"Trotskyists of defeat, they export revolution not in order to save it but in order to evade it."*
-Corey Robin
Easterhouse were a Manchester band, notable for their connection to the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group of by all accounts unbearable lefties who ended up all unbearable, no left.
The RCP's the more interesting story here: as the RCP split many members went on to Living Marxism, then to the Institute of Ideas, and most ended up finding a home at Spiked Online, where they pedal a hyper-charged "'twas young but now I know better" form of libertarianism and lazy contrarianism, such as how within critiques of economic inequality lie green shoots of oppression and totalitarianism. Careful with that tax, Eugene!
George Monbiot has written about the group, and Jenny Turner has a particularly interesting piece in the London Review of Books which covers some of the weirdness of the group and Frank Furedi's piss-poor research skills. For some more, let's say speculative writing on the group, read Pandora's Docs, wherein an Adam Curtis fan comes to believe the filmmaker shares ideological affinities with the group and has included some of the LM types in his productions.
In Canada, the nearest and closest practitioner of this would be Terry Glavin, who admonishes the left for their weak-kneed pacifism, etc; but unlike other pot-bangers and sword-rattlers, such as Andrew Coyne and David Frum, at least has the strength of his convictions to fly to a war-zone to get a picture taken with a machine gun.
Oh yes, Easterhouse... Well, they were on Rough Trade and from Manchester and not the Smiths (though there were a few connections (check Wikipedia). The centre of the band, or the dialectical core (let's say), were the two brothers Andy and Ivor Perry. Ivor Perry left in 1989 and the band's final album, Waiting for the Red Bird, has the tepid, head-nodding quality of contemporaneous CanCon rock, while the earlier work (which you can hear above) sounds a bit like The Sound or New Model Army.
*(h/t @equalitybfast for finding this quote)
