What exactly is the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ (RCP) and why is it being so heavily promoted?
People interested in left-wing politics are being bombarded with links to RCP content on social media right now. Why?
Back in May, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman took part in an 18-minute sit-down chat-show segment on GB News with an articulate young woman who came across to the uninitiated as very brave and appealing. This free advertisement was clearly designed to signpost her rebranded organisation to the revolutionary-minded youth of Britain.
Within days, Michael Gove (a high-level Tory Party apparatchik, former leadership contender and just then Secretary of State – don’t laugh! – for ‘Levelling up, Housing and Communities’!) had reinforced this promotional message by standing up in Parliament, apparently to denounce as ‘antisemitic’ the Palestine encampments that have invigorated the Palestine Solidarity movement – but specifically stating his opposition (without suggesting any repressive measures) to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Socialist Party (SP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) as the organisations with which he most disagreed on Israel, labelling them all as ‘antisemitic’.
Gove’s melodramatic and widely-reported denunciations were aimed entirely at Trotskyist organisations. Why?
It is ridiculous to believe that Gove would even know about the existence of the RCP were it not a state asset. Why single out a small and relatively unknown group that has existed for less than six months in its current form?
A form, moreover, that has been specifically designed to be confused with Britain’s really revolutionary communist party – the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML).
The RCP’s new website and content is being algorithmically promoted. Elon Musk himself recently retweeted a video of some US actors in New York, dressed up like communists, waving hammer and sickle flags. There was no hint of a broader message or campaign context. Just a huge signpost to the Revolutionary Communist Party of America. Musk’s comment was simply “!”. Given that he has 40 million worldwide followers, and is not known for promoting communism, it is legitimate to ask why he might signpost an allegedly anti-establishment party, while the CPGB-ML’s social media and mainstream media presence is consistently censored and suppressed. Indeed the ‘RCP’ website and newspaper rebrand carries a banner that could easily be mistaken for the CPGB-ML’s: ‘The Communist’.
CPGB-ML comrades have been arrested and had trumped-up charges related to the Public Order and Terrorism Acts thrown at them. Their homes have been raided in the middle of the night, and they have been ordered to keep off the streets and prevented from distributing literature. CPGB-ML leaflets – ultimately found to have been entirely lawful – were nonetheless confiscated by the S015 ‘anti-terror’ police and burned, rather than returned. CPGB-ML comrades have been harassed at work by the state, their families have been harassed by social services, they have been prevented from “entering Westminster”, or “leaving the country”, under the threat of being arrested again if in breach of any of these conditions. One Comrade, Ranjeet, has been publicly doxed (in the globally circulating Daily Telegraph, and by the Jewish Chronicle, well known Zionist and imperialist organs) as an ‘antisemite’ and his professional body has been pushed into investigating his fitness to continue practising medicine. All of this has been carefully orchestrated between high level Zionist operatives, high level policing bodies and officers, and Cabinet-level politicians. All are quite clear that, even as Gove attempted to have his ‘Prevent’ ‘anti-terror programme’ mobilise against the CPGB-ML, and the wider working class turning to communism, that no mention is to be made of the Party, lest to do so should fan the flames of its popularity among the mass of British workers.
And yet Michael Gove chose to focus his denunciations on “Revolutionary Communist” and “Socialist” groups that spend almost as much time denouncing the Palestinian resistance (‘Hamas’) as they do the Israeli regime. One would think that Mr Gove would be more friendly towards these groups given how much common ground he shares with them.
Clearly, something else is going on here. When we look more closely, what we see is a classic attempt to divert working-class young people by presenting them with a well-packaged but controlled, and ultimately harmless opposition. One young activist has been promoted nationally and her organisation’s name is immediately on the lips of cabinet ministers as ‘the alternative’ with whom the hated Tories ‘disagree’.
This is the same Gove who proposed referring young people expressing communist sympathies to the Prevent ‘anti-radicalisation’ programme and who wants to redefine Britain’s ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation to cover communists and socialists!
It seems the British state has been putting on its thinking cap since the rise of the Palestine solidarity movement, which is quickly moving on from opposing the genocide in Gaza to opposing the entire world order that backs and is ultimately responsible for that genocide. One can almost hear the ‘brainstorming’ session convened by Braverman, Sunak and Gove, in cooperation with various MI5 officers, Met police commanders and Media moghuls.
A couple of weeks after the first arrest of CPGB-ML comrades went viral, helped along by multiple protestors’ mobile-phone footage of comrade Ranjeet Brar explaining to the arresting officers that they were complicit in war crimes, and were enforcing a regime of political policing, the RCP produced slick footage of another arrest. This one had some remarkable parallels – and more remarkable differences! A young ‘activist’ steps forward to complain that the police are arresting their member. Pan left, and witness… the carefully choreographed ‘arrest’ of a ‘young Indian doctor’ (Raj, not Ranjeet) being led to a police van (quite calmly, by city police, on cue, and without the handcuffs Ranjeet Brar had to endure) and politely driven away (to be released a few hours later). The whole performance was fortuitously live-streamed by an RCP paid full-timer, Jack Tye Wilson. All that was missing was a final step back, to witness the director, clapper-board in hand!
It seems clear that this was a copycat algorithm promotion device. The newly rebranded ‘revolutionary communists’ aimed to get themselves a boost from the legitimate wave of sympathy CPGB-ML received following police repression. They want to create confusion between their pseudo-revolutionary organisation and the genuinely revolutionary one in the eyes of casual internet surfers and newcomers to left-wing politics.
And it is clear they have the full backing of the ruling class in this effort. Domination of internet search engines is a major part of the ruling class’s armoury in preventing workers from finding the CPGB-ML. We know it has been targeted by spies. We know it has been subject to systematic shadow banning and algorithm suppression on major social media platforms. What other electronic methods are used against it we cannot at this stage find out, but we have no doubt there are more.
Ruling-class media – including supposedly ‘left-wing’ and ‘independent’ media – have an unwritten rule that is very rarely broken, i.e., never to mention the CPGB-ML or any of its leaders by name and never to invite them onto their platforms. Thus the path for many who do eventually stumble across Britain’s only real communist party is long and tortuous, often taking many years and much persistence. Many give up, assuming the organisation they were looking for simply does not exist.
If the RCP really were a threat to the system, it would suffer the same treatment the CPGB-ML does. Instead, it is being promoted everywhere and its content is pushed, rather than being suppressed, by the social media giants, all of whom are known to be hand in glove with US and British secret services.
‘Left’ liberal misdirection – ‘double-down news’
It is notable that Roger Waters, the lead singer of Pink Floyd – a band best known for their celebration of the fall of the USSR and the eastern European socialist states – was drawn into a heavily promotional video of Fiona Lali, pushing her as an individual, her ideas and her candidature in the 4 July British general election against Halima Khan in Stratford and Bow, so using her to split the vote of the established pro-Palestine and anti-war (Workers Party) candidate.
In that interview, Lali asserts that communists were the leading force in the ‘black’ (civil rights) struggle in the USA “until Stalinism put them all off”. What is needed, says Lali is a “total revolution” (what’s that?). She then announced that we need a “planned economy” (quite right) “which has absolutely nothing to so with the Stalinism of the USSR” (??? yet the Soviet Union’s planned economy during Stalin’s lifetime is by far the strongest example of a planned economy that the world has seen until today!). A clearer example of an anti-communist posing as a communist in order to discredit communism would be hard to find.
Roger Waters then takes the opportunity to denounce the USSR intervention to put down the fascist counter-revolution in Hungary in 1956 – an event that apparently led Waters’ mother to “leave the communist party”, and become a Labour Party activist.
Whether Waters is aware of the nuances of Trotskyism and who he is promoting is not absolutely clear from this. He seems to all intent and purpose to be a well-intentioned liberal. But the effect of this promotion of a state agent is deeply harmful, and at very least, stupidly plays into the hands of the very imperialist forces really responsible for the genocide in Palestine.
Marxist analysis and organisation more needed than ever
The economic and political crisis of imperialism is intensifying, and its consequent war drive is accelerating. On every side the proletariat of Britain is beset by problems as the ruling class pushes the burden of the present crisis onto working class backs.
As anger grows, the British bourgeoisie is doubling down on its centuries-old strategy of running interference in the working-class movement in the hope of diverting and disorganising its potential power. It makes use of anti-immigrant rhetoric, race-baiting and the open persecution of progressives and anti-imperialists. In a multipronged attack, the British state also invests in the creation of false opposition parties and media, whose job is to mislead and confuse those who are starting to look for answers.
Trotskyism in Britain has been playing this state-sponsored provocative role since its earliest days. It works by spreading incorrect analyses amongst workers and students, particularly amongst those who are new to politics and attracted by the ‘ultra-revolutionary’ clothing in which Trotskyism’s pro-imperialist politics are routinely dressed.
It is therefore important that all class-conscious workers understand the history, current practice and dubious nature of the organisation now calling itself the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ and why it should be outed as the reactionary state-sponsored agent it really is.
What is Trotskyism and why must it be understood?
Trotskyism is a varied and eclectic movement, just as the collected writings of its founder are incoherent and self-contradictory. But there are common points amongst the groups who follow (intentionally or not) Trotsky’s anti-worker, anti-Marxist tradition.
A common approach such groups share with their guru is the penchant for ultra-revolutionary phrasemongering. Trotskyite groups are well known for making themselves (and more importantly the communist movement) ridiculous by their bombastic but essentially empty declarations with no practical, definitive programme of action that will bring the working class to the stated goal of ‘general strike now’ or ‘revolution everywhere’.
It is notable that, rather than skilfully and steadily building up the forces needed for working-class victory, these groups often push for reckless advances when then tide is against the workers’ movement but argue for caution and compromise when the revolutionary masses are surging forward. Unsurprisingly, no Trotskyite group has ever built, led or won a revolution, despite more than a century of their proclaiming themselves the ‘vanguard’ and ‘true proponents’ of Leninism.
Despite their claims to be the upholders and inheritors of the October Revolution, the truth is quite the opposite. The main essence of Trotskyism has always been opposition to Lenin and Leninism. Trotsky himself worked consistently against Lenin and the Bolsheviks from the moment of their split from the Menshevik faction in 1903 until the last months before the socialist revolution of October 1917.
The origin of that split was on the question of organisation, and Trotsky was firmly of the Menshevik view that a broad mass organisation of self-enrolling members was all that was required to make revolution, while Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued that a disciplined, centralised organisation would be needed to harness the power of the working class and enable it to strike successfully against its powerful enemies.
Without organisation, said Lenin, the working class has nothing. But the intellectual individualists recoiled from the idea that anyone could ‘dictate’ to them as if they had been the common herd and refused point blank to be held accountable for their work or to follow a line they might not have been instrumental in creating.
When socialist revolution was in the offing, and the Bolsheviks had defied all Trotsky’s theories and predictions by building a party of the masses on Leninist lines, Trotsky jumped ship at the last minute and joined them just in time to proclaim himself a key leader of the party whose development he had done everything to oppose for a decade and a half. He later wrote a self-aggrandising history of the revolution that was excellently refuted in Joseph Stalin’s 1924 article ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’
Among Trotsky’s more notorious errors were his refusal to recognise the revolutionary potential of the poor peasants (condemned out of hand as ‘petty bourgeois’) in Russia and his corresponding refusal to recognise the revolutionary potential of the oppressed nations (condemned out of hand as ‘bourgeois’) in the Russian empire. In Trotsky’s world, only a pure proletarian could be revolutionary.
In opposition to this line, the Bolsheviks successfully carried out Lenin’s programme of building an alliance between the workers, the poor peasants and the oppressed nationalities of the Russian empire, all of whom had a strong interest in bringing down the Russian tsarist autocracy. This alliance was further developed to become the foundation for the socialist revolution and the building of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky’s mistake regarding the poor peasantry led him to the view that the revolution in Russia, since it would necessarily be carried out by a tiny proportion of the population (the urban working class at a time when Russia’s population was overwhelmingly peasant), would have to be supported by workers from Western capitalist countries, who would be needed to back up the Russian workers in putting down the peasants’ opposition.
This is what is meant by the theory of the ‘permanent revolution’, also known as the theory of ‘permanent hopelessness’ since it dictates that all enemies must be fought simultaneously and therefore dooms the working class to defeat.
In fact, it now appears that the originator of this self-defeating theory was not Trotsky himself but his émigré close friend and mentor, Alexander Parvus, a shady character in Russian socialist circles abroad who made money as a gun runner during WW1, and who is known to have worked with both British and German intelligence.
After Lenin’s death, Trotsky dressed up his continued opposition to the politics of Lenin in revolutionary Russia as a ‘defence of Leninism’ against Lenin’s successor Stalin. In fact, it was Stalin who upheld Lenin’s ideas and successfully led their implementation by the Party and the people, who were thus the first and most spectacularly successful builders of a socialist state.
Trotsky, like his modern political spawn, never understood the necessity of persuasion if the Party wanted to bring the masses over to the side of the socialist revolution. As the arguments in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) of the 1920s repeatedly show, a majority of Party members (led by Stalin) repeatedly made the point that the Party must carry the people with them through argument and experience, not via coercive measures.
Trotsky, on the other hand, seemed to believe that shouting his demands loudly enough was all that was required. If that didn’t work, he was ready to turn to military and bureaucratic methods of coercion – as was revealed by his attitude towards trade unions in the USSR.
Pervading all this was personal arrogance, a contempt for discipline and organisation, a contempt for the poor and uneducated – all the hallmarks, in fact, of a petty-bourgeois intellectual.
And these errors continue to be replicated in the actions of those who follow Trotskyite organisations like the RCP in the present day. They advance ultra-revolutionary sounding slogans such as “Regional workers revolution” in the Middle East while ignoring or denigrating those who are already waging the anti-imperialist struggle in that region, none of whom meet their criteria for support.
Such an attitude can only lead those who follow them down a path of disorientation and disillusion. Who but the imperialist ruling class stands to gain from the promotion of such a method?
Where did the RCP spring from?
The organisation now calling itself the RCP is a rebrand of a group called Socialist Appeal (SA), which is connected to an international organisation known as ‘International Marxist Tendency’ (IMT). Along with many other Trotskyite sects, the SA was organised inside the imperialist Labour Party for many decades, firstly as ‘Militant’ and then as ‘Socialist Appeal’.
The group’s rebrand occurred towards the end of 2023, when its members suddenly started calling themselves ‘communists’ – a word they’d barely ever used before – and started adopting a Soviet aesthetic in their material.
Some may argue that organisations change over time, but there is reason to be very suspicious of this rebrand given that it happened very suddenly and saw the organisation relaunch not just its British section but its entire international group. It is now running an extensive (and expensive) advertising campaign across Britain, Europe and the USA – with generous funding from an unknown source, state promotion from government ministers, and corporate media sponsorship spanning the gamut of imperial organs, from the Telegraph and Mail to the information empires of Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch.
All of this takes considerable resources, as does employing numerous full-time organisers, which the RCP is doing in many countries. Yet none of its sections ever had a large membership, so where has the funding come from for this slick operation?
One is forced to conclude that the RCP relaunch is being funded either directly by a substantial grant of the Anglo-American capitalist class, or directly by the British and/or the US state and security services – at a time of a rapid growth of interest in real revolutionary change and in communism, and that this is essentially a spoiler operation. That is the role that Trotskyite operations have played for 90 years, and this one is no different. Why would they choose the IMT? Likely because the relationship is longstanding. IMT/RCP leader Alan Woods has a long history of attempting to infiltrate and influence the Venezuelan leadership of Hugo Chávez, via his lesser-known brother Adan Chávez, with the ideas of Trotskyism, which it seems was largely unsuccessful, but hardly accidental.
The relaunch of the RCP/IMT / Socialist Appeal comes at a time when the Trotskyite parties that used to dominate left-wing politics in Britain and the USA have lost almost all their credibility and traction.
What are the RCP’s main positions on the important questions of the day?
When it comes to the two biggest crises facing US and British imperialism today, the RCP’s analysis is so wrong that it ends up essentially supporting the propaganda of British imperialism.
If we examine its position on the Ukraine war, for example, which is the defining issue of the present era, we discover that the RCP’s ultimate conclusion is that it is an “inter-imperialist” war, in which aggressive imperialist Russia is waging an unjust war of conquest against Ukraine.
The CPGB-ML has been debunking every aspect of this specious argument for a decade, so there is no need to go into it further here, except to note that it is an ‘analysis’ that denies all history, all context and all economic fact and only serves to bolster the narrative created by the imperialists to hide their aggression, their use of fascist proxies, their destruction of Ukraine’s sovereignty, their theft of Ukraine’s wealth and their sacrifice of Ukraine’s people on the altar of imperialist profit.
The RCP’s analysis of the Gaza war is also incorrect when it comes to the resistance movements. It denounces the actually existing Palestinian resistance movements, of which Hamas and its military are the leading force, and brand the entire liberation struggle as futile. The RCP’s ‘analysts’ refute the actually-existing anti-imperialist struggle and assert that the only thing that can defeat imperialism in the Middle East is a region-wide workers’ revolution!
And if wishes were fishes, we’d all have tea! Of course, no one is going to object to a region-wide socialist revolution, but the RCP seems to have no idea how the conditions of such an event might develop. It is clear to anyone with eyes to see that the resistance against imperialist domination of Palestine is being conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and others. And that on the regional level, these are being supported by the Iraqi, Lebanese and Yemeni resistance movements. All of which are doing real damage to imperialist interests and are well on course to achieving the final defeat and destruction of Anglo-American imperialism’s settler colony of Israel in the coming period.
Some of these resistance groups are nationalist groups inspired by Islam, while others are secular socialist groups (PFLP and DFLP, for example). The Palestinian Marxist groups are part of a broad alliance with Hamas and others, and they operate on the basis of a common programme, forming a united front against US-led Zionist occupation. They correctly identify their primary enemies as US imperialism, British imperialism and their Zionist colony.
The RCP position ignores what is actually happening inside Palestine and opposes to it an imaginary “region-wide workers’ revolution” that has no connection to reality – the way the struggle against imperialism is actually being conducted on the ground. This is a mistake which has its roots in Trotsky’s own works. Trotsky would routinely advance ultra-left slogans that were completely out of line with social forces both before and after the revolution.
In the 1920s, he did this over the trade union question, over collectivisation of the land (which he wanted to forge ahead with when the conditions were not yet ready and which he denounced when they were) and the programme for industrialisation.
We cannot give workers’ enemies free rein
We are often asked why the CPGB-ML criticises the RCP on its social media platforms. Is this not ‘divisive’ and ‘sectarian’? For all the reasons outlined above, one cannot but regard the RCP as an asset of the British state. Its leaders are directly or indirectly serving imperialism and its members, many of whom are no doubt sincere individuals who genuinely want to contribute to building a revolutionary movement in Britain, need to be made aware of that fact.
By denigrating the forces who are fighting imperialism, and dying in large numbers in Ukraine and Palestine, the RCP is misleading potential revolutionaries and leading them down a cul-de-sac. Its analyses serve imperialism. Its slogans create confusion and bring the true revolutionary movement into disrepute.
As communists it is our duty to be honest with the working class about the true nature of such groups as the RCP and what they represent. We remain ready to engage honestly with all those who have been misled and to offer them a better path.
As Stalin himself observed in 1927, Trotskyism long ago moved from being a mistaken trend in the workers’ movement to being an asset of the intelligence services of the imperialist powers. The RCP is but one more plank in the raft of measures adopted by the capitalist class to sabotage the historic mission of the working class to rise to the position of ruling class, and build a bright socialist future. They remain, of course, a subordinate plank to the mainstream Labour social democrats, but as the Labour Party loses all credibility along with the British political ‘mainstream’, in the gathering storm of political and economic crisis, the capitalist class and their state are using the RCP to target the rise of Marxist understanding and sympathy, and the CPGB-ML in particular as the vehicle of that scientific ideology, undeårstanding and organisation.
We must be absolutely clear as to the dangers that can come from such organisations and do our best to help workers steer clear of their poisonous misdirection.