Our Answer to RCI Rally in Rome: Program Is Decisive

Proclaiming Yourself a Communist
Doesn’t Make You One

The following article is translated from a leaflet issued by the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, section of the League for the Fourth International, in November 2024 and reprinted in L’internazionalista No. 8, May 2025.

This past June [2024], several hundred delegates from a number of different countries met in central Italy and bombastically proclaimed themselves the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). Now the Italian section of the brand spanking new RCI is out to “plaster the country with tens of thousands of posters and stickers,” all building up to a giant rally in Rome in November where it will be proclaimed: “The Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR) Is Born!” Amid the rejoicing, this will then be the kick-off for a campaign to spread the glad tidings far and wide.

The RCI/PCR’s campaign “Are You a Communist?” has attracted a considerable number of young people. After a decade of capitalist economic depression followed by the hecatomb (slaughter) of the COVID pandemic and with continuous wars, from the imperialist attack on Afghanistan and Iraq to the NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia over Ukraine and the Israel/U.S. genocide in Gaza, both backed by Italy, for many youth, the word “communism” doesn’t have the scare effect that it once did.

The call for November 23 rally declared that “A new international organization,” the RCI, “was launched in June, with sections, groups and supporters in more than 40 countries.” As Marxist materialists do not believe in a virgin birth, one would have to ask, where does this new international, with groups and supporters in 40+ countries, come from? The answer is that the RCI is the transmogrification of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), although that organization is not mentioned in the rally call or even in the RCI Manifesto.

“Is the time right for a Revolutionary Communist International?” asks that March 2024 “Manifesto.” After listing some of the horrors of the “never-ending cycle of wars, economic collapse and increasing misery” besetting the capitalist world, and the growing rejection of the “free market economy” – all of which is absolutely true – it concludes that “Now is the time”! But while putrefying capitalism gives rise to potentially revolutionary situations that urgently require a genuinely communist vanguard, it is not enough to simply proclaim yourself one.

Particularly in Italy, which once had the largest Communist Party in the West that after World War II had over 2 million members and in 1976 received over 12 million votes, more than one-third of the total, calls for a generic communist party, even if you tack on the word revolutionary, can mean many very different things, including out-and-out reformism. Program is key. In the imperialist age, a revolutionary vanguard can only be Leninist and Trotskyist, guided by the lessons of the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution.

Note also that the RCI’s Manifesto, in speaking of the nature of the party they seek to build, refers only to the reference in the 1848 Communist Manifesto to the Communists as “the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country.” Not a word about the insistence of the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky that, in this imperialist age, when a whole section of the workers movement (the “labor aristocracy”) has been bought off by imperialist bribes, what’s needed today is a party of “professional revolutionaries,” who make the fight for international socialist revolution their life’s work.

While RCI leaders appeal to youthful enthusiasm and try to whip up a quasi-religious fervor for their latest campaign, they are heirs of the Militant Tendency that for over three-quarters of a century was buried in the arch-reformist British Labour Party. In a number of countries, the IMT has entered bourgeois parties, and up until recently, particularly in Britain and other English-speaking countries, it consciously and explicitly went out of its way to avoid the word “communist.”

So for the IMT, giving birth to the RCI is definitely a turn, but in many ways it continues its opportunist policies of the past. In its March 2024 Manifesto, the only mention of the word “Trotskyist” is in denouncing “pseudo-Trotskyist sectarians,” advising people to stay well away from “ultra-left and sectarian grouplets.” A monster (almost 20,800-word) diatribe against the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of our League for the Fourth International, is titled “Marxism vs. Sectarianism” and refers to the IG as “a virulent ultra-left sect.”

If in its Manifesto and agitational propaganda the newborn RCI portrays itself as a kind of immaculate conception, coming out of nowhere, for the cognoscenti the nascent PCR has an article by Alessandro Giardiello¹ on “The Origins of the Partito Comunista Rivoluzionario.” This upholds the political positions of Militant tendency leader Ted Grant going back to the 1930s and of IMT (now RCI) leader Alan Woods since the tendency split in the early 1990s. What the “Origins” article doesn’t spell out is that Grant and his heirs, rather than building an independent communist vanguard, were embedded in the British Labour Party for decades.

Grant founded the newspaper The Militant in 1964 as the organ of his group that had undertaken “entrism” in the Labour Party since the late 1930s and remained there for over 80 years. At its high point, Militant Labour controlled the Liverpool City Council from 1983-87. In 1985 the Militant-led Council fired 31.000 city workers because “they did not have the money to pay them.” When the workers organized strikes and protest actions, Militant (4 October 1985) stigmatized them, writing that “it would be crazy to carry out a general strike.” In short, the Grantites’ brief sojourn in office served to carry out capitalism’s dirty work. 

In 1991 the large majority of Militant, then the leading group of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), decided to leave the Labour party. Ted Grant and Alan Woods refused to do so and split from the CWI to set up the IMT in 1992. They stayed in Labour under Prime Minister Tony Blair during 1997-2007 when he continued the “neo-liberal,” anti-worker polices of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories. This also meant that Grant and Woods were part of the government party of British imperialism during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the 2003 U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, and thus bear responsibility for those crimes.

In 2021, Alan Woods’ group (Socialist Appeal) was finally forced out of the Labour Party in the purges around the ouster of Jeremy Corbyn. It did not want to leave, and would no doubt still be ensconced in Labour today, as it continues warmongering from Ukraine to Gaza, if it hadn’t been axed. More than any other ostensibly Trotskyist current, the IMT was wedded to “entrism,” turning what Trotsky put forward as a short-term tactic in the 1930s as masses of workers were moving left, into a long-term strategy. It’s the underlying reason why Grant and his group were not part of Trotsky’s Fourth International on its founding in 1938.

Thus part of the reason for the current “left turn” of the IMT is that its mother section in Britain was forced into an independent existence. There is also less possibility to do entries into other forces in some other countries. But the March 2024 RCI Manifesto makes clear that it is always ready to carry out other deep entries, if the opportunity should arise: “Under certain circumstances, it cannot be ruled out that it may be necessary to send all our forces into the reformist organizations,” adding that presently that is not posed.

Moreover, the IMT/RCI’s predilection for entrism extends even to bourgeois parties, which it rebaptizes as “reformist” for the occasion. The same Manifesto polemicizes against the left that capitulated to SYRIZA in Greece (as well as to Bernie Sanders in the USA, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos in Spain). What the RCI does not say is that the IMT hailed the election of SYRIZA in January 2015 and that its group in Greece was posing at the time as a Communist Tendency of SYRIZA.

The fact that the IMT was part of such a bourgeois party is nothing new, as it has for years posed as the “Marxist wing” of populist capitalist parties from Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party to the Party of the Democratic Revolution in Mexico. This is diametrically counterposed to one the pillars on which Trotsky built the International Left Opposition and to the lessons he drew from the bloody defeat in China in 1927. In response to Stalin’s disastrous policy of entering the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang, leading up to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Communists by GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek in April 1927, Trotsky wrote:

“Never and under no circumstances may the party of the proletariat enter into a party of another class or merge with it organizationally. An absolutely independent party of the proletariat is a first and decisive condition for communist politics.” [emphasis in original]

–L.D. Trotsky, “The Political Situation in China and the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition” (June 1929)

In 2024, the newborn RCI’s Mexican section is critical of Claudia Sheinbaum, the victorious presidential candidate of the bourgeois-populist Morena party of her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has acted as a border guard for Yankee imperialism for years. But in 2012, the IMT’s Mexican section bragged about being part of Morena, and again in 2018 it backed AMLO for president. And for over ten years Grant and Woods were perhaps best known for their fawning over the bourgeois-nationalist Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, wholeheartedly praising his “socialist” rhetoric.

The IMT also supported other bourgeois nationalists in Latin America like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Pedro Castillo in Peru. These are the politics of class collaboration, in direct contradiction to the Bolshevik politics of Trotsky. Real communists do not give political support to bourgeois parties and politicians.

The IMT/RCI also practices class-collaborationist politics in the imperialist countries. In France, the IMT backed bourgeois populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the elections of 2017 and 2019, and this June, the RCI “call[ed] for people to mobilize in the streets and vote for the candidates of the Popular Front” (marxiste.org, 13 June 2024). The Nouveau Front Populaire is a bourgeois electoral alliance of Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Communist Party, Socialist Party and Greens, harking back to its namesake in the 1930s, pushed by the Stalinists, which led to the defeat in France (1936) and in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

Another example: in the September 2022 Italian elections that led to the Meloni government, the IMT section, Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione, wrote that it would “give our vote to Unione Popolare,” which it said was “the only option that is in the camp of the working class” (Rivoluzione, 8 September 2022). In the camp of the working-class? Unione Popolare was headed by bourgeois ex-judge and ex-mayor of Naples, Luigi De Magistris, and is mainly pushed by the bourgeois populists of Potere al Popolo (Power to the People). Over and over the IMT has given political support to such class-collaborationist alliances. From Latin America to Europe and the U.S., the rebranded RCI is incapable of drawing a class line.

In Britain, in the 4 July 2024 elections, the RCP wrote: Get the Tories out! But we also say no trust in a Starmer government” (The Communist, 22 May). This classic opportunist “fight the right” rhetoric is a subterfuge to appear left while not calling straight out for no vote for Labour under (now prime minister) Keir Starmer. Then, following the racist and fascist-led anti-immigrant riots that broke out at the end of July after a fatal stabbing falsely ascribed to a Muslim refugee, the RCP wrote, “We can have no trust in Starmer or the police to protect us” (The Communist, 12 August). “’No trust”? The police are the guard dogs of capital, among whose jobs for the bosses is meting out racist repression of immigrants.

This is no momentary or minor blip. The Militant tendency headed by Ted Grant and then the IMT has long claimed that the cops are “workers in uniform,” they call for unionization of police and prison guards, and have repeatedly supported “strikes” by police. When the police go on strike they do it to increase their repressive powers. The League for the Fourth International has long denounced the IMT’s betrayal of class principle with its support for police “unions,” and has for decades called for cops out of the unions. See our article on the Militant/IMT’s talk of “Bolshevik Bobbies” (an affection name for police).¹

This gross denial of Marxist class politics is the product of a social-democratic milieu where reformist leftists dream of taking over the state apparatus and being the bosses of the cops, as Militant Labour did in the 1980s. This is in line with the IMT/RCI’s longstanding call for the British parliament with a Labour Party majority to approve an “Enabling Act” which would nationalize the largest companies and thereby supposedly establish socialism, all while the bourgeois state remains intact. Far from fighting for socialist revolution, such policies hark back to the left Labour government of Aneurin Bevin in the late 1940s.

The historical Militant/IMT political current has nothing to do with Trotskyism and has systematically capitulated to imperialism. Two examples: in World War II, Trotsky and the Fourth International stood for revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the clash between the fascist and “democratic” imperialists, while fighting for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism. Ted Grant’s Workers International League, in contrast, had a social-chauvinist position of backhanded support for British imperialism. And in the 1982 Falkland/Malvinas Islands war between Argentina and Britain, the Militant group sided with British imperialism, even calling for “workers boycotts” against Argentina.

Today, NATO imperialists and their puppet Ukrainian government have been waging a proxy war against Russia, which now may be escalating to a direct war, as a step in their imperialist war drive ultimately aimed at restoring capitalist rule in China, the one major country in the world that, precisely because of its planned economy was able to mobilize to protect its population against the ravages of the COVID pandemic. We of the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, section of the League for the Fourth International, stand forthrightly for the defeat of NATO and defend Russia in the current war and unconditionally defend the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialist war and counterrevolution.

The LFI warns that the frenzied imperialist warmongering, reflected also in the U.S./Israel genocidal war on Gaza, is careening dangerously toward a thermonuclear World War III. In contrast, the not-so Revolutionary Communist International refuses to defend Russia or China against imperialism, a “plague on both your houses” line that is a capitulation to imperialism. Moreover, the RCI Manifesto assures us that “a world war is ruled out under present conditions,” both because a nuclear conflict mean “mutually assured destruction,” and due to “mass opposition to war.” But that hasn’t stopped the U.S./UK/NATO imperialists from constantly escalating their attacks in the Ukraine proxy war on Russia.

The Manifesto also reassures us that talk of “an alleged danger of ‘fascism’” is disorienting, and that a fascist regime as a “battering ram to destroy the workers’ organisations” is “ruled out by the balance of forces.” This “keep calm and carry on” message may be news to the RCI’s Italian supporters who are already saddled with a fascist-led government. Is the Meloni government a full-fledged fascist-bonapartist regime? No, but then neither was Mussolini’s parliamentary government in its first years. Until it was.

We of the League for the Fourth International encourage those who have been attracted to the “new” Revolutionary Communist International by its flamboyant “left turn” to verify what is written here, and to study the history of the communist movement. The renewed interest in communism among youth is encouraging, but it must lead to the understanding proclaiming yourself a communist doesn’t make you one. What is decisive is program. We also encourage you to get into contact with us and to read our press. A revolutionary communist international today can only be explicitly Leninist and Trotskyist, it cannot be built on the basis of class collaboration and capitulation to imperialism..  ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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