed increasing libertarianism with an épater la gauche caviar swagger that eventually led to its demise after claiming the Bosnian-Serb Trnopolje internment camp t’was but a voluntary resettlement centre. The slide into pure libertarianism continued as Living Marxism gave way to publications and groupings of the like-minded at Spiked Online, the Institute of Ideas, the Academy of Ideas, the Battle of Ideas, the LM Network and Sense About Science.
It’s not uncommon for left-wing firebrands to moderate with age and even to switch sides. What distinguishes Füredites is that they did this together and continue to do so even as they morph from ex-Marxist libertarian Brexiters into national/traditional conservatives. Füredi’s head of policy is a Battle of Ideas alumnus, his head of outreach from the Academy of Ideas and Sense About Science, and a visiting research fellow and the most recent guest speaker (aside from Orbán’s justice minister) are LM Network old-timers.
Majority rule
Have they moved so far together that they don’t even know they’ve crossed a line? First, let’s remove Füredi’s favourite straw man. Orbán isn’t Vladimir Putin or Alexander Lukashenka. During his 13 years in power, he has increasingly melded Fidesz and the administrative state, come to dominate the media, tinkered with the electoral system to his advantage, adopted equidistance between Moscow and the West, and misused referendum powers. But Hungary is still a democracy – albeit an avowedly illiberal version – and the combined parties of the right (Fidesz–KDNP and Our Homeland) together won 60% of the vote at last year’s election against a combined opposition.
I’m not questioning the legitimacy of his office or the failure of the united opposition but that neither makes Orbánism a political philosophy to follow nor his opponents to blame for Hungary’s political failings. In a Politico editorial last November to announce the birth of MCC Brussels, Füredi wrote: “I, too, often feel that democracy in my home country is under threat. But …” (can you guess what’s coming?) … “the real threat to Hungarian democracy isn’t the Fidesz government — it’s the absence of a serious and responsible political opposition. A democratic society requires an able, mature political alternative. And it always needs an opposition that can speak on behalf of those who feel ignored and marginalized. Indeed, a government can only grow more effective when it’s kept on its toes by credible critics. Yet, the Hungarian opposition finds it difficult to reflect the sentiments of the people. It is alienated from those living outside the capital, and seems only able to talk to itself — much like a group of self-centered children who blame their failures on their opponents rather than their own incompetence.”
This is pure majoritarianism and victim blaming. Winning doesn’t make Orbán right or losing make the opposition wrong. The former leader of the Red Front and recipient of 0.01% of the British national vote in 1987 should appreciate that. Are the 34% of Hungarians who voted for Péter Márki-Zay not “the people”? Is democracy only threatened by an opposition perceived as not “upholding the traditions and values of its people — including Christianity”? Can Comrade Richards hear himself? Do the self-perceived libertarians of the old LM Network agree with the views so carefully set out by Orbán in his Bálványos summer camp speech last July? Do they too think immigration leads to “population replacement or inundation”?
I suspect the contrarianism has been too much fun and too lucrative for too long to stop and reflect. Füredi is probably too old to change but some of you kids - come on.