A teenaged goth and a ponytailed man were smoking outside the Revolution Festival. “I’m outside because someone who is 16 years old and needs to be chaperoned everywhere is being a little dick and needs a cigarette,” said the chaperone, Sam. He pointed at the goth, who wore smudged eyeliner and thick metal chains. “Sixteen and a communist. It’s pretty based,” said Sam. The goth smiled. His braces gleamed.
I asked how they knew each other. “He’s a weird little goth kid and I work at a cemetery, so we see each other fairly often,” Sam said. Sam digs graves “literally and figuratively. Figuratively, in the sense that capitalism creates its own gravediggers.” For a long time, Sam’s beliefs were basically, “everything sucks”. Then he saw the Revolutionary Communist Party leafleting on the high street. “I thought, oh cool. That’s my bloody bag.”
The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) is a descendant of the Trotskyist group Militant (it is not connected to the 1970s RCP whose leaders ended up founding the libertarian magazine Spiked). These days, the RCP runs the Revolutionary Festival, an annual three-day school of communist ideas at Friends House, the offices of the British Quakers in Euston, north London, and its goal is to train “a new layer of revolutionaries for the fight to end capitalism”.
RevFest, as it is known, had sold more than 1,000 tickets for the weekend to some very young and very excitable people. Things were stirring under the surface, attendees whispered – voters were tired of the old parties, tired of the establishment. It was a shame most of these voters were moving to Reform, people sighed. They just needed class consciousness. Then maybe, just maybe, they’d become communists too.
In a tiered lecture theatre, Jorge Martín, a Spanish member of the revolutionary communist international secretariat, was rallying his comrades. “Advanced capitalist countries in Europe are preparing themselves to join the worldwide current of what is known as the Gen Z revolution,” he said. “Workers will move when they are ready to move. And there’s nothing you can do about it. They will move.”
An interruption to proceedings: “We have found the plane tickets of Canadian comrades,” said a woman who had taken over the microphone. “If that’s your ticket, please come get it.”
Between talks, at stalls dotted about the foyer, people were selling badges saying “Books not bombs” and the rather nostalgic “Tories out”. A young man with a mop of bleached curls was advertising subscriptions to the RCP newspaper, the Communist. I asked how he got involved. “People were like, all cops are bastards, and I was like, yeah, sick!” he said. “And then I was like, why?”
The revolutionary communists had the answers. They also taught him about sexism. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of the beginning of the oppression of women,” he began. I said I hadn’t. This delighted him. “In the early days, as Engels said, everyone ‘lived frivolously’ – everyone fucked.” He looked wistful. “It was only with the start of class society we started producing a surplus, and men wanted to pass their surplus on to their children. So they couldn’t let women sleep around.” It all came down to who’s inheriting your wealth. “You have to know your children are yours.” He shook his head. “It blew my mind.”
The idea that class is the root of sexism – as opposed to, say, I don’t know, men – is the sort of thing revolutionary communists like. They generally consider themselves to be above identity politics adopted by weaker, non-revolutionary factions of the left, like the Greens. A red-haired woman was complaining about an ongoing fight over this issue in her London branch. “A new comrade wants to leave,” she explained. “He thinks we don’t understand minority struggles. I’m like: we’re communists. Of course we understand these issues.”
She said she liked my second-hand dress. I felt momentarily flattered, until she continued: “So many comrades here have amazing fashion sense – like Anthony over here.” She pointed to a long-haired man wearing a burgundy cravat, suspenders and what he later told me was a Bulgarian Soviet coat.
The most stylish member of the RCP was 28-year-old campaign co-ordinator Fiona Lali, who wore dangly green and gold earrings with matching gold in her hair. Lali joined the Labour Party at 18 to support Jeremy Corbyn, but was expelled in 2022, and ran as an independent MP candidate in Stratford and Bow in 2024. She came second last. Lali told me she was happy when Corbyn first formed Your Party with Zarah Sultana, but had been disappointed since. She would support any party or campaign that would “improve the material conditions of the working class”.
Lali didn’t think revolution was going to happen too soon. “The way I would phrase it,” she said carefully, like a politician, “is that the conditions are being prepared today for a revolutionary situation to erupt in Britain.”
At the final talk on Saturday, a Welsh RCP executive committee member, Rob Sewell, was lecturing on recent upheaval in countries like Nepal and Madagascar. “You would think that Britain is far removed from such revolutionary convulsions,” he said. But you would be wrong.
In Britain, Sewell said ominously, Brexit and the fall of Toryism were only the starter. The main course was yet to come. “And there will be many big meals.” One couple, in RCP T-shirts, were holding hands, enthralled.
Sewell was beginning to drone on, and I was losing focus, when a man wearing what looked like two hats on top of each other called out: “Sir, you’re wrong!” He shouted about Jeffery Epstein and Stephen Hawking and the links between American and British capitalism.
Relatively more muscular men in RCP vests surged forward. Here was a fight they could win. Removing this man would improve everyone’s material conditions. They encircled the hatted protester and pushed him out of the room. Strangled screams about the bourgeoisie drifted from the back of the hall. “You’re worse than bloody Starmer!” Sewell told him. “And take that funny hat with you as well. Halloween is over.”
The day’s talks had finished. Fists raised, the communists broke out into “The Internationale” (“Arise, ye workers from your slumbers”) and then, in Italian, “Bandiera Rossa”. Everyone was preparing to head to the evening’s sold-out social gathering. “Enjoy your partying or whatever,” said Sewell, leaning in to the position he’d assumed of an elderly, embarrassing teacher. “See you at ten o’clock in the morning.”
The social was held at Camden School for Girls, which gave the event the energy of a Year 7 disco. There were trestle tables with beer cans and juice; a band from the Leeds chapter was warbling “Shangri-La” on a stage whose painted backdrop was clearly intended for a school play. The house lights were still on.
The evening crowd felt even younger than the group at the lectures. Members from Birmingham nodded sympathetically when I said I was 28 – they didn’t have anyone in their branch as old as that. “Most revolutions start with young people,” they reasoned. A boy said he lived in a house with “six comrades. Well, five comrades – one is just on my course.”
Most people had been converted recently. A 22-year-old called Evan had been politicised when his mum was laid off “for bullshit reasons” during Covid. “I was at home on the internet looking at commie shit.” He felt inspired by the conference’s optimism, the idea of a better future. Then the band, now playing “Proud Mary”, called everyone to the front of the stage. “We’re all sheep,” Evan shrugged, as he rushed to join his comrades on the lacquered dance floor. Tonight there was a disco ball and £3 beers. Tomorrow, a world to win.
[Further reading: On the front line in the Battle of Ideas]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes