The Clean Banner: The RCP exemplifies Trotsky's warnings about propaganda societies
The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Two
TL;DR: The RCP has redefined the united front so tightly that every broad campaign the rest of the left builds, anti-racist, anti-war, climate, counts as 'popular frontism' to refuse, a stance it dignifies as a 'clean banner'. But Trotsky invented the united front to do the opposite, enter the common fight without dissolving into it, and warned that refusing joint action leaves you a 'propaganda society', never a party for power; abstaining on purity just hands the ground to the campists the RCP claims to despise. Its own tradition saw this coming: in 1970 the IMG, smaller then than the RCP is now, argued its way out of exactly this bind, in the document we publish alongside this piece.
One of them went to the anti-racist counter-demonstration by himself. He said so afterwards, in the party’s own paper, and he was proud of it: all he had on him was a bundle of The Communist and some leaflets, and the point, the thing worth writing up, was that he had stood out from the moralism of the main organisers. Alone, on purpose, distinguishable. That is the RCP’s model of intervention in a single image. Turn up to the movement, yes. Stand with the people organising it, never.
The theory behind the image got its fullest airing at the end of June, when the Central Committee met, in the party’s phrase, under sweltering heat, and Rob Sewell, the political secretary, gave the session on popular frontism. The talk is old Grant, restated for 2026. The united front, Sewell explains, and he explains it correctly, was the Comintern’s tactic of 1921: the mass Communist parties turning to the mass reformist parties and the unions, proposing common action on a concrete demand, marching separately and striking together, so that the reformist leaders stood exposed before their own base. All true. Then the wall goes up. Because every broad campaign in Britain today is cross-class and led by liberals or reformists rather than a bloc of mass workers’ parties, every one of them is filed not as a united front but as a popular front, class collaboration, to be refused.
The congress document names them and shelves them. The TUC, it complains, farms its campaigning out to an ‘alphabet soup’ of ad hoc bodies, ‘Stand Up To Racism, Stop the War, the People’s Assembly’, which hand ‘the SWP and the CPB’ an air of legitimacy and are ‘off-putting to most workers’. The sects who staff them, it adds, ‘dissolve themselves “into the movement”’ until they are indistinguishable from the reformists. Against all of it the RCP raises what it calls a clean banner. Whether the comrade alone at the demo experiences any of this as absence, or only as integrity, is impossible to say from outside, and perhaps from inside too.
Give them their due, because they have some. The popular front really was a disaster wherever it governed. In Spain it presided over the disarming of the revolution and cleared the road to Franco; in Chile the Popular Unity government of Allende took Pinochet into the cabinet weeks before he took the presidential palace. Trotsky’s word for the mechanism was a strike-breaking conspiracy, and the word fits. Lesser-evilism does tend to breed the greater evil it was raised to hold off. The SWP and Counterfire announcing that fascism is at the gates every time Reform tops a poll is a lever for precisely the opportunism the RCP names, and this publication has said so in its own pages. Grant even the sharpest version of the defence: Trotsky himself wrote that for a party of numerically insignificant size, conduct on the mass-struggle front is not yet the decisive organisational question, since the old mass organisations still lead. The RCP has thirteen hundred members. By that measure they are entitled to say their first task is to build themselves.
Entitled to that, but not to what they build on top of it. The popular front and the united front are opposites, and the whole of Trotsky’s 1922 went on holding the two apart, which is the half of the tradition the RCP quietly folds shut. Read him on what the united front actually asks. ‘We participate in a united front’, he wrote, ‘but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment.’ The banner stays up inside the common action; that was the entire design. You go in, you keep your flag, you argue in the open for your politics, and you drag the reformist leaders onto the terrain of struggle where their hesitation shows. The RCP has collapsed that. For them, to be inside the broad front at all is to dissolve into it. Not to risk dissolving: to dissolve, automatically, by mere contact. What Trotsky built as a way of being present without capitulating, they read as a choice between capitulation and absence, and they choose absence.
Trotsky wrote the sentence that waits for them at the far end of that choice. A party that will not seek the organisational avenues to joint action with the non-communist masses, he warned, ‘would degenerate into a Communist propaganda society but never develop into a party for the conquest of power’. Set that beside the RCP’s account of itself. Thirteen hundred members, aiming first at two thousand and then ten; the task defined as winning ‘the vanguard of the vanguard’; the movements that actually exist dismissed as alphabet soup and left to others. That is the propaganda society, described from the inside and filed as a virtue. The party quotes Trotsky and Ted Grant in every second paragraph, and has arranged its entire practice around becoming the one thing Trotsky built the united front to prevent.
And who is left holding the broad fronts the RCP has walked out of? The campists.
Sewell spends a good stretch of the talk on what he calls the two-camp theory, the Stalinist reflex that sorts the world into good people and bad, fascist and anti-fascist, war and peace, with no class content underneath. He is right about the reflex. It is the disease that runs through Stop the War and the Morning Star, and this paper has tracked it for two years. But a clean banner carried out of the room does not beat campism; it hands campism the room. Every platform the RCP refuses on grounds of purity, the anti-war coalitions, the Palestine movement that drew millions, the climate mobilisations, is a platform the campists keep uncontested, by default, because the people with the sharpest critique of them have ruled it a point of principle to stay away. It is the same move at work on the climate: they swing at Malthusianism in all its varieties and connect with the metabolic rift, which is Marx’s. Here they swing at the popular front and connect with the united front, which is Trotsky’s. Twice now the club has come down on the thing they claim to defend, and twice they have not felt it land.
There is another way to carry a banner, one that the RCP’s purity and the liquidators’ surrender both miss. It is the one Anticapitalist Resistance works in the Greens and in the ecosocialist current: the visible tendency inside the broad formation, arguing its corner in the open, keeping its own paper and its own politics while doing the common work, neither dissolved nor absent. It is unglamorous, it is exposed, and it wins slowly, an argument at a time, in rooms full of people who do not yet agree. It is also the only thing Trotsky ever meant by the united front, and the only thing that fights campism where campism actually lives, which is inside the movements and not outside them.
So picture the comrade again, the one at the counter-demonstration, alone with his bundle of papers, distinguishable, pure, standing a little apart from the moralism of the main organisers. The march moves off around him. It is led, as it happens, by the people he will not stand with, towards the compromises he can see coming and has decided it is beneath him to prevent from the inside. His banner is spotless. Whether that is the discipline of a revolutionary party husbanding its forces for a wave it alone can see, or a way of staying right about everything while the fight is lost by others, is not a question the clean banner can answer, and it is not going to be answered here.
Published alongside this piece: From a Propaganda Group to a League for Revolutionary Action, the 1970 document in which a sister current then in the RCP’s own tradition, at the RCP’s own size, made the opposite case. The climate instalment of this series follows.