International Communist Current

In recent months, our organisation has received a whole series of letters from readers posing the question "What do you have to do to join the ICC?" This desire for militant commitment on the part of elements looking for a class perspective has been expressed in several parts of the world, in countries as different as France and the USA, Britain and Bangladesh. We have already sent to each of these readers a personal reply proposing that they start a discussion with our organisation in order to make our positions more explicit. However, this question is not only relevant to those who have posed it to us directly - joining a revolutionary organisation is a political question in its own right. Thus in this article we aim to give a general response to all those who are concerned with the question of what it means to be a militant in a revolutionary organisation like the ICC.

To begin with we want to salute the approach of the readers who are now showing a will to make a militant commitment. This extremely positive dynamic is the expression of a wider reflection going on within the working class. Despite the campaigns of the bourgeoisie, despite its attacks against the left communist current, despite the slanders thrown at the very idea of communism,[1] these readers have stood up to all this and have been able to recognise the seriousness of our organisation.

The conditions for becoming an ICC militant

The process of integrating new militants into a political organisation depends first of all on the class nature of this organisation. In bourgeois parties (for example the Stalinist parties), it is enough just to take your membership card and pay your dues to be member of the organisation. Militants of this type of organisation are not involved with developing the consciousness of the working class; on the contrary, their task is to derail the workers' awareness onto a bourgeois terrain, especially at election times.

For a revolutionary organisation, that is to say an organisation that really defends the perspective of the proletariat (the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a world communist society), the role of the militant is radically different. Their goal is not to make a career as a representative of this or that faction of capital, or to stick up posters for electoral campaigns, but to contribute to the development of consciousness in the working class. As Marx and Engels affirmed in the Communist Manifesto, "the communists have this advantage over the rest of the proletariat, that they have a clear understanding of the conditions, the line of march and the general results of the proletarian movement". This is why the militants of a revolutionary organisation have to be involved in a continuous process of raising their own level of consciousness.

In this sense, the first condition for joining the ICC is that the comrades who pose their candidature have to show their understanding of, and full agreement with, our programmatic principles.

However, the degree of their agreement with our political positions is not in itself sufficient to become a member of the ICC. Candidates must also show their will to defend the positions of the organisation, each according to his or her own personal capacities. We don't demand of our militants that everyone has to be a good orator, know how to write a leaflet or articles for the press. What's important is that the ICC as a whole can carry out its responsibilities and that each militant is ready to give the best they can to allow the organisation to assume fully the tasks for which the working class has engendered it.

Militants of the ICC are not passive spectators, nor sheep bleating behind a 'bureaucratic leadership' as our detractors claim. But they do have definite duties the organisation. First of all by paying their dues (because without money the organisation can't meet the costs of printing its press, hiring rooms, paying for travel, etc.) They have the duty to take part in meetings, in interventions, in the distribution of the press etc., and in the internal debates of the organisation: defending their disagreements while respecting the rules of functioning established by our statutes.

These duties are not new. Already in 1903, in the debate on paragraph 1 of the statutes of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party this question of "who is a member of the party" set the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks.[2] For the Bolsheviks, only those who took an active part in the life of the organisation could be considered members of the party, whereas for the Mensheviks it was enough to be in agreement with the positions of the organisation and give it their support to be considered as militants. The position of the Mensheviks was firmly opposed by Lenin in his book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. For Lenin, this was a purely opportunist vision, marked by petty bourgeois conceptions. Lenin's detractors have often claimed that his position was 'authoritarian' and was part of his aim to establish the power of a small minority. In fact the opposite is the case: it is the opportunist vision defended by the Mensheviks that contains that danger. 'Rank and file' militants who have little conviction and little political formation are going to be much more inclined to allow the 'leaders' to think and decide on their behalf than militants who have a deep understanding of the positions of the organisation and are actively involved in defending them. It is the conception of the Mensheviks which at best leads to a small minority carrying out its own personal, adventurist policies behind the back of the organisation and in opposition to it.

On this question of "who is member of the party" the ICC remains faithful to the conception of the Bolsheviks. This is why we make a very clear distinction between militants of the organisation and sympathisers who share our positions and give us their support.

A fair number of the comrades who take part with us in public interventions, help us to distribute the press and give us financial help are not yet ready to be fully involved in militant activity, which demands a lot of energy and perseverance in long-term, regular work. To join the ICC as a militant means being able to put this activity at the centre of one's life. Commitment to a revolutionary organisation is not a kind of hobby. It requires of each a militant tenacity, a capacity to stand firm against wind and rain, to avoid being demoralised by the ups and downs of the class struggle. In other words, it requires a profound confidence in the historic perspective of the proletariat. Revolutionary militancy also demands a loyal, disinterested dedication to the proletarian cause, a real will to defend the precious instrument of the organisation whenever it is attacked, denigrated and slandered by the forces of the bourgeoisie and their accomplices in the parasitic milieu.

In order to become a militant of the ICC, you also have to have the ability to integrate yourself into a collective framework, to bring solidarity between comrades to life and to banish petty bourgeois individualism, which is expressed in the spirit of competition, jealousy or rivalry towards one's comrades in the struggle, all of which are veritable diseases of the ideology of the ruling class.

To become a militant of a revolutionary organisation, what is needed, as Bordiga put it, is strength of conviction and a will to action, which includes the permanent combat against the weight of capitalist ideology within the organisation.

Concretely, comrades who want to join the ICC should start right now preparing to assume their responsibilities, which means:

• making themselves available to hold discussions on the ICC platform with delegations mandated by the organisation. This process of discussion is aimed at deepening their agreement with our platform, something that cannot be a purely superficial approximation. This implies that candidates should not hesitate to express their disagreements, divergences or incomprehensions so that the discussion can lead to a real clarification;

• begin to provide regular material support to the organisation through financial donations and by participating in sales of the press.

At the end of this process of discussing our programmatic positions, comrades who want to join the ICC must also show their agreement with the ICC's conception of the functioning of the organisation and its statutes, the spirit of which is contained in our article in International Review n°33 ('Structure and function of the organisation of revolutionaries').

The ICC's policy towards candidates

The ICC has always enthusiastically welcomed the new elements who want to join us. This is why it invests a great deal of time and energy to the process of integrating candidates, so that these future militants will be able straightaway to take part in all the activities of the organisation. However, this enthusiasm does not at all imply that we have a policy of recruitment for its own sake, like the Trotskyist organisations.

Our policy is not one of premature integrations on an unclear, opportunist basis. We are not interested in comrades joining the ICC and then leaving us after a few months or years because they have realised that militant life is too much of a constraint, that it demands too many 'sacrifices', or because they see in retrospect that they had never really assimilated the ICC's organisational principles (in general, these comrades have a great deal of difficulty recognising this and prefer to abandon the combat bearing recriminations against the ICC, which can lead them to justifying their desertion through some kind of parasitic activity).

The Bolsheviks' conception of organisational questions has shown the validity of this approach. The ICC is not a bed and breakfast stopover and it's not interested in fishing for members.

Neither do we peddle illusions. This is why those readers who pose the question 'how do you go about joining the ICC?' have to understand that becoming part of the ICC takes time. Every comrade who poses his candidature must therefore be prepared to be patient. The process of integration is a means whereby the candidate finds out for himself the depth of his conviction, so that the decision to become a militant is not taken lightly or on the spur of the moment. This is also the best guarantee we can offer that his will towards militant engagement does not end up in failure and demoralisation.

Because the activity of revolutionaries is part of a historic perspective, militants have to hold out over the long term, without getting demoralised. This is why comrades who want to join the ICC have to avoid any immediatism, any impatience in the process of integration. Immediatism is precisely the basis of leftist recruitment - they never stop reproaching the ICC with phrases like "what do you do 'practically'?" or "what immediate results have you obtained?"

More than ever the working class needs new revolutionary forces. But the numerical growth of the organisations of the communist left can only be a real reinforcement if it represents the culmination of a process of clarification aimed at forming new militants, at giving them a solid basis for assuming their responsibilities within the organisation.

GL, 18/2/04.

[1] We can point to a number of bourgeois campaigns against the revolutionary perspective, most notably the whole furore about the 'death of communism', which followed the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in 1989. We have also written articles about the campaigns on 'revisionism', which has been aimed at discrediting the communist left by associating it with the Holocaust deniers.

[2] See the article '1903-04 and the Birth of Bolshevism' in International Review 116.