“What’s behind the Green surge?” asks an article on the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). One wag suggested that their answer might be either Ecotricity’s Dale Vince or NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg and I was half expecting that the answer might involve petit bourgeois radicals too frightened to embrace bold Marxist answers.

Actually, the piece by Kieran Lee is nuanced and concludes by saying “We will continue to provide analysis and comradely critique of the Greens’ programme, and we look forward to continuing discussions with Green supporters.” For the aspirant Bolshevik leadership of the British revolution that is tantamount to inviting someone to a posh restaurant, paying the bill and the taxi home then sending flowers and chocolates a day or two later.

For the past couple of years, I have been impressed with how successful the RCP has been at recruiting relatively significant numbers of young people, getting them active and giving them a grounding in the house brand of Marxist theory. Simultaneously, I’ve often found some of their, what we might call more optimistic assertions, about how they are “forging the general staff of the revolution” entertaining and reminiscent of a centuries old millenarian British radical tradition, albeit one where people daydream about being commissars wearing leather trench coats while extirpating the bourgeoisie.

There is a faint possibility that someone who has been living in a cave for the last fifty years has no idea who the RCP are. The short version is that the older members used to be in Militant; they had a split with the people who are now the Socialist Party; for a few years they were called Socialist Appeal; they were in the Labour Party while Corbyn was leader; got expelled; changed their mind about Labourism and set up the RCP; they are not to be confused with a weird organisation of the same name that was around in the eighties, though they are linked to the RCP of the 1940s. I hope that clears things up.

Kieran makes the point that the Greens are recruiting very large numbers of new members at the moment. The party has doubled in size in the few weeks since Zack Polanski was elected leader and the reasons for joining are his firm opposition to the Israeli genocide, his superbly confrontational approach to Reform and racism and the general loathing of Starmer’s Labour among people on the left. We can assume that the RCP are now part of the growing consensus that Your Party’s moment is rapidly passing, a view I’m inclined to share. Meanwhile in London 36 percent of people aged 18-24 now say they would back the Green Party.

The Green Party is in a process of rapid political evolution. Kieran’s fundamental point is that it is not revolutionary Marxist and because of that it is doomed to fail and disappoint. Show me a political project that hasn’t. Citing the example of housing, he observes that the housing crisis can’t be solved within the limits of capitalism. Actually, it can. Austrian social democracy built beautiful council homes and  even Labour and the Tories showed that it was possible to house people decently without bankrupting the state or the citizens.

It was a bit of a gamble when I joined the Greens about eighteen months ago and it has not been without its frustrations. Now it may just be a coincidence that my membership has coincided with the emergence of an impressively radical and dynamic leadership, an astonishing recruitment surge and an unprecedented shift to the left. That is for others to judge. However, the fact is that the Greens now really are the only show in town for anyone who wants to join a radical left party in which they can help shape its politics. I have no more qualms about nicking ideas from the Marxist left than Lenin did about plagiarising the Socialist Revolutionaries’ programme on the peasantry.

The main positive in the RCP article is that it has grasped the real significance for the British left of the growth of the Greens. In some of next year’s mayoral elections they will either push Labour into third place or even win the mayoralty and they are certain to beat loads of Labour councillors on the basis of a radical ecological and socialist programme. More importantly, they will be the organised mass opposition to Reform and Tommy Robinson. That is Zack Polanski’s pitch. That may not be Kieran’s “revolutionary, working-class solutions on an international level” but it’s good enough for me and to be getting on with.