Why I Am Not Joining the RCA
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Recently I began looking into the Revolutionary Communists of America, investigating the possibility of joining. I contacted them, and even attended a meeting at a local cell. The RCA is a Trotskyist party, part of the broader Revolutionary Communist International. I was attracted to them by their apparent momentum; via their website, at least, they project the image of being an energetic and fast-growing organization. Their newspaper is visually appealing and flashy, and many of their articles appealed to me. I felt like I had finally found an organization I could be a part of, with broadly democratic ideals I could genuinely espouse, and with the propaganda power to fight American capitalism.
However, a few things about the organization gave me pause. And when, at the end of the meeting, they asked if I wanted to join, I had to defer my decision. I began to do further research, read more of their articles, ruminate on my experience and on my concerns. And ultimately I decided not to join.
The first thing that concerned me was their exclusionary attitude, something I recognized from my time as an American Evangelical. It's an attitude which says "All others have fallen from the true path, and only we have stayed on the straight and narrow." Members at the meeting described the RCA as "the only party with the correct analysis." RCA frequently describes themselves as standing for "genuine Marxism." In their manifesto, they write:
If we are serious about winning, we must base ourselves on the pinnacle of revolutionary theory, summed up in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky.
Our party did not emerge spontaneously. It is a continuation of the unbroken thread of genuine Marxism, defended and preserved for decades by a core of dedicated revolutionaries.
This concept of the "unbroken thread" betrays a kind of pseudo-religious attitude toward revolutionary theorists, a tendency to canonize certain ideas as unquestionable dogma. RCA likes to describe its philosophy as "scientific socialism," but this very concept of an "unbroken thread" of philosophy is flatly unscientific. Science is not a tradition to be guarded, but a method which lets us identify useful ideas and discard useless ones. There is no "thread" of scientific ideas, only an ever-shifting body of ideas currently known to work.
The second thing that concerned me was their attitude toward religion. In a recent podcast, they outlined their ideas about religion. They conclude that, though a Marxist worker's state has no business banning religion, and that religion is a "personal matter," the party itself must keep an atheistic philosophy. They position themselves as opponents of spirituality of all kinds, seeing it as counterproductive wish fulfillment, that a person seeking hope from religious beliefs will not revolt. They don't wish to ban it, but do believe it will naturally end when the class contradiction is abolished.
But I believe this reveals a narrow-minded idea of how spirituality functions and develops in practice. I don't see spiritual practice as an attempt to misdirect revolutionary energy, or seek control over the unexplained, but as an attempt to find and capture wonder. Religion is not only the neo-pagan manifesting, or the Christian praying for change. Religion is quiet contentment watching the full moon and stars; it is unbridled awe at a total solar eclipse; it is childlike joy at seeing a frog; it is wild abandon as the rain soaks your clothing from head to toe; it is the historical "vertigo" of realizing you and your cat share a common ancestor. This form of spirituality will not, and should not, vanish from our culture. In fact, it represents humanity at our best.
My final concern, and the one which ultimately led me to reject the RCA, is their use of right-wing language as a kind of "trojan horse" for Trump voters. The RCA has released articles condemning both "identity politics" and "the deep state". These articles, if you actually read them, do not use these terms in the same way right-wingers do. This rhetoric seems to exist primarily as a form of clickbait, attracting Trump supporters to read the article, and then providing them with a Marxist analysis of a related situation.
However, I do not believe this is a good tactic, not at all. Using the terms in this ways ignores their actual function in right-wing polemic; they are dogwhistles, euphemisms, ways to avoid saying what they actually mean. When Trump voters condemn the "deep state," they do not mean that the bourgeoisie manipulates liberal democracy to serve their own interests. They mean that the Jews do. It is an antisemitic dogwhistle. "Identity politics," too, is a euphemism for "anti-bigotry." The right-wing is not actually condemning the liberal tactic of running candidates from marginalized groups, who ultimately serve the same bourgeois interests as the white men they used to run. They are condemning the egalitarianism itself.
Trying to use these terms to draw in right-wing voters and win them for Marxism will, I think, backfire horribly. Because you cannot use a dogwhistle or a euphemism, even to redefine it, without unintentionally spreading the fascist ideology tied to it. In the best case, it simply won't work, but fascists can now say, "Look, even these Marxists don't like identity politics," or "Communists know about the deep state, too!" In the worst case, they will attract and ultimately be infected by these fascist ideologies, turning from their current unambiguous stance against bigotry, and toward something resembling the "MAGA communism" of Jackson Hinkle.
This entire experience has, frankly, pushed me away from statist communism altogether. I still consider both Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists to be comrades, and I hope we will one day destroy capitalism together. But I have become convinced that these sorts of large organizations become magnets for abuse, ideological missteps, and bad tactics. My search for revolutionary ideas and communities must continue. I have not found what I am looking for in the RCA.