Nous publions ici un texte de camarades canadien.nes sur leur départ de l'ICR (anciennement TMI). Nous nous sommes beaucoup retrouvé.es dans leur travail et voulions le partager ici comme contribution externe.
Our balance sheet of the Revolutionary Communist International
Introduction
This document is the result of extensive discussions between former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the Canadian section of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). Most of us left the organization in 2022 in the wake of a scandal in which the Canadian leadership covered up a case of transphobic sexual harassment and grossly mishandled a case of sexual assault. We published our thoughts on the scandal at the time (when the organization was called the International Marxist Tendency or IMT, and its Canadian section was called Fightback), but this was only the beginning of discussions about how to build an organization that truly combats all forms of oppression, maintains a consistent class-independent perspective, and acts as a tribune of the people rather than a pyramid scheme or parasite on social movements.
All too often, when there’s a split in a Marxist organization, former members either try to recreate a more “pure” version of the organization they left or give up Bolshevism entirely and liquidate themselves into the wider movement. We set ourselves a different task: to critically analyze the often unspoken assumptions and habits we developed in the RCI, and to consciously chart a new path while retaining the grain of Marxism that attracted us to the RCI in the first place. Through this, we aim to differentiate ourselves from the various centrist and reformist tendencies on the Canadian left, and rediscover genuine Marxism which hasn’t had a strong voice in the workers’ movement for roughly a century. While we don’t believe in an “unbroken thread” of consistently revolutionary inheritors of Bolshevism, we believe that the communist movement and particularly the Trotskyists produced valuable contributions to Marxist theory and practice that we can learn from and build on, like a scattered collection of red threads.
This document is divided into three parts: the “good” (positive lessons from the RCI we wish to carry forward), the “bad” (shortcomings in the RCI’s politics), and the “ugly” (how the RCI applies their politics organizationally and in the movement). We hope it’ll be useful for anyone who wants to get involved in revolutionary politics but wishes to avoid the pitfalls of what is currently Canada’s largest socialist organization.
The Good
The Organization is Essential
Many of us joined the RCI because we wanted to fight against capitalism and its morbid symptoms – imperialism, police violence, sex/gender oppression, etc. – but were disillusioned by protest movements that felt like outlets for blowing off steam, not real vehicles for change. We wanted to organize a revolutionary tendency in the labour movement, but didn’t know where to start. Like many Marxist organizations, the RCI views itself as a piston-box to channel the energy of workers’ frustrations and coalesce the advanced layer of various social and labour movements into a single organization. Although their hyperfocus on recruitment can lead to problems, they’re right that movements need revolutionary leadership, that this leadership won’t arise spontaneously, and that it’s not enough to simply “weave socialism into the fabric of working-class life” through existing institutions. The RCI is correctly skeptical of conscious consumerism and organizations that claim to “build dual power,” because the working class doesn’t have enough discretionary income to substantially influence the direction of the economy through our wallets. Our power lies in our labour power and ability to withhold it.
Some consider the RCI (and Trotskyists generally) to be outdated, or accuse them of hijacking the movement when they set up literature tables and sell newspapers at demonstrations. Even though the RCI doesn't always do it at appropriate times, a few strange looks are worth it if a few demo attendees are won over to a Marxist analysis, and Trotskyists recognize that workers have nothing to lose but our chains. In our opinion, it would be wonderful if progressive movements were hijacked by workers and students coming to revolutionary conclusions and aligning themselves with whoever calls themselves “revolutionary” and “communist.”
The RCI also has a reputation for cult-like behaviour. While some of these criticisms are valid, unity in action and a level of ideological homogeneity shouldn’t be mischaracterized as cult-like. Effective organizations want an enthusiastic membership, a shared sense of direction and strategy, appropriate message discipline, and the ability to move as a cohesive unit. The negative aspects of cults (infallible leaders, strict control of communication, lack of democracy, etc.) also exist in looser, “big tent” organizations, so the problem isn’t the RCI’s ideological homogeneity or on-paper commitment to democratic centralism. Their cultish tendencies are a product of the concrete conditions the RCI emerged from, and the type of person who rises through the ranks with the RCI’s politics.
Defending the ABCs of Marxism
The RCI traces its lineage to the Militant Tendency in Britain, led by Ted Grant. Since their emergence in the 1960s, the Grantites traditionally claimed that the main feature differentiating them from other Marxist groupings is a heavy emphasis on theory and an orientation towards mass working-class organizations. This “emphasis on theory” rarely goes beyond the very basics of Marxism, and almost never into authors outside of their self-proclaimed “unbroken thread” of Marxism. Nonetheless, many of us joined the RCI because of their engagement with pressing theoretical questions and heavy emphasis on educational reading groups.
This emphasis on theory was particularly important during the post-World War II economic boom, when the Trotskyist movement entered a period of confusion and disorientation. While Trotsky predicted that World War II would end with crises and revolutions, the victory of the Allies brought in a period of incredible growth and stability for the imperialist world, the so-called “golden years” of capitalism, as well as the expansion and strengthening of Stalinism. While Ted Grant correctly assessed the post-war boom and its political consequences, the majority of Trotskyists got wrapped up in revolutionary apocalypticism, leading them to look for shortcuts, either by hiding their politics in mass organizations (deep entryism), trying to build parties in isolation from the masses (ultra-leftism), wavering between reformism and revolution (centrism), or bandwagoning on any movement that appeared to present a path forward.
For example, while some Trotskyists put their faith in peasant-based guerrilla armies, Grant maintained that working-class self-organization should be the driving force of any revolutionary movement. As opposed to the dual pressures of 1) developing illusions in bureaucratically-planned economies as “building socialism,” and 2) dismissing the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. as no different from capitalism, Grant defended Trotsky’s theory of degenerated (or deformed) workers’ states. He understood that these systems were neither capitalist nor socialist, but a different mode of production in which a privileged bureaucracy plans the economy for their own interest, not in the interest of profits nor international revolution. Unlike the heterodox Trotskyists who celebrated the collapse of the USSR (i.e. the largest peacetime GDP decline in history), and the Stalinists who were caught off-guard by the collapse, orthodox Trotskyists like Grant correctly predicted that the USSR’s internal contradictions would lead to its collapse, and this would be a massive setback to the productive forces.
In the contemporary period, the RCI has successfully resisted some harmful trends that other Marxist groups fell for. For example, after the fall of the USSR, when many Marxist groups dissolved themselves into “broad left” formations, the Grantites kept an independent revolutionary banner. They maintained a critical stance against campism, neither falling for the trap of viewing modern Russia and China as “liberators,” nor supporting economic sanctions or weapons shipments to US proxies to fight them. They have also resisted some of the most egregious and liberal forms of identity politics and standpoint epistemology, highlighting the way these liberal ideas divide the movement and obscure the central role of class struggle in uniting these struggles (although, as we will see, they take this way too far and fall for the opposite mistake of economism).
Rank-and-File Orientation
Finally, the RCI (at least on paper) orients itself toward the rank and file of the labour movement, rather than trying to reform the union leadership from above. Unlike some groups that spend much of their energy trying to elect their own members to executive positions or cultivating friendly relationships with left-reformist executives, the RCI has a more patient approach, understanding that a few Marxists in positions of power will be isolated and forced to make concessions if there isn’t an organized base of power in the rank and file.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened when Mike Palecek — one of the RCP’s first members — left the organization and successfully ran for president of his union, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). Even though Palecek agreed that civil disobedience is necessary to fight back-to-work legislation, he found himself outnumbered within the CUPW leadership when Trudeau legislated CUPW members back to work in 2018. Lacking an organized base in the rank and file that could carry out a wildcat strike, Palecek had little choice but to instruct CUPW members back to work without a contract, a move that led him to lose his re-election race the following year. Even though we have criticisms of the RCI’s approach to labour and social movements, they understand that betrayal is inherent in reformism, and therefore, the best strategy is to organize the rank and file for revolution, not pretend we can reform unions into fighting organizations that improve workers’ livelihoods under capitalism indefinitely.
The Bad
No Clear Break From Reformism
Long-Term Entryism and Reformist Adaptation
One of the defining features of the RCI, and particularly its predecessor groups, was its commitment to “entryism”. Entryism is the tactic of temporarily joining a larger socialist or labour organization such as the British Labour Party or French SFIO with the intent of breaking the revolutionary wing from its reformist leadership. Trotsky suggested this tactic to the French communists in 1934 when there was a serious possibility of France falling to either fascism or communism.
However, Trotsky viewed entry work as a relatively short-term tactic, and vociferously argued for the French communists to break with the SFIO just a year later as soon as the SFIO formed a popular front with the bourgeois Radical Party. Additionally, it was not a tactic for all conditions at all times. In 1959, before the foundation of the Militant, Grant himself outlined the classical conditions for entry work: a) pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation, b) ferment in social democracy, c) development of a left wing, and d) the possibility of the rapid crystallisation of the revolutionary tendency. Despite none of these conditions existing in post-war Britain, the Militant and its successor groups continued its entry work all the way to 2023, and exported that approach to its other sections around the world. Although one shouldn’t dogmatically limit a tactic’s application to specific conditions, the Militant’s long-term entryism had little to do with Trotsky’s conception of the tactic, elevating it into a strategy. The Militant ran into a problem faced by other entryist groups in that they had no exit plan: when was their influence finally great enough that it made sense to split the Labour Party? If you’re successful with a certain tactic, why change things? In a 1935 letter to French Bolshevik-Leninists, Trotsky wrote that temporary entry work “is not an evil in itself; however, it is necessary to know not only how to enter, but also how to leave. When you continue to hang onto an organisation that can no longer tolerate proletarian revolutionaries in its midst, you become of necessity the wretched tool of reformism, patriotism, and capitalism.”
Trotsky’s warning proved prescient. While the Militant made impressive gains in the Labour Party, such as winning control of the Labour Party Young Socialists, Liverpool City Council, and electing three of their members as MPs on the Labour ticket, this was achieved by taking opportunist shortcuts to appeal to the consciousness of the “average” British worker. Instead of exposing the limitations of electoralism and using Parliament as a bully pulpit to bolster the working-class struggle on the ground, the Militant called on the Labour Party to pass an “Enabling Act” to abolish the monarchy and House of Lords, allowing the House of Commons to peacefully legislate socialism. While the Militant internally and informally maintained the need for a socialist revolution, they publicly argued that their program could be carried out on the back of an election victory. This idea has far more resemblance to Karl Kautsky’s centrism than it does to Marx or Lenin, who heavily ridiculed the idea that socialism could be achieved within the framework of the bourgeois state and its institutions.
No Lessons Learned From the Militant Years
When Grant and his followers were expelled from the Militant, they made it their goal to essentially recreate it. There was no attempt to draw any real balance sheets from their experience, nor to critically reevaluate their own tradition. This led to a dogmatization of Grant’s formula that the masses would inevitably gravitate toward their traditional organizations, and therefore the new organization, the IMT, had to remain in the Labour Party at all costs. Until 2023, the IMT maintained at least some level of activity within Labour, even through the reactionary Blair years. There was a stronger case for entry work when the Corbyn movement revived the left wing of the Labour Party, but the IMT formulaically applied the same centrist approach to the Corbyn movement, which they dubbed the “Corbyn revolution.” They made only a few friendly criticisms of Corbyn, calling on him to nationalize more than what he promised, and to fight more unapologetically against the Blairites. They made no mention of the need for a worker’s state, smashing the bourgeois state, the formation of factory committees or workers’ councils, or arming workers’ militias to defend against a right-wing coup.
Further into the Corbyn years, the IMT launched a campaign called “Labour4Clause4” to reinstate Clause 4 of the Labour Party, a tepid commitment to “common ownership of the means of production” that was removed from the Labour Party’s constitution by Tony Blair. This demand was originally put forward by the Fabian Society, a reformist, anti-Marxist grouping in the Labour Party which Trotsky had some choice words for. While this may sound very socialist even compared to Corbyn’s program, it’s not Marxists’ job to reheat reformist demands and paint them as the road to socialism. The IMT’s campaign not only uncritically supported the demand without touching on its origins and limitations, but even ran the campaign with the left bureaucracy and leadership of the Labour Party such as John McDonnell.
When Keir Starmer took over leadership of the Labour Party, the IMT concluded that the main lessons of the Corbyn experience were the need to “drive the Blairites and bureaucrats out of the PLP and Labour HQ, and transform Labour back into the mass social movement that it was becoming at the height of the Corbyn era”. Is this the role of the Marxist? To argue that we need to return to the status quo before Starmer; i.e., to left reformism which, because of its own logic, was incapable of fighting the Blairites? And even if the Blairites were kicked out, would Corbyn have been able to implement socialism with the “right” policies, the “right” amount of pressure? Nothing in the RCI’s material gets to the core of Corbyn’s main weakness — his left reformism — nor specifically what methods would be necessary to achieve a “socialist transformation of society,” because the RCI would in turn have to criticize some fundamental assumptions its own tradition has operated on since the beginning.
The reorganization of the IMT into the RCI in 2023 marked an abrupt end to decades of long-term entryism. While this is a positive development, there was no reassessment of their maxim that workers will always return to their traditional mass organizations, and therefore we have to be there in advance to meet them. There was no questioning whether this no longer applies or was wrong in the first place, and therefore no evidence that the RCI has truly absorbed any lessons from the past. Even though the British RCP has started running independent candidates against Starmer’s Labour Party, their program still reflects a Kautskyist perspective of winning a majority in Parliament and reforming capitalism from above. All of their platform’s points are geared toward what they’d do in office, with nothing about what workers can do to fight the incoming government in their workplaces and in the streets. Compare this to Trotsky’s Program of Action for France — which calls on workers to form factory committees and people’s antifascist militias, while making clear that the bourgeoisie will never give up their power voluntarily — and the difference couldn’t be more striking. When Marxists contest elections, the purpose shouldn’t simply be to build the party and highlight left-reformist demands, but to galvanize struggles on the ground and give them ideas for how to move the struggle to the next level. So while the RCI’s open turn is a step in the right direction, they will need to thoroughly reconsider their formulas from the Militant days if their “Revolutionary Communist” banner represents anything more than an aesthetic rebrand.
Popular Frontism in Latin America
Whether or not to enter a mass labour party is a tactical question, but not crossing class lines should be a point of principle for Marxists. Unfortunately, the RCI also has a history of joining and endorsing “left” bourgeois parties, especially in Latin America. They were swept up by the “pink tide” of reformist governments in the 2000s, and continued endorsing “lesser evil” bourgeois candidates in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, etc. well into the 2010s and 2020s. Despite their populist rhetoric, these parties are not labour parties or expressions of working-class self-activity in any meaningful sense – they’re attempts to pull the working class into bourgeois politics, and the RCI helped them.
The RCI called on these bourgeois governments to break with capitalism, even though they made it clear that they respect private property and free markets. The RCI justifies their perspective of left-bourgeois parties breaking with capitalism with an abstract comparison to the Cuban revolution, where the Castro government was forced to nationalize major industries under pressure. This comparison ignores the concrete circumstances that allowed Castro to make this turn (namely, the existence of the USSR which they could lean on for support), and ends up raising illusions in the working class’s direct oppressors.
Perhaps most disorienting was the IMT’s cheerleading of the bourgeois Chavez government of Venezuela, which they called a “socialist revolution.” The RCI’s paramount leader, Alan Woods, even had multiple comradely meetings with Hugo Chavez himself. While it’s true that the anti-poverty reforms under Chavez were significant, and he occasionally leaned on the working class for support, the majority of industry stayed in private hands throughout his term, meaning that Chavez’s main job was administering capitalism in collaboration with the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. He would criticize them, but reassure investors that, “we have no plan to eliminate the oligarchy, Venezuela’s bourgeoisie.” The New Yorker remarked that, “if this is socialism, it’s the most business-friendly socialism ever devised.” Instead of explaining that Chavez’s reforms were only possible in the context of the 2000s commodity boom, the RCI draws a sharp line between Chavez and Maduro, calling for a “return to Chavez” as recently as 2018; i.e. a return to the reformist policies that failed to solve the problems of Venezuelan capitalism. It’s Marxists’ job to dispel illusions in reformism, not coddle them.
Friendliness with Cops and Prison Guards
The RCI’s reformist tendencies can be traced all the way back to the Militant’s emergence in the mid-1960s, during a factional fight between various Labour Party entryist groups. A major flashpoint was the so-called “Wandsworth incident,” when a fight broke out at a Labour Party Young Socialists meeting and the Militant refused to condemn the use of police to remove a group of “ultraleft” Healyite “hooligans.” The United Secretariat for the Fourth International agreed that the Healyites’ actions were ultraleft, but criticized the Militant for not pursuing class-independent methods to combat them. Some of the Militant’s own supporters described their leadership’s “wishy-washy” justifications for police repression as “disgraceful.” This was not an isolated incident, but the beginning of the Grantites’ reputation as the friendliest far-left group toward the police.
In contrast with Trotsky, who said that “the worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker,” the RCI refers to cops as “working class boys in uniform.” When the Militant had members on the Liverpool City Council, they didn’t call for the police department to be disbanded, but made “accountable” (to which class?) and “subject to the supervision of democratically elected watch committees.” The RCI fundamentally believes that the police can be reformed and brought to our side, which is why they support police and prison guards’ inclusion in the labour movement as a way of bringing them “closer” to the working class. They ignore the fact that cops have an interest in being able to do their job (i.e. enforcing anti-labour laws and brutalizing Black and Indigenous people) with impunity, putting them at odds with the labour movement as a whole. The RCI doesn’t consider the potential silencing effect cops can have at union meetings, as workers (and particularly racialized workers) may have good reason not to spread “subversive” ideas when their oppressors are present.
The RCI even supports funding the police and military in certain circumstances, such as in 2005 when they supported the Jack Layton-backed Liberal budget. This budget not only included funding for Canada’s racist cops, but also its war in Afghanistan. Marxists should strive to be at least as radical as the early SPD of Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, which rejected all capitalist budgets on the principle of “not one man, not one penny” for the armed enforcers of the bourgeois state. Although the RCI has shifted their tone on policing in recent years, they never critically re-evaluated their past mistakes, meaning they’re likely to make them again.
Orientation Toward the Privileged
Neutrality in the “Culture War” or Coddling Its Right Wing?
The Militant’s decades of entryism in the Labour Party didn’t just affect their attitudes toward parliamentarism and revolution, but the way they approached questions of oppression. Instead of investigating the particularities of how oppression and privilege impact the class struggle, their immediate need to win elections put the Militant in the habit of paving over differences and focusing on policies that can appeal to the “average” British worker. Already in 1976, a group of 21 members left the Militant over this question, one of them claiming that Militant organizers “treat all young people as if they were white Anglo-Saxon male workers.”
The RCI claims that their attitude toward oppression is essentially a “negative” one; i.e. they’re against oppression, but they don’t feel the need to have any positive program for women’s liberation, Black liberation, LGBT liberation, etc. They frequently counterpose the “culture war” with the class war, when in reality many of those “cultural” issues (such as trans people’s right to use the bathroom) are democratic rights that should be considered part and parcel of the class struggle. By sweeping away differences under the general banner of “united class struggle,” the RCI de facto adopts a race- and gender-blind approach that leads them toward an unconscious orientation toward the privileged.
You can see this when they refuse to adopt terminology from the broader left like “feminism,” “privilege,” and “settler colonialism,” but are more than willing to adopt the language of the right, using “political correctness” and “woke” in derogatory ways, complaining about “64 different terms for different types of gender” and how you can’t say “fat” anymore. In their attempt to coddle social conservatives, they deny that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is far-right, and take Trump’s word that his cabinet appointments are a “taskforce for waging a struggle against the establishment.” They even adopt the logic of the right, arguing that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election was a lesser assault on democracy than the Democrats’ “extraordinary lengths to persecute Donald Trump.” In the face of a burgeoning feminist, pro-LGBT, pro-immigrant movement against the Trump administration, the RCI would rather orient toward the more backward layers of the working class who support Trump, because according to RCI leaders, “support for his anti-immigrant policies, in a highly distorted way, reflects class anger.”
In the RCI’s manifesto of over 10,000 words, there are only a few sentences on women’s oppression and no discussion of racism, homophobia, or transphobia (aside from a single sentence announcing their opposition to these things), whereas the vast majority of the section on “[t]he struggle against oppression” is spent complaining about “alien ideas: postmodernism, identity politics, ‘political correctness’, and all the other bizarre nonsense that has been smuggled in from the universities by the ‘left’ petty bourgeoisie.” While there’s good reason to be critical of liberal tokenism and standpoint epistemology, the RCI uses “identity politics” to mean anything remotely related to anti-oppression politics that they don’t like, even characterizing our demand for better handling of sexual harassment and assault cases as “identity politics.”
The RCI’s negative approach to oppression is not only flawed; it undermines the unity of the working class they claim to champion. Marxist organizations must avoid this by actively supporting the struggles of all oppressed groups, understanding that these struggles are central to the fight against capitalism. By treating them as secondary or simply part of a “culture war” to be circumvented, the RCI ends up disproportionately attracting the most well-off layers of society and subconsciously adopting the prejudices that come with them.
Colour Blindness
This opportunist approach toward anti-oppression is deeply rooted in the RCI’s history. When the Militant controlled the Liverpool City Council in the 1980s, Black community organizations protested and staged an occupation of council offices because the Militant-supported race relations officer refused to support affirmative action policies — a position the RCI still holds to this day. When the conservative US Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in 2023, the RCI didn’t see any advantage of diversifying higher education (even slightly) in a country where Black youth are constantly told that they’re unworthy of such things. They didn’t seek perspectives from anyone who might lose their admission over this ruling, only quoting a white woman complaining about how affirmative action programs are “giving people something they haven’t earned through their own hard work” and calling this a “healthy instinct.”
The RCI would like to see all workers as more or less the same, and dismiss studies on settler colonialism as “one of the strains of postmodernism” and therefore “extremely reactionary.” Instead of understanding settler colonialism as a social relation in which Indigenous people are dispossessed of their land to make room for capital accumulation, their avoidance of the topic blinds them to the unique historical realities that shape the class struggle in countries like Canada — and Israel in particular — which is still in the frontier stage of its colonial project. The RCI blames the conservatism of Israeli workers on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) tactic, ignoring the material benefits these workers receive from the ongoing theft of Palestinian land. The RCI’s articles about the Israeli cost-of-living protests in 2011 emphasized the “unity of Jewish, Palestinian and Arab workers”, but never mentioned how the movement was cut across by the construction of new West Bank settlements, giving Israelis free land if they’re willing to defend it. The RCI views the settlements as a burden on the public purse, not as a bribe for Israeli workers, whose defence is financed by billions of dollars in foreign military aid. A genuine Marxist approach would not make excuses for the economism of privileged layers of workers, but emphasize that the liberation of the oppressed is essential to the liberation of the working class as a whole, without papering over the (limited, temporary) benefits these workers receive from the existence of an open frontier and massive subsidies from US imperialism.
Anti-Feminism
Just as the RCI papers over the particular dynamics of settler colonialism, they also reject the idea of male privilege and position themselves in opposition to feminism as a whole. In contrast with Lenin, who spoke about the “privileged position of the men,” and that “the Party must have organs, working groups, commissions, committees, sections or whatever else they may be called with the specific purpose of rousing the broad masses of women,” the RCI argues against the idea of privilege, and doesn’t feel the need to establish any women’s commissions or caucuses to diversify what appears to be a very male-dominated organization. While they’re right that women’s oppression ultimately hurts men because it divides the workers’ movement, they deny that men receive any limited privileges under capitalism, such as being more than 1.5 times more likely to receive promotions than women.
The RCI does, however, mimic the Bolsheviks’ attitude toward feminism in the 1910s, when feminism was a specifically bourgeois movement. They ignore the last century of unions, socialist organizations, and revolutionary movements taking up the label, stripping it from its bourgeois roots, and turning it into a general banner for women’s emancipation (much like how Marx and Engels reappropriated the term “socialism” from the petty-bourgeois socialists Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier). Instead of positioning themselves as the proletarian wing of feminist struggles, the RCI sees feminism as a threat, de facto aligning themselves with misogynists and conservatives at a time when women’s reproductive rights are under attack.
The RCI likes to play up the possibility of cops joining the working-class struggle, but deny this possibility for sex workers (who they refer to with the more stigmatized term “prostitutes”). They don’t mention instances of sex workers protesting and striking against attacks to their livelihoods, or about exotic dancers unionizing, because they have no interest in these movements. They even oppose the basic demand of getting bourgeois cops out of the sex industry, because decriminalization would allow “traffickers to expose their victims in the open, in the windows of brothels in Hamburg and Amsterdam.” The RCI apparently thinks that exposing the public to sex workers is worse than forcing them underground, depriving them of any possibility of labour rights.
The RCI has never published an article on how to combat sexist abuse in the workers’ movement, but have published multiple articles defending their members from allegations of sexual harassment and assault, and characterized attempts to hold abusers accountable as “sectarian witch hunts.” RCI members should ask themselves what kind of person this rhetoric attracts and who it alienates.
“Both Sides”-ing Transphobia
The RCI’s opportunist approach to sex and gender can be traced back to their days as the Militant. In 1976, they wrote, “[s]erious socialists will recognise that ‘gay liberation’ cannot provide the slightest social basis for an independent contribution to the labour movement.” While some rank-and-file gay members participated in Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, the grassroots organization that built important bonds of solidarity during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, the Miltant’s leadership dismissed gay rights as a “bourgeois concern.” This silence continued well into the 1990s, lagging far behind the mainstream left.
Today, the RCI is making the same mistake with trans liberation. As the right and the “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” worked through the 2010s to strip away the hard-won rights of trans people in Britain, the RCI’s only comment on the issue was to denounce those organizing against this. In their official document on identity politics, the organization laments that masses of students rallied to no-platform transphobes like Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer, denying that these no-platformings “serve the fight against oppression in any sense, shape or form” and describing them as “thoroughly reactionary.”
The RCI showed their true colours when their section in the former Yugoslavia signed an open letter denouncing a Serbian film festival for screening a film that portrayed the social transition of a prepubescent trans girl, demanding that they add a disclaimer falsely claiming that puberty blockers are unsafe and irreversible. The international leadership described their position as follows:
“The endless arguments about whether a trans woman is ‘really’ a woman, or whether you can be ‘born in the wrong body’ do not interest us. Such so-called debates only serve to divide and distract attention away from the real issues. The question that must be asked is the following: does an adult person have the right to dispose of their body as they see fit? If the answer is yes, then it is undoubtedly the right of an adult person to take the necessary steps to change their sex or gender, if they so wish. And nobody has the right to prevent them from doing so. Of course, there is no question of children taking such a drastic step, before they are mature and able to make that decision.”
They can only justify defending the right to gender-affirming care through the liberal framework of bodily autonomy for informed adults. This completely ignores the large body of evidence showing that age-appropriate gender-affirming care provides overwhelmingly positive outcomes for both adults and adolescents. Additionally, if such a framework is the sole justification for allowing transition, then there is no basis for the demand to have gender-affirming care as part of healthcare. The RCI positions itself as neutral in the “culture war,” but ends up siding with reactionary bigots and transphobes, dividing the workers they supposedly wish to unite.
British Imperialist Chauvinism
What’s Good for Britain Is Good for the World
The RCI is perhaps the most British of the various London-based socialist internationals, and this bias affects every aspect of their politics, all the way down to the way their satellite sections sing The Internationale and pronounce the word “cadre.” The RCI seems to operate on the imperialist myth that political considerations in Britain are globally applicable, regardless of local conditions. As the Militant grew into an international, they exported their entryist strategy around the world, even in countries where labourism isn’t the “default” channel for workers to voice their discontent. Then, when the British section was kicked out of the Labour Party, they not only changed that section’s name to the “Revolutionary Communist Party,” they decided that it was the perfect time to rename the entire organization to the “Revolutionary Communist International” and push its satellite sections into adopting similar names.
It was also apparently the perfect time to launch a global “Are You a Communist?” marketing campaign, where its satellite sections adopted identical tactics, slogans, imagery, and even font choices. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a globally-coordinated marketing campaign, it's an example of how the RCI’s politics flow directly from its London office. Much like how the RCI opposes “both sides” in the “culture war,” the RCI’s neutrality in struggles for national liberation are often justified by an on-paper commitment to class independence. As we’ll see, this is often little more than cover for the RCI’s British chauvinist biases.
British Troops Reducing Violence in Ireland?
One of those biases came to the fore during the Troubles. While initially supporting the demand to get British “Troops Out” of Ireland, the Militant’s rapid growth in the Labour Party put pressure on them to adapt to British public opinion. They ended up flip-flopping on the “Troops Out” demand, based on the fear that the withdrawal of British troops would lead to a “bloody all-out sectarian war.” This formulation imagines British troops as a moderating force in the occupied six counties, when in reality, the British Empire enabled, colluded with, and encouraged the growth of loyalist terrorist groups. They turned a blind eye to loyalist provocateurs and allowed them to “assist” official forces in “security” matters. Inadequate vetting allowed loyalists to raid British armouries, giving them one of their only sources of modern weapons during the Troubles. Every second British troops stayed in Ireland, loyalist paramilitaries were strengthened, and the situation got more bloody, not less.
Instead of demanding an immediate withdrawal, the Militant conditioned it on the demand that workers in the six counties form non-sectarian militias. In the context of a labour movement segregated on sectarian lines, with significant privileges for Protestant workers, demanding such a development before British troops withdraw amounts to accepting British dominance on the island for the indefinite future. The RCI will call for “Troops Out” without conditions in cases like the EU invasion of Chad, but British troops appear uniquely capable of being a peacekeeping force.
Proletarian Military Policy for Me, Revolutionary Defeatism for Thee
The Grantites understand that sometimes it’s strategically necessary for communists to join their country’s armed forces to fight an imperialist invader while agitating among the soldiers. They adopted this “proletarian military policy” in Britain during World War II, arguing that the military training they receive in Churchill’s army can eventually be applied “in the interests of the working class.”
Unfortunately, they don’t extend this policy to subjects of British imperialism such as Argentina, whose economy was dominated by British investors in the 19th and early 20th century, and straitjacketed by IMF-imposed “structural adjustment programs” to this day. The British Empire maintains a military base in the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands) within striking distance of Argentina, which they’d mobilize if South American bourgeois governments became unable to contain the class struggle on their own. In 1982, the Thatcher government sent a fleet of warships to protect their assets in the South Atlantic, which were threatened by the Argentine military junta. Even though the junta wanted to absorb the Islas Malvinas for their own bourgeois-nationalist reasons, the defeat of imperialism in the South Atlantic would’ve been a boon to the working class and a major blow to the Thatcher government. The Argentine left largely understood this, and adopted the proletarian military policy during the Malvinas conflict. The Grantites, on the other hand, opposed Argentina’s “imperialist claim“ and advocated revolutionary defeatism for “both sides,” essentially asking the Argentine working class to roll over and accept British imperialism in the South Atlantic. They even adopted the absurd position to “continue the war on socialist lines” by electing a “socialist” Labour government.
More recently, the Grantites adopted a “both sides” approach in the context of Azerbaijan ethnically cleansing 100,000 Armenians — almost the entire population — from Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2023. They claim that the source of this “clash” is the “inter-imperialist conflicts in the region, which is contested by both Russia and the US and European imperialists.” Somehow, Russia is just as culpable as US- and Turkish-backed Azeri troops in the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, despite the fact that Russia played no role in the defence of the now-defunct Armenian-led proto-state of Artsakh. As the RCI admits, the Russian government doesn’t have the capacity to play a decisive role in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, they don’t mention that Russian-Armenian relations have been fraying for some time. Armenia agreed to conduct joint military drills with the US as early as 2011, signed a landmark deal with the EU in 2017, and refused to support Russia in its war with Ukraine. Clearly, Armenia isn’t simply a stooge of “Russian imperialism,” but by describing the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh as part of an “inter-imperialist” conflict, the RCI justifies a pacifist position. They’re essentially asking Armenians to accept being forced out of their homes by NATO-backed Azeri bayonets. If supporting the war effort was in the working class’s interest in World War II-era Britain, why not 2023 Nagorno-Karabakh?
Right of Self-Determination for the Colonizers, Not the Colonized
Perhaps the most stark example of the RCI’s pro-British double standard is their selective application of the demand for the right to self-determination. The Grantites not only defended the “rights and interests” of British settlers on the Islas Malvinas at the exact moment when Thatcher was exploiting that “right” to protect British military assets, they also defend the right of self-determination for Israel – a country whose national identity and nation-building project is premised on the ethnic cleansing and subjugation of Palestinians.
While formally opposing the “two-state solution,” the RCI believes that “two separate territories would have to be worked out” within historic Palestine, where an “autonomous” Israel would have the power to determine its own affairs within a socialist federation of the Middle East. The article was retroactively edited to remove the word “separate,” but the content remains functionally the same. Their formulation assumes that there’s a possible situation in which large swaths of Israeli workers will simultaneously abandon the Zionist project of settler-colonial domination of Palestine, while also retaining the Zionist principle of carving out a distinct Jewish territory in Palestine. In line with their pattern of coddling the reactionary tendencies of privileged layers of workers, the RCI opposes the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their former neighbourhoods (unless socialism is established), as this would leave Israelis feeling “swamped.” They even instruct their members not to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” because, “taken literally, this slogan can easily be interpreted to mean the expulsion of all Jews from the region.” Instead of combatting the Zionist talking point that a free and united Palestine would necessitate ethnic cleansing, they accept that framing, because to heed growing calls for a single democratic Palestine would conflict with their insistence on defending the self-determination of Israelis.
Their approach has little to do with Lenin’s, who defended the right of self-determination for oppressed nations like Poland as a way to cut across the bourgeois national liberationists and demonstrate to Polish workers that Russian workers have no interest in maintaining their oppression. He didn’t defend the right to self-determination of oppressor nations like Russia as an abstract principle.
While extending this olive branch to Israelis, the RCI opposes the demand of self-determination for Indigenous peoples in Canada. They argue that no Indigenous groups are demanding separation from Canada and that “we do not force these communities to adopt slogans that do not correlate with their own struggles or wishes”. They say that Indigenous calls for self-determination are really calls for “increased autonomy”, and self-determination has a different connotation here than in Europe. While it’s true that Indigenous calls for self-determination haven’t historically been framed in the Westphalian sense of separate nation-states, self-determination encompasses much more than the demand for separation — it means sovereignty over one’s land, resources, and culture, whether or not it’s defended by a state apparatus. It’s possible that as Indigenous struggles against the Canadian government escalate, the demand for special bodies of armed people to defend sovereignty (ie, a nation-state) may arise organically. Already, examples like the Haudenosaunee passport system express a desire for distinct citizenship. Further, Indigenous peoples use their right to self-determination as a legal, political, and moral argument all of the time to oppose their own oppression. To say the demand has zero relevance for Indigenous people is to deny reality. Again, the RCI’s approach has little resemblance to Lenin’s, who took every case of self-determination into account concretely and empowered each oppressed nation to carry out its self-determination struggle as they saw fit.
The RCI’s rejection of this slogan may appear at first to be an error of being overly semantical. In reality, it stems from a refusal to recognize the settler-colonial nature of Canadian capitalism and its institutions. They blame postcolonial theory for the divisions between Indigenous people and Canadian workers more than settler colonialism itself, and claim that the nebulously defined “postcolonialists” are the same as the far right to the extent that they allegedly deny the possibility of a united struggle against capitalism. Their formulation of Canada as simply a capitalist state “no different in its fundamentals than the British, French, or German states” blinds them to the fact that Canada’s settler-colonial nature inherently ties “nation-building” projects to the dispossession of Indigenous land, creating real contradictions for the labour movement today. The most obvious example is workers in oil and gas, who, as part of their job, come into conflict with Indigenous land defenders and often end up aiding the RCMP to build illegal pipelines on unceded territory. Pointing this out is not “far-right,” nor is it a denial that the unity of workers and oppressed people against Canadian capitalism is the only solution to this issue. This is an assertion that combating chauvinism, and calling on the labour movement to take militant action against the bosses when they violate Indigenous sovereignty is the best way to foster solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers. Unfortunately, the RCI complains that Indigenous blockades to defend their sovereignty “sow division among the working class,” ironically dividing themselves from the very workers they claim to unite.
Canadian Federalism
The RCI also opposes independence for Quebec. While supporting the right of self-determination in the abstract, in reality they find themselves on the side of Canadian federalism, because “if there is a referendum we will certainly agitate and vote against separation,” based on the argument that “separation will be to the detriment of the Quebecois and all the people of Canada.” The RCI admits that Quebec is an oppressed nation under the Canadian state, but they nonetheless view the Quebec sovereignty movement — not Canada’s oppressive relationship with Quebec — as the main barrier to unity between Canadian and Quebecois workers.
In line with their contradistinction of class war and culture war, they view the Quebec independence struggle and class struggle as conflicting, as if the Quebec national movement distracts from more important issues like wages and benefits. The RCI admits that in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Quebec national movement represented an “outer shell of an immature Bolshevism,” but after 1972, they claim that the Parti Quebecois (PQ)’s politics of sovereignty “was directed against the class struggle and used to destroy the militant revolutionary traditions of the workers.” What they blame on Quebec sovereigntism should be blamed on the PQ’s politics of conciliation with the Canadian bourgeoisie and state. Just as how the class struggle in the 1960s and early 1970s was advanced forward by the independence movement, the downturn in class struggle was caused in part by the defeat of the independence movement — not because nationalist sentiments persisted. The class struggle reached its limits within the bounds of Canadian capitalism. Either all of Canadian capitalism needed to be overthrown, or Quebec workers would have to separate from Canada and pursue revolutionary struggle independently. Because neither of those happened, both the class and national struggles went down in defeat, and all the PQ had was nationalist demagoguery to justify their privileges.
As long as Quebec is nationally oppressed, demagogues like Francois Legault will always be able to channel frustration at Ottawa toward reactionary “culture war” politics like Bill 21. However, the way to resolve this isn’t to ignore Quebec’s national oppression and focus only on class, but to end that national oppression so Legault won’t be able to blame Ottawa for problems caused by the Quebec bourgeoisie. As the class struggle intensifies in Quebec, there will be more events like the Canadian government’s use of back-to-work legislation to break strikes, which may lead to a resurgence in worker-led independentism to break out of Ottawa’s anti-worker policies. The RCI should consider this very real possibility, and not decide in advance that they’d campaign for Canadian federalism in the event of a new referendum.
The Ugly
A Parasite on the Movement
Showing Up to Recruit, Not Help the Movement Succeed
The above provides an overview of the RCI’s ideas and their shortcomings, but their organizational habits are in many ways just as important. All Leninists recognize the importance of building a revolutionary organization, but the RCI has built a reputation of intervening in movements solely to recruit new members and boost paper sales without contributing any meaningful support or even investigating the situation. Their slogans end up disconnected from the reality on the ground, earning them a reputation of being alien to the movement. For example, they showed up to a rally of laid-off Amazon workers in Quebec telling them to occupy their facilities, not realizing that the facilities were already closed and there was nothing to occupy. The RCI repeatedly misreads the room, such as when they set up a literature table to sell papers at an event honouring Indigenous children killed in the residential school system. In Britain, the RCP’s heavy-handed self-promotion led a broad consensus of encampment members to support their expulsion from the Sheffield Palestine encampment. While communists have a collective interest in defending our right to build the forces of Marxism in the movement, we have to do it tactfully, by investigating what the movement is saying, putting in the work to help it succeed, and then recruiting based on the good will we built.
The Bolsheviks didn’t just shout good slogans, they proved themselves useful in the throes of class struggle. With all the RCI’s talk about workplace organizing, they have very little to show for it. They even pulled one of their members away from a union drive at Ripley’s Aquarium to focus on recruiting students, then took credit for its success, once again prioritizing organizational interests above those of the working class. Real solidarity means offering practical support to ensure that collective actions succeed, and listening to the concerns of fellow organizers while acting in good faith. Even small gestures like donating proceeds from paper sales to organizing efforts can go a long way fostering good will in the movement, leading to more recruits in the long run. These examples aren’t isolated incidents, but a larger pattern of organizational parasitism, earning themselves their negative reputation on the broader left.
Undermining Coalitions They Can’t Control
The RCI is usually averse to working with other leftists on joint political projects, but will set up front groups or coalitions if they think they can control them. They pulled this off in 2019 with their front group, the Ryerson Student Strike Committee, which remained in Fightback’s control throughout the campaign. The initiative was overall a disaster, as it was a huge drain on members’ energy without actually fomenting a strike (a few dozen students picketing the university’s entrance is not a strike), but it was good for recruitment, so they decided to repeat the same tactic again five years later with their Student Strike for Palestine.
If the RCI can’t control the coalition, they’ll either back out or disrupt it using petty, sectarian methods. This was the case when they participated in the Students for CUPE 3903 coalition during the 2018 York University strike.
The conflict within the coalition began when Fightback refused to participate in a student occupation (because it wasn’t the “will of the workers”), then took credit for it later once they eventually joined. During a tense meeting of Students for CUPE 3903, Fightback was accused of protecting an abuser, at which point a leading Fightback member shouted out “slander!” Although the abuser wasn’t named at the time, it was later confirmed to be the future leader of Fightback’s student work. Fightback was voted out of the coalition, and responded with an article titled “Sectarian Witch-Hunt Against Fightback at York University: Stalinist censorship campaign sabotages student occupation and university strike.” Fightback tried to get the union to reinstate them to the student coalition, but this backfired as union members were frustrated that their time was being wasted on student squabbles. The union voted to ban Fightback’s propaganda material from their picket lines, which Fightback falsely reported as banning their members themselves. Instead of learning from their mistakes and trying to repair relations with the union, they wasted their time and even had the hubris to blame the low morale of the strike on their own expulsion. The following year, an anti-racist collective denied them a speaker’s slot at a rally, citing the 2018 scandal. The collective approached Fightback in good faith, proposing concrete steps Fightback could take to improve their standing, but Fightback leaders dismissed the collective’s concerns as “weaponizing vague allegations of abuse,” doubled down on the issue, and ultimately diverted energy and resources away from anti-racist organizing.
Fightback again showed how not to behave in a coalition when they participated in the Labour May Day Committee (LMDC) from 2019 to 2022. When they set up the committee, they were the largest group in it, alongside Socialist Action and a few Toronto labour activists including Tynan Liebert. Over the course of two years, it became clear to everyone in the committee that Fightback was stacking meetings with their members to win votes without doing any of the work to make May Day a success. To combat this, Liebert called in his friends in the labour movement to counter-stack a meeting and pass a motion stipulating that each tendency gets a maximum of five votes in the committee. The motion passed and Fightback was humiliated, prompting them to scale down their involvement in the committee. The next year, they lost another vote arguing against the slogan “Self-Determination for Indigenous Peoples.” They were so frustrated at being sidelined in the committee, they instructed almost their entire Toronto membership to boycott the rally and stand around in Queen’s Park for two hours doing nothing while the LMDC rally progressed at Nathan Phillips Square. This petty, sectarian act undermined what should’ve been a much larger May Day rally. Unfortunately, the RCI views coalitions and united fronts strictly as recruitment opportunities, not as venues to build links in the workers’ movement and achieve broader political goals. As soon as it became clear that they were losing potential recruits and weren’t going to control the meetings, they pulled away with their tails between their legs.
A Pyramid Scheme
A Bloated Bureaucracy
Some Marxist organizations punch above their weight, leading workers’ struggles and spreading revolutionary analyses far and wide while keeping a lean apparatus. The RCI is the opposite, hiring dozens of full-timers and renting more and more office space while commanding almost no influence outside their own ranks. In this sense, it closely resembles a pyramid scheme, where members themselves are the most frequent end consumers of the organization’s content, and growth and recruitment take precedence over broad and meaningful engagement with the movement.
At the time of our departure in 2022, Fightback employed 17 full-time staff and managed a $1 million budget, but had fewer than 1,000 subscribers to its paper and minimal influence within the labour movement. They established a small rank-and-file committee in one union, but it was composed almost entirely of their own members salted into the workplace. Other committee members quickly realized that this “organizing” was not about building rank-and-file power, but solely about party-building for its own sake. Full-time RCI staff seem to function as full-time party whips with endless 1-on-1 “consolidation” meetings, rather than mobilizers and enablers of the broader membership’s potential. Most members never write a single article for the paper or give a single public intervention, even with the leadership’s guidance. Can you imagine how much impact a more dynamic, bottom-up organization could have with 17 full-timers and a few hundred devoted volunteers?
Maintaining such a top-heavy organization creates political problems, because it means there’s a relatively large layer of members whose livelihoods are dependent on the organization’s constant growth, and a relatively small middle layer of experienced members who are confident enough to challenge the leadership but don’t rely on the organization for employment. The result is that when a problem arises, the leadership has a material interest in circling the wagons and sweeping the issue under the rug rather than taking responsibility. During the 2022 scandal for example, IMT leaders used undemocratic means to push out the opposition, such as cracking down on any informal discussions (which they called “undemocratic secret meetings”), expelling a group of members, denying members faction rights or the right to issue an internal bulletin, etc. They even pressured one of their top U.S. leaders into resigning after accusing him of “aiding the Canadian opposition.” With nothing learned and no one held accountable, scandals like this one will inevitably repeat themselves, pushing away abuse survivors and reinforcing the RCI’s orientation toward the privileged.
Squeezing Members for Every Penny
To finance such a bloated bureaucracy without a large periphery for support, the RCI relies almost exclusively on donations from its own members. To support a million-dollar budget off the back of about 500 members, the average member paid about $2,000 throughout the year. While this isn’t a debilitating amount for most adult workers, it’s a lot for such a student-heavy organization, and the average is much higher among experienced members who’ve sat through many high-pressure meetings to raise their dues.
Every event, every branch meeting, and even splits are a fundraising opportunity for the RCI. Long periods of time are wasted at each congress by sessions where members are encouraged to shout out the amount they’re donating for the entire organization to hear, making it conspicuous if you don’t donate. During these sessions, it’s not uncommon for leading members to donate their entire savings or declare that “my retirement plan is socialism,” encouraging others to do the same. Although the RCI doesn’t say this publicly, members are repeatedly told that their financial contribution is indicative of their political level. This means you can prove your political level (and therefore your likeliness to be put in a leadership position) by donating more, whereas low dues might earn you a talking-to.
This atmosphere where financial contribution is the clearest expression of political level leads some low-income members to feel like they’re not valued, while bourgeois and petty-bourgeois members are showered with praise. This contributes to the class composition of the organization, affecting their analysis. Instead of using a simple formula to calculate dues based on members’ salaries, the RCI pushes away low-income members and wastes everyone’s time acting as a full-time internal fundraising machine.
“The One True Communists”
To keep members in the organization despite the high dues, the RCI presents itself as the only Marxist organization in the world, whereas other groups are dismissively referred to as “the sects.” They previously used this term to refer to Marxists operating outside the Labour Party, but now they use it to describe anyone other than themselves. They’ve constructed a myth of an “unbroken thread” of Marxism, which runs through Marx and Engels, to Lenin and Trotsky, to Ted Grant, and therefore to themselves. Instead of admitting that the whole communist movement was disoriented during the postwar boom, the RCI has built a cult of personality around Grant, referring to him as “the permanent revolutionary.” This vulgarization of the concept of revolutionary continuity has more in common with papal succession than with dialectical materialism.
When founding the Workers’ International League (a precursor to the RCI), Grant proudly proclaimed that he would “turn our backs on the sects. They were a waste of time, mostly rubbish.” His successor, Alan Woods, continued that tradition, declaring that the RCI is “the only organisation that has a responsibility for re-establishing communism,” and that any group's request for a united front will go “straight in the waste paper basket.” This is a shame coming from an organization that claims to oppose sectarianism. They don’t see any possibility of collaborations strengthening the cause at hand, or even learning from the other groups involved. On the rare occasion that they do participate in coalitions, they’ll do it for the sake of controlling the politics, and if they can’t, they’ll undermine it.
Most contributions and insights from outside the organization are dismissed as irrelevant, if not malicious. New recruits are given a narrow reading list that includes only Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Grant, and Grant’s followers, and even experienced members are discouraged from reading outside this “unbroken thread.” The RCI will publish hack-job “critiques” of books outside their tradition, making them seem like the only genuine Marxists in the world, whereas everyone else is a “postmodernist,” “postcolonialist,” “queer theorist,” etc. Even a central demand of the Palestinian liberation struggle — for an undivided Palestine from the river to the sea — was attacked as “postcolonial” by multiple British full-timers at the 2021 Canadian National Council. Most resolutions discussed at congresses are very minor changes to congress documents, but when a member proposed substantial reforms to the Central Committee election process at the 2022 Canadian Congress, one of those British full-timers lambasted the proposal, accusing it of “lowering the level of discussion.”
This intellectual narrowness and heavy-handed criticism fosters an echo chamber of agreement, where members are rewarded for conformity and those who dissent or disagree with the organization’s politics are systematically pushed away and shunned. Even though it’s not an official position of the RCI, their denial of the Big Bang across many books, magazines, articles, and podcast episodes functions as a useful litmus test for who will unquestioningly accept the RCI’s half-baked “theories” and who’s a critical thinker. A new member’s previous political experience is not treated as an asset, but as “baggage” to be treated with suspicion. New members are given very few opportunities to write articles for the paper, and leadership positions rarely rotate beyond a few long-time members, resulting in stale, predictable analyses that fail to evolve with the times.
To address this issue, a Marxist organization should prioritize and actively seek input from a wide range of perspectives and engage with broader working-class and revolutionary movements. This would involve studying countries like Argentina where the Trotskyist movement is strong, and considering why the Argentine Trotskyists organize outside the left-bourgeois Justicialist Party as part of a Trotskyist united front. Unfortunately, the RCI dismisses them as “sectarian” for not adopting their entryist strategy. The RCI could benefit from breaking down barriers between members and non-members, valuing contributions from all quarters (not only the financial), and creating an environment where criticism is encouraged and valued, rather than merely treated as a slogan and not executed in practice.
Insularity and Social Dependency
The RCI’s rigid divide between members and non-members has the effect of trapping members in a web of social and political dependency. Most members' social and political lives are closely intertwined, in part because the RCI uses every opportunity, such as Christmas and Halloween, as opportunities for fundraising, blurring the line between political and social events. Virtually every public event is also followed by a pub night, sometimes rationalized as “bringing pub culture back to the workers’ movement.” Members are encouraged to recruit their friends into the organization and aggressively push the paper to anyone they meet, annoying and pushing away anyone who isn’t a true believer, while reinforcing the pyramid scheme dynamics described above.
The RCI’s insularity and social dependency pose serious problems. First, it isolates the membership from real developments in working-class consciousness, leading to disconnected, abstract analyses that fail to reflect the material realities workers face. Second, the social pressure to “get along” discourages members from speaking out against misconduct, or from leaving the organization because of the social connections you’ll lose. This fear stifles dissent and critical reflection—vital elements of a healthy, revolutionary organization. If the RCI fails to break out of its insularity, it risks becoming further disconnected from the real needs and aspirations of the working class, and remembered only for its long list of scandals and failure to adapt and serve the needs of class struggle.
Revolution Around Every Corner
Many of the RCI’s organizational problems are downstream from their political problems, but their heavy emphasis on recruitment and fundraising in turn ends up incentivizing skewed political perspectives. The idea that revolution is around the corner is rhetorically useful, because it means that even if a sect is small and insignificant now, we’ll be in the throes of revolution in a few short years, so you better get on the bandwagon as soon as possible and donate money you’d otherwise save for retirement. Recruitment is much more difficult if you admit that the struggle will be long and protracted, so it’s not surprising that the RCI has doubled down on “final crisis” language that they used to criticize, bending facts to make their case.
For example, the RCP cited a discredited National Post article to claim that even the RCMP agrees with them that “revolution is around the corner.” The leaked RCMP report doesn’t mention “revolution,” let alone “revolt” or “unrest” like the National Post article claims. The RCP also claims that “one million Canadian youth want communism,” which sounds good out of context, but they leave out important facts like that only six percent of Canadians as a whole agree that communism is the ideal system, and that six percent includes people who think “communism sounds good in theory but not in practice” and “communism is when the government does stuff.” The implication that a million Canadian youth are ready to fight for communism if we can only recruit them is highly misleading, and makes it seem like we can skip over the difficult, drawn-out task of building up militant traditions in the workers’ movement.
The RCI frequently quotes Trotsky’s 1938 statement that “the world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat,” implying that the main bottleneck to revolution is the fact that they’re not leading the workers’ movement. They ignore the fact that in the 1930s, general strikes were common, Spain was engulfed in revolutionary civil war, communists were organized and powerful, and they may have taken power if it weren’t for significant betrayals by the Stalinist leadership. After decades of defeats and setbacks to the workers’ movement since the 1970s, the main question today isn’t whether the “revisionist” communist leadership can be replaced by real revolutionaries, but whether we can patiently rebuild militant working-class traditions to the point that workers demand revolutionary leadership. The RCI ignores this inconvenient truth, to the point that they don’t even use the word “neoliberalism,” as if that period of setbacks didn’t happen.
To justify their perspective that revolution is around the corner, they claim that Britain is in a “permanent slump,” ruling out any temporary upticks in British capitalism, even small ones. They also have a history of characterizing non-revolutions as revolutions, for example, the Chavez government of Venezuela as discussed above, and also the Green “revolution” in Iran, a petty-bourgeois movement with no intent to topple the government. Characterizing everything as a revolution might enthuse new members in the short run, but it sets them up for disappointment and burnout when movements like Chavismo and the Green Movement fail to create the promised revolutionary change.
Even turns to the right, such as Trump winning reelection or corporations abandoning even symbolic gestures toward inclusivity, are viewed as good things according to the RCI. Just because most U.S. voters rejected the liberal status quo in 2024, doesn’t mean they’re any closer to accepting revolutionary communism. The success of Trump’s slogan “Mass Deportations Now” isn’t an example of burgeoning class consciousness, but of how the ruling class is able to offload blame from themselves onto the most vulnerable sectors of society. Painting shifts to the right as positive advances toward revolution are not the method of Lenin or Trotsky, but of Stalin’s Comintern during the so-called “Third Period,” when he had German communists raise the slogan “After Hitler, our turn.” Revolution is a marathon, not a sprint, so it’s absolutely essential that communists explain events as they are — not as we want them to be — so that comrades stay in the struggle for the long run.
Conclusion
Taken together, a general picture of the RCI emerges: an organization whose origins in the Trotskyist movement gave it a solid political direction, but decades of entryism in the Labour Party led it to take opportunist shortcuts. After leaving the Labour Party, they kept their pro-British and economistic tendencies, while leaning into sectarianism and abstract “revolutionary” rhetoric. The RCI’s history should alert us to the importance of combating every form of chauvinism and questioning dogmas before they become organizational imperatives. We wrote this balance sheet not to take cheap shots at the RCI, but to learn from their history so we don’t make the same mistakes. The working class needs a Marxist organization grounded in internationalist, class-independent politics that engages with the broader movement deeply and meaningfully, not simply as opportunities for recruitment.
Our thoughts on these critiques may change over time, but we hope that this balance sheet will clarify our major differences with our former organization, and allow us to define ourselves independently. We plan on developing some of these critiques in more depth while looking outward and charting a revolutionary, class-independent path forward. This should not be done by shying away from differences within the left, but working through them with open discussions, debates, and polemics across tendencies. We want to break down the silos of the left, work together in areas of shared interest, and make the differences within the movement as clear as possible to the working class.
Ultimately, we need an international organization that breaks with old habits while keeping the lessons of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky close at hand. We hope the comrades of the RCI take our criticisms seriously, because the success of one Marxist organization is good for the entire movement, and the perception of one Marxist organization as chauvinist or self-serving hurts the entire movement. Taken in good faith, this balance sheet can be the beginning of a more collaborative but still critical left, as we collectively navigate the storms of capitalism and fight for a socialist future.
