International Communist Current

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Introduction

We publish below a Resolution adopted in May 2004 by the Nucleo Comunista Internacional (NCI), a small group of militants in Argentina that has recently moved towards the positions of the Communist Left. We have already published several of the NCI's texts in our press, especially on the social movements in Latin America. The resolution below refers to the activity of the self-proclaimed “Internal Fraction of the ICC”, a parasitic grouplet composed of former members of the ICC excluded from our organisation for behaviour worthy of police informers (and not for any political disagreements which we want to silence, as they pretend). The latest episodes in the offensive of the IFICC have been aimed not only at our organisation but against the whole of the Communist Left: this is why we have decided to publish the NCI’s resolution. In n°27 of its publication on the Internet (copies of which have also been sent to the addresses of our subscribers in France whose address list was stolen by a member of the so-called “Fraction”) the IFICC has published a document entitled “Report of a meeting between the IBRP and the Fraction”, where one can read, amongst other things “This meeting is an additional and significant concretisation of the bonds that our Fraction is trying to develop with the IBRP and, more widely, with the organisations and elements of the proletarian camp” (...) “this meeting made it possible to provide the bases of a common work in which the debate must take a place of the first importance”.

In reality, the least of the IFICC's concerns is the development of the proletarian milieu and the debates within it. What motivates this grouplet (as anyone can see, month after month, in the content of its publication on the Internet) is to damage the ICC as much as possible (something its members tried and failed to do when they were still in the organisation). Its members therefore need the other groups of the Communist Left to grant them a certificate of respectability in order to whitewash their thuggish behaviour worthy only of the agent provocateur. To this end the IFICC will doubtless deploy any means necessary to gain the sympathy of these groups, and especially of the IBRP: “According to our fraction, it is a political reality that there is , today, only one pole of regroupment among the groups claiming to belong to the Communist Left” (...) “The only organisation with the ability to play this role of pole of reference and of regroupment, armed with concrete experience on which we can rely, is the IBRP (...) Even with very few forces the IBRP is nevertheless the only organisation which is able to defend inside the class, in a practical way and through its intervention in the struggles, the communist, internationalist positions against bourgeois propaganda and which is able, at the same time, to serve as a pole of regroupment”. “It is also in the field of the ability to impulse the debate, to push toward a real political clarification within what we call the proletarian camp, the internationalist milieu and with respect to those who have the concern to integrate themselves in a dynamic of construction of the Party, that this organisation is active”.

In order not to tire the reader, we have only reproduced a minimal part of the tons of soft soap that the IFICC has poured over the IBRP. It appears that the IBRP has never read Aesop's famous fable where the wolf flatters the raven in order to snatch away its cheese. And so the IBRP, utterly incapable of understanding the real game of this grouplet, is handing over to the IFICC its… cheese, in other words the certificate of good conduct that the IFICC yearns for so much.

This is just the trap that the comrades of the NCI did not fall into. The NCI's Resolution is accompanied by a text explaining the reasons for their decision to take this position. The text is available in full, on our Spanish site. We will only cite one passage here: “We do not want to repeat ideas that are expressed in the following paragraphs, but a careful reading of the material that we possess can only lead us without any hesitation to say, that the IFICC, despite all the statutory guarantees that it enjoyed, has decided of its own will to abandon the discussion and to go over lock stock and barrel to the enemy camp. This was clearly proved by its conduct before and during the ICC Congress, as well as today. The attitude adopted by the IFICC is analogous to that adopted by the Menchevik fraction during the Congress of the RSDLP and which Lenin brilliantly portrayed in One step forwards two steps back. The attitude of this small nucleus is therefore one of political solidarity with the ICC, programmatic confidence in the ICC, and the rejection and repudiation of relations with the IFICC.”

The Resolution was thus adopted, as their accompanying document explains, only after having attentively examined the documents published both by the IFICC and by the ICC. They were all the more able to do so in that the IFICC had already contacted them, as we can see from the IFICC's Bulletin n°22. Since the IFICC offers to send anyone who asks not only its bulletin (which it even sends to those who explicitly ask not to receive it), but also any of the ICC's internal documents on which it was able to lay its hands, the NCI clearly had ample opportunity to study the IFICC's positions.

Today a new group has suddenly appeared from nowhere on the Internet, under the name “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas”. Although it pompously proclaims itself to be the “NCI's second epoch”, it at no point (at time of writing) explains its relationship with the NCI, nor does it explain why it now rejects the positions of the NCI which we publish below. We consider that a 180° turn in the positions that this new “Circle” defends requires nothing less that a profound political explanation on its part, something that up till now it has not done.

Resolution adopted by the Nucleo Comunista Internacional 22nd May 2004

By virtue of the above [ie the introductory text], the group Nucleo Comunista Internacional, which is based in Argentina, has unanimously decided upon the following:

1) We reject the accusations made against the International Communist Current by the Internal Fraction of the ICC.

2) We emphatically reject the doubts and suspicions that the IFICC has maliciously spread against a number of comrades of the ICC, we give our full solidarity to these comrades.

3) We consider the accusations of the ICC's Stalinist methods to be unfounded.

4) We consider that these accusations were motivated by a sect and clan spirit on the part of the Fraction arising from personal loyalties, not programmatic differences.

5) We repudiate the IFICC's stealing of money and material from the organisation.

6) We consider the IFICC an organisation outside of the working class, thus we propose its exclusion and expulsion from the proletariat, for conduct of a bourgeois character.

7) We consider the IFICC to be an organisation one hundred percent influenced by bourgeois ideology.

8) We reject the method used by the IFICC in order to avoid political debate at the XV Congress of the ICC, and renounce its liquidationist and destructive attitude.

9) We consider the conduct adopted by the IFICC as alien to the working class, and the Communist Left, being closer to that displayed by Stalin in his defamatory campaigns against Bolshevik militants.

10) We unanimously consider that the IFICC is a provocateur organisation in the service of the bourgeois state.[1]

11) We consider that the IFICC is not the inheritor of the ICC's programmatic principles of functioning; on the contrary it is their enemy.

12) We consider the ICC to be an organisation which, despite its own difficulties, which it does not hide, sticks to the fundamental principles of the Programme and Manifesto of the ICC just as it does the other theoretical acquisitions that have arisen from the class struggle.

13) We reject the false accusations formulated by the IFICC about the ICC abandoning the class struggle and having lost confidence in the Communist Revolution.

14) We authorise the ICC, if it considers it appropriate, to publish this document, for whatever purposes it may consider pertinent.

Buenos Aires May 22nd 2004.

The reasons for a repudiation

The positions defended by the NCI in the above Resolution, as well as the arguments contained in the accompanying text (see the Spanish version), leave no doubt as to their condemnation of behaviour foreign to the proletariat and their denunciation of those responsible for such behaviour. As the comrades of the NCI say, it is only after having “understood through reading the publications, both of the ICC, and of the Internal Fraction of the ICC” that they “repudiate the IFICC’s stealing of money and material from the organisation (...) We consider the conduct adopted by the IFICC as foreign to the working class, and to the Communist Left (...), We consider the IFICC an organisation outside of the working class”. This appreciation by the NCI dated May 2004 was repeated again in June 2004 in its contribution on the piqueteros movement (published in International Review n°119) when it affirmed that “the IFICC has only carried out a policy of lies and insults against the ICC”.

During the public meeting of the IBRP[2] in Paris on the 2nd October, a “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas”, claiming some kind of relationship with the NCI, made its presence known through a “Declaration” distributed as a leaflet by the IFICC, in which we can read that “the members of this small nucleus, want to declare that we don't agree any more with these accusations” (in other words, with the NCI's resolution) and that they therefore decide “to reject the contents of the May 2004 document published by the ICC”. This declaration appeared publicly solely on the website of the IFICC, and that only after the public meeting of the IBRP! Despite the Declaration's claim that copies have been sent to all the groups of the political milieu (amongst which the Declaration includes the ICC), we have never received it, either before or after it was distributed by the IFICC.

Such an unexpected 180° about turn, concerning questions of such vital importance for the workers' movement as the condemnation of the behaviour of informers and thieves, does not even merit the most minimal political explanation from this “this small group”. In order to “justify” its open contradiction of the position previously defended by the NCI, the Circulo’s “Declaration” suggests that NCI had adopted its Resolution “without any information about the vicissitudes through which the proletarian political milieu, and more specifically the ICC, had been going, since the expulsion of founding members of this current and today form the Internal Fraction of the ICC”, thereby insinuating that the ICC gave the NCI biased and one sided information.[3] In reality, any reader can easily check for themselves[4] that in May 2004 the IFICC had already published on the Internet the majority of its bulletins. And we know the IFICC has without a doubt been sending them to all who have asked for them (it is still sending them to those who have repeatedly asked them to stop sending them). Faced with such a level of distortion we will limit ourselves to repeating that the NCI asserted that its Resolution was adopted “through reading the publications, as much of the Internal Fraction of the ICC, as the ICC”.

From what is said in the “new Declaration” it is the author who is the one who is really badly informed since, as our readers can verify for themselves through our territorial press, the International Review and our Website, the ICC has never said that the members of the IFICC are “police” nor “agents of the bourgeois state” unlike what the “Circulo” tries to say. We call on all interested readers to verify this through reading the Public Warning concerning the exclusion of the element called “Jonas” as well as the recent articles on the IFICC. This new “Circulo” interestingly avoids pronouncing upon what the NCI said concerning the behaviour of denouncing and thievery being alien and incompatible with the proletariat and the Political Milieu. In fact, we can see that at the time of writing (15th October), 2 weeks after the IFICC began circulating the Declaration by the “Circulo”, this declaration has still not appeared on the “Circulo’s” own website,. What are we to think of such “discretion”? Perhaps the author of this violent attack on the ICC wants to hide his most recent writings? Perhaps he wants to hide it from the eyes of those in whose name he claims to speak?

Lastly, it is rather “curious” that the reason given for the “Declaration” is “the publication in the press of the International Communist Current, and on its Website of a Resolution adopted by the NCI in the month of May 2004”, since the NCI had expressly declared that “We authorise the ICC, if it considers it appropriate, to publish this, for purposes that it consider pertinent” and at no time has the NCI changed position or uttered any reservations in this respect.

ICC: 15th October 2004

[1]This phrase is ambiguous, and goes further than the ICC's opinion on the matter. As we have pointed out previously, we do not consider the IFICC to be directly in the pay of the state.

[2]International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, (Battaglia Comunista, Communist Workers Organisation, et. al.

[3]It should be noted that the IFICC, in its commentaries accompanying its publication of the “Circulo’s” “Declaration” says that the NCI’s May 2004 Resolution condemning the IFICC was “extracted from the militants of the NCI through traps and blackmail” that this text was adopted “under pressure and even at the dictation of the ICC delegation sent to the Argentinean comrades”. Clearly the IFICC are contributing some of their own inventions, proving the profound scorn they have towards the members of the NCI who, according to them, were nothing but puppets “writing under the dictation of the ICC”. Moreover, there was no delegation of the ICC in Argentina on 22nd May 2004. Another invention of the IFICC! In another fragrant lie, the IFICC accuses the ICC in the following terms “the ICC published this text [the position of May 2004] without mentioning that the ex-NCI had rejected it, a rejection that they know about. Another dirty trick and 'omission' that equals a dishonest lie”. The facts speak for themselves: the May Position of the NCI was published in Révolution Internationale and on the French website of the ICC on the 27th September, when the txt of the “Circulo” rejecting the NCI’s Resolution is dated the 2nd October. Nor has the ICC ever been informed by the NCI about any rejection of their 22nd May Resolution. Shameless lies are the great speciality of the IFICC that has a real tendency to attribute to others its own dirty tricks.

[4] As we put the English translation of this document on the web (1/11/2004), the IFICC site has mysteriously disappeared from view. For what reason only time will tell.