Communism at the End of the Rainbow: The RCP has decided the climate crisis is already solved
The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Three
TL;DR: The climate generation is pouring into Polanski’s Greens, and not because the Greens have the better ecological politics, since they have quietly dropped most of the climate framing for the cost of living. They have a vehicle. The two revolutionary organisations competing for the same recruits have a position. The RCP treats climate change as solved in advance by expropriation and planning, quotes the metabolic-rift Marx while burying degrowth as ‘Malthusianism’, and gives its own World School not one session on the planet in a record-heat summer. The SWP runs the same rift in theory, rules degrowth an ‘inadequate strategy’, then organises for the sectoral cuts it will not name. The label is fairly contested, including inside the Fourth International. The abstention is not. Neither organisation has built anything on this terrain with anyone else, the terrain ACR and the Fourth International, as well as groups like rs21, are still trying to hold, and the RCP has built nothing on any terrain with anyone else at all.The RCP’s World School programme went up in early July. Twenty-one sessions across six days, and you can read the whole thing top to bottom without once finding planet Earth. Cosmology is there, and they deny the Big Bang. So are Shostakovich, the 1926 General Strike, the Enlightenment, Rojava, and a session on the Epstein class. Alan Woods opens the week. In the hottest run of summers ever recorded, at the flagship school of an International that describes itself as steaming towards 10,000 members, there is no session on emissions, no session on adaptation, no session on the transition. The subject that likely drives most of those recruits through the door in the first place does not make the timetable.
That gap, between the door and the syllabus, is the issue.
Go to Gorton and Denton, in the east of Manchester, where in February the Greens took their first seat in the North of England, and their first parliamentary by-election anywhere, on nearly forty-one per cent of the vote with Labour pushed into third behind Reform. The Revolutionary Communist Party, until its 2024 relaunch the International Marxist Tendency, works those same streets and stalls the same estates, chasing the radicalised nineteen-year-old the Greens are pulling in by the hundred thousand. May Day in Manchester was for decades the guarded preserve of the trades council; now the Greens run their own rival event, sold out, with the new MP on the platform. Into this the RCP sends its paper and its recruiters, and the recruit who stops at the stall no doubt almost always arrives carrying the same question. The climate. It is the one question they have quietly decided not to answer.
Not by turning her away. The RCP is far too clever for that, and its own writers say so plainly: they will not, in the words of their April piece on Polanski, ‘dismiss this phenomenon in a haughty, sectarian way’, nor cheerlead the Greens either, but engage the layers moving leftward and win them ‘over to a revolutionary programme’. So the recruit gets a warm hearing on rent and landlords, on Gaza, on the greed of the billionaires. On the climate she gets four words, expropriate and plan, and the conversation moves on. Communism at the end of the rainbow, with the walk towards it offered as the whole of ecological politics.
It was not always this thin. Here, the obvious charge, that the RCP simply ignores ecological Marx, turns out to be wrong, and the real fault is worse. Their 2020 theses on the climate crisis are the high-water mark, and they are serious. They quote Marx in Capital on capitalist agriculture as a progress in the art of ‘robbing the soil’. They answer Malthus through Engels’ letter of 1865. They close on the Engels of 1876, on how each human conquest of nature ‘takes its revenge on us’, how we do not rule over nature ‘like a conqueror over a foreign people’. That is the metabolic rift, quoted at length, though the theses never call it by that name. Every classic is marched out for one purpose: to bury degrowth. Zero growth and degrowth are reactionary, ‘an argument for permanent recession and permanent austerity’; the whole emphasis is ‘actively harmful’; the target is ‘Malthusianism in all its varieties’. And the reflex is already fixed. Nationalise the monopolies and they will ‘slash emissions and pollution in the space of a few years’. The same theses open by citing the IPCC’s own timetable: emissions cut by nearly half by 2030, net zero by 2050, and above that the decades of adaptation the document itself lists, the flood defences and the reforestation. A dozen theses later, the monopolies change hands and that timetable shrinks to a few years. The adaptation is not mentioned again, nor is the warming already banked.
To be fair to them, and the characterisation only holds if it is fair, the 2020 document is no hymn to endless output. It grants that enough is already produced, that rational distribution would do the work without a gram of additional production. The problem is never that they want more growth. The problem is that they have folded the entire ecological question into a question of ownership, and thrown the biophysical one out of the window, along with the word they refuse to say.
By December 2025 even the seriousness is gone. Manon Powrie’s ‘What would the communist solution to climate change look like?’ is the party’s current explainer, the thing you hand the worried teenager, and it is a catalogue. Fifty-one billion solar panels laid across a patch of the Sahara. Dutch vertical farms. Half a trillion trees. Hurricane-proof houses in Florida. The Marx soil quotation survives, reduced now to a single ornament. Degrowth is not argued against; it is simply gone, the question treated as settled years ago. And the Engels of 1876, the warning about revenge and consequence, has vanished from the text entirely. The piece ends on the opposite promise, that the working class can ‘mitigate and reverse the climate crisis’, can ‘possibly halt it altogether’.
You do not need to import a single outside critic to see the problem. Hold their own 1876 quotation against their 2025 programme. In 2020 they printed Engels on how every conquest of nature takes its revenge in second and third effects that cancel out the first. That is the rebound effect, named a century before the economists reached for it. In 2025 they propose to conquer the climate with fifty-one billion panels and leave the warning on the floor. The Powrie piece rests, first line to last, on the claim that ‘the technology exists’ today. It never asks whether the throughput to build all of it, the copper and the lithium, the grid cables the article itself admits are running short, meets any limit that ownership cannot dissolve. That is the green-growth answer with a single variable swapped. And the people who noticed the limit, the RCP calls Malthusians.
Watch where Powrie reaches for her emblem of harmony. She picks the Netherlands, the world’s second agricultural exporter on a sliver of land. The Netherlands is the standout European case of intensive farming in open metabolic crisis: a livestock and manure base so overloaded that the country’s highest court halted construction over its nitrogen emissions, and the state now pays farmers to cull their herds. She quotes Marx on capitalist agriculture robbing the soil, and picks as her model the one country where the robbery became a constitutional emergency.
Here the RCP has a real point, and it must be granted in full or the rest is worth nothing. Neo-Malthusianism is reactionary. It is genuinely there in the movement, in Ehrlich and the population bomb, in the deep-ecology fringe that treats the poor of the global South as the problem to be managed. The RCP is right to hate every part of it, and so are we. Nothing in this argument asks them to soften that.
But population is not the question degrowth asks, and this is where the theses stop reading their opponents and start sorting them. Malthusianism is a claim about how many people there are. Degrowth, in the form any ecosocialist would defend, is a claim about what gets produced and for whom: that fossil extraction, private aviation, fast fashion and the advertising industry that manufactures the demand for both have to shrink absolutely, and that health, housing, care and public transport have to grow. Those are opposite arguments. One wants fewer people sharing a fixed pile. The other wants the pile broken up and rebuilt around use-values, which is a proposition about class power and nothing whatever to do with birth rates. A third thing again is the collapse politics rs21 diagnoses, the position that mitigation is finished and only prepping remains, and that is not an argument for reduced throughput at all but a refusal to fight for anything. The RCP files all three under ‘Malthusianism in all its varieties’ and swings once.
Michael Löwy is the proof that the distinction holds, and he makes it from inside the Fourth International rather than as a concession to it. He junks Serge Latouche’s ‘immoderate celebration of the Stone Age’ and the contempt for the Enlightenment that goes with it, in terms the RCP would recognise as their own, and he rejects the population frame outright. What he then argues for is the planned suppression of specific destructive production, which is the thing the RCP has told itself is austerity. So the line the theses insist cannot be drawn is drawn, in print, by their own tradition’s ecosocialist. Swinging at Malthusianism in all its varieties, the RCP connects instead with the metabolic rift, which belongs to Marx, and never feels the contact.
The SWP reaches the same abstention by the opposite road. Its road is paralysis. Martin Empson’s work runs with the metabolic rift concept throughout, cites Foster with approval, concedes that socialism will carry ‘aspects of degrowth’, and then rules that degrowth is ‘an inadequate strategy’. The objection is to the word, and its dangers on a leaflet, never to the analysis underneath. On that much they have a case, and it is not only theirs. The Fourth International thinned the label out of its own manifesto after its sections in the global South said plainly that degrowth lands as austerity on people who have never had the growth, and the drafters were right to listen. Nobody has to march under a bad noun. What cannot be conceded is the next step, which is to drop the word and then never name what shrinks. Camilla Royle, in Socialist Worker at the start of 2025, went further than the line permits, presenting degrowth warmly and closing that ‘another world without growth is possible’. No correction from the leadership followed. Whether Royle’s piece is a crack in the wall or a licensed vent nobody outside a party aggregate can say, and possibly nobody inside one either. Meanwhile the Campaign Against Climate Change, where SWP members do a lot of the work, demands the closure of the fossil sectors and the conversion of the car plants, which is sectoral degrowth under another name. The party organises for the cut six days a week and warns against the word on the seventh.
And the cohort keeps walking anyway, which is the part that should worry everybody, because it is not walking over vocabulary. The Greens are not offering a better account of throughput. They have dropped most of the climate framing to run on the cost of living, and the RCP’s own report of Polanski notes he mentions the environment only in passing. What the Greens offer is a vehicle: an electoral machine with momentum, a leader on the news, a by-election in Gorton and Denton, something to do on a Tuesday that shows up in a result. What the revolutionary organisations offer is a correct position and a paper. The recruit is not choosing between analyses. She is choosing between a thing that moves and a thing that is right, and she is twenty, and the summers are getting worse.
What are they all walking away from? A terrain, and the clearest map of it comes from rs21, whose ecological bulletin Red Bird spent its February issue asking where the climate movement had gone. The answer is bleak and unsentimental. The movement is at its lowest ebb in a decade, activists pulled towards Palestine and the anti-racist mobilisations, collectives turned inward by state repression, and in the vacuum a ‘collapse’ politics spreading: the concession that mitigation is finished and only prepping and charity remain. Against it they set what they call the triple fight, to cut emissions as fast as they can be cut, to contest the transition that states and capital are imposing from above, and to organise the adaptation that breakdown already demands. ACR names the same ground from the programmatic side, the planned suppression of fossil fuels, of fast fashion, of advertising, the sectors that simply have to shrink. This is the united front for climate justice. It is exactly the terrain the RCP has declared already won, and the terrain the SWP cannot bring itself to name.
And everyone is leaving it. The Greens leave it as they broaden, Polanski mentioning the environment, by the RCP’s own account, ‘only in passing’, the Spring Conference quietly walking its own energy-nationalisation pledge back to the wires and nothing more. The collapsitarians have declared it lost and gone home to prepare. As for the RCP, its departure is the most complete of the three, because a problem you have already solved is one you need never return to. No, worse than that: never teach, never defend, never put on the timetable of a six-day school in a burning August. And the two retreats are not equal, which has to be said even where it flatters the party this paper has spent a year criticising. The SWP is at least in the Campaign Against Climate Change, doing the unglamorous work of a coalition it does not control, which is the thing the RCP will not do anywhere on any question. Thirteen hundred members, a print shop, a world school, and not one campaign in the country that exists because they built it with anybody else. The organisation that has solved the climate crisis in advance has also arranged never to be in a room where anyone might test the solution.
So the recruit keeps coming. As long as the summers worsen she will arrive at the stall in Gorton, at the meeting upstairs in the Friends Meeting House, carrying the one question, and the organisations built to answer it will hand her everything except the answer. Whether anyone is still standing on that terrain when she gets there is not a thing a correct programme settles. It is the question the doom-monger cannot ask and the RCP will not. For now the field empties a little more each summer, and she comes anyway.
The general method behind this retreat, the RCP’s refusal of the united front itself, is set out in The Clean Banner, the earlier instalment in this series.