Cosplay Communism?

From Bernie Boosters to “Revolutionary Communists of America”

By Joe. H and Sasha

“A specter is haunting” social media, a small leftist group proclaimed last September. “The success and ubiquity” of the group’s “Are You a Communist?” sticker campaign was causing online reactionaries to “reel,” announced its website. On the site you can buy “10 stickers for just 70 cents” (or “get half price for bundles of 100+”), featuring that question and an image of Karl Marx patterned after the U.S. Army’s “Uncle Sam Wants You” recruitment posters from WWI. The campaign consisted of putting lots of these stickers on lampposts in metropolitan areas. The ad includes a QR code directing people to a “join form” for the group.

Then this March a video, “Communist Agitators Take to the Subway,” was posted to YouTube, in which some people with hammer-and-sickle shirts and a red flag announce: “We’re here in Brooklyn. We’re going to go down into the subway right here to find communists….” The camera follows the intrepid searchers into subway cars where, competing with service announcements, they exhort random passengers to “Get organized!” “You can help us,” they declare. Soon, the screen fills with a slogan in all-caps italics: “AUDACITY,AUDACITY AND YET MORE AUDACITY! ON THAT BASIS WE WILL WIN!” The same day, an article on the group’s website (marxist.com, 4 March) “reports” that “Hundreds of millions watch launch of the Revolutionary Communists of America!”

No, it wasn’t a parody – or wasn’t intended to be one. Nor was the group performing for the camera drawn from the somewhat better-known “Revolutionary Communist Party” (aka revcom) of Bob Avakian, the Mao Zedong wannabe whose theatrical acolytes used to imitate the Red Guards of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” As for the claim about “hundreds of millions” of video viewers, it turns out that 19,000 views had actually been garnered by a video announcing plans to found a new “party” called Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA).

With stirring music in the background, a subsequent item in the multi-level PR campaign blared: “248 years ago, in this revolutionary city of Philadelphia, the American Revolution declared independence from Britain,” and invited all and sundry to come to Philly in late July to “Attend the Founding Congress of the RCA!” And “if you like what you’re hearing, we ask only one thing: Join the communists!” a chorus of voices declaim. No sweat, apparently. “One comrade, One week, Five new recruits,” begins a piece titled “I Built a New Communist Cell Over My Spring Break” (12 April). Oh yeah? Well, “I Met Another Communist on the Street and 30 Minutes Later, He Was an RCA Member,” boasts another (9 July). On the site, an “RCA At Large Cell Starter Pack” may be had for just $30.

At the end of said Philadelphia congress, on July 28, attendees marched through the streets, as displayed in a further video, on X. (Elon Musk shared it with an exclamation point.)

Thus, in a torrent of hype was born the “new party,” U.S. affiliate of an equally “new international” – the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). Yes, the level of self-aggrandizement is frankly embarrassing. But what’s the spectacle all about, where do these “new” groups come from, and how new are they, actually? (Not new.) Crucially: what do they stand for politically and what is their record? As for “revolutionary,” is it true, as we have pointed out, that they’re known for supporting police and prison guards’ “strikes” and “unions”? Yes it is, as those familiar with the group know and we document again in this issue.

Gimmicks Galore – But What Are the Politics?

First let’s address the question of where the RCI and its U.S. group, the RCA, are coming from, both politically and organizationally. Normally when a left group gets founded, refounded, or changes its name, it explains its origins and something of its own history. But neither the RCI manifesto (11 March) nor that of the RCA (9 May) nor the “Join us” sections on their sites say anything about where they emerged from – nor even that a group called the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) ever existed. Yet the RCI is the new name of what until now was known as the IMT, whose U.S. section is now called RCA. Under one or another name it’s been around for well over six decades, though if we start with its origins in Britain it goes back even longer. Known as the “Grantites” because the group was first headed up by a prolific writer named Ted Grant (1913-2006), it made the claim of being Trotskyist but gained a well-earned reputation for outsized opportunism.

The grab bag of get-rich-quick gimmicks they’ve been using to “launch” a fake mass party gives an idea of that opportunism – but the roots of it are political. The already ill-named International Marxist Tendency’s adoption of the even less accurate moniker of “Revolutionary Communists” is the rebranding project of a tendency whose actual politics are fundamentally social-democratic. For over 40 years their leading section was part of the British Labour Party (which today is once again running British imperialism’s government). IMT/RCI old-timers still boast of how, in the 1980s, their British group administered the city of Liverpool. Pandering to and absorbing the outlook of Labourism, the Grantites claimed that socialism could be peacefully introduced by an “enabling bill” that would be enacted by the British Parliament. Thus through the bourgeois state itself, capitalism could, supposedly, reform itself away.

In a range of other countries, the IMT’s national sections were long part of outright bourgeois parties that head the capitalist state – such Mexico’s governing party, MORENA. In 2018 they hailed the presidential election of its leader “AMLO” (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) as an “insurrection at the ballot box” (Izquierda Socialista, 15 July 2018)! In office, AMLO ramped up Mexico’s militarization, acting as a border guard for U.S. imperialism under both Trump and Biden.

Where a group stands regarding the armed first of the bourgeois state is fundamental to its politics in the real world. What the IMT-now-RCI is most notorious for among those familiar with the radical left is its long-standing support to “strikes” by and “unions” of police and prison guards, and its long record of calling the professionals of repression “workers in uniform” who should be drawn further into the labor movement. (See accompanying article on page X.)

Despite the recent changes in packaging, the methodology of the IMT/RCI and its U.S. section, the RCA, remains the same: pander to your hoped-for audience and try to get rich quick. Rather than forthrightly addressing prevalent illusions in order to win over those receptive to a genuinely revolutionary alternative, it seeks to ingratiate itself with politically inexperienced youth while evading crucial issues of political principle.

While yesterday that meant the IMT enthusing over Bernie Sanders as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) Democrats in Congress, today it means pretending that never happened. Why? Because lots of Gen Z youth got fed up with the Sanders/AOC cheering squad for “Genocide Joe” Biden. These days, the IMT’s U.S. section, now called RCA, pursues a new gambit, styling themselves representatives of what they call “America’s communist generation.” (The hyperbole is characteristic of the group, which under Grant’s successor Alan Woods specializes is announcing revolutions breaking out tomorrow in one country after another.)

That Was Then?

Laying claim to leadership of the working class in a struggle for revolution is serious business, with criteria far different than a shifting series of marketing campaigns. A group’s track record speaks to its political methods, outlook and nature. Given the claims of today’s RCI and RCA to represent “revolutionary communism,” let’s take a look at what they were pitching just a few years ago, when tailing after “democratic socialists” was the name of the game.

In November 2019 (for example), participants at an IMT educational asked whether members should identify as “communists.” The editor of their paper, John Peterson, answered that given the bad connotations of the “C-word,” he tried to avoid it. The event, a public “Marxist School” held in New York, was co-sponsored by the Queens DSA’s political education working group. It was part of the IMT’s all-out pursuit of “mass” influence through adapting politically to the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America.

To this, members of the IMT-now-RCA might respond, “Well, that was then” – but that’s actually the point. Opportunist left groups seek to go with the flow, echoing the illusions of the moment in pursuit of popularity. But building a party that is revolutionary in deeds as well as words requires that we “speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter,” as Trotsky put it in the “Transitional Program” of the Fourth International (1938), including when this requires “swimming against the stream.” And leftist-minded youth who learned to see through the fakery of AOC, Sanders and the pseudo-socialist DSA don’t want to be hoodwinked again.

Today, with the widespread discrediting among would-be leftists of Biden’s bro Bernie and the DSA Democrats, the RCI and RCA manifestos state that Sanders has played a “pernicious role” and describe the DSA as “doomed to irrelevance.”  But back when many disaffected workers and youth entertained hopes that fake-socialist Democratic politicians represented “change,” the IMT-now-RCA was among the most assiduous boosters of Bernie, AOC and the Democratic pressure group launched to stardom by Sanders’ campaign. Professing to know better than to support Democratic candidates, but salivating over the numbers that Sanders’ campaign events garnered, the IMT echoed liberal praises and beseeched Sanders: “Bernie: Build a Mass Socialist Party of the Working Class!” (10 June 2016). In other words, in pursuit of popularity, it was selling illusions in a capitalist politician.

In contrast, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs exposed these illusions and Sanders’ role in corralling workers and youth into the Democratic Party, and his record as an imperialist politician – including backing for Israeli terror against the Palestinians. As we insisted at the time:

“The political function of Bernie Sanders’ campaign is not to sharpen the struggle against capitalist reaction but to blur consciousness and lead those increasingly fed up with the status quo back into supporting the Democratic Party of war, racism and police terror.”

–“No, Bernie Sanders is Not a Socialist,” Revolution No. 12, March 2016¹

“Just a Tactic”?

When pressed on these topics, IMTers argued that their calls for Sanders to form a “mass socialist party” were all just a tactic calculated to counter illusions, but in a gentler way. (According to this mindset, anything can be justified if you label it a tactic.) While sold to the IMT membership as an ingenious application of dialectical wizardry, the “tactic” could only politically disarm would-be Marxists, promoting the fantasy that Bernie might actually launch some kind of leftist party at the final hour. IMT guru Woods pontificated: “what were assumed to be the laws of politics in the USA were in fact only customs and traditions that … are in fact being broken. It cannot therefore be excluded that this could lead to Sanders breaking with the Democratic Party and moving in the direction of setting up a new party to the left of the Democrats”  (“The Sanders phenomenon,” 12 February 2016). Yeah, right.

Sanders’ role was “pernicious,” they now declare. True. But what about theirs, when building illusions in this imperialist politician was all in a day’s work for the leaders of what is now the RCA? As the 2016 race heated up, Peterson pronounced:

“Sanders will have to make a decision that will determine his political legacy and potentially change the course of US history. Will he follow through on his word to support Clinton if she is the nominee? … Or will he help lay the foundations for something new and necessary in American politics? Will he call on the unions to break with the Democrats and build an independent socialist labor party?”

– John Peterson, “USA: Revolution on the Horizon” (sic), 4 March 2016

A year later, the Editorial Board of the IMT’s U.S. paper exulted that “the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America is an exciting development,” so that “it appears socialists are finally swimming with the stream.” It went on:

“At its height, the Sanders campaign mobilized millions and rallied broad layers of society, particularly the youth, around the banner of democratic socialism. For a moment, the potential for the emergence of a new party – a mass socialist party – became a concrete prospect. No longer was this a hard-to-imagine abstraction – if only Bernie would break with the Democrats!”

– “The Growth of the DSA and the Fight for Socialism,” 16 July 2017 [emphasis in original]

But he didn’t, they lamented.

The spurious claims of opportunists of this ilk had long since been answered by revolutionary Trotskyists:If donkeys could fly, pressure would transform the likes of Bernie Sanders into the opposite of what is: a capitalist Democratic politician. So these fake-leftists whip up enthusiasm for ‘Bernie’ supposedly to pressure him to the left….”²

Still the beat went on, ramping up again with the election in 2018 of AOC, a former intern for Democratic senator Ted Kennedy’s office who joined the DSA after it endorsed her campaign for Congress. In “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Rescue of the Democratic Party” (August 2018), we cited the “reformist fantasy scenario … promoted by the International Marxist Tendency, which writes (Socialist Revolution, 1 July [2018]): ‘If Ocasio-Cortez operated in Congress as an independent socialist, she could call for the Fortune 500 companies to be placed under workers’ control in order to provide the resources for full employment and a genuine living wage, healthcare, education, and housing for all,’ and so forth and so on.”

As our article noted, this was yet another of the IMT’s “ridiculous appeals for capitalist politicians to please introduce ‘socialism’ through the bourgeois state.”

From “Build the DSA” to “Join the RCA!”

Time flies when you’re … well, we don’t know if the IMT was having fun, but it seems only yesterday that they were oh so “excited to continue building and strengthening DSA” (“Why I Joined the IMT,” 9 February 2018), “extremely happy to see the growth of the DSA” and “want to help build the DSA,” as the “membership, resources, and visibility of DSA give it the potential to contribute immensely” to the socialist cause (“Building a Mass Socialist Party,” 5 April 2021); believed the “DSA could become a genuine point of reference for the working class as a fighting force that offers a way forward” (“What Kind of Party Are We Fighting For? A Reply to Comrades in DSA,” 15 June 2021), etcetera ad nauseam.

Today, under their new name of RCA, they hark back in sorrow to fantasize once again: “Sanders had an opportunity to take on the Democrats by breaking with them and forming a mass socialist party.” Yet “Sanders, AOC, and the rest of DSA’s congressional representatives have not used their position to organize against the capitalist system” (“Biden abandons the race: can switching horses in midstream stop Trump?” 23 July). This is a revelation? As the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth has consistently emphasized with no ifs and or buts: Sanders, AOC et al. are capitalist politicians whose job it is to defend the capitalist system through one of the oldest capitalist parties in the world: the strike-breaking, mass-incarcerating Democratic Party of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War and genocide in Gaza. The DSA is and always has been an appendage of that party.

So when the former IMT now launches article after sticker after video after X-post calling to “Join the Revolutionary Communists of America today!” curious minds want to know: And what will you be calling for tomorrow?

If there is a tomorrow, that is. Unless the international working class stops it through a socialist revolution, the U.S. imperialist ruling class will lead humanity into a thermonuclear  Third World War. Telling the truth about this is an urgent responsibility for revolutionaries, which our press seeks to do through serious explanation and documentation, connecting this to the fight for international workers action against the U.S./NATO war machine.³

For a group that projects itself as “the Communists” who will lead a revolution “in our lifetime,” the newly fledged Revolutionary Communist International and its U.S. section are strikingly oblivious to how capitalism in decay is escalating the threat to human existence posed by U.S. imperialism’s drive – from the Middle East to Ukraine to the South China Sea – toward WWIII. The Manifesto of the RCI blithely asserts that “a world war is ruled out under present conditions” (our emphasis) – despite the fact U.S. imperialism’s political and military leaders have repeatedly made clear that the current U.S./NATO war against Russia is a way station toward war with China.

Reformist Complacency, Radical Garb

Under the gimmicks, revolutionary rhetoric and radical garb, the “new” RCI and RCA maintain the reformist complacency that causes political blindness. Parallel to its “ruling out” of the danger of WWIII, the RCI manifesto blandly maintains that “the working class, in most countries, has not suffered serious defeats in decades” and pooh-poohs “the alleged danger of ‘fascism’,” recycling the Grantite adage that “the ruling class burned its fingers badly when it threw its weight behind the fascists in the past.”

Yes, liberals tell people to vote Democrat in order to “stop Trump fascism” (though history has repeatedly shown that to fight far-rightist threats, the working class must unchain its power from all wings of the ruling class). It is also true that Trump does not lead an actual mass fascist movement like those of Hitler or Mussolini. But it is false and dangerous to claim that fascist threats are just “alleged.” Trump’s raging bigotry emboldens fascist terror groups, as exemplified by 2017’s deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, while in Europe Italy’s government is headed by an outright fascist party and the fascist National Rally has surged in France. In Britain in early August, the fascist English Defence League took to the streets in a violent anti-immigrant rampage.

Against the very real threats of racist, fascist and other ultra-rightist attacks, the League for the Fourth International (LFI) raises the call, from Trotsky’s Transitional Program, to build workers defense guards. The LFI’s U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, and its supporters in the union movement have organized mobilizations of labor’s power such as Portland Labor Against the Fascists in June 2017, which brought out hundreds of workers from 14 area unions to stop a white-supremacist provocation staged days after a local Nazi carried out a double murder.⁴

At the same time, revolutionary Marxists underline the crucial fact that the most powerful threats to the workers and oppressed are those from the capitalist state itself. In the U.S., the repressive apparatus of capitalist class rule has been systematically strengthened by one Democratic administration after another, even as Trump’s authoritarian ravings give the Democrats another chance to falsely claim they “defend democratic freedoms.”

And when it comes to the armed fist of the bourgeois state, all the “revolutionary communist” rhetoric and rebranding of the RCI and RCA cannot hide the reformist reality underneath. Our article on their long-standing line on the cops, printed here, makes that clear as day. ■

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

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