The Communists Are Coming! How YOU can promote the RCI founding conference

A new Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) will launch in June. In the run-up, we need YOU to go out and paint every street, in every neighbourhood, in every nation RED. Read on for all the tools you need to announce the coming of the RCI in your area, workplace, school or college; to win new comrades to our ranks; and to strike fear into the hearts of the bourgeois politicians, bankers and bosses. Help us spread the word: The Communists Are Coming! (#CommunistsAreComing)

Three simple steps for promoting the RCI Conference:

1. An image to promote the RCI conference is available to download in seven languages below. It can be printed as a sticker or a poster, and contains a QR code that links to the sign-up page.
2. These can be printed and plastered all over any town, city, university, school and college where communists are organised!
3. Share photos and videos on social media using the hashtag #CommunistsAreComing. Show the world the streets of New York, Paris, London, Toronto, Madrid, Lisbon, Lahore, Sao Paolo and beyond covered with hammers and sickles!

Let’s make the capitalists tremble, and show the new generation of communist youth that there are many like them out there, and we’re getting organised!

Download the promotional image here:

English | Deutsch | Español | Français | Italiano | Português | 繁體中文

Why we need the RCI

Capitalism has entered a period of existential crisis. All over the world, workers and youth are enduring horror after horror at the hands of this rotting system. Millions have hit the streets to oppose Israel’s war of slaughter in Gaza. The cost of living is unbearable. The planet is burning. People are being radicalised, and an increasing number are drawing revolutionary conclusions.

The working class has shown time and time again that it is willing to fight. But we have to learn from the history of our movement: both its conquests and its defeats.

In the last decade, we have seen tremendous revolutionary struggles in one country after another: from Sri Lanka, to Sudan, to the Arab Spring that swept the Middle East in 2011. Then there are historical examples like revolutionary conflagrations in Spain in the 1970s and 1930s; uprisings in colonised nations throughout the 20th Century; the German Revolutions of the 1918-23; and the heroic tragedy of the Paris Commune.

All lacked a decisive factor: the right leadership. In every example above, the workers did not possess a revolutionary party to lead them to final victory, or were betrayed by leaders who were not up to the task. To ensure a successful world socialist revolution, we need a revolutionary party steeled in the ideas and traditions of Marxism and Bolshevism.

This party cannot be limited to one country. Capitalism is an international system that exploits workers all over the world. We aim to build a world party of communist revolution.

This necessity was also understood by Marx and Engels, which is why they established the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, in 1864. Its successor, the Second International, became a powerful organisation with millions of members, which was destroyed when its chauvinist leaders lined up behind their respective capitalists in the First World War.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks set up the Third International (the Communist International, or Comintern) following the degeneration of the Second. Despite promising beginnings, the Comintern itself degenerated in the hands of the Stalinists after Lenin’s death. Meanwhile, Trotsky’s efforts to found a Fourth International were destroyed, after his assassination, by the second-rate leaders who were left in charge of that organisation.

Today, all the old parties formed to lead the working class, and leaders raised up by the masses in the last period have fallen far short of the needs of our epoch. The right-wing reformists behind the big social democratic and labour parties are subservient to capitalism. The left-reformists like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, SYRIZA and Podemos have disappointed their supporters with defeats and sell-outs. All the Stalinist so-called Communist Parties are in crisis.

Now, with support for communism on the rise, there is a burning need for leadership. There is a vacuum to be filled. We need a new Revolutionary Communist International. This is why, in two months’ time, thousands of communists from all over the world will come together to launch the RCI.

Join the World School of Communism

The RCI aims to begin the task of recruiting and organising the future worldwide army of communist revolution. But every army needs training. That is why the founding conference will be combined with a World School of Communism, to arm attendees with our most powerful weapons: Marxist theory and ideas.

This school will give everyone who tunes in a serious education in our communist programme. Topics will include war and revolution, imperialism, the Russian Revolution, the revolutionary philosophy of dialectical materialism, and many more.

This will be the highest level of political discussion anywhere in the world: there is no better school for the next generation of revolutionary communists!

Help us build for the RCI launch!

We have already seen the popularity of our ideas, and support for our objectives, reflected in

the interest towards our founding conference. Over 1,600 people from over 100 countries have signed up to participate so far, with hundreds more attending in person. But this is just the start!

We need you to help us build, to ensure that every communist knows about the founding of the RCI. We need to bring as many class fighters as possible under our banner!

This is why we have designed these stickers and posters. We are asking all our comrades, readers and supporters to ensure every communist in the world can find us, learn about our conference, and sign up!

If you are already organised with the IMT/RCI, your section and group should print a big supply of posters and stickers. Go out in force with your branch or cell, and conquer every street corner for the RCI!

If you’re an isolated communist: join your local group to help them build! And if we have no group in your vicinity, everything you need is available in this article to get out and spread the word!

If every one of the over 1,600 people who have signed up so far could encourage 10 other people to attend, and if we can train them up, this is a potential force of 16,000 communists we can unleash on the world! This is double the membership of the Bolshevik Party during the February Revolution of 1917, just nine months before they seized power at the head of the Russian workers and peasants.

There is no time to lose. Go out and start building for this historic event!

Record reels and take pictures of any activity to promote the conference, and share them on social media with the hashtags #CommunistsAreComing and #SchoolOfCommunism.

This should include not only images of our posters and stickers, but public agitation, recruitment stalls, demonstrations, conferences and rallies for the new Revolutionary Communist Parties our comrades are founding worldwide. All of this will showcase our strength, and help create excitement for the RCI’s founding conference.

When people online click on these hashtags, we need them to see bold and enthusiastic mobilising communists on every continent. Other communists will see that there are thousands of us, and will be inspired to join our struggle.

As our Manifesto states:

“We have important work to do, and that work is already bearing important fruit and is reaching a decisive stage… It is incumbent upon every one of us to make sure that this work is carried out immediately, with no hesitation and with the absolute conviction that we will succeed.”

The Communists Are Coming: forward to the Revolutionary Communist International!