RCI Critique: The Revolutionary Communists Who Aren’t Revolutionary!

The Revolutionary Communists, formerly the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), are a split from the Militant Tendency in Britain. They’ve now set up in Ireland as the “Revolutionary Communists of Ireland” (RCI). They come out of the same British Trotskyist gene pool as the Socialist Party. When Militant were kicked out of the British Labour Party in the early 1990s future RCI theoreticians, Ted Grant and Alan Woods, considered leaving was an “ultra left” turn. They stayed in Labour calling themselves the “Committee For A Marxist International” and published a paper called “Socialist Appeal”.

While the Militant Tendency renamed themselves “The Socialist Party” and gave birth to a sister organisation in Ireland of the same name, the Ted Grant faction renamed themselves the “International Marxist Tendency” in 2004. That meant that Grant’s supporters had been in the British Labour Party from the late 1950s until 2024. The “Revolutionary Communists” claim an unbroken thread connects them, through Ted Grant, back to Trotsky and Lenin. But Grant abandoned many of Lenin’s key ideas and twisted many others. Young people genuinely looking for revolutionary politics will be led down a dead end by the RCI.

Ted Grant was a South African socialist who moved to Britain in 1934. He joined the “Marxist Group” in the Labour Party. In 1937 Grant and some other South African socialists joined the “Militant Group” in Labour. The “Revolutionary Communist Party” which was founded in 1944 contained the future founders of three key British Trotskyist trends - Ted Grant of Militant, Gerry Healy of the Workers Revolutionary Party and Tony Cliff, founder of the Socialist Workers Party.

Ted Grant’s trend gave birth to the RCI and to the Socialist Party in Ireland, while People Before Profit Ireland is dominated by the Socialist Workers Network - followers of Tony Cliff. Many of these groups on the Irish far left are the children of British parents. When the Revolutionary Communist Party broke up Ted Grant joined with Gerry Healy for a while before he went back into a small group in the Labour Party called the “Revolutionary Socialist League” later publishing a paper called “Militant” and eventually changing the name of the tendency to match.

Being an active Labour Party member for decades deformed the politics of the Militant Tendency. Many of their flawed positions - on the state, the police, on imperialism - can be traced to pandering to the British union bureaucracies who ultimately control the Labour Party. Militant’s grotesque formalism can be traced from their time in Labour - believing that the Labour Party could be transformed into an instrument of revolution requires extreme magical thinking.

Militant had control of Labour Youth by the 1970s and even elected two of its members as Labour MPS. For decades Ted Grant was the main theoretician for the Militant Tendency. He developed their justifications for working through the British Labour Party, as he wrote as far back as the 1950s: “To the sectarian splinter groups… the problem is posed in the simplest of terms: Social Democracy and Stalinism have betrayed the working class; therefore the independent party of the working class must immediately be built. They claim the independence of the revolutionary party as a principle, whether the party consists of two or two million.” This was his usual style - everyone outside of the Labour Party was a “splinter group”.

“The working class does not come to revolutionary conclusions easily. Habits of thought, traditions, the exceptional difficulties created by the transformation of the Socialist and Communist traditional organisations into obstacles on the road of the revolution; all these have put formidable obstacles in the way of creating a Marxist mass movement. All history demonstrates that, at the first stages of revolutionary upsurge, the masses turn to the mass organisations”

The strategy was to join Labour or Communist Parties and build a Trotskyist faction inside, waiting for the day the masses inevitably returned “home” to those parties. This was not what Leon Trotsky himself has described - he had urged his French supporters, who were mostly middle class and detached from the working class, to engage with leftward moving working class masses who were joining Leon Blum’s reformist organisation. When Blum entered into the so-called Popular Front Trotsky called for his supporters to leave and form an independent revolutionary group. This “entryism” was over the span of just two years, not decades.

Seventy years of organising in the Labour Party deformed the politics of the Grant group. They adopted a reformist view of the state and adapted to the pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy. For Lenin the Labour Party was “capitalist workers party” - Grant rejected this view. Instead of being agents of the capitalist class in the working class they were expressions of the class. Lenin, replying to a British socialist, once wrote:

“He called the Labour Party the political organisation of the trade union movement, and later repeated the statement when he said that the Labour Party is the political expression of the workers organised in trade unions… It is erroneous… Of course, most of the Labour Party’s members are working men. However, whether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics… Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers.”

When Lenin recommended Communists in Britain join Labour it was to get the ear of leftward leaning workers and expose the leaders of the Labour Party as traitors. The Communists were to “help” Labour win elections but the revolutionaries would say to the workers:

“We must, first, help Henderson or Snowden (of Labour) to beat Lloyd George and Churchill… second, we must help the majority of the working class to be convinced by their own experience that we are right, i.e., that the Hendersons and Snowdens are absolutely good for nothing, that they are petty-bourgeois and treacherous by nature, and that their bankruptcy is inevitable; third, we must bring nearer the moment when, on the basis of the disappointment of most of the workers in the Hendersons, it will be possible, with serious chances of success, to overthrow the government.”

Lenin was for telling workers the truth, clearly outlining that the whole plan was to get Labour into government to show them up as “treacherous” and then the plan was to overthrow them! Lenin did not say to go around telling workers that Labour, armed with a socialist programme could just nationalize the commanding heights of the economy and that would be socialism! Lenin said: “I want to support Henderson (Labour) in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man!” The way a “rope supports a hanged man!” The point of Lenin’s tactics was to prepare workers to overthrow a left government, the capitalist state it rested on and replace it with democratic mass assemblies of workers.

Ted Grant instead wrote things like this: “Should Labour win the next election, the bill will be presented by the workers accordingly. The advanced elements in the unions and LP will demand steps in the direction of socialism.” The conservative and counter revolutionary bureaucratic bulwark of the British Trade Union Congress was going to demand steps in the direction of socialism? This was stupid. It was insane formalism to think a programme could transform the bureaucrats. Even if rank and file members put pressure on the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy itself would never change its nature.

Grant wrote: “The Labour Movement with all its faults has been built by the pennies and sacrifices of the workers. It is responsive to the pressure of the workers. The class-conscious workers will bear the brunt of the attacks of the Tories. Let them bend all their efforts for a Labour victory… A world of Security and Plenty, of peace and prosperity can only be secured by the overthrow of the capitalist system and the inauguration of a democratic Socialist Britain.”

This is very far from Lenin’s tactics which were about destroying the Labour Party, not promoting it. “It is responsive to the pressure of the workers” - yet the whole history of the British Labour Party shows that that is just not true. At every decisive moment in class struggle Labour sabotaged the struggle, as did the union leaders. This was one of Militant’s key ideas: get Labour into government on a socialist programme and then nationalise the commanding heights of the economy. Grant repeated it over and over for decades and into the 1980s:

“The one thing that blocks the way for a peaceful transformation of society in Britain is the attitude precisely of the Social Democrats and of their counterparts in the Solidarity group of Labour MPs. They do not wish to provoke the ruling class by suggesting a change in society… A new period opens up in which only the transformation of society will solve the problems of the working class. What is necessary is for a Labour government to operate on the policy which is advocated by Militant. Break the power of big business by taking over the major companies and organise production on the basis of a plan.”

The monster British imperialist state machine with Labour sitting on top of it could “peacefully” transition to socialism? If only the class traitors running Labour and the unions were more radical they could just declare socialism! The British unions have always been weak on imperialism, chasing after any crumbs that might fall from their masters table after their masters had robbed the world.

Militant tailed this attitude to imperialism, often condemning both sides in any conflict and pandering to imperialist and racist illusions held by British workers. For example they condemned “both sides” during the Falklands War: “The ultra-left sects of various descriptions have - quite predictably! - supported Argentina on the grounds that it is a colonial country faced with imperialist aggression. That is nonsense…On the Falkland Islands themselves… Had there been a colony of, say, 100,000 Argentines, a case for colonial oppression could have been made out. But the Islands have been in British possession for 150 years.”

Some socialists Militant were, giving left cover to Thatcher’s imperialist aims and condemning everyone else on the left for being “ultra-left sects!” Then they went on about the rights of the British inhabitants of the Falklands who were oppressed by Argentina. Never mind the full might of the British state was bearing down on the Argentinians. It is the duty of Marxists in any war to call for the overthrow of their own government. The main enemy is at home. British workers needed their pro-imperialist prejudices challenged. Militant refused to do that, writing: “Thatcher and the Tory Government did not seek a conflict with the Bonapartist military-police dictatorship.”

Elections were their answer to the war: “We must demand a general election now, as a way of bringing down the Tories and returning the Labour Party to power with a socialist programme… If necessary, British workers and the Marxists will be willing to wage a war against the Argentine Junta.” Get the Labour Party to sit on top of the monster British imperialist state and then wage war against Argentina in the name of socialism! This was a disgraceful betrayal of Marxism. By putting so much focus on the nature of the Argentine regime they encouraged illusions in the British regime.

This flawed attitude to imperialism was also evident in how they spoke about Ireland. They initially condemned the presence of British troops in Ireland but soon started putting the emphasis on combating the petty bourgeois nationalism of the IRA. This was a British organisation lecturing the Irish about the threat of the IRA - their focus should have been on warning British workers about the dangers of their own ruling class. But their criticism of the IRA would chime with what British workers were hearing on the news and save Militant the trouble of defending the right of the Irish to break from Britain without conditions.

Their flawed logic was the same as Rosa Luxemburg’s - to use an abstract truth to arrive at a wrong position: Marxists must never capitulate to nationalism, even that of oppressed peoples. But socialists in oppressor nations needed to defeat the nationalism of their own imperialist ruling class. By criticising the nationalism of the oppressed, from the oppressor nation, you only help the nationalism of the oppressor nation. British socialists should not have compared the nationalism of the British state to the nationalism of those that state brutally oppressed. The violence of the oppressor and that of the oppressed are not equivalents.

Rosa Luxemburg criticised Lenin’s call for national liberation for Poland, for example, but Lenin warned her that her concern over the nationalism of the oppressed nation was leading to her playing down the greater threat represented by the nationalism of the oppressor nation, Russia. While socialists in Poland had to build their own working class organizations, separate from the nationalists, it was Lenin’s duty to break Russian workers from their imperialist and racist attitudes: “Carried away by the struggle against nationalism in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg has forgotten the nationalism of the Great Russians, although it is this nationalism that is the most formidable at the present time… Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot… Rosa Luxemburg is actually playing into the hands of the Black-Hundred nationalism of the Great Russians!”

Militant were playing into the hands of the reactionary British state. This was the result of absorbing the atmosphere of the Labour Party for decades. In 1980s Liverpool Militant councillors dominated the council and one member, Terry Fields, was elected as an MP. The council refused to cap rates and ran an illegal deficit. When they were told they couldn’t pay wages they decided to lay off workers: “It must nevertheless be admitted that some mistakes were made, in particular the issuing of redundancy notices to the council workforce.”

The plan was to lay off council staff for 3 months but when they figured out that would be unpopular with workers they laid off the workforce for a whole month! They wrote: “On September 6th, 1985 we announced the decision. How it backfired on us. The trade unions revolted, their national officials went for us, and at Labour Party headquarters the decision was seized upon as a stick with which to beat Militant.”

Sending taxis around Liverpool with redundancy notices to workers discredited Militant with much of their base, and set the stage for Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock to begin expelling leading members of the group from the Labour Party in early 1986. They still managed to elect an MP but mistakenly took that vote as a sign that everything was OK despite declining struggle. The district auditor had charged the Militant-led Liverpool city councillors £106,000. Their appeal to the House of Lords was lost and another charge of £242,000 was imposed. The job of socialists in councils is to fight against council managers and central government, not run the councils. Militant’s electoralism made a mess of the situation. They refused to pull the council down.

Militant regarded their own electoral success as indicating a growing mood to fight, but their votes reflected the opposite - workers were looking for a way to express their anger through the ballot box because confidence was falling, particularly after the defeat of the miner’s strike. This inability to see beyond their own support is a failing that carries over into the RCI. For a year from 1983 to 1984 Militant called protests in Liverpool and even planned a strike but the Militant dominated council did a deal with Thatcher at the height of the miner’s strike buying themselves another year but sacrificing a united fight against the government.

While most people recognised the 1980s represented a period of low working class struggle, Militant put out apocalyptic predictions based on the fact that the Labour left had increased its support. Their formalism didn’t allow them to understand the relationship between political representation and wider struggle. They didn’t always rise and fall together. But once the fight actually came and their apocalyptic fantasies were shown to be false, they fell back. Reality always comes as a disappointment to those who can’t see that reality.

Once Thatcher was done with the miner’s she came for Liverpool anyway. Her baton wielding thugs smashed the miner’s picket lines but Militant always regarded the cops as “workers in uniform”. The Militant leadership of the “Anti-Poll Tax Federation” announced after the London poll tax riot that they would hand over names and photographs of the rioters to the police. After the British police murdered Joy Gardner in 1993 Militant wrote: “Until there is democratic control of the police, including control of their day-to-day operations, outrages like this will continue to happen.”

Democratic oversight of the existing capitalist police force doesn’t change the nature of the machine. They argued that cops should be brought “into the orbit of the labour movement”, through the “right of the police to an independent, democratic trade union organisation to defend their interests as workers”. Militant argued for “local government police committees” to ensure that “any racist elements or fascist sympathisers within the police are weeded out of the force”.

The International Marxist Tendency carried over this weakness by arguing: “Senior officers should be democratically accountable to the rest of the police force, and all police officers should be democratically accountable to the public. Working class communities should be able to oversee, judge, and democratically control the police locally, through the election of oversight committees from the labour movement, with elected representatives from the trade unions and local councils.”

They argued that: “As Marxists, we cannot dismiss all police officers as incapable of siding with the labour movement in its fight against austerity… We should argue in favour of the right of police officers to unionise and go on strike. Through such organisation, rank and file police can be brought into the labour movement and closer to the working class… The labour movement should welcome the rising class consciousness and campaigns for industrial rights among the rank and file of the police, who can be brought closer to the side of the working class.”

This is garbage. The police are agents of the system. Class isn’t just determined by ownership or non-ownership of the means of production (factories, offices, machinery) but also by your relation to exploitation (whether you assist it or not) and your relationship to other classes. The police don’t own the means of production but they guarantee the continued exploitation of the working class by maintaining the system and batoning those workers who challenge it. Their relationship to the working class is one of opposition and oppression. They are not workers.

Ted Grant eventually handed the baton over to Alan Woods who is now the main theoretician of the Revolutionary Communists. 80 year old Woods was a member of the Militant Tendency for decades and is now the key thinker driving the rebranded International Marxist Tendency. He regurgitates Grants politics - this is clear in the poverty of his position on the national question, which is in no way Lenin’s. He panders to British imperialism and refuses to challenge the prejudices of British workers.

In “Marxism and the National Question” Woods argued that: “While naturally sympathising with the oppressed Irish people, Marx always subjected the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders to an implacable criticism.” In public Marx hammered the British ruling class and organised solidarity with Irish prisoners. In private he wrote to Engels that individual acts of terrorism were foolish and counter productive. Using these private letters as an excuse to join with the British state in condemning the Irish struggle for freedom, using the excuse you’re criticising the petty bourgeoisie (of the oppressed nation, from the comfort of the oppressor nation!) is very poor Marxism indeed!

“Later on, they gave critical support, for a time, to the petty-bourgeois Fenians. This was natural and correct at a time when the workers’ movement did not yet exist in Ireland which remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society until the early years of the 20th century.” So urging British workers to break from their own ruling class was OK in the past but things have changed!

“The first principle of Leninism was always the need to fight against the bourgeoisie - the bourgeoisie of both the oppressor and of the oppressed nations.” British socialists should fight both equally? This is not Marxism. They continued: “The fact that the Swedish workers defended the democratic right of the Norwegian people to secede disarmed the Swedish reactionaries who, after some initial hesitation, decided not to intervene. This served to consolidate the solidarity between the Swedish and Norwegian workers. But, although Lenin regarded this case as a model of how the national question should be settled, it is, in fact, an historical exception."

Lenin took on this abstract nonsense when Rosa Luxemburg had spouted it: “Carried away by the struggle against nationalism in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg has forgotten the nationalism of the Great Russians, although it is this nationalism that is the most formidable at the present time… Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot… Rosa Luxemburg is actually playing into the hands of the Black-Hundred nationalism of the Great Russians!”

Lenin called out the cowardice of socialists in the oppressor nations like Britain: “The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation… The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them… not by “postponing” the question until socialism is established, but in a clearly and precisely formulated political programme which shall particularly take into account the hypocrisy and cowardice of the Socialists in the oppressing nations.”

Grant and Woods tried to defend British troops in Ireland with their abstract Marxism: “It bears no relation whatsoever to a situation like Northern Ireland, where the population is split and the withdrawal of British troops would have meant a religious war between Catholics and Protestants… there was, and is, no question of London withdrawing its troops from the North… But the problem is that withdrawal would provoke a bloody chaos which would spill over into the rest of the United kingdom. This is the nightmare scenario which London cannot permit to happen. Therefore they are condemned to remain.”

Militant had always taken the same line - withdrawing British troops would lead to a bloodbath: “A common feature to what happened in Bosnia and Lebanon was that the central state collapsed… Ethnically based armed militias fighting for territory filled the vacuum of central authority in both cases. In Northern Ireland the state, especially since 1969, is the British state.” The soldiers responsible for Bloody Sunday were there to stop worse atrocities being enacted by the IRA? Not only did they conflate both sides of the sectarian divide, equating the violence of those trying to escape oppression and those defending it, but they also were suggesting it was a good thing the British troops were there! This is a far cry from Lenin, who wrote:

“The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly “unpleasant” for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression.”

The IMT did the same tailing of imperialism when it came to the Apartheid Israeli state: “Israel now exists as a state, and the clock of history cannot be turned back. Israel is a nation and we cannot call for its abolition.” We can and should call for its abolition. The Israeli state is a settler colonial state built on the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It is an outpost of imperialism in the region and needs to be overthrown by the wider working class of the region. Instead the IMT looked to the Israeli working class:

“A far-sighted leadership would strive to link the revolutionary movement of the Palestinians with the movement of the Israeli working class. It would explain that the common enemy of both Arab and Israeli working people are the Israeli bankers and capitalists.” They called for a: “Socialist Federation of the Middle East with full autonomy for the Palestinians and also for the Israelis.” The Israeli working class are a particular working class wed to the Israeli state because any material gains they make are at the expense of the Palestinians. There is a material basis to the racism of Israeli workers.

The IMT’s position later changed slightly, arguing for a free Palestine as part of the “socialist federation” but they still argued that: “In the last analysis, only the establishment of a united front between the people of Palestine and the working class and progressive layers of Israeli society will create the possibility of dividing the Israeli state on class lines.” The mass movement on Palestine forced them to use new words to say the same old things. But their positions have not fundamentally changed and the RCI still argue there is an unbroken line linking them to Ted Grant and Alan Woods is still their ideological leader. Their ability to change positions based not on objective realities but on their own party needs is shown by their approach to building outside the British Labour party.

In “A New Stage in the World Revolution”, written in July 1996, the IMT wrote: “The ultraleft idea that it is possible to find a short cut by raising the banner of the ‘independent party’ is false to the core… All history shows that, when the masses move into action, they first express themselves through the traditional mass organisations… The crisis of the reformist parties, especially when in government, will prepare the way for a swing to the left and the emergence of mass left reformist currents everywhere. It is the task of the Marxists to penetrate these currents and, by patient explanation and friendly criticism, win over the workers to a genuine Marxist programme.”

But the return to the traditional parties of the working class, the Labour Parties, has been the source of the defeat of many working class movements because those parties were agents of the bourgeoisie in the working class. That doesn’t mean we don’t seek to work alongside those kinds of organisations in united front movements, in order to steal their base. But we don’t pander to illusions. The German SPD for example used dominance over the German “soviets” - mass assemblies of revolutionary workers - to kill the German revolution. They organised the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Reformist organizations can move left in rhetoric during a revolt, but they move right in action - just as the Mensheviks in Russia did in 1917.

This theory led to Alan Woods being best mates with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. There was no socialist revolution in Venezuela. Chavez was able to use the country’s immense oil revenue to balance between workers and bosses while sitting on top of the Venezuelan capitalist state machine. When the cash ran out and the regime had to choose between revolution or retreat they chose retreat. The masses of workers and poor saved the regime from counter revolution through mass mobilisation - but there was no organisation that could have led the workers forward to the overthrow of the state.

Hugo Chavez flattered Woods by reading extracts from his book “Reason in Revolt” on his TV show “Alo Presidente” in March 2004. At the filming of “Alo Presidente” Woods was “placed in the front row, in a prominent position immediately opposite the president”. He was also “received by President Chavez for a private audience that lasted well over an hour”. Chavez was a charismatic politician who did great things for workers and the poor. But we don’t judge a regime by the subjective intentions of those who run it.

Woods wrote of the Venezuelan movement: “They wanted a fairer, more just and equal society, but imagined that this was possible without breaking the bounds of capitalism. But this immediately brought them into conflict with the bourgeoisie and imperialism. The masses took to the streets and imparted an entirely different dynamic to the process. The mass movement has provided a stimulus to Chavez and in turn he has encouraged the movement in a revolutionary direction… President Hugo Chavez has consistently revealed an unerring revolutionary instinct.”

If Woods’ position was translated into the situation in Russia in 1917 his words would be a joke: “The mass movement has provided a stimulus to the Provisional Government of Kerensky and in turn Kerensky has consistently revealed an unerring revolutionary instinct!” Whatever mask the bourgeois state wears - whether authoritarian, liberal or “socialist” - the job of real revolutionary socialists is to organise workers to overthrow that state machine and to take power through their own mass assemblies, rooted in workplaces and working class communities. The Bolsheviks certainly worked alongside workers who had illusions in Kerensky, for example when a right wing coup threatened, but they did so to break workers from Kerensky and to then overthrow him. As Lenin wrote at the time of an attempted coup by General Kornilov:

“Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing Line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events. We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is a difference. It is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential.and must not be forgotten.”

When the masses became frustrated with Chavez Alan Woods warned of “ultraleft adventures” from below: “Frustration is already growing among the activists. This is a warning. This frustration could lead to moods of impatience and ultraleft adventures on the part of a layer of activists who have moved far ahead of the rest of the class. This could have negative consequences for the revolution. “ He admitted that socialist revolutions normally require a Marxist party to be victorious - but since this was absent in Venezuela “all sorts of peculiar variants are possible”.

The centrality of a party made up of the vanguard of the working class, which could challenge for power, wasn’t vital, in fact all sorts of things can happen, he argued! Woods warned that: “All attempts at compromise are futile” but he then asked that “Hugo Chávez should base himself on the masses and the soldiers who are with the masses… Do not trust those who pose as loyalists but who advocate a policy of conciliation with the enemy and complain about the ‘masses going too far’! Remember the fate of Salvador Allende.”

He wrote: “The reformist and social democratic elements are weak or non-existent in the rank and file but strong at the top. They are constantly giving Chávez incorrect advice - advice that can ruin the revolution.” The key to a left government being replaced by the working class itself was better advice to this left government? The agent of change wasn’t the vanguard of the working class fighting against the bourgeois state (no matter how left it’s mask) but the parliamentarians and reformist leaders! If only Kerenksy had better advisers in 1917. If only Allende had better advisers in 1973!

Then again Alan Woods and his political ancestors in the Militant Tendency before him had always advocated winning the British Labour Party to a socialist programme and nationalising the commanding heights of the British economy as the path to change. Chavez and Allende were more akin to Kerensky than Lenin. They sat atop capitalist state machines, offering reforms, while balancing between capital and labour. Lenin never offered “advice” to such governments, like the Provisional Government in 1917. The Soviet assemblies had to win against the Provisional Government and replace the capitalist state it rested on.

Venezuelan radicals like Roland Denis wrote that from 2005 onwards “a corrupt bureaucratic and military caste began to seize leadership positions within the party and government, rolling back large swathes of their democratic and emancipatory content to the point of creating a sort of political autocracy.”

The IMT applied the same flawed reformist logic to Greece. They set up the “Communist Tendency of Syriza” that urged the party to carry out “the socialist transformation of society” - as if it was possible for the reformists leading Syriza to transform themselves by some magical act of transubstantiation into revolutionaries. This was a repeat of the old Militant line of Labour to government and nationalise the commanding heights. Syriza betrayed every promise they made to the Greek working class when they came to power in January 2015. The far left inside Syriza had absolutely no effect on the course of events. Greek workers were demoralised leading to the return of the Greek right.

After the Syriza surrender the IMT asked workers and students to join the British Labour Party and help the “Corbyn revolution”. In October 2017 they explained how Corbyn wouldn’t surrender like Syriza did: “Britain is not Greece; Labour is not Syriza; and Corbyn is not Tsipras. The Labour Party has a far greater historical weight and much deeper roots within the working class than Syriza ever had. It is not an ephemeral trend, but the traditional mass party of the British working class, with strong links to the trade unions.”

The British state didn’t need to kill the Corbyn “revolution” - the Blairites in Labour did it for them. And Corbyn didn’t put up a fight. The roots that Labour had in the union bureaucracies were precisely a mechanism for capturing and killing every mass movement that ever threatened the British state. Woods called for a return to Lenin while rejecting Lenin’s theory of the state. In his work “Marxism and the State” Woods wrote: “Without the aid of the reformists, Stalinists and the trade union leaders, it would not be possible to maintain the capitalist system for any length of time.”

The trade union leaders act as a bulwark that defends capitalism, they act as the outer ramparts of the system. But even if you breach those walls the permanent bureaucracy, army command and cops need to be beaten. Woods continues: “The development of the productive forces has brought about a considerable increase in the relative weight of the working class within society.” You can see where he’s going - the workers are so numerous, their mass organisations are so powerful, that socialism can be achieved peacefully!

The problem, he argues, is “the political bankruptcy of the leadership of the workers’ organisations.” He writes of the problem of the “petty bourgeois”: “Together with the development of the means of production, there has been a sharp decline in small-scale ownership.” This is crazy. The petty bourgeois are very numerous. There are tens of thousands of small shops, nail bars, self employed people, judges, farmers, criminals and others who all constitute the petty bourgeois “middle class”. But Woods wants you to think the revolution will be easy: “the working class will find itself in a generally more favourable position at the outset of the revolution than was the case in the past… A peaceful transformation of society would be entirely possible if the trade union and reformist leaders were prepared to use the colossal power in their hands to change society.”

He knows this isn’t Lenin’s view so he twists Lenin’s words to fit Woods’ reformist “peaceful revolution” thesis: “Marx explained that the working class cannot simply base itself on the existing state power, but must overthrow and destroy it. That is ABC for a Marxist. But after the ABC, there are other letters in the alphabet. In State and Revolution, Lenin castigated the reformists for presenting the socialist revolution as a slow, gradual, peaceful change. But the same Lenin was capable of asserting in 1920 that in Britain, because of the enormous power of the proletariat and its organisations, it would be entirely possible to carry through the socialist transformation peacefully.”

Lenin, according to Woods, argued “that the reformist leaders should take power into their own hands, that this would guarantee a peaceful transformation of society.” Let’s let Lenin speak for himself: “Kautsky tried his utmost to conceal from the reader the fundamental feature of this concept, namely, revolutionary violence. But now the truth is out: it is a question of the contrast between peaceful and violent revolutions… he himself has sunk to the level of a liberal who utters banal phrases about “pure democracy,” embellishing and glossing over the class content of bourgeois democracy, and shrinking, above all, from the use of revolutionary violence by the oppressed class.”

Tactical considerations might favour presenting the revolution as a defense of the working class - the October Revolution was presented as a defense after the Provisional Government closed a printing press. But the vanguard of the working class needs to be clear on the need to smash the state, break up the police, turn the army rank and file on the army command and break up the state bureaucracy. Woods has distorted and debased Lenin’s writings on the state.

The IMT also adopts apocalyptic perspectives to justify that things will come their way automatically: “The only limit to our growth is a subjective one – our quantitative and qualitative strength – which we have to consciously fight to overcome. There is also another factor: our will to grow, to educate ourselves in the theory, to rise to the historic challenge and to break every barrier in our path on the way. Do we have that will?”

This will just burn people out. The pendulum of struggle in Ireland was moving left from the 2008 crisis to the end of the water charges movement. It swung right afterwards. To get out of this situation we need detailed work in the poorest estates and in the workplaces to start restoring confidence and winning authority. Recruiting students and declaring communism as an immediate aim is just another form of the external moralism the RCI condemn in identity politics. Everything will be easy, they claim.

Don’t criticise reformist leaders either, there’s no need, everyone will be spontaneously socialist soon! While many on the left should be rightly criticised for tailing the damaging moralism of identity politics, the RCI go to the other extreme and are in danger of tailing the far right. It’s a shame they deny the existence of the petty bourgeoisie, because while one wing of the middle class polices the left with moralism the other wing of that class is the basis of Reform UK and Trumpism.

But the RCI seem to think supporting Nigel Farage or Donald Trump means you’re on your way to being a socialist: “You see, the masses need to go through this experience in order to expose this demagogy for what it is. And that will prepare the ground for a new radicalization and a revival of the class struggle, which is beginning already in America. That’s the point… It is not at all far-fetched to foresee that some of the boldest, most dedicated and self-sacrificing militants of the future communist movement in America will consist precisely of workers who have passed through the school of Trumpism.”

The working class has a head and a backside. “The workers” didn’t vote for Trump or for Reform UK. Sections of workers did. As did sections of other classes. In fact the Trump vote split every class down the middle, showing how effective the culture war is in hiding class relations. The best workers know that no billionaire represents their interests. But the Militant Tendency, the IMT and the RCI have long tailed imperialist attitudes among British workers, why not tail their present prejudices?

When the Revolutionary Communists launched on June 11th 2024 Alan Woods said that: “We are entitled to call for the struggle for communism now because that demand is not only possible - in the past it was not possible, the material basis was absent - now the material basis is present.” So when Lenin said the first world war showed capitalism was “overripe” for socialism he was wrong? Apparently the world only became ripe for revolution in 2024 when Alan Woods left the Labour Party. Up until that point any break with Labour was “ultra left”.

This is not Marxism. The objective nature of the capitalist economy, the class nature of the Labour Party - those things did not change when the Revolutionary Communists left Labour in 2024. Reality isn’t determined by the subjective fantasies of their cult. This is an idealist approach to reality, not Marxist.

Before Keir Starmer drove them out, Labour was supposed to be won to a socialist programme and peacefully declare socialism by nationalising the top companies. Once they were out they went on a ultra-left rampage - like a jilted lover. They had after all been in Labour for almost 70 years! Woods now argues that it was impossible to break the hold of Labour over the masses until now. Now they have no choice but to build independently, building independently is the way to go! Never mind all the decades of abuse hurled at everyone outside of Labour as “ultra lefts” and “sectarians”.

He argues that “real communism doesn’t come from the books. It comes from the soul. It comes from your gut instinct and the need to fight to change things. These young kids, they call themselves communists. They may have never read the Communist Manifesto. But they are communists. You don’t need to convince these kids… All you need to do is to stand on the street corner, proclaim communism, take a banner, take a newspaper if possible, and the gold will come to you.” They argue that “millions of young people have accepted ideas of communism”. You see no hard work or deep organising in workplaces and communities is necessary! This is backed up by attacks on Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?”:

“However, it is not true that the proletariat, if left to itself, is only capable of rising to the level of trade union consciousness (i.e., the struggle for economic betterment within the confines of capitalism). Over a decade before the Communist Manifesto saw the light of day, the British working class, through the medium of Chartism. “

This wasn’t what Engels said of the Chartists when he wrote: “The Chartists are theoretically the more backward, the less developed, but they are genuine proletarians all over, the representatives of their class. The Socialists are more far-seeing, propose practical remedies against distress, but, proceeding originally from the bourgeoisie, are for this reason unable to amalgamate completely with the working-class. The union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner, will be the next step, and has already begun. Then only, when this has been achieved, will the working-class be the true intellectual leader of England.”

Without a fight for the “merger” of socialist politics and the Chartist movement they would remain mired in capitalist modes of thought. The “merger” theory informed Lenin when he wrote “What Is To Be Done?” The RCI echo the worst defects of Lenin’s rivals when they argue that socialist consciousness will come automatically: “From a lifetime’s experience of exploitation and oppression, the working class, beginning with the active layers which lead the class, acquires a socialist consciousness.”

If experience alone created socialist consciousness the system should have been and gone a long, long time ago. This is why the RCI often just shout maximum demands. Just shout “communism!” from the sidelines and gather together others who want to do the same. Minimum demands are those that are shaped by the needs of our class today, like the need to fight the housing crisis. Maximum demands are those that require a revolution to achieve, like a real workers’ parliament with recallable delegates. You have to connect both.

Lenin argued that a minimum maximum programme was vital in explaining your “line of march” to workers. This is who we are, this is where we want to march to. The RCI just wants to shout about the end of the road without explaining the first steps. They are miseducating workers and students and will burn out a whole layer of radical people. Nothing we do will ever be easy. We need to be honest with our class. Karl Marx wrote against this approach when French Communists refused to utilise minimum demands.

The French socialist Jules Guesde wanted only maximum demands. If socialists stood aside from the everyday battles of the working class they would lose all credibility and their call for revolution would become abstract. They would fail to build a path, or illustrate a “line of march”, from the minimum demands to the maximum. Marx accused Guesde of “revolutionary phrase-mongering” and of denying the value of struggles for reforms as a path to revolution, Marx made his famous remark that, if their politics represented Marxism then: “ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”).

Without action on minimum demands workers would think that socialists were all talk. The RCI has no real programme. They claim they follow Trotsky’s “transitional programme” but there is no real programme on their website, just a list of 10 demands that confuses minimum and maximum demands. The point of it is to merely recruit. Their “10 point programme” calls for what they deem “transitional demands”:

No trust in Starmer’s big business government! No to austerity! Overthrow the billionaires and their profit system!

No to militarism, arms exports, and imperialist war! For healthcare not warfare! Books not bombs!

The banks and monopolies are robbing us. Nationalise the lot of them, without compensation!

The education system is being run into the ground. Young people deserve a say in their future. We demand free education, living grants, scrapping student rent, and votes at 16!

To solve the housing crisis, we need to build a million council homes a year. Nationalise the land, construction companies, building societies, and banks! Put people before profit!

Repeal all the anti-trade union laws. For a real living wage!

For united class struggle! Fight against racism, sexism, and all forms of discrimination!

Don’t simply tax the super-rich, but seize their wealth! Democratically plan the economy for the benefit of the majority, not the billionaires!

Capitalism is killing the planet. Make the billionaires pay for the climate catastrophe!

For international class struggle and world revolution! Workers of the world: unite!

This is a mix of minimum and maximum demands without clarity as to who is to implement them, they confuse demands made now - on the capitalist state - and demands of the future. “No to austerity” is a minimal demand, to overthrow the billionaires a maximum demand. No to war is a minimum demand, as is the demand for books not bombs. Nationalisation of banks and seizing the wealth of the rich instead of “simply taxing them” sounds very radical but avoids the question of who’s in power?

Even Marx said after taking power workers would “wrest by degrees” capital from the capitalists. The question isn’t about how much you want to take from the rich but whether you want a workers’ state or capitalist state to do it. The Irish section of the RCI makes 4 demands at the end of their “what we stand for”: Expropriate the big monopolies! Overthrow the bosses’ system! For a Socialist United Ireland! Fight for World Revolution!

The RCI have always fudged the question of state power and this programme is a fudge too. They argue: “The concrete demands that communists raise in the movement will, of course, change frequently in line with changing conditions, and will vary according to the conditions in each country. Therefore, a programmatic list of demands would be out of place in a manifesto of this nature. “However, the method by which communists in all countries should formulate concrete demands was elaborated brilliantly by Trotsky in 1938 and published in the foundational document of the Fourth International, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International – or the Transitional Programme as it is more commonly known.”

We can’t have minimum demands because they vary. But we can shout maximum demands while rabbiting on about the “transitional programme” that is nowhere to be seen. This is the problem with Trotsky’s transitional demand method. It’s a fudge. It mashes together the demands of today, made on capitalist governments and the demands of tomorrow, implemented by workers in power.

Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938: “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution.” But Lenin argued against those who implied that merely fighting on day to day issues would automatically bring workers to a revolutionary consciousness. This raises a clear problem with Trotsky’s approach – the implication of the transitional demand method was that the demand itself would be enough, combined with the force of apocalyptic circumstances, to create a conscious minority of workers.

Trotsky wrote: “This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” The conscious revolutionary minority should find demands that are compatible with the consciousness of “wide layers of the working class” but at the same time “unalterably” lead to revolutionary conclusions? Demands that are compatible with “wide layers” of the working class are going to inevitably be minimum demands, reformist demands

The whole scenario smacked of Trotsky’s desperation and isolation – he wrote that transitional demands themselves would inevitably “lead to revolution but also to the masses”. Trotsky even admitted that the transitional programme didn’t remove the necessity of the minimum programme saying: “The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers.”

The RCI “Manifesto” ends by saying: “Let our fighting slogans be: Down with the imperialist robbers! Down with capitalist slavery! Expropriate the bankers and capitalists! Long live Communism! Workers of all countries, Unite! Forward to the building of a new International!”

It’s hard to see how repealing anti-union laws and calling for books instead of bombs “unalterably” leads to revolutionary conclusions? The RCI don’t care - just keep shouting about communism and the apocalyptic situation will do all the work for us. If all else fails they’re ready to go back into the Labour Party as soon as they can: “the great majority of the working class… remain under the influence of the traditional reformist organisations” and “there is no way that the working class can avoid passing through the painful school of reformisms.”

The new Revolutionary Communist Parties must therefore do nothing that leads workers to see the Woods group as “alien elements or enemies” and proposes in some circumstances to send “all our forces into the reformist organisations in order to win over the leftward-moving workers to a firm revolutionary position.” So they posture as “communists” to recruit a load of naive young people and will later guide them back towards reformist organisations, all the while promoting a distorted Lenin and their idea of peaceful revolution. From a class point of view they are serving the reformists - they are a faction of the petty bourgeois out to capture young people who genuinely want a revolution and divert them back into safe channels for the system. It’s a con job.

This is why the vast majority of their work is in the colleges. They want to create another left bubble at precisely a moment in history where we need to be doing everything we can to break from the moralism of student politics and merge with the working class.

The Red Network has been very critical of the opportunism of People Before Profit. We think socialists should do “broad work” in workplaces and estates to gain a reputation we can use to explain revolution to our class. People Before Profit representatives like Richard Boyd Barrett TD work their fingers to the bone helping homeless families and workers. While we criticise the politics of People Before Profit, similar hard work has to be the basis of all socialist activity. The RCI wants to skip that hard work of base building. Workers won’t respond to that. We need deep organising and revolutionary politics combined.

The Red Network will continue to fight both deviations from Marxist politics, the opportunists and the ultra lefts - those who do broad work but refuse to talk about the need for a revolution and those who talk about revolution (although in the RCI’s case they distort it!) but from the sidelines. Our strategy is to build an organic leadership within the working class. Alan Woods calls for a return to the politics of Lenin: “It is our task to return the movement to its genuine origins, to break with cowardly revisionism and embrace the banner of Lenin. To this end, we extend a hand of friendship to any party or organisation that shares this aim.”

But we cannot extend the hand of friendship to those who distort Lenin while claiming to promote his politics. Those who attack Lenin’s view on the state, on imperialism, on Labour. We advise members of the RCI who genuinely want to return to Lenin to escape the clutches of your reformist cult and join the Reds. Or at least come talk to us about the future of the revolutionary left in Ireland and abroad. We extend the hand of friendship to all those who want a working class revolution and will work hard to get it.