What are the causes of the implosion of the Russian RRP and which consequences should be drawn?

By Denis Sokolov and Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, 16 September 2024, www.thecommunists.net

The Russian Revolutionary Workers Party (RRP) is undergoing a process of collapse. As we did report a few months ago, that organisation had split between an “optimist” and a “pessimist” faction. Meanwhile the RRP has crumbled into at least four different groups and more splits might follow in the next weeks.

It might appear to young activists that such a process of decomposition has been caused by differences about perspectives or by the stubbornness of some leaders. However, if an organisation collapses within such a short period in various splitters, it is clear that it was already inwardly disintegrated long before, and it just needed a final push to bring it to collapse.

In our view, the RRP has become a victim of the consequences of the two major wars of our time – in the Ukraine and in Gaza. The organisation’s superficial “revolutionism” and “anti-imperialism” clashed with the reality of its opportunistic capitulation to Great Russian chauvinism and social-imperialism.

The RRP had always based their policy on the pseudo-Marxist tradition of Ted Grant. ^[1] Consequently, as we did show in a number of articles, it has failed to take the side of the oppressed peoples who had come under attack by imperialist predators. It refused to defend the Ukraine and to advocate the policy of revolutionary defeatism, i.e. for the defeat of Russian imperialism. In fact, the RRP leadership hesitated even to call Russia an imperialist Great Power. Worse, it even speculated how the motherland could be defended – in the midst of a reactionary imperialist war! ^[2]

The shameful result of such a capitulation to Russian imperialism was the opportunist accommodation of the RRP leadership to Zyuganov’s KPRF – a thoroughly Great Russian social-imperialist party. According to these mis-leaders, communists should work within the KPRF, support this party and even stand as candidates at its electoral lists. Could you imagine Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg standing as candidates for the social-imperialist SPD in Germany in 1917?!

Likewise, the RRP leaders refused to side with the Palestinian people and to support its resistance against the Israel which carries out one of the worst genocides of modern history. Instead, they rather advocated a neutral position putting Hamas and the Zionist monster on the same level. [3]

It is well-known among Marxists, that wars and revolutions are the biggest tests for any revolutionary organisation. The RRP leadership has totally failed the test of the two major imperialist wars of our times. It is no surprise that this organisation is now imploding.

The task of authentic Marxists among the RRP members is to draw the lessons of the programmatic failure which resulted in organisational failure. We appeal to these comrades not to waist time with minor organisational issues, if this campaign or another should be done, or which leader is more bureaucratic and who is less.

First thing first. First, Marxists need to get clarity on the program, on the fundamental questions of the class struggle. We urge the comrades of the former RRP to study the critique which the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency and its Russian section have elaborated in the past years against the RRP policy. It is only such a way that will make it possible to overcome the fundamental mistakes of opportunism and to join forces in building a revolutionary party – in Russia and internationally.