The truth is revolutionary - For a factual history of the Communist Left (Correspondence with the ICT)

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In December last year the ICC wrote to the Internationalist Communist Tendency, asking them to publish a letter of correction of serious falsifications made about our organisation that appeared on the ICT website in an article entitled ‘On the forty-fifth anniversary of the Founding of the CWO’[1].

The ICC does not request such rectifications from the bourgeois camp. We expect lies coming from this direction and simply denounce any such defamations as the trademark of the enemy class.

If we asked the ICT for a correction of important defamations of the ICC it’s because we consider the ICT, whatever our political differences with this tendency, part of the internationalist proletarian camp, and we therefore assumed a common interest in rectifications of any important deviations from a truthful picture of the history of the Communist Left[2].

We expected that the ICT would either recognise these important inaccuracies and agree to rectify them or would provide evidence to refute our corrections.

Unfortunately though, the ICT replied angrily to our request, refusing to publish any correction, suggesting the request was a ‘provocation’ or a ‘political game’. They declared in their reply that this would be their last word on the subject and the correspondence was now closed.[3]

Nevertheless, despite this rebuff, the ICC wrote again hoping to effect a change of mind, explaining that our request for a rectification was not a provocation or a game or a dispute over the CWO’s interpretation of their history, or an attempt to try and impose our own interpretation of it, but a desire to reestablish important facts. And we noted in our second letter that despite the irate refusal of the ICT to publish our correction their reply did not refute the facts in question and were as we described them. But the ICT was consistent on one thing: they have so far stood by their unilateral ending of the correspondence and three months later have not replied to our second letter.

If we now publish this correspondence with the ICT it is because it was obviously impossible to arrive at a commonly agreed solution with them and because we nevertheless consider the falsifications serious enough to need a public correction. Given the ICT’s refusal to discuss a mutually acceptable public rectification further in private, which we would have preferred, we are obliged to make the facts public ourselves.

Our first letter

ICC to ICT, 8/12/2020

Dear comrades,

We ask you to publish the following corrective on your website:

"We noticed that an article on your website ‘On the 45th Anniversary of the founding of the CWO’ contains some falsehoods that defame our organisation. Three particularly stand out and they need to be corrected:

Firstly, the article claims that the ICC ‘slandered’ Battaglia Comunista concerning its origins in the Internationalist Communist Party founded in 1943:

‘We also discovered that the ICC slanders that they [the ICP] worked ‘inside the partisans’ were not true except in the fact that they had worked wherever the working class was present’.

In a letter from Battaglia Comunista to the ICC reprinted in an article “The ambiguities of the Internationalist Communist Party over the ‘partisans’ in Italy in 1943” in International Review No8 1977 it says:

“The comrades who came from the Communist Left and who constituted the [Internationalist Communist] party were the first both in Italy and outside it to denounce the counter-revolutionary policies of the democratic bloc (including the Stalinist and Trotskyist parties) and were the first and only ones to act inside the workers’ struggles and even in the ranks of the Partisans, calling on the workers to fight against capitalism no matter what kind of regime it was hiding behind.

The comrades who RI calls ‘Resistance fighters’ were revolutionary militants who engaged in the task of penetrating the ranks of the Partisans in order to disseminate the principles and tactics of the revolutionary movement, and who paid for this work with their lives.”

The Internationalist Communist Party, in which Battaglia Comunista originated, acted inside and penetrated the ranks of the Partisans – according to its very own testimony. So the ICC recognition and criticism of this fact is no slander.

Secondly, the “Timeline Summary” at the end of the CWO’s recent article says:

“1980: Third Conference of the International Communist Left (Paris) lead to the abandonment of the conferences by the ICC and other smaller groups”.

To affirm that the ICC abandoned the conferences is a pure falsification of reality, a falsification which is moreover contradicted by what is written earlier in your article:

“On the floor of the meeting [of the Third Conference] the CWO and the Belgian GCI separately announced that they would not attend the next conference. The CWO did not consult with the PCInt [ie, Battaglia Comunista] before doing this but the PCint, as the initiators of the conferences, tried to salvage something from them by proposing a new criterion for the next conference which would satisfy (or so they thought) some elements like the CWO and GCI and it would force the ICC to take a clearer stand. It did not work out like that as the ICC argued that the resolution was only intended to exclude them. They tried to get the PCInt to change the words of the criterion so that it would allow for the confusion on the party question to continue. PCInt stuck by the original formulation and the CWO delegation decided to support them.”

So it was not the ICC but the CWO which wanted to abandon the Conferences. The PCInt, in order to ‘salvage something’ introduced a new criterion (which they refused to alter, but which the CWO supported) for participation in the conference which the ICC could not accept. The debate on the nature of the party between the groups of the Conferences had been artificially closed. The ICC was in fact excluded by the two groups and did not abandon the Conferences.

Thirdly, the article says that:

‘When the ICC started breaking into people’s houses (ostensibly to recover ICC property) including that of JM who left alongside the splitters, Aberdeen threatened them with calling the police’.

The affirmation that the ICC ‘started breaking into people’s houses’ is a malicious lie put out by parasites like the long defunct Aberdeen ‘Communist’ Bulletin Group in order to justify the theft of ICC material resources and to excuse their threats to call the police against the ICC. The insinuation in the article – by the use of the adverb ‘ostensibly’ – that the recuperation of material by the ICC was a pretext for intimidation, was another lie put out by the parasites to excuse their own villainy.

One of the principles by which the communist left tradition has distinguished itself from Stalinism and Trotskyism has been to speak the truth and unmask the lies of the counter revolution, in particular the latter’s falsification of historical facts. This principle of factual accuracy is particularly important in a history of the communist left. The falsifications in the article need to be corrected in order to give a truthful picture of this history for new generations of communist militants.

The article has now been on your website for some time and could have been read by many people, so we ask that the corrective above appears within the next two weeks in a prominent place on your website.

Communist greetings, The ICC.”

Our second letter

Despite refusing to publish this letter the ICT effectively corroborated our corrections, as we pointed out in our second letter:

“…we note that in your letter you actually confirm the validity of the corrections that we asked for:

  1. That it wasn’t an ICC slander to say that the PCInt entered into the Partisans at the end of the 2nd World War in Italy.

“PCInt members entered the partisans to win workers away from anti-fascism, Stalinism (and the CLN)”

2) That the ICC did not abandon the Conferences of the Communist Left:

“[The PCI] certainly did not want positive invitations to participate in the conferences to be reduced to only the ICC”

(In other words, there was no likelihood that the ICC would refuse to participate in the conferences.)

3) That the ICC did not commit any ‘break-ins’ during the recuperation of political material in 1981:

‘As to the question of “break-ins” you are right.”

The integrity of the ICC put in question

The facts in question, which we rectify in our first letter and confirm in our second letter, and which the ICT does not contest but refuses to correct publicly, are clearly not trifles but pertain directly to major aspects of the integrity of the positions of the ICC.  The CWO article suggests that the ICC's differences with the conduct of the PCint toward the Partisans in Italy in World War 2, – that helps to explain the different trajectory of the ICC’s antecedents, the Gauche Communiste de France, to that of the PCInt during the 1940s – was built on, a ‘slander’.

Then the article says that we abandoned the International Conferences of the Communist Left of the 1970s which we in fact defended tooth and nail. The negative impact of the failure of these conferences is still being felt today. And finally, the article pretends that the ICC, which has always defended revolutionary organisation and its honest behaviour, used the same kind of thuggery as those who were attempting to destroy it by theft, slanders and threats of the police. In a word, completely contrary to the facts, we come across in the article as slanderers, thugs, and deserters.

This is not a question of polemical exaggeration but of fabrications that defame us.

Obviously, the ICC is obliged to publicly defend itself against such denigrations.

The CWO intended their history for new members and contacts to know the ‘bedrock of our political awareness and perspectives today’. And as such their history was bound to have a polemical side since their past intersects at many points with that of the ICC. But this is all the more reason to keep to the facts in order for new militants to know the actual history of its divergences with other tendencies. The deep conviction of new militants in the politics of the ICT, or any other tendency of the Communist Left, can’t be formed on the basis of denigrations and falsehoods about opposing tendencies. On the contrary the formation of new militants of the Communist Left demands a knowledge of the facts.

Unfortunately, as the fate of the ICC’s request to the ICT shows, the collective determination to defend the truth within the Communist Left as a whole – part of its historical tradition – despite its mutual political disagreements, has been more and more forgotten and the attempt to rectify falsehoods is instead deemed by the ICT to be ‘playing a game’ - i.e, the demand by the ICC for factual honesty is itself considered to be dishonest. And then refused.

This wretched disregard for establishing the facts is however a fairly recent departure from the tradition of the marxist left and the Communist Left in particular.

‘The truth is revolutionary’ - Marx

The revolutionary nature of the truth has a general meaning for marxism in the sense that the sequence of historical changes from one mode of production to another throughout human history can only be understood scientifically, and therefore truthfully, as the result of class struggle. And it has a specific meaning for the struggle of the working class, which needs to unmask the lies the capitalist class uses to justify its rule of pitiless exploitation, economic crisis and destitution, endless war and catastrophe. Since the communist goal of the revolutionary proletariat is not to justify a new mode of exploitation but to abolish classes and create a society of the free association of the producers, the pursuit of the truth is the greatest political and theoretical weapon of the working class and its communist minorities, both against the bourgeoisie and in the reinforcement of its own ranks.

The theoretical, political and organisational development of the marxist tradition has occurred mainly through factually accurate polemics. There are the famous polemics by Marx and Engels against the Left Hegelians, (Holy Family, German Ideology) against Proudhon (Poverty of Philosophy), the Anti-Dühring, the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the polemic by Rosa Luxemburg against Eduard Bernstein (Reform or Revolution) Lenin’s polemic with the Russian populists in Who the friends of the people are and how they fight the social democrats, etc. They are all based on extensive quotations from the writings and the accurate, evidential accounts of the actions of those they are criticising, and were all the more powerful and vehement for that. Conversely the marxist tradition was determined to answer publicly all fabrications of its politics and most particularly expose the slanders and manoeuvres serving the enemy camp, such as Marx’s book- length exposure of the police spy Herr Vogt, or the report of the First International into the Bakunin conspiracy.

These principles of accuracy and honesty began to weaken in the marxist camp with the opportunist degeneration of the 2nd International. After the collapse of the latter in 1914 and the support of the main Social Democratic Parties for the imperialist war and active hatred for the revolutionary wave that emerged in 1917, the slanders against the marxist international left intensified and were the prelude to the attempt to exterminate its militants. The vilification of Rosa Luxemburg by the Social Democratic press, for example, created the climate for her assassination in 1919. Lenin and Trotsky narrowly escaped the same fate in the summer of 1917 after being slandered as German agents by the Mensheviks and others.

The long Stalinist counter-revolution that followed the end of the revolutionary wave from 1917-23 intensified this attack against the principles and honour of the revolutionary vanguard in the name of marxism and the working class –  a hypocrisy unprecedented in history. Stalinist attacks, dressed up as ‘marxist polemics’, aimed at the destruction of those that maintained the internationalist core of the marxist programme in the face of the degeneration of the October Revolution and the Communist International - that is, the opposition aroundTrotsky but above all the Communist Lefts of Germany and Italy. Falsifications of history, lies and denigrations prepared the ground for expulsions, imprisonment, torture, show trials and murder.

Trotsky attempted to uphold the true marxist tradition with the Dewey Commission in 1936 that exposed the frame-ups of the Moscow Trials with systematic and testimonial evidence.

But Trotskyism joined the bourgeois camp during the Second World War by abandoning internationalism, and in the process its methods became more akin to those of the Stalinist and Social Democratic counter-revolution. Lying and slandering became normal behaviour within the left and extreme left of the bourgeois counter-revolution. Only the Communist Left remained on the side of the proletariat and the defence of the truth during the imperialist butchery 1939 - 45. And today the Communist Left still has to contend with and sharply distinguish itself from the ignominious methods of the counter revolutionary left.

In the resurgence of the Communist Left tradition after 1968, despite the weight of sectarianism amongst the different groups and the difficulty of new militants breaking from the mores of leftism, the need for a common effort to establish the truth was mutually recognised by the different groups. As the ICC letter to the CWO above shows, the ICC published in 1977 in its International Review the request of Battaglia Comunista (that is the PCint/ICT) for a correction of its article on the partisans and the origins of the PCint. And at this time the request of the PCInt referred to this revolutionary principle of historical accuracy, an episode which we recall in our second letter to the ICT:

“In 1976, comrade Onorato Damen, in the name of the Executive of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, addressed a letter to our section in France asking it to rectify certain statements contained in a polemic with the Bordigist PCI published in No. 29 of our newspaper Révolution Internationale. He protested, in particular, against what we had written about the Partito's policy on the partisan issue. And he concluded his letter with the following: "We want all revolutionaries to know how to carry out a serious critical examination of positions on the main political problems of the working class today, documented with the seriousness that is proper to revolutionaries, when it is a question of returning (and this is something that is always necessary) to the errors of the past”. We published his entire letter in the International Review No. 8, with, of course, our own reply.

Our question to you is: do you think that comrade Damen and the Executive of the PCInt had engaged in "provocation", in "political games" by asking us to publish a correction?

Of course, there can be a dispute over the reality of the facts. In International Review 87 for example, we published a letter from the CWO (written as "provocation" and for "political games" ?) that claimed there were falsehoods in an earlier polemic of the ICC. We argued that they were in fact true.

More recently in the last few decades, though this revolutionary tradition recalled by Onorato Damen has been forgotten, partly as a result of the failure of the Conferences of the Communist Left referred to earlier, and the resulting rise, despite the best efforts of the ICC, of a destructive ‘each against all' mentality, where the principle of honesty within the Communist Left was more and more forgotten. The principle of mutual discussion and common action established by Marx during the Ist International as the ethos of all the different tendencies within the proletarian movement was increasingly ignored. Connected to this failure, and exacerbating it, was the proliferation of groups - often no more than disaffected bloggers - who verbally claimed to be part of the Communist Left but whose function in reality proved to be to denigrate and slander this organised tradition of left communism. However the latter as a whole has so far failed to close ranks against this malignant phenomena which further weakens the principle of honesty within the Communist Left.[4]

The ‘Circulo’ Affair

The infection from the dishonest practice of leftism, symptoms of which appear in the falsifications in CWO’s latest article on its history, is reminiscent of an earlier episode of a similar kind, the infamous scandal of the ‘Circulo Affair’ when the ICT (then called the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) re-published on its website, without any criticism, a litany of slanders against the ICC that originated from an imaginary group in Latin America called the ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’.

 In the early 2000s the ICC started discussions with a group in Argentina about the positions and organisational principles of the Communist Left and about the analysis of the piqueteros movement in that country in December 2001. As a consequence this group, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista, launched an international appeal to the groups of the Communist Left for organised discussion, to which, unfortunately, only the ICC responded positively. The NCI also made a statement condemning the actions of a parasitic group against the ICC.[5]

However, the difficulties faced by new groups coming to the Communist Left was revealed by a bizarre and destructive episode.

An ambitious individual, within the NCI, (who came to be known as Citizen B) was displaying a decidedly adventurist behaviour within the group with the air of a guru, and peremptorily demanded immediate membership of the ICC. When the conditions of this demand were rejected he took revenge by pretending that the NCI had transformed itself into an imaginary political group, the ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’ ! This outrageous usurpation took place entirely without the knowledge of the other members of the NCI.

On behalf of this phantom group, Citizen B then began to produce statements on the internet and on his own account personally reversing the previous position of the NCI against parasitism and instead taking up the very attacks of the latter against the ICC.

The first of these statements, which was physically distributed at an IBRP public meeting in Paris by the parasitic group the IGCL[6] declared:

“It is the one-sided voice of the ICC which, adopting the harmful lessons of Stalinism in 1938 to liquidate the Bolshevik old guard, is today trying to do the same: politically liquidate revolutionary comrades for the simple fact of disagreeing with its political line.”

Not only Stalin but Goebbels:

“It is necessary to put a stop to the slander and to Goebbels' policy of lying and lying again and again so that there is always something left of it”.

All this slanderous rubbish against the ICC from the statement of the bogus ‘Circulo’, unsupported by a single shred of evidence, was published without comment, and without any attempt to verify it, in several languages, on the ICT website. The non-existent ‘Circulo’ was even welcomed as a genuine addition to the ranks of revolutionaries.

The ICC, alarmed that such calumnies were published on a Communist Left website against another tendency of the Communist Left, immediately wrote to the ICT giving comprehensive evidence that the ‘Circulo’ was the grotesque invention of an adventurer and demanded that our statement of rectification of its slanderous statement be published by the ICT. It took three letters from the ICC and three weeks before this was finally done. But the matter didn’t end there.

The ICC contacted the other members of the NCI to corroborate the facts of the situation and found that the comrades were dumbfounded to learn of the usurpation and slanders of Citizen B and his ‘Circulo’ and decided to write a statement themselves denouncing the imposture and supporting the facts as presented by the ICC.[7]

Learning of this contact Citizen B then doubled down on his slanders from his first statement and produced a second tirade.

“…these telephone calls were not innocent. They had the devious intention of destroying our small nucleus, or its individual activists, by provoking mutual mistrust and sowing the seeds of division in the ranks of our small group.

…the current policy of the ICC provokes doubts and an internal atmosphere of mutual distrust. It uses the Stalinist tactic of ‘scorched earth,’ that is, not only the destruction of our small and modest group, but also the active opposition to any attempt at revolutionary regroupment which the ICC does not lead, through its sectarian and opportunistic policies. And for this, it does not hesitate to use a whole series of disgusting tricks with the central objective of demoralizing its opponents and, in this way, eliminating a ‘potential enemy’”.

Citizen B got so caught up in his manoeuvres and slanders that he found himself accusing the ICC of destroying a group that he himself had tried to replace with a completely fictitious group of his own imagination! But when this second slanderous declaration of the ‘Circulo’ appeared on the ICT website, the ICT refused to publish the statement of the NCI which completely exposed at first hand the fraud of the ‘Circulo’ and would have independently clarified and verified the whole episode. Nor did the ICT, once the facts had become obvious, and the ‘Circulo’ and Citizen B disappeared without trace, publish any retraction or explanation why the slanders against the ICC had appeared on their website or any recognition of the damage this had done to the reputation not only of the ICC but the whole Communist Left. The lying statement of the Circulo still remained for some weeks on the ICT website before it was quietly removed as though nothing had happened.

The ICC subsequently wrote an open letter to the militants of the ICT on the extreme gravity of facilitating the infiltration of the rotten methods of leftism into the behaviour of the Communist Left. We promised in this open letter that any further actions of the same type as the Circulo scandal would be exposed, particularly if the ICT again tried to extricate itself from the scandal by giving our letters the ‘silent treatment’ [8]. The present article is a fulfilment of that promise.

Instead of drawing the lessons of the experience and recognising the attacks of the ‘Circulo’ for what they were, and their own grave error of republishing them, the ICT responded at the time by adding insult to the injury on the ICC. Instead of denouncing the fraud of the ‘Circulo’ they denounced the ICC as a paranoid organisation in the process of disintegration, and posed instead as a victim of the ‘vulgar and violent’ attacks of the ICC.

The crime of the ‘Circulo’ fiasco, therefore, according to this scenario, was not that the ICT had facilitated a malicious attack on another group of the Communist Left but the fact that the ICC had reacted to this outrage and exposed it for the fraud it was.

The insolence didn’t end there. Having played a significant role in creating the ‘Circulo’ mess the ICT pretended that it was now much too busy to help clean it up and answer the critiques of the ICC. It implied that its important work toward the class struggle meant that it didn’t have time for the disputes of small groups, as though the attempt to drag a group of the Communist Left through the mud was of minor concern. 

……………….

If we recount the history of the ‘Circulo’ in this article it is to show the lessons haven’t been learnt and the same damaging mistakes are still being made. In a similar way to the episode of the ‘Circulo' the recent defamatory fabrications about the ICC contained in the article on the CWO’s history remain on their website. Not only has the ICT refused the request to publish the ICC rebuttal but it has refused to further discuss the question with the ICC, even though privately they do not contest the facts in question.

In its letter the ICT in effect responds to our request for the establishment of the facts with similar insults to those of the response of the ICT to us in 2004. According to them the problem is not the falsifications in the article but the ICC causing trouble by demanding that they be corrected publicly. The CWO pretends that the ICC is making a political game to discredit them. And they make believe they are much too busy anyway to pursue this question further; goodbye.

In reality the ‘political game’ is in this attempt to hide the falsifications in the article by further compounding them. The main discredit is here. The public rectification of the original falsifications in fact would have been to the credit of the CWO.

The Communist Left: revolutionary positions and revolutionary behaviour

The implication of the responses of the ICT to our critique is that the ICC is not concerning itself with the class struggle but only with the disputes between revolutionary groups. A glance at the work of the ICC on this site over the past 45 years will immediately reveal that this isn’t true.

It is no use pretending, in order to hide failures in this regard, that the question of the honest comportment of revolutionary organisations amongst themselves is secondary or irrelevant to the general political goals, analyses and intervention of the Communist Left. The organisational honesty of the latter in the working class is indispensable to its ultimate success. Conversely adopting, or excusing, behaviour that is more akin to leftism can only risk demoralising those who are breaking with the counter-revolutionary left to come to internationalist positions.

If the Citizen B and his ‘Circulo’ failed to make the NCI disappear immediately in 2004 as he wanted, the NCI nevertheless did not survive this whole fraudulent episode which, as we have explained, was more typical of the leftist milieu they had just escaped from than the milieu of the Communist Left which they believed they had joined. The experience had a long-term demoralising effect on them.

Today, without a revolutionary behaviour by groups of the communist left, there is a real danger of destroying the potential for new militants coming to their class positions.

Without a revolutionary behaviour, new revolutionary militants will find it difficult to distinguish not only the Communist Left from all strands of leftism but the real from the fake Communist Left. The numerous micro-groups, adventurers, individuals with a grudge, who today pretend to be part of the Communist Left tradition while devoting themselves to discrediting it, like the infamous ‘Circulo’, are proof that the internationalist platform is more than a document but a way of life, of organisational integrity.

However, upholding a common standard of behaviour amongst its different groups would strengthen the political presence of the Left Communist milieu within the working class as a whole.

The political programme of the Communist Left, that is the elaboration in the working class of the revolutionary truth of  the proletarian struggle, depends on an organisational behaviour that is consistent with these political ideals. The combat for the internationalist unity of the proletariat against the lies of imperialism and all its apologists for example, cannot be waged with the same morals as the latter and their contempt for the truth.

This is not an appeal to an eternal moral ideal but the recognition that the ends and means of the revolutionary organisation, the goal and the movement, are inseparable and constantly interrelate.

The ICC, in bringing to light the falsifications of the article on the CWO’s history is not playing a ‘game’. It is in earnest and will continue to make the question of revolutionary honesty and accuracy a central aspect of its communist intervention.

“Participating in the combat of the Communist Left does not only mean defending its political positions. It also means denouncing political behaviour such as rumours, lies, slander and blackmail, all of which are diametrically opposed to the proletariat’s struggle for its emancipation.” [9]

ICC (14/04/2021)

 

[2] Aside from the CWO the main organisation of the ICT is the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) in Italy. Like the ICC they are inheritors of the Communist Left tradition, most noted for its internationalist positions during the 2nd World War. Between 1984, when the formal regroupment of the CWO and the PCint began, and 2009, the ICT was known as the IBRP; that is the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party.

[3] The ICT reply was sent from the ‘Executive Committee of the CWO’

[4] This is not to say that the PCint/ICT has been unable to react to such slanders against itself. In 2015 a statement appeared on the ICT website ‘Response to a vile slander’ denouncing lies that were being circulated by former militants against members of the ICT:

"They have spared us nothing in their senseless accusations: fear, cowardice, betrayal, opportunism of individuals, up to accusations of links with forces of the bourgeois state.

They have never produced a thread of evidence. But since those who make accusations have the burden of producing evidence, the very absence of concrete evidence is evidence of the iniquity of these individuals and their manoeuvres.’…

In the history of our Party a thing just as bad had its counterpart - in a much more serious form - only during the Second World War, when internationalist militants were targeted by Togliatti’s thugs, who justified their campaigns of persecution right up to assassination, by accusing us of being ‘in the service of the Gestapo’."

However the ICT refused to generalise from this experience and draw the obvious parallels with similar attacks on the ICC. It has therefore been unable and unwilling to defend the Communist Left milieu as a whole from the hostile milieu of slanderers and denigrators. Worse, the ICT has made the serious mistake of trying to recruit new members and sections from such cesspools, and has inevitably been infected by the latter, to the detriment of the Communist Left as a whole.

The ICC, for is part, has always tried to defend the other groups of the Communist Left against calumny, even if the ICC’s solidarity is not reciprocated. Indeed it supported the ICT in its ‘Response to a Vile Slander’:  en.internationalism.org/icconline/201504/12486/statement-solidarity-ict.  The ICC did the same when the Los Angeles Workers' Voice group launched a campaign to denigrate the ICT (see Internationalism No. 122:  en.internationalism.org/inter/122_lawv.html).

[5] See en.internationalism.org/ir/120_regroupment-i.html for a history of this group

[6] ‘International Group of the Communist Left’, formerly known as the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”. For a history of this group see en.internationalism.org/content/16981/adventurer-gaizka-has-defenders-he-deserves-gangsters-igcl

[7] The NCI comrades also tried to have a face to face meeting with Citizen B in Buenos Aires to confront him with the facts. But he was unavailable for comment.

Rubric: 

Communist Left