On 15-17 November, comrades from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! attended the Revolutionary Communist Party’s (RCP) Revolution Festival, a ‘school of communism and anti-imperialist conference’. The RCP seeks to position itself as the communist party in Britain, drawing in many young people with its newspaper The Communist and its claim to be a revolutionary organisation. In reality, it is a reactionary social chauvinist organisation, steeped in the rotten traditions of the British labour and trade union movements. Its Marxism is no more than a veneer.
Under imperialism, a ‘socialist’ trend will always spring into existence using the language of Marxism to advance supposedly radical credentials. This trend, which Lenin labelled opportunism, has its social basis in a materially privileged upper layer of the working class bought off by imperialism which controls the trade unions and organisations which claim to organise or represent the working class. The RCP is part of this trend. It has its origins in Militant, a ‘left wing’ section of the Labour Party until 1991. As Socialist Appeal, it remained firmly attached to the Labour Party before being unceremoniously booted out in 2021. Militant was renowned for its sectarian, social chauvinist politics which enabled it to remain for decades in the imperialist and racist Labour Party. The RCP’s politics are but a continuation of this past; all that has changed is a recently-acquired taste for calling itself communist.
Imperialism and the working class
Despite the RCP’s anti-imperialist rebrand and its claim to be a Leninist organisation, it denies imperialism’s central characteristics. In a session at the festival titled ‘The role of British Imperialism today’ RCP General Secretary Ben Gliniecki repeated the reactionary assertion favoured by many on the British left that Britain is but a ‘lapdog of the White House’ and as such completely subordinate to US imperialist interests. In a later session, while speaker James Kilby admitted a privileged upper layer of the working class existed in the 20th century, several contributions from RCP members claimed it had now disappeared as ‘there is no longer a basis for superprofits’ given British imperialism’s decline.
What exactly then is the purpose of Britain’s £13.7 trillion in overseas assets (five times its GDP)? In 2016, 101 London-listed companies (the majority British) collectively controlled $1 trillion worth of Africa’s resources – a very obvious ‘basis for superprofits’. The RCP concedes British capitalism’s parasitic character but then argues that this has no impact on the living standards and consciousness of the British working class. This is backward and reactionary.
The RCP outright denies that the working class within Britain is split between the mass and an upper privileged layer so that it can justify its preoccupation with trade unions which only organise one in five workers, who are disproportionately degree-educated professionals or administrators and managers. The majority of these workers enjoy incremental pay structures that compensate for the real-term fall in salary bands as well as expecting generous pension packages. Even if their conditions have been under attack, they still remain very privileged compared to the mass of the working class: those dependent on working benefits, precarious workers, disabled people, migrants, black youth, the unemployed and so on. Their standard of living is tied to the viability of British imperialism. The RCP appeals to this layer by pretending it is the real working class. Its concept of the ‘working class’ is completely abstract – it wants to cover up for the divisions created by imperialism.
Palestine: where is the solidarity?
The RCP’s reactionary politics were also evident in the session on Palestine entitled ‘Why is there a genocide in Gaza?’ The introductory speech by Khaled Malachi, co-author of the RCP’s pamphlet Israel-Palestine: a revolutionary way forward, was in fact just a short history of the Israeli state, and although he highlighted the complicity of British and US imperialism in Israel’s crimes, he had little to say about building solidarity with Palestinian liberation in Britain.
Instead, he gave us a lecture on what the Arab working classes should be doing; told us how the Palestinians should conduct their struggle; and how the Palestinian and Israeli working classes should unite to create a socialist federation in the Middle East. The notion that the Israeli working class can play a progressive role has no basis in material reality. It can at best be neutralised with the destruction of the Israeli state, the guarantor of its highly privileged material interests. Otherwise, it will remain an agent of imperialist interests in the Middle East. Contributions from the floor by RCP members attacked the resistance in the Middle East – specifically Hamas and Hezbollah, a telling continuation of Militant’s social chauvinism.
In opposition, an FRFI comrade referred from the floor to Lenin’s writings on the national question and the position of communists in oppressor countries in relation to national liberation struggles, in particular citing from a 1916 article that:
‘National self-determination is the same as the struggle for complete national liberation, for complete independence, against annexation, and socialists cannot – without ceasing to be socialists – reject a struggle in whatever form, right down to an uprising or war.’
When asked whether the RCP supports the Palestinian liberation struggle ‘right down to an uprising or war’, Fred Weston, editor of the RCP’s theoretical journal In Defence of Marxism, explained ‘of course we support the resistance’, but implied that armed struggle is pointless because, he pointed out, the resistance could not defeat Israel militarily. Malachi expressed similar sentiments, calling the Palestinian resistance ‘isolated’. This is a gross distortion of reality. Despite being armed to the teeth by US imperialism, the Zionist state has achieved none of its objectives in Gaza after a year of war; the majority of Palestinians still support armed struggle; the IDF’s war effort in southern Lebanon was a disaster; and the Yemen-imposed blockade has been disastrous for Israel’s economy.
Social chauvinists such as the RCP cannot see that it is the supposedly isolated Palestinian resistance that threw the imperialist system into political crisis with Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023, not the British trade unions nor a mythical united Palestinian-Israeli working class. The RCP along with much of the British left will not accept that to be a communist in Palestine means fighting alongside the resistance in the tunnels, organising within Zionist prisons, and being part of the armed resistance to the occupation. These real communists can expect no solidarity from the RCP.
In practice, the RCP concept of solidarity is entirely sectarian especially when it comes to direct action against Israeli arms factories in Britain. Thus, in Newcastle it attacked the Shut Down Rafael campaign, and implied the campaign was ‘anti-worker’ for attempting to close the factory. It argued that the campaign should have tried to ‘reach the arms workers’, by appealing to their trade union, and that the factory should be ‘repurposed’. In reality, arms workers are among the most backward sections of the working class, their conditions directly dependent on imperialism.
Social chauvinism is not communism
The role of communists in Britain is clear: unconditional solidarity with the oppressed in their struggles to free their nations from imperialism and to go ‘lower and deeper’ into the masses. It is on this basis alone that a revolutionary movement in Britain can emerge which is capable of overthrowing the British ruling class. The RCP will never do this – it is not revolutionary, nor is it communist, nor is it a party.
Kotsai Sigauke
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 303 December 2024 /January 2025
