The Revolutionary Communist Party, which the Revolutionary Communists of Camosun club is a part of (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn the past, the RCP was more shy about its communism. Formerly, the party was called Socialists Fight Back: Marxist Voice of Youth and Labour.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cAll of our rhetoric was used in terms of socialism,\u201d says Gibson. \u201cSo, we were saying: are you a socialist? Are you interested in socialism? Are you interested in Marxism?\u2019 That kind of thing. That was kind of our pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beech says that they were never duplicitous in their communist identity\u2014indeed, it\u2019s difficult to imagine that a group with \u201cMarxist\u201d in their name would be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cOur name being the Revolutionary Communist Party is a relatively recent thing… about the past year or so,\u201d says Gibson, \u201cand we found that since we\u2019ve been more bold and more open about the fact that we are unabashed communists [we\u2019ve got more members].\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201c[It] was the criticism of capital that was what interested them in the far right,\u201d says Beech. \u201cAnd when that didn\u2019t pan out or when they saw the disconnect between action and rhetoric [they were drawn to communism].\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it\u2019s not really a failing on their part,\u201d adds Proudlove-Dunne, \u201cbut failings in their capitalist endeavours. Like, there\u2019s a lot of people who would see, like, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m going to own a big business one day; I\u2019m 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, \u2018I\u2019m broken\u2019 or \u2018The system\u2019s fucked.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Beech stresses that the RCP is not a Stalinist organization, although he does defend the Stalinist concept of a planned economy.<\/p>\n
\u201c[We] would defend it as a democratically planned economy,\u201d he says. \u201cThat is to say that right now, the economy is not planned at all. Or if it is, it\u2019s planned by Amazon for profit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beech separates the party\u2019s vision from that of the Soviets\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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\u2019re now literally just punching numbers and calculating\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/a> for more information on the Revolutionary Communists of Camosun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26771,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,331],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-april-2-2025-issue"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26769"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26773,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26769\/revisions\/26773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/P3031684-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a>