Denmark: a greeting from the Revolutionary Communist Party to the left

Just before the founding of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RKP) in Denmark, Reinout Bosch wrote a kind of greeting for our new party on Solidaritet.dk. We hereby send a greeting back to Reinout and the rest of a left wing characterised by gloom and pessimism.

[Originally published in Danish at marxist.dk]

In his greeting, Reinout Bosch – who was a candidate for the European Parliamentary elections for Enhedslisten (Unity List/The Red-Green Alliance) this summer – praises RKP's ‘recruitment campaign’, our membership growth, and fondly recalls his time in our organisation many years ago.

I worked politically with Reinout and remember him as a likeable person and a well-meaning leftist. But Reinout's greeting is an excellent expression of the deep crisis that the entire established left is in.

The disillusioned old guard

Reinout's greeting could come from anyone in the disillusioned and pessimistic old guard that wants to convince the youth to give up their revolutionary zeal and energy. With the classic ‘we've tried it before’ argument, they try to discourage a new generation from engaging in revolutionary work.

But the old guard have learnt the wrong lessons from the experience of the left in recent years. This is one of the reasons for their deep pessimism and despair. They don't understand the radicalisation that is currently happening among young people and are therefore unable to connect with it. Hence the crisis of the left in general, and the Enhedslisten more specifically.

At the end of his greeting, Reinout reveals the purpose of the article when he writes: “And this is also a call to those comrades who may one day tire of newspaper sales and study circles [...] For the Enhedslisten and SF (Green Left), it would be a gift to have an influx of members educated in theory and history. The trade union movement would benefit from comrades with concrete experience in union pickets.”

In other words: abandon the hopeless RKP project, resign before you burn out, and join us instead.

Dear Reinout. I don't think your attempt to fish for members will be very successful. As you write, it's rare to meet former RKP activists in Enhedslisten and SF. I would venture to say that for most of them it is not because they are burnt out, but because they have no faith whatsoever that these parties can show a way forward.

We will continue to build the Revolutionary Communist Party because we believe that a Marxist revolutionary cadre party is necessary if we are serious about the task of fundamentally changing this society.

What Reinout writes is nothing new as such. But Reinout's use of his own personal experiences may give his warning to young communists a certain credibility. Of course, the latter will not know the story he tells in detail. That's why I'd like to start by spending some time explaining the experiences Reinout mentions.

Why do people burn out?

When Reinout Bosch joined Socialist Standpoint (the RKP’s predecessor organisation) in the years following the financial crisis, the organisation had around 50-60 members. It was a period when the organisation was discussing tactics and strategy after we were expelled from the Socialist Youth Front (SUF) in 2007. In that discussion, two wings crystallised: one that wanted to join Enhedslisten and one that wanted to build an independent organisation.

The first wing argued that we should join Enhedslisten because, in their eyes, our task was to build a left wing within the already existing left wing. The second wing argued that it is necessary to build a revolutionary cadre organisation.

We didn't think that would be possible by joining Enhedslisten. This was due to several things. Firstly, the people who led the Enhedslisten were the same people who had just kicked us out of SUF. We assessed that we would not be allowed to enter and build a cadre organisation with our own newspaper etc. as a faction in Enhedslisten.

More importantly, our analysis was that Enhedslisten had already reached a point where it was failing to attract the most radical layers of young people. Our task was to find the most politically conscious young people and recruit them to build a revolutionary cadre organisation. We wouldn't be able to do that inside Enhedslisten.

This gruelling discussion ended in a split in 2014, with one group joiningEnhedslisten (the Socialists) and another group founding the Revolutionary Socialists. At that time we were 25. 12 went to one group, 12 to the other, and one simply went home.

As you can see, we had already lost a number of comrades in the period between 2008 and the split in 2014. What was the reason for the dropout? It was the lack of a clear tactic and strategy. It was a lack of clarity that arose from a new situation: both in the form of our exclusion from SUF, but also from a shift in the objective situation with the crisis in 2008.

A shift in the objective situation requires a discussion of new tactics. Clarification came with the split in 2014, and we could now build Revolutionary Socialists with the clear goal of building a Marxist cadre organisation by openly reaching out to young revolutionaries, winning them to the organisation and educating them.

From 12 members in 2014, Revolutionary Socialists grew to the first 100 members in the summer of 2023, and we have since grown to 270 with the founding of the Revolutionary Communist Party in October this year.

As you can see, Reinout's narrative about why people burned out doesn't hold water. We didn't lose people in the period when Reinout was a member up to 2014 because our comrades had to sell newspapers or read Marxist theory. We lost people during that period because it was unclear what our tactics and strategy were. To them, it was unclear why we were selling newspapers and reading theory.

Does that mean that with a clear tactic and strategy, no one will drop out along the way? Of course not. Being a revolutionary is not a walk in the park. Being a revolutionary requires active involvement, although the level of activity naturally fluctuates according to your life situation. For some, life gets in the way. The mental health crisis and societal stress epidemic also affects revolutionaries.

We can’t do anything to guarantee that some people involved in revolutionary activity won’t burn out. What we can do is train revolutionaries to become cadres, i.e. Marxists who understand the experiences of the revolutionary left so well that they can apply them to the specific situation they find themselves in. We do this through our newspaper, podcast and website, and our publishing house.

Anger is seething under the surface

Reinout writes that the RKP “loves to say that it's seething under the surface”, that we're prophesying about “the big shift that's about to happen”. He urges us to self-critically study “why current developments are not ‘a harbinger of a far more drastic and large-scale shift in working-class political consciousness’.”

This is the core of the real difference between us and Reinout and the entire established left. Yes, we actually think anger is seething under the surface. You know this if you actually talk to workers and young people. There is growing frustration and dissatisfaction with the current system.

You don't have to talk to most people for long before they express these frustrations, whether they are students, nurses, tradesmen, high school teachers, food delivery drivers or something else entirely.

A whole layer – especially of young people – have started to draw revolutionary conclusions: that capitalism is incapable of solving many of the problems the world is facing, whether it's the climate catastrophe, war or the mental health crisis. These are young people who have demonstrated and fought in the climate struggle, against the bloodshed in Palestine, etc. but have realised that these struggles are linked to the fight against the whole system.

This shift in consciousness is reflected in a poll conducted in 2023 by the centre-right Canadian think tank, The Fraser Institute. They found that 29 percent of young Britons aged 18-34 agreed that communism is the ideal economic system. The same survey documented a similar trend in other countries, including the United States, where 20 percent of young people believe that communism is the ideal system.

We don't have a similar poll in Denmark, but the success of our ‘Are you a communist?’ campaign is an indication of the mood among young people here.

We are not saying, as Reinout claims, that a revolution will happen tomorrow. That's a distortion of our perspective. But we are saying that the general trend right now is towards further radicalisation and that the future will bring increased class struggle and yes, also revolutionary movements.

Capitalism has reached a historical dead end and therefore cannot create a decent future for the vast majority. Welfare is crumbling, pressure is mounting and fear of the future is widespread. It is against this backdrop that we foresee shifts in consciousness and mass movements in the streets among the working class.

Reinout writes that we cannot “bet our entire strategy on the fact that an increasingly weak left will be saved by sudden political shifts in our favour.”

In the RKP, we are not betting on being saved by sudden political shifts in our favour. The reason for the weakness of the left is a wrong analysis that leads to a wrong tactic, a wrong perspective and thus also a wrong policy that does not attract young people and workers.

The reason for our success is precisely our analysis. We did not sit back and wait for times to change. We are building a party here and now, so that we can be as strong as possible when the situation changes.

A strong left wing

Reinout writes: “The Revolutionary Communist Party's many new cadres have an important role to play in rebuilding the left. But it must be based on the premise that the left wing – that’s what we are together. Only by working together across political differences can we go from being a few hundred or a few thousand to actually becoming the mass movement we dream of.”

We are more than happy to collaborate with the rest of the left. But a mass movement is not created by the left, as Reinout claims. It is created by capitalism itself. What matters is which left wing there is when a mass movement breaks out.

A strong left requires a clear programme as a basis for clear tactics and strategy. Unclear ideas lead us exactly where the Enhedslisten is today: they succumb to bourgeois public opinion, accept capitalism, and a whole host of things follow from that.

There is a huge vacuum on the left. There is not a single party that is clearly in opposition to the existing society in the Danish parliament. There is not a single party that is against war and imperialism. There is not a single party that is against NATO and the EU. There is not a single party that puts forward an internationalist and revolutionary programme. But this is what is actually needed to build a strong left wing.

With the founding of the RKP, we have set out to build the seeds of this party. We will not become a mass party tomorrow. That depends on the development of the class struggle. But we are building the foundation now, based on the radicalisation that is already taking place.

Reinout writes that the left “will have to accept that the situation is difficult and nobody has yet given convincing answers on how to move beyond the current impasse in the class struggle”. And further, “the left must create the situation for its own progress”.

The last 20 years have seen massive movements around the world. In Denmark, the 2000s were characterised by widespread strike movements and mass demonstrations. It's true that the last few years have seen a certain stagnation in many parts of Europe. But why is this?

Firstly, because the working class cannot be in constant struggle. But it's also largely due to the capitulation of the entire left: Corbyn, Podemos, Syriza, Green Left and Enhedslisten. The responsibility for the stalemate in the class struggle and the crisis of the left lies first and foremost with the left itself.

While young people are being radicalised, Enhedslisten is moving further and further into the established political scene. They are completely unable to connect with this radicalisation. Where are the young revolutionaries in  Enhedslisten? If anyone has created an epidemic of burnout and disillusionment among a large layer of young people, it is the leadership of Enhedslisten itself.

We need a party that can organise the vanguard that is developing among young people in particular, a party that can be a real opposition to the existing society, whether on the issue of climate, war or the defence of welfare. That is why we have chosen to found the Revolutionary Communist Party.