A leaked RCMP report about the possibility of civil unrest in Canada was read by the Revolutionary Communist Party as a sign that revolution was near. This is the organisation’s characteristic move, and Corey Ansel has supplied the name for it: Third Period Alan Woodsism.
The RCP is the Canadian section of the Revolutionary Communist International, which until recently was the International Marxist Tendency, and which in Canada was until recently Fightback. The rebranding turned out to be more than nominal.
The argument here is that the RCI’s two visible failures have one root. It cannot judge whether a situation is revolutionary, and it cannot tolerate being told so. The first produces a permanent announcement in place of a strategy. The second produces an apparatus that deletes the people who notice.
The argument that started it
The position Ben Marenlensky defends is that a revolution is defined by the masses taking the driver’s seat of history. Eric Fernández pressed him on whether transformations that are not socialist can be called revolutions at all.
That is a real question, and the RCI’s inability to hold it steady shows up every time it reads an event. The record, as Marenlensky sets it out, is a series of category errors:
The rise of the Chavez government in Venezuela described as a revolution, when what occurred was a bureaucratisation that defeated Chavismo-from-below.
The Green movement in Iran, ideologically Khomeinist, read as a revolutionary moment.
Working-class support for Trump’s anti-immigrant policies presented as class anger, when it shows the ruling class successfully redirecting working-class frustration.
Pro-Russian nationalist forces in eastern Ukraine described as authentic working-class resistance and anti-imperialist struggle, when that support comes largely from opportunistic local elites and Kremlin-backed authoritarianism.
Feargal McGovern adds the strikes in France, which the organisation grossly exaggerated.
Each error runs the same way, and always towards the conclusion that revolution is around the corner. An organisation that always reaches the same verdict is not analysing.
What Lenin actually said about timing
The early Comintern had a word for this: voluntarism, the belief that revolutionary transformation is perpetually imminent and that what is therefore required is constant, frenetic and usually unprepared action.
Lenin’s position was the opposite, and he stated it in a form that leaves no room for the RCI’s reading. Proletarian revolution “can become a reality only if the proletarian class struggle culminates in a gigantic process, stretching out over years and decades”. The work of a revolutionary minority in the meantime is patient propaganda resting on a sober assessment of class strength.
Ernest Mandel’s formulation names both halves of the job. A revolutionary organisation must be capable of the conquest of the masses and of revolutionary initiative. Drop the first and you are a sect announcing the second.
Refusing to engage is not a principle
Joel Bergman: “no, we will never support someone running for the Democrats.”
Set against the Mamdani campaign, that is not a hard line but an evasion. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign put more than 50,000 volunteers into motion. Solidarity’s “Beyond the Ballot Box” analysis takes the sensible view, which is that the campaign matters for what can be built out of it rather than for its own sake.
That contact network could become workplace committees in key sectors of the local economy. A platform commitment to rent freezes is the natural starting point for tenant unions capable of direct action, without waiting for anything to be implemented institutionally. Community defence networks can be built as concrete alternatives to existing institutions. And the whole exercise can demonstrate that independent socialist politics is viable, which is what prepares a future campaign on an explicitly socialist ballot line.
None of that requires endorsing a Democratic ballot line. It requires being in the room.
The RCP has chosen instead to direct its fire at Mamdani for running as a Democrat, which is as much a failure as uncritical electoral cretinism and comes from the same place: neither approach turns momentary political energy into lasting organisation.
Brandler’s united front policy of 1921 to 1922 is the model. Mass work conducted “not in an excessively sectarian manner” but “in a reasonable manner, taking support on the immediate demands of workers”, while building independent revolutionary capacity at the same time. The united front is not a compromise. It is a method for uniting working-class forces despite political differences.
Lenin had a phrase for the alternative, and it fits: fleeing the fight. Categorical refusal to engage is a lack of confidence in your own ideas, wearing ultraleftism as a costume.
The costume slips in Rome, where the RCI provoked its own exclusion from a feminist march rather than march under one of the progressive demands of the women’s movement. That is not tactical firmness. It echoes the worst of twentieth-century Italian Stalinism’s hostility to the movements for women’s equality.
Harry Liang describes all this as principled Leninist flexibility. The organisation’s own history says otherwise: its earlier entrism into the NDP was an acknowledgement that revolutionaries have to work inside existing mass movements. That acknowledgement has been withdrawn. Julian Innerhofer makes the point that even the entry tactic was always just tactical, adapted to particular conditions, which is exactly what a dogma cannot be.
The organisational half
Where the Bolshevik tradition was characterised by the struggle of factions and the full right of tendency, the RCP has come under what Pierre Frank called the domination of the administrative concept of the revolutionary organisation.
The evidence is not hidden. Ben Marenlensky records that Joel Bergman, the de facto leader of the Canadian section, deletes comments critical of the organisation. Bergman’s defenders answer that it is a personal account.
Samuel Eric asks the question that settles it: “Do they think the Bolsheviks would have deleted Martov’s comments or would they have wrestled with them?”
Frank warned about precisely this degeneration, naming the systematic spreading of slander to discredit dissidents and the use of administrative measures to decisively influence the outcome of debates. Catherine Crockett’s observation is that the group appears more concerned with shedding accountability for internal scandals than with political development.
Then the human cost, which is where an organisational pathology stops being an abstraction. Don Wren calls the cycle rapture-exhaustion. Critics describe a human meat grinder wasting good people, through repeated burnout and demoralisation. Jay Woodruff notes the incentive underneath it: “People find relevance, power, and financial benefits to leading movements, once that happens they will actively slow the movement to maximize their gains.” Radhika Vimla, from her experience of Fightback, calls them very delusional.
The connection to the political error is direct. If revolution is always imminent, every disagreement is a betrayal at the decisive hour, and there is never a moment calm enough to examine an error. The Comintern’s own documents put the requirement plainly: it is very important to critically examine one’s own errors. An organisation in permanent emergency never has time.
Appendix: what Ted Grant actually did
The RCI traces its roots to Ted Grant’s current, which withdrew from the Fourth International in 1965 and afterwards remained closer to the FI than to other Trotskyist currents. Grant’s approach was not mechanical. It put a heavy emphasis on work inside the unions and entrism in the mass workers’ parties, and the emphasis was a judgement about conditions, not a doctrine.
Grant knew how it sounded. Orienting to the mass organisations might seem “mundane or even ‘boring’”, he wrote in the work collected in Ted Grant Selected Works Volume 2, but it was “in fact the most revolutionary lever there is”. His statement of the aim is the sentence the RCI has abandoned: “Before conquering power, it was first necessary to conquer the masses. That is the essential meaning of Lenin’s policy in the nine months leading up to the October overturn.”
His methodology came down to four things: absolute confidence in the working class, urgency about building revolutionary cadres, consistent engagement with mass organisations, and patient propaganda in place of revolutionary posturing.
Grant’s limits should be stated too. He bent the stick too far, neglecting the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in the developing world. His commitment to internal democracy was often thin, reflecting the top-down norms of the labour movement, and he held the astonishing view that he was sufficient as the movement’s theorist on his own, which he says openly in his 1982 interview with Sam Bornstein.
Even so, the contrast holds. The Militant Tendency under his leadership showed how, with “program, methods, and ideas, combined with a flexible approach to the traditional workers’ political parties, the unions, elections, and the youth, a small group can grow rapidly”. Its later decline came from a leadership that believed it could build a mass revolutionary party outside the Labour Party in the conditions of the 1990s, which was a strategic misjudgement of the same family as the RCP’s, and a smaller one.
What this is evidence for
Three propositions, none of them abstract, all of them testable against an organisation you can observe.
Patient propaganda beats performative radicalism, and the test is whether your organisation’s assessment of the situation ever changes.
Tactical flexibility is a strategic necessity rather than a concession, and the test is whether there is any electoral or movement formation your organisation will work inside.
Internal democracy is the condition of the other two, and the test is what happens to the comments of people who disagree.
Our articles “United Front Work, not Propagandism, is Key to Revolutionary Agitation” and “Beyond the Ballot Box” work through the first two in more detail.