One day, all members in Phoenix were told to attend a meeting for a national call. It announced that Socialist Revolution was changing its name to the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA). This decision was imposed top down, and it seemed to be an almost delusional overestimation of the IMT’s own political strength. In this meeting, the leadership of the RCA congratulated members for the RCA’s growth and its interventions across the country, and many people felt very optimistic. The leadership insisted that this was an organizational transformation, not just a name change, but the leadership acknowledged that some members may disagree with this decision. However, we, the rank and file of the IMT, were supposed to carry out this decision, this supposed “transformation.”
Of course, this name change and the RCA’s march in Brooklyn caught the attention of conservatives and even foreign state media from Russia and China.$^{1}$ The IMT gained many new members as a result of this name change, but it changed nothing fundamentally. Members were encouraged to raise their dues and turn events into paper sales. This only worsened the existing problems.
This made me question why I was a member of the IMT. The IMT had initially seemed like a good place to read theory and get involved in real world politics, but this approach couldn’t last long. Many recruits didn’t have the time to commit themselves to the IMT, even those who cared deeply about changing the world. An overemphasis on quantitative measures such as membership and funding prevented people from thinking about real organizational questions.
This name change occurred in various sections of the IMT, starting in Britain. Socialist Appeal renamed itself to the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The IMT as a whole was renamed the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). Along with the name change, the IMT published the “Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist International,” which I will go over in my section on strategy.
The IMT separated its press into the national newspaper and the theoretical journal. In the US, this paper was called Socialist Revolution and changed to The Communist. Its theoretical journal, In Defence of Marxism (IDOM), written in the United Kingdom, was a denser paper about Marxist theory. We read both, but we mainly sold The Communist. The Communist had the news, some history, and short quotations from workers and IMT members. We were encouraged to send short reports via a form$^{2}$ to participate, but only short optimistic quotes were published. These didn’t really encourage rank and file members to think for themselves, and this didn’t affect decision making in the IMT. In fact, it reinforced the existing decisions.
IDOM covered more theoretical and historical topics such as the Soviet Economy and the life of Lenin. It is notable that many if not all of these articles were written by the founders and earliest members of the IMT. Some members seemed not to deeply understand these views but parroted them anyway.
We were told to learn from the life of Lenin, but we didn’t really. Theory was something passed down from above, from the founders of the IMT, to the higher bodies, all the way down to the rank and file.
Members were expected to read both the national bulletin for the US section and the international bulletin. The bulletins were strictly internal, and the IMT published them often and sent them to all members online. They were the main lines of communication between various regions of the IMT. They discussed IMT events, interventions, and “reports” from various comrades. The Central Committee (CC) published them, and most of their content was written by CC members.
Rank and file members could provide information for these bulletins via reports, but they were not guaranteed to be published in the bulletins.
Many bulletins focused on the successes of the IMT’s growth and interventions. They occasionally contained membership numbers but not consistently. They didn’t discuss the problems and barriers the organization faced nearly as much. When it did discuss these problems, it blamed them on individuals. According to the bulletins, the IMT’s problems were always caused by a lack of “optimism” or “motivation” from the members and never caused by the structure of the IMT itself.
This individualization of systemic problems, such as burnout and turnover, permeated the IMT. The rhetoric of “revolutionary optimism” was used to avoid talking about real organizational questions. “Pessimism” or critique was treated as a sort of sickness. The IMT tried to prevent it from spreading.
The IMT only released its membership publicly after the start of the AYAC campaign because it started as an even smaller organization. Many small leftist organizations do not release their membership size publicly. Here, I want to analyze how AYAC was presented to the general membership. I will quote the internal bulletins here, but I will not link them because they are internal organizational documents.