According to its own statements, the group "exists in order to defend and develop an anti-imperialist trend within Britain, based on the long term interests of the entire working class and the oppressed internationally.

"[1] Emphasising a campaign against capitalism and the oppression of the working class, the group is also highly critical of British foreign policy, which they consider to be imperialistic in nature.

This is because many of these groups denounced the governments of socialist states such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and North Korea, and instead encouraged their members to vote for the Labour Party.

When the leading figures of the "Revolutionary Opposition", the name itself only first appearing in print in their appeal document, were expelled from the IS, its members met to decide on their course of action, and disagreements between Tearse's allies and the majority of the faction around David Yaffe rapidly surfaced.

The result was that Tearse's supporters formed the Discussion Group which led a quiet life for a number of years inside the Labour Party before dissolving.

[4] In 1975 the RCG began publishing a theoretical journal called Revolutionary Communist in which it in part espoused a view of crisis theory, a theme they had already addressed in the IS when challenging the work of the theoreticians of that group.

[5] They developed Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin's analysis of the labour aristocracy, and showed its relevance for politics in the period after the Second World War.

[citation needed] A few years after the RCG's foundation, disagreements emerged amongst its members regarding such topics as Stalinism and the South African government.

[citation needed] Whilst many self-proclaimed socialist organisations, especially those regarding themselves as Trotskyist, in the UK welcomed the demise of the Eastern Bloc and then of the Soviet Union[8] the RCG argued that these events were counterrevolutionary and constituted a setback in the class struggle internationally because many national liberation movements and socialist states in the Third World were supported by the Soviet Union and the Comecon.

The analysis which the RCG developed through this work, on the role of national liberation movements in opposing imperialism, laid the foundations for much of its later positions, and its relationship to the rest of the British left.

[9] During the 1980s, the RCG's most notable activity was its participation in the non-stop picket of the South African embassy in London calling for the release of Nelson Mandela.

This developed into a high-profile national campaign involving people from left-wing groups such as the RCG, local residents of Manchester, and extending to church leaders and Labour Party Members of Parliament.

[citation needed] Following the start of the Palestinian second intifada in September 2000, in October the RCG joined a group which had begun to picket Marks and Spencer in Manchester over their support for Israel, and helped to spread this to other cities.

Over the next six years pickets of Marks and Spencer were held in places including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Newcastle, Stockton, Middlesbrough, Durham, Rochdale, Nottingham, Leicester, across London, Stratford and Brighton.

This move led to widespread student protests taking place in November and December 2010, during which demonstrators occupied the central Jeremy Bentham Room in University College London (UCL) for several weeks.

The protesting UCL students (some of whom were RCG members or supporters) organised a panel discussion to be held during which representatives from several leftist organisations (including the RCG's David Yaffe as well as figures from the Green Party of England and Wales, Socialist Appeal and Workers Power) discussed the reforms then being made by the government and university authorities to higher education in Britain.

[17] In October 2017 the RCG posted on their website "The Revolutionary Communist Group is aware of a historic allegation of sexual harassment by a member of the organisation.

[18] At the end of that year in December, the RCG updated on their website "Following an investigation and a period of suspension, the comrade has been reinstated as of 1 January 2018.

The RCG takes seriously the sexism, discrimination and exploitation women face and is committed to building an organisation that opposes all such oppression.