Back in May, former home secretary Suella Braverman took part in an 18-minute 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 for – don’t laugh! – ‘levelling up, housing and communities’!) had reinforced this promotional message by standing up in Parliament, apparently to denounce as ‘antisemitic’ the Palestine encampments that had been invigorating the Palestine solidarity movement. In the process, he specifically stated 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 CPGB-ML.
Rebranded ‘revolutionary communists’ heavily promoted by the state
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 and 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 our own party’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 our own: ‘The Communist’.
Our comrades have been arrested and had trumped-up charges related to the public order and terrorism acts thrown at them. Our homes have been raided in the middle of the night, and we have been ordered to keep off the streets and prevented from distributing literature. Our leaflets – ultimately found to have been entirely lawful – were nonetheless confiscated by S015 ‘anti-terror’ police and burned, rather than returned.
Our comrades have been harassed at work by the state, their families have been harassed by social services, we have been prevented from “entering Westminster” or “leaving the country” under the threat of being arrested again if we breach any of these conditions.
Our Comrade Ranjeet Brar 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.
Yet Mr 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 a Tory government minister would be more friendly towards these groups given how much common ground they share.
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 was promoted nationally and her organisation’s name was immediately on the lips of cabinet ministers as ‘the alternative’ with whom the hated Tories ‘disagree’.
Let us not forget that this was the same Michael 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. And even as Gove attempted to mobilise this supposedly ‘anti-terror programme’ against our party and against those in the wider working class who are turning to communism, no mention is to be made of our party itself, lest the flames of our popularity be fanned among the mass of British workers.
It seems the British state has been thinking since the rise of the Palestine solidarity movement, which is beginning to move 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 months after the first arrest of our party comrades went viral, helped along by mobile phone footage from several protestors, which showed our comrade Ranjeet 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 our own comrades 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, clapperboard 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 our party received following police repression. They want to create confusion between their pseudo-revolutionary organisation and our 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 our party. We know we have been targeted by spies. We know we have been subject to systematic shadow banning and algorithm suppression on major social media platforms. What other electronic methods are used against us 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 never to mention our party or any of its leaders by name and never to invite us 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 we do. Instead, it is being promoted everywhere and its content is pushed by, 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 particularly known for its celebration of the fall of the USSR and the eastern European socialist states – was drawn into appearing in a video for the RCP’s Fiona Lali, pushing her as an individual, her ideas and her candidature in the 4 July general election when she stood against Halima Khan in Stratford and Bow, thus helping her to split the vote of the established pro-Palestine and antiwar (Workers party) candidate.
In that interview, Lali asserted that communists were a leading force in the “black” (civil rights) struggle in the USA “until Stalinism put them all off”. What is needed, said Lali, is a “total revolution” (whatever that might be). She then announced that we need a “planned economy (quite right) … which has absolutely nothing to do with the Stalinism of the USSR” (although the USSR’s economy during the Stalin era is by far the strongest example of a planned economy that the world has so far seen).
A clearer example of an anticommunist posing as a communist in order to discredit communism would be hard to find.
Mr Waters took the opportunity to denounce the Soviet intervention that suppressed a fascist counter-revolution in Hungary in 1956 – an event that had apparently led his own mother to leave the Communist party and become a Labour party activist.
Whether Waters is aware of the nuances of Trotskyism and who he was promoting was not absolutely clear from this. He seems to all intents and purposes to be a well-intentioned liberal. But the effect of this promotion of a state agent was deeply harmful and, at very least, stupidly played into the hands of the very imperialist forces that are 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 working class of Britain is beset by problems as the ruling class pushes the burden of the present crisis onto workers’ 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 heavily in the creation of fake 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 the 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 should ‘dictate’ to them as if they had been the common herd. They 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 along 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 Josef 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 may not have been 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 organisational relaunch not just of its British section but of its entire international network. It is currently running an extensive (and expensive) advertising campaign across Britain, Europe and the USA – with generous funding from an unknown source, state promotion by government ministers, and corporate media sponsorship spanning the gamut of imperial organs from the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail to the information empires of Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch.
All of this takes considerable resource, as does employing numerous full-time organisers, which the RCP is doing in many countries. Yet none of the IMT’s local 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 indirectly, via a substantial grant from some member of the Anglo-American capitalist class, or directly by the British and/or the US state and security services – perfectly timed to coincide with the 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 have chosen the IMT? Likely because the relationship is longstanding. Veteran 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. This seems to have been largely unsuccessful, but can hardly be described as accidental.
The relaunch of the IMT/Socialist Appeal as the ‘RCP’ 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. Clearly a new vehicle was needed to keep the influence of this pernicious ideology alive amongst the workers.
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 “interimperialist” war, in which aggressive imperialist Russia is waging an unjust war of conquest against Ukraine.
Our party 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, in which Hamas and its military are the leading force, and brands the entire liberation struggle as futile. The RCP’s ‘analysts’ refute the real anti-imperialist struggle that is now being waged and assert that the only thing that can defeat imperialism in the middle east is a region-wide workers’ revolution.
Well 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 to bring about such an event might develop. It is clear to anyone with eyes to see that the resistance against the imperialist domination of Palestine is today 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 going on inside Palestine and opposes to it an imaginary “region-wide workers’ revolution” that has no connection to reality – to how the struggle against imperialism is actually developing on the ground.
This is a mistake which has its roots in Trotsky’s own works. Throughout his career, 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 over the programme for Soviet industrialisation.
We cannot give workers’ enemies free rein
We are often asked why the party criticises the RCP on our 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 who are dying in large numbers in Ukraine and Palestine, the RCP is misleading potential revolutionaries and leading them down a dead end. 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: who they are 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 1937, 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 plank in a 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 to build a bright socialist future.
These Trotskyite tailers remain, of course, a subordinate plank to the mainstream Labour social democrats, but as the Labour party loses all credibility along with the rest of the British political ‘mainstream’, in the gathering storm of political and economic crisis, the capitalist class and its state are using the RCP to target the rise of Marxist understanding and sympathy – and to keep workers away from our party in particular, as the vehicle of that much-needed scientific ideology, understanding 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.
