CW: Mention of SA
From the more circumspect comrades within one of the many, many socialist groups in Britain, we sometimes hear that their group is ‘the least bad sect’. More often, it seems, these days, we hear it from comrades from rs21: the only remaining group that split from the SWP as a result of the SWP’s 2013 rape cover-up crisis.
Is rs21 the least bad? Other comrades have covered the group’s trajectory more broadly.1 Suffice it to say that it lacks the bureaucratic centralism of other groups (with associated speech controls, permanent leadership, old grandee theoreticians, etc.) and, thanks to its reaction against these features in the SWP, its lack of political requirements on membership has meant its Cliffite Trotskyism is now largely historic, at least in terms of a % of members. It has one organised minority faction, the Marxist Unity Caucus (MUC), of which some members of this publication’s Editorial Board are also members.
This letter is not meant as a general assessment of rs21, though. This is probably better left to members of the organisation, which I am not. However, this is partly my complaint.
From semi-public and shared Google Doc links, we can conclude that MUC, with whom readers of this publication (including myself) may sympathise, have been largely successful in their programmatic aims. rs21 has committed to drafting its own programme (in Feb 2026) as a political basis for membership, and it now has a written constitution (also passed Feb 2026), which includes a (albeit soft) right to factions. To know this, though, one has to click through various sub-menus in the rs21 website, and the live constitution is linked within the PDF of a motion that more recently updates it. I’m not even sure if that’s intentional.
This is to say that rs21, despite shedding some of the worst elements of the other left groups, maintains a level of secrecy without justification. I understand that the organisation’s supreme body is the All-Members Assembly; what happens there? Where are the motion debates and reports thereafter? Some members tout the group’s pluralism as its differentiating factor, but we, the unwashed masses, see little of this. It seems debates and reports are for the Internal Bulletin (IB), a practice the group has maintained from the SWP. As with the SWP’s IB, handily it often leaks anyway, if you know the guy who knows the guy.
Even from MUC, who claim to hold value in transparency, we hear almost nothing. We heard their sensible proposals for a Your Party Communist Caucus in September: supposedly this was put to rs21 and rejected? Who knows. Certainly nothing came of it.
To rs21: if you are not like the others, prove it. Properly advertise your actual structures. Publish conference reports, voting results, the motions that fell. Open up your IB (or at least give me the number of someone who can leak it to me more consistently! If you like, I’ll do the work and pass it to Weekly Worker for you.)
Until then, I will continue to confuse you with A*CR, Plan C, and Orbit, on purpose.
- See: Archie Woodrow, ‘Not Cliffite’, Weekly Worker, 24 October 2024, <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1512/letters/> [accessed 3 October 2026]; Archie Woodrow, ‘the DSA, the Belgian Workers’ Party, and the British left’, Archie Woodrow Substack, 28 November 2025, <https://archiewoodrow.substack.com/p/the-dsa-the-belgian-workers-party> [accessed 3 October 2026]; Jonny Jones, ‘rs21 – The First Ten Years’, rs21 website, 12 January 2024, <https://revsoc21.uk/2024/01/12/rs21-the-first-ten-years/> [accessed 3 October 2026] ↩︎
