Hey, is anyone familiar with Revolutionary Communists of America? (https://communistusa.org/) It is separate than Revolutionary Communist USA which was confusing to me. Anyway they are organizing more and I’m sure if you live in a bigger city you have seen their posters or seen them organizing.
A while back I saw them organizing in my areas. I went to three meetings as well as a small demonstration in my city. The last time I went they discussed joining the party and that they asked for a days wage. Although I had already mentioned my disability in passing I felt a little embarrassed and decided to text my contact later about it. A days wage for me is about 5 dollars as I make about 200 dollars a month in gig work in addition to my state disability benefits. I told them I was happy to pay that much and continue coming to the meetings and join the party but that I wanted to be clear upfront that my disability would restrict my participation in some of the more public facing things, agitation, etc.
My contact who had been texting me weekly about these meetings for a few months completely ghosted me after texting them about this. While I felt bad about it it’s not exactly shocking as I know well enough now that I can and will encounter ableism in all sorts of communities which seem like I shouldn’t.
After doing some research it looks like they do have a history of some organizational stuff that doesn’t sound great like sexual abuse claims in the Canadian branch. What is weird to me is that they don’t seem to have a way to contact anyone centrally if issues like this come up. Maybe this is by design?
I am not interested in joining this group anymore but I felt like I wanted to let the party know that this is what goes on in the local cells. Or maybe just put this out to the internet in case anyone encounters something similar. Anyone had any similar experiences with these guys? I didn’t notice any red flags until this happened.
You didn’t miss out on anything, they’re trots. So just doing trot things
I hear people put down trots a lot but I don’t really understand why this is. I don’t remember them mentioning anything that was specifically trotskyist either. Not defending them at all but my take is that it was more of an organizational culture thing vs a trot thing, but I had pretty limited experience with them
I think you came to answer yourself throughout this thread haha. The thing about not budging on the fees (as if everyone could easily pay a day’s wage), ghosting you, not having a central contact to report misconduct, etc.
Internally trot orgs often end up building cults, the Red Clarion has a good analysis on the cult tendency from a marxist perspective taking the IMT as an example (now rebranded as Revolutionary Communist International, with the RCA being the Statesian branch): https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2024-04-02-the-cult-building-tendency/
They’re often not bad communicators but they dilute Marxism. It’s like when I read something trotskyist I see the verbiage but not the belief. This helps them recruit because externally it’s a “safe” brand of communism, one you can wear in the streets. Then they put you to work recruiting more people and paying more dues but never actually doing anything worthwhile. It’s all about “join join join” with them.
At least in my experience, trots are mainly opposed to AES and have to reframe everything AES does or might do as bad. I recently mentioned Cuba’s family code to a queer member of socialist alternative here (main trot group) and they were surprised that cuba did anything good. Their view was that cuba was a patriarchal chauvinist system but hadn’t even heard of this thing that been blaring over queer communist news networks for the past several months (at time of conversation).
This idea that real communist revolutionary potential is found in rich western countries over any other revolutionary program alienates them from a lot of their political allies, and also makes them useful patsies for anyone wanting to throw a spanner in the works. It also explains why a bunch of trots became neo-cons, their separation from other leftists and their belief that revolutionary potential in the US is stronger there than in Vietnam means they wound up supporting US hegemony abroad
Occasionally you can find Trotskyists with plenty of good takes, and being postsectarian I tend to be reluctant to chalk up misbehavior and awful opinions to ‘ultraleftism’, but it might be true that Trotsky’s politics tend to attract a lot of theory noobs because he showed that there were lefty alternatives to one particular communist politician deeply reviled in the West. To newcomers, Trotsky offers the appeal of communism without the stigma of being–dramatic pause–‘pro-Stalin’. Of course, there are good reasons why trying to avoid that stigma is a waste of time, but it’s only natural that anybody whose brain has been ruined by capitalist education is unlikely to immediately notice them.
They also have a weird fixation on Trotsky and Trotsky alone. Sometimes they’re not so bad with Lenin but nothing MLs didn’t come up with too.
You do find a lot of their written content bc most of their organization is centered around writing and publishing, so sometimes I do find some interesting piece of history. You just have to navigate through it when they start talking about ‘deformed state’ or whatever.
Like I can’t make this up, I was at a march thing once with comrades, we had our party flags and everything, and some trot just walks up to us, hands us a prospectus without saying a word, and promptly leaves. I see Marx’s head on it and I think “wait a minute…”, look at the back, yep, it’s the trot party lol.
That last paragraph was exactly my experience with them in my medium sized town in Canada. I attended a few weeks of meetings when I first started out trying to engage in politics and not just read theory, they are the only real option in my town. They seemed like people who were pretty engaged with the ideas at first but the whole time I was being constantly pressured to become a paying member and the only things we ever really discussed in earnest were how we can “build the party” AKA get more people to join.
Party activity outside of weekly meetings was entirely putting up posters and doing recruitment speeches. They even gave me a pamphlet about how community building is dumb and cringe or something, idk I only skimmed it. In the one issue of the party newspaper they gave me the focus was half shitting on AES, especially the post Lenin USSR, and the other half was all about how many members each branch of the party has accrewed across canada. Obviously building a party base is important but like it shouldn’t be the only thing focused on. Left after about a month. Definitely felt cult-y in retrospect.
doesn’t sound very revolutionary or communist of them :\
sorry you had to go through that, comrade. 🫂 i hope you can find a better and an actually commie org.
thanks for your support, comrade. this has happened to me before for other orgs that should be friendly (queer groups, etc) so I learned never to let my guard down and assume. Honestly looking for more of the book club side of things for now so maybe I can find that.
I don’t remember what it was but I have heard more sus shit about that org so don’t feel too bad. Good on you for trying to get into organizing anyway though.
Honestly as all over the place as they can be look up your local DSA, their chapters run a broad range of the spectrum but I at least know the one in my area is pretty rad and has actually got some shit done (like helping get the whole starbucks union off the ground to begin with), and at least from my experience don’t have any baggage I am aware of. They are relatively open about not being a revolutionary party by any means but it can be a good place to start looking for more radical comrades.
I just seem to have terrible luck with orgs in general. My local DSA had a problem that it could never resolve because my address is part of the state’s domestic violence confidentiality program. They could only connect me to the DSA chapter that was on the confidential address and not my local one…
That’s fucked. I’m sorry, comrade. Ya this is a huge red flag for an org.
I also noticed that their website doesn’t have anything about a sliding scale/low income membership due as other parties have like https://www.cpusa.org/ . The language is very much in terms of “days wages” which doesn’t apply to everyone, and for some a “days wages” may be asking too much.
Most communist movements have red flags actually :)
They’re the IMT rebrand, right? They don’t have an amazing history. At least they aren’t Avakian, despite the similar name.
Yeah I know, the choice of rebranding name is crazy, it took me a month to figure out it wasn’t the Avakian one!
I’m sorry to hear that, comrade.
thank you comrade, I know it’s just posting into the void but felt like I had to get it out.
