In the outbursts of enthusiasm on the left for Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zarah Sultana’s ‘Your Party’, perhaps the most effusive response came from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Immediately following the announcement of the new party on 24 July, the RCP’s national organiser Fiona Lali stated in The Communist that the RCP ‘enthusiastically welcomes this important step. We will be mobilising our members to help make a success of this new – much-needed – party.’ Lali continued ‘Finally, there is a political alternative on the left for ordinary workers and youth: a party that stands against “an economic system that protects the interests of corporations and billionaires”; against war, genocide [and] against cuts and privatisation.’ She concluded ‘The RCP calls on all our supporters and readers to throw their weight behind this new venture.’
There is no evidence that Your Party will offer any challenge to the ruling class, and statements made by both Corbyn and Sultana in recent interviews confirm that this concept of the new party is fantasy. Nevertheless, RCP organiser Lali believes that it could adopt ‘bold socialist policies’; that it will be possible to ‘equip this party and movement with the revolutionary programme needed to bring about “real change”’. Hence, The Communist emphasises, ‘The immediate task for socialists and communists is to sign up to Corbyn and Sultana’s party, enthusiastically promote it, get stuck in, and help channel this energy towards revolutionary aims’. Quite why communists should get ‘stuck in’ to build what cannot be anything other than a social democratic organisation defies logic. Having told us time and again that there is no economic basis for reformism, The Communist is now telling its readership to throw its weight behind a reformist party.
The social chauvinist background of the RCP
The RCP evolved from the Labour Party’s Militant Tendency, an organisation proscribed by the Labour Party in 1982, which declared itself an ‘independent’ party as Militant Labour in 1991 to 1997, when it then became the Socialist Party of England and Wales. Alan Woods, expelled from Militant in 1992, then founded Socialist Appeal along with Ted Grant. Socialist Appeal maintained Militant’s fiction that Labour Party entryism was the way forward to socialism, despite the daily evidence that the Labour Party was a vindictive anti-working class party. Militant itself had been a social chauvinist organisation which ferociously opposed the Irish liberation struggle, dismissing the Provisional Republican movement as reactionaries and terrorists having no relationship to the working class. Its position on Palestine was equally reactionary: it called for the establishment of a socialist Israel alongside a socialist Palestine. Socialist Appeal never distanced itself from these positions. In 2024, following its expulsion from the Labour Party, Socialist Appeal decided to re-invent itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party without accounting for its reactionary inheritance after decades in the imperialist Labour Party.
Woods is now seen as one of the RCP’s leading theoreticians. Two days after Lali’s outburst, he advised ‘We must keep a cool head at all times, and not give way to sudden impulses’. Adding that ‘it is necessary to give the matter careful thought and consideration’, he also cautioned us that ‘Haste, in politics as in warfare, is always a bad counsellor.’ Even so, when he asks ‘Should we support the new party?’, he too fantasises that ‘this question is easy to answer. We communists welcome the launch of a new left party in Britain with every possible enthusiasm.’ (In Defence of Marxism, 26 July)
Having abandoned his own advice for ‘careful thought’, he blithely states that ‘It is too early to say what the actual physiognomy of the new party will be.’ Who is he trying to fool? It has been obvious for years that any such new ‘left’ party would be a lash-up organised behind closed doors by the remains of the Labour left and their hangers-on among the petit bourgeois left. What else could it be? There are no independent forces driving it in a different direction, no movement to give it any political courage. Undeterred, Woods goes further, because when he states that ‘the crucial question is whether the leadership stands for a fundamental transformation of society…the abolition of capitalism and the assumption of power by the working class’, he concludes ‘we cannot answer this question in advance’. What conceivable doubt could there be? The constant delays in announcing the formation of the new Corbyn-Sultana party have been driven by the need to persuade Corbyn to act as its leader. No one with their wits about them could imagine that the party’s founding conference will turf out the Corbyn leadership and implement a revolutionary programme. Quite the contrary, its formation is driven by the need of this gang to create a force which can undermine any emergent revolutionary movement of the working class. It is sheer deception to say it can be something different with its left Labour heritage.
Corbyn and Sultana on the new party
What do Corbyn or indeed Sultana themselves have to say about the party they are creating? In his recent interview with Owen Jones, Corbyn painted a misty view of ‘some kind of federal’ structure for the new party: ‘I’m very conscious that there are lots of independent groups around the country, independent groups of councillors, independent party activists… There’s also People’s Assembly and many other groups… We’re not going to get involved in a turf war.’ Alliances with sections of the Labour Party will be the order of the day; notably when Jones asked him if he thought that Labour was dead, Corbyn refused to say yes.
Sultana appears the more radical; she was happy to say that ‘To me, the Labour Party is dead. It’s dead morally, it’s dead politically, and it’s dead electorally as well.’ But she then says that the party would follow a ‘tactical alliance method’ to ‘stop Farage getting into power, because that has to be the guiding principle’ as if Reform UK was qualitatively more racist and reactionary than Labour. Hence her party would ‘identify where we can win and where others who have the same goals and values around progressive politics, around defeating Reform, where we can work together… that will be, I imagine, a negotiation.’ It follows the dangerous trope that in the final analysis, a Labour Party that has consistently criminalised and vilified migrants and attacked the most vulnerable sections of the working class is somehow a more defensible and progressive option than Reform. This is the real leadership and political direction of Your Party: it will embrace compromises with the Labour Party against the interests of the working class, not the empty dreams of the RCP.
Marx, Engels, Lenin and the labour aristocracy
To provide theoretical spin to its position, The Communist (1 August) published an excerpt of what it described as ‘part of a resolution by Lenin to the Third Congress of the Communist International, entitled Theses on Tactics and Strategy.’ In fact, the Theses were written by Karl Radek. Lenin was not impressed by them, telling Grigory Zinoviev, then Chair of the Communist International, that Radek’s first draft was ‘much too long and boneless, and lacked a central point’ and that Radek then ‘diluted them still more, completely spoiling them’ in the second draft.’ (Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International ed John Riddell, p1,098)
What is shocking is how The Communist actually censors key points in the Theses for its readership. The last sentence in the second paragraph of its edit says ‘However, the majority of the working class is not yet subject to Communist influence…’ But the original document reads after the ellipsis: ‘…this is especially true in countries where the strength of finance capital makes possible the existence of significant layers of workers corrupted by imperialism (Britain and the United States, for example), and where genuinely revolutionary mass propaganda has hardly begun.’ (Riddell, p927)
The Communist censors this because it completely rejects Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the material basis it provides for opportunism. Like most of what we call the petit bourgeois left, it treats Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, as a book about ‘economics’ rather than a demolition of the ideas of the supporters of imperialism within the working class. The Communist does not want its readership to know that Lenin was extending Marx and Engels’ account of the obvious split in the English working class that developed in the mid to late 19th century because of Britain’s colonial monopoly. The existence of a privileged layer within the working class, a labour aristocracy, was taken for granted in the political world of the time: Marx, Engels and Lenin did not discover it, they explained its consequences, and showed how it used the language of socialism to dominate the working class for its own narrow reformist purposes.
So, how do the self-styled communists in the RCP leadership present the survival of social democratic ideas among the working class? No differently from the rest of the petit bourgeois left that they pretend contempt for: it is down to wrong ideas. From where do these wrong ideas arise? Insufficient ‘careful thought’? Who knows? They cannot have a material basis as far as Woods and the RCP are concerned, since they would have to explain that material basis and how it has been maintained and reproduced. All that we know from Woods is that there is a ‘left reformism’ and a ‘right reformism’, and that ‘the difference between the left reformists and the right reformists is that the latter stand openly for the interests of the bankers and capitalists, whereas the former believe that it is possible to achieve ambitious reforms and improvements in living standards within the limits of the capitalist system.’
But for real communists, what the so-called left reformists believe is of no significance, it is what they do that matters, and left reformists stand for the interests of the bankers and the capitalists as much as the right reformists do. The difference is that they do so in a cowardly and hypocritical manner.
In contrast, Woods tries to present them as honest but misguided individuals, and so schoolmaster-like, he declares that ‘Whenever Jeremy Corbyn takes a step in the right direction, we will support him. But whenever he takes a step back, whenever he shows equivocations and vacillations (which he has done on many occasions) we reserve the right to criticise him in a firm but comradely manner.’ The point of course is that Corbyn’s political life has been an unbroken history of equivocations and vacillations as he looks for a kinder and gentler capitalism – one only has to look at his reactionary position on Palestine.* Imagining that Corbyn might stand for a moment with a revolutionary opposition to the British state is hoodwinking us.
Let us be quite clear: neither Corbyn nor Sultana have the intention of leading a party that presents a radical, let alone revolutionary, challenge to the British imperialist state. They are setting up a compliant electoral alternative to the Labour Party, not an opposition to it. Behind them will be the networks of opportunists who have come out of the Labour Party, such as the interlocking leaderships of Stop the War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, People’s Assembly and CND and so on. They have fiefdoms to protect and radical challenges to see off. They need Corbyn’s party to provide them with political protection.
The new party is an organised expression of opportunism, of compromise with imperialism and capitulation. In the past, the left of the Labour Party has performed this role with the aid of the organisations of the petit bourgeois left. Now, to retain the smallest shred of credibility, the left has had to abandon a Labour Party which has become so integrated into the capitalist state and which has become the face of imperialist barbarity. However, Your Party cannot advance the interests of a radical petit bourgeoisie and its labour aristocratic allies if it remains a shambolic mass of fragmented committees, groups, movements and organisations. Only with centralised organisation can it persuade the working class to be content with a sham radicalism that obscures a bankrupt parliamentarianism.
While the job of the Labour Party is to defend the outer ramparts of the British state, the job of the new party is to defend the outer ramparts of the Labour Party, and that of the petit bourgeois left organisations such as the RCP, to provide a layer of defence for the new party. In 1914, Rosa Luxembourg called German social democracy a ‘stinking corpse’, an epithet equally applicable to the Labour Party at the time. Now the self-styled communists of the RCP have decided that social democracy is no longer a corpse, but has risen Lazarus-like from the dead, and it is celebrating the occasion. This has nothing to do with communism: it is a disgrace.
* Woods notoriously stated ‘The ruling Israeli clique led by Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Israel has a right to defend itself. So it has.’ (The Communist, 8 January 2024). See our review of the RCP pamphlet on ‘Israel-Palestine’.
