While communism may seem like a relic of the 20th century, The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) has been gaining new members in Victoria, and there’s a communist club right here on campus, the Revolutionary Communists of Camosun (RCC).
RCC members Dan Gibson, Adam Beech, Liam Proudlove-Dunne, and Toby Cummings all cite discontent with the status quo as the reason for joining the club. Cummings was particularly attracted to the party as a disabled person.
“[The system] essentially leaves people like me to die because we can’t function in the system,” he says.
In the past, the RCP was more shy about its communism. Formerly, the party was called Socialists Fight Back: Marxist Voice of Youth and Labour.
“All of our rhetoric was used in terms of socialism,” says Gibson. “So, we were saying: are you a socialist? Are you interested in socialism? Are you interested in Marxism?’ That kind of thing. That was kind of our pitch.”
Beech says that they were never duplicitous in their communist identity—indeed, it’s difficult to imagine that a group with “Marxist” in their name would be.
“Our name being the Revolutionary Communist Party is a relatively recent thing… about the past year or so,” says Gibson, “and we found that since we’ve been more bold and more open about the fact that we are unabashed communists [we’ve got more members].”
Currently, RCP membership in Victoria is up from under 20 members in 2023 to around 40 members in 2024, spread across five cells, including two at UVic. A portion of the new membership was once affiliated with the alt right.
“[It] was the criticism of capital that was what interested them in the far right,” says Beech. “And when that didn’t pan out or when they saw the disconnect between action and rhetoric [they were drawn to communism].”
“And it’s not really a failing on their part,” adds Proudlove-Dunne, “but failings in their capitalist endeavours. Like, there’s a lot of people who would see, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to own a big business one day; I’m going to climb up the ladder. Anybody can make it with just the right level of ingenuity and they go one of two ways. They either say, ‘I’m broken’ or ‘The system’s fucked.’”
Beech stresses that the RCP is not a Stalinist organization, although he does defend the Stalinist concept of a planned economy.
“[We] would defend it as a democratically planned economy,” he says. “That is to say that right now, the economy is not planned at all. Or if it is, it’s planned by Amazon for profit.”
Beech separates the party’s vision from that of the Soviets’.
“The Soviet economy was bureaucratically planned, in a very centralized way. As in, there was an office of whatever, that you get appointed to by the government and you’re now literally just punching numbers and calculating… then spitting it out to the workforce that you might have no relationship [to] whatsoever. [The party aims for a system wherein] people involved in the industry get that kind of say. Not some guy in an office separated out from it all.”
But a planned economy is further off in the future. Currently, the party is collaborating with labour organizations and working to boost new membership. Email communistclub@camosunstudent.org for more information on the Revolutionary Communists of Camosun.