I am self-aware enough to appreciate that some of my interests tend towards the niche. A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Inis Mór to see a 4000 year old Neolithic fort. My preferred listening when in the kitchen is a podcast in which a Biblical scholar goes into great detail about the texts and ideas of early Christianity. However, my fascination with how small groups of fervent believers who are convinced that they hold the key to a happier world and have privileged knowledge transmitted from ancient authorities which they alone have correctly interpreted is not confined to ancient Palestine and the Roman Empire.

So it was that for the second time in a year I found myself in a local cinema watching the latest production from Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) Studios. The Communists Are Coming, which is available on YouTube, is the follow up to Independent Candidate, a documentary about the Revolutionary Communist Party’s (RCP) general election campaign for Fiona Lali. My review of that is here.

The sequel is subtitled “A Visual Manifesto” and aims to set out the RCI’s world view and persuade radical young people to join them. I will assume that lots of radical young people have already seen it, because whereas the screening of Independent Candidate was packed, this time the same auditorium was way less than half full.

Sitting through the ten sections of the film became a bit of an endurance test. There are only so many ways you can say capitalism is in crisis; things are getting worse for people everywhere; all the political leaderships that have gone before us everywhere are rubbish; Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Ted Grant (sic) told is everything we need to know; join us because everyone else is wrong and only we are right. If you have ever spent an hour with a relative who has dementia and keeps repeating the same handful of ideas, you will have some appreciation of the experience.

This was a Marxism which, for all practical purposes, asserts that nothing new or interesting has been produced outside its own circles since Trotsky died. For all the emphasis on the need to recruit young people, it had absolutely nothing to say about the impact of capitalism on the world’s climate and how they will grow older in a world where the ecological crisis will be the major problem of their generation. It gives some sense of political priorities when you note that Fiona Lali giving a Tory MP a hard time on a far right TV station was considered much more significant than climate change.  

No organisation on the far left has rejuvenated itself so successfully in Britain or internationally as the RCP in a long time. All its national groups featured in the film are overwhelmingly young, with big majorities in their late teens and early twenties, though I think Alan Woods, the current’s leader and a man of some maturity, overstates the case when he says that he has never seen such a resurgence of Marxism in his lifetime. He was around in 1968.

Manifestos are supposed to package a body of ideas in a succinct and attractive way for the unpersuaded. This is definitely one for the true believers. We were told at the start that there is a three hour director’s version. I am not sure the Tik Tok generation is ready for that.