(This letter is published as a supplement to World Revolution 281, February 2005)
Following the immense earthquake and its terrible effects radiating from and around the Indian Ocean, communists can only express their solidarity and commiserations with the great numbers affected. The tales of life saving, assistance and sustenance from local populations and tourists alike in the midst of the most terrible suffering contradicts the ‘each for themselves’ of the ruling class. This solidarity, with the vast majority of workers and poor who took the brunt of the grief, stands in stark contrast to the hypocrisy, parochialism and charity of the bourgeoisie.
Some newspaper columnists are already talking about the “no-blame” disaster. Of course it was a natural disaster but one whose effects were made a thousand times worse by a decomposing system of production for profit. Local nuclear powers and other local regimes who spend fortunes on the military decided only last year that a relatively cheap and effective warning system was “too expensive” (an advance warning of typhoons from weather stations in Bangla Desh involving people going out on push bikes and blowing whistles has reduced the loss of life from flash floods by 90%).
Two of the regions hit are major war torn areas: Aceh, Indonesia and the Tamil region of Sri Lanka. Already here the majority of the populations were on the floor mentally and physically. Tens of thousands of land mines have been churned up here to add to the ongoing carnage. There have been hints that the governments involved have been restricting aid to these areas thus making full use of nature’s “dirty bomb”. Outside of the war zones, most people were making a precarious living at best in countries with little infrastructure and welfare and dominated by corrupt politicians who work with the Godfathers of the major imperialisms.
We once again see clearly that capitalism is not set up to save people in danger. In the first day and a half after the event, dozens and dozens of aircraft left the European metropoles to pick up stranded tourists. Apart from the flight crews every one of these planes were empty, while the wide ranging scale of the disaster was obvious after a couple of hours of the news breaking. Only after 4 whole days did the first help begin to trickle in.
The UN has shown it is worse than useless. Kofi Annan, the great champion of the poor, carried on with his holiday and made his first – empty – statement over 4 days later. The British government was forced to up its paltry “aid” in the face of a massive response from individuals who wanted to help. As with the Bam earthquake of a year ago the majority of this promised aid will not materialise. Five days later and no British military aircraft have even been put on standby in order to assist (6 days later and Hilary Benn, Minister of Overseas Development, has said that that military transport will be “ made ready” at “the Government’s expense”), i.e., for some two weeks later.
Imperialist rivalries have inevitably reared their heads: European diplomats criticising the US and vice versa. The US taking the lead in setting up a “coalition” of itself, India, Australia and Japan has annoyed the British bourgeoisie and led to anti-US leaks from them to the British media. This important military alliance undermines the UK’s position in the region.
In short, while expressing solidarity with the victims, communists can only denounce the bourgeoisie and their system of production for profit which has laid the basis for and exacerbated the toll of death and misery here, and will continue to do so as long as it exists.
Fraternally, E
In October 2004 delegations of the Hungarian group Barikád Kollektíva and the International Communist Current met for a discussion around the following points:
- Russian Revolution, role and character of the Bolsheviks and the left fractions of the Komintern
- Decadence of capitalism
- Current situation: imperialism and the class struggle.
In spite of important political divergences on almost every question, the atmosphere of the discussion was friendly and open and it was possible to explain the respective points of view at length. This was certainly due largely to the fact that both groups want to achieve the same goal, i.e. the classless society, and both are also agreed that this can be realised only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism on an international scale.
In addition to this there are a number of common programmatic points:
- the only class that is able to carry out such a revolution today is the proletariat;
- in the process towards revolution the proletariat cannot ally itself with the bourgeoisie or any part of it;
- revolutionaries defend an internationalist position on imperialist war;
- the so-called national liberation movements and anti-fascism are bourgeois and have nothing to do with the proletarian struggle;
- the working class is an international unity that transcends national boundaries; revolutionaries have to emphasise the common and general interests of the working class;
- an expression of the unity of the working class is its tendency to centralise its struggle.
For reasons of time and space it is not possible here to draw a balance sheet[1] [2] of every point discussed at this meeting. Instead we will concentrate on two points which are particularly important today: firstly, the defence of the historic materialist method and hence the question of the objective and subjective conditions for the proletarian revolution; secondly, the responsibility of revolutionaries to mercilessly expose the lack of perspective and the barbarism of capitalism today.
One of the points on the discussion’s agenda was the question of the decadence of capitalism. The Hungarian comrades reject the ICC's view that every mode of production has gone through an ascendant and a decadent phase. The ICC defends the position that approximately 90 years ago capitalism ceased to be able to offer the conditions necessary for the further development of the productive forces and that the first world war, with its destructive fury , showed that the capitalist mode of production had entered its decadent period. This was also the view of most of the revolutionaries in that period and during the working class struggles that followed it (especially in Russia, Germany, Hungary etc), that is, in the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), for example, stated in its programme of 1920: “The world economic crisis, born from the world war, with its monstrous social and economic effects which produce the thunderstruck impression of a field of ruins of colossal dimensions, can only signify one thing: the Twilight of the Gods of the bourgeois-capitalist world order is nigh. Today, it is not a question of the periodic economic crises which were once a part of the capitalist mode of production; it is the crisis of capitalism itself; (…) It appears more and more clearly that the ever-growing antagonism between exploiters and exploited, that the contradiction between capital and labour, the consciousness of which is becoming more widespread even among those previously apathetic layers of the proletariat, cannot be resolved. Capitalism is experiencing its definitive failure, it has plunged itself into the abyss in a war of imperialist robbery; it has created a chaos whose unbearable prolongation places the proletariat in front of the historic alternative: relapse into barbarism or construction of a socialist world.
(…)
In conformity with its maximalist views the KAPD equally declares itself for the rejection of all reformist and opportunist methods of struggle, which is only a way of avoiding serious and decisive struggles with the bourgeois class. The party doesn’t seek to avoid these struggles, but on the contrary actively encourages them. In a State which carries all the symptoms of the period of the decadence of capitalism, the participation in parliamentarism is also part of these reformist and opportunist methods.”
The comrades of the Barikád collective defend the position that dividing history into ascendant and decadent phases does not make any sense and is rather mechanistic. Their view is that ever since the emergence of private property, there have been those who are oppressed and who rebel against exploitation and the ruling class; the Spartacus insurrection of the slaves in ancient Rome or the peasant wars in Germany in the 16th century are proof of this. As there has always been class struggle, the revolutionary overthrow of the dominant class has been possible at any time. For Barikád, to say that the proletarian revolution was not yet possible in 1871, at the time of the Paris Commune, is to be diverted from this revolutionary task.
As the Barikád collective refers a great deal to Marx and Engels in its texts, the ICC delegation tried to establish to what extent (if at all) there is agreement on this question with the founders of dialectic materialism. Marx and Engels considered parliamentarism in the 19th century as a necessary weapon in the arsenal of the working class; they also supported various national struggles in this period as necessary for the development of the conditions for the proletarian revolution. In the decadent phase of capitalism these means and struggles are not only useless, but are also counter-revolutionary. The reply made by the Hungarian comrades to this is that Marx’ and Engels’ support for certain national struggles was a “sin”; Barikád Kollektíva does not consider the method of Marx and Engels valid.
For the ICC too the name or the person in itself is not decisive. We do not think that each sentence of Marx or of other revolutionaries should be accepted automatically as the truth. Even from a superficial point of view this is not possible because sometimes they contradict each other or they defend different ideas in different periods. There are revolutionaries who were able to contribute more to the advancement of revolutionary theory than others, but this does not mean that the errors made by the latter necessarily make them counter-revolutionary. However for us the historical and materialist method of Marx and Engels is indispensable for analysing the past and present relationship between the classes and the conditions for reversing the domination of the bourgeoisie. After the insurrection of 1848 Marx recognised, quite correctly, that he and the other comrades of the Communist League had overestimated the possibility of revolution: "With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms come in collision with each other." (Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-50, Part IV, The Abolition of Universal Suffrage in 1850)
For a successful revolution to take place, certain objective and subjective conditions must be fulfilled. The old order that is to be overthrown, must be unable to offer a real perspective any longer. It must have lost its vitality and be seen to be so empty that even the dominant class is unable to defend it convincingly any longer. At the same time there must be a class which embodies the new perspective, the future society, and which is both able and willing to make the revolution. To go from the general to the specific conditions at least four historical conditions for the success of a revolutionary movement can be identified:
A) The old social order must have become too narrow for the development of the productive forces.
B) The dominant class must have lost its legitimacy to continue its rule. It cannot continue to govern.
C) The revolutionary class must refuse to be suppressed any longer. It does not want to go on being governed.
D) Geographically the balance of forces between the dominant and the revolutionary class must shift so strongly in favour of the latter that it can be victorious on the military level as well (as the proletarian revolution is a world revolution, the balance of forces must change in favour of the proletariat at an international level).
In reality these factors cannot be completely separated from each other, they are related, but they can be distinguished from each other and they show that a revolution must fail if even one of these four conditions is not fulfilled. Marx and Engels realised that after both 1848 and 1871, the situation was such that capitalism’s mission had not yet been completed and so it was because the first of these conditions had not been met that the June 1848 insurrection and the Commune ended in defeat.
The revolutions in Germany and Hungary 1919/20 cannot be seen in isolation; they were part of the international revolutionary wave. The third factor is crucial in order to understand why they failed; the will and ability of the revolutionary class and its vanguard to lead the revolutionary process to a successful conclusion, were not sufficiently developed and so the ruling class succeeded in firmly establishing a new government (second factor).
It is the fourth factor that was decisive in the failure of the Russian revolution: the proletarian revolution cannot be realised in one country alone. It was necessary for the balance of forces to tilt internationally in favour of the proletariat. In Russia alone the capitalist mode of production could never be abolished; the affirmation that this was in fact possible was fraudulent and opened the door to the (Stalinist) counter-revolution.
The fact that Marxists examine the conditions for the revolution using this historical materialist method cannot by any means be mistaken for a mechanistic approach. The examples given above are enough to show that we consider the subjective as well as objective factors. In the long run everything depends on the proletariat, its consciousness, its will and its unity. If we speak of capitalist decadence as a necessary precondition for the proletarian revolution, it has nothing to do with fatalism; we know that the capitalist social (dis-)order will not vanish without the conscious action of the working class. "The collapse of capitalism in Marx depends on the act of will of the working class; but this will is not a free choice, but is itself determined by economic development." (Anton Pannekoek, The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism)
Barikád Kollektíva and the ICC felt that it was important to discuss the analysis of the present situation as well. Because we had little time we concentrated on the question of imperialism.
On this question too there were differences. Both groups defend an internationalist viewpoint in relation to imperialist war and so draw the conclusion that there can be no support for any side in any imperialist conflict: neither Israel or Palestine, no faction in the Iraq war, in Chechnya or elsewhere - the proletariat has nothing to gain from any of these wars. We also agreed that pacifism does not help stop wars, rather capitalism itself must be overthrown in order to put an end to them.
However, there was no agreement on how to explain the causes behind the imperialist conflicts. Whereas the ICC insists on the fact that there are material contradictions between the opponents in the various wars, particularly between the main powers, and that they want to weaken the others and strengthen their own position, the Barikád collective defends the view that these contradictions are only apparent and that wars are really directed against the working class. The comrades say that capitalism suffers from overproduction, in particular it produces a surplus of workers and it is the aim of the bourgeoisie to eliminate proletarians by means of its constant wars. It is also the workers who are the victim of the massacres in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. The second world war was the international bourgeoisie's answer to the struggles of the working class in Spain, France and China during the 1930ies. On the question of the massacre of the Jews in the concentration camps, they say that the allied forces as well as the Nazis were responsible. In addition to this, the crushing of the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto reveals the complicity between the different imperialists, specifically Hitler and Stalin.
The ICC replied to this argument with a criticism along two lines: firstly that the Barikád collective underestimates the gravity of the condition in which capitalism finds itself; secondly that it overestimates the ability of the bourgeoisie to control its descent into chaos and/or to postpone it ad infinitum. It is certainly true that the bourgeoisie is able to unite against the working class and it always does so when there is a proletarian threat to the dominant social order. The division of labour between the Nazis and the Russian Army in relation to the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto is an example; the complicity of the bourgeoisie of all countries against the proletarian struggle in November 1918 is another one; the war was ended immediately in order to leave the dominant class in Germany, Austria and Hungary with its hands free to fight against the developing power of the workers' councils. And for the ICC there is no doubt about the joint responsibility of the Allies and the Nazis in the Holocaust; even in 1945 our political predecessors of the Communist Left of France attacked the whole of the international bourgeoisie and its macabre demagoguery around the concentration camps.[2] [3]
But the fact that the bourgeoisie is able to band together against the proletariat should not blind us to the reality that the dominant class today is tied to the nation state and that the contradictions between the different nation states cannot be overcome under capitalist rule. Only the working class is a really international class which has the same interests which reach across all borders. The bourgeoisie on the other hand always acts according to the laws of competition: every man for himself. In particular, from the beginning of the 20th Century, when the world market had been divided up and there were essentially no more extra-capitalist markets to be conquered, this competition sharpened into a murderous battle in which each nation state had continuously to defend its sphere of influence against its rivals and try to increase its area of influence. It is precisely for this reason that, since then, there have been more numerous and destructive wars than ever before in the history of mankind. The barbarism of capitalist exploitation in its decadence is reflected not only in the hell of the factory and mass misery, but also through the uncontrollable conflicts between nation states and between the various bourgeois factions. It is a dangerous illusion to think that there is somehow an economic rationality behind this slaughter of the proletariat in the wars that have been waged after 1914.
The situation is extremely serious and only the conscious act of a united proletariat can put a stop to the destruction of mankind (and perhaps to all life on the planet).[3] [4] It would not only be stupid to delude ourselves, it would also be irresponsible because time is not on our side; if the barbarity of massacres, military destruction, the predatory exploitation of nature goes on, then we will reach a point of no return and the perspective of a classless society will be definitively lost simply because the soil on which such a society should grow, is destroyed - literally as well as metaphorically.
As Pannekoek said in the contribution quoted above: the removal of the old illusions is the first task of the working class!
31/01/05
[1] [5] The two delegations agreed that each would write a balance sheet and would submit it to the other previous to its publication in order to avoid misunderstanding when quoting the position of the other group. The balance sheet of Barikád Kollektíva can be found on the internet here: anarcom.lapja.hu
[2] [6] See the article on our website The joint responsibility of Allies and Nazis in the Holocaust [7].
[3] [8] If the proletariat is undefeated the bourgeoisie is not able to unleash a world war. That’s why the analysis of Barikád, that sees WW2 as a response to the struggles of the working class in Spain, France and China during the 1930ies, is wrong. The opposite is true: because of the defeat of the working class after the revolutionary wave the bourgeoisie in the different states could march towards generalised war (see our book The Italian Communist Left 1926-1945).
To all the Parisian members of the group called the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”
We took note of your text published on your web site in which you support a "Declaration", dated October 2nd 2004, of a "Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas", which is presented in the form of a successor of the NCI of Argentina, to denounce the "ignominy" of "these bastards" (according to your own words) who direct the ICC. In this text, you denounce slanders of which you have been victims and that were used to justify your exclusion from our organisation. The "Declaration" of October 2nd, which you published in three languages, affirms that our charges related to your political behaviour are null and void with the following argument: "the charges of the ICC against the Internal Fraction (…) are not based on an independent investigation".
So that our charges can be examined by an authority independent of the ICC, we reiterate once again the proposal we made to you during your exclusion: we ask you to ensure your defence in front of a Jury of Honour by addressing a formal and public letter to the other groups of the Communist Left explicitly asking for their participation in such a Jury. As soon as you make this step, we will transmit to the members of this Jury of Honour all the elements of the file we hold concerning your intrigues at the centre of the ICC, and that it will rest on each one of you to refute in front of this authority of the proletarian political milieu.
You will find on our Internet site an article [12] (which we published in 1996), based on the experience of the workers’ movement, which recalls the duty of communist militants to convene a revolutionary tribunal each time that they estimate themselves to be victims of slanders or that their honour and their probity are called into question (as you affirm that it is your case today).
The ICC,
15/10/2004.
Since the end of the 60's world capitalism has been going through a permanent crisis, one of whose most flagrant manifestations has been mass unemployment. There have been successive waves of lay-offs, and a total inability to integrate the new generations of workers into the productive process. To try and mask this enormous unemployment and to seek to avoid its explosive growth, which could expose the bankruptcy of capitalism, the exploiters have used the trick of filling a post using five, ten or even twenty different kinds of temporary contracts. In Spain, in October alone nearly one and a half million contracts were registered with the Employment Offices, and this despite the fact that the number of unemployed increased by more than 30,000 workers!
The answer is NO, despite what the “left” parties or the “anti-globalisation” movements tell us about casualisation being the fault of right-wing governments or of “neo-liberalism”. What is true is that countries famed for their “social awareness”, such as France or Germany, have been developing the use of such contracts under preposterous names such as “insertion contracts”, “replacement contracts” etc. In Spain, the process of casualisation was begun by the “Socialist” Gonzalez government with the whole series of measures that it began to impose in 1984. The leading proponent of casualisation in Spain is the public sector. “Left-wing” regional and town councils have carried this out on a large scale.
From the trade unions to brainy sociologists, they try to sell us the idea that “the working class is not what it was”, since there is a division between: the “privileged” workers with “fixed” contracts, with redundancy pay and higher wages, on the one hand; and those with temporary contracts without any form of “security” on the other. The aim of all this ideology about the “new composition” of the proletariat is to sow divisions and conflicts within the proletariat's ranks, to the great rejoicing of the capitalists.
The proliferation of “temporary contracts” is a very pointed expression of the precariousness that is quintessential to wage labour. If by precariousness we mean insecurity about one’s own existence and the future, then the proletariat is the class of precariousness. Workers are totally separated from the means of life and production. If they want to eat they have to pass through the ordeals of wage labour. However, getting a job does not depend on one's will, nor the individual will of the capitalist, but the laws of the market. If this is expanding then more workers will have the “privilege” of eating in exchange for increased exploitation; but if it is contracting, as has been happening for the last 30 years, exploitation will continue growing but less workers will be able to earn a living or will have to put up with increasingly insecure work.
Unlike the exploited classes of previous modes of production such as slavery or feudalism (who despite all their poverty at least had their existence insured due to personally belonging to the master or to the feudal lord) the proletariat does not belong to any boss in particular but to the capitalist class as a whole. Workers have “freedom of work”, that is to say no individual capitalist has the commitment to guarantee their existence for life. This supposed liberty, as characterised by bourgeois propaganda, is, on the contrary, the worst kind slavery, because it is based on the most terrible insecurity and precariousness.
Indeed yes. Precariousness has always been part of workers’ existence. The existence of an important layer of the population needing work and therefore the means to procure its existence (what Marx and Engels called the “reserve army of labour”) is not only a consequence but a necessity, a pre-condition, of the capitalist economy itself. The present massive process of casualisation is not the expression of a “new way” found by capitalism in order to “reinvent itself”. It is the most patent manifestation of its terminal crisis.
Absolutely not. Permanent work is on the way to becoming a museum item. In Japan and Germany the myth of a “job for life” is crumbling. In China – which for years was presented as a “proletarian revolution” and which today is sold as a “capitalist miracle” - not only is unemployment growing, but for the “fortunate” ones with jobs in the “new industries” working conditions are frightening. Not to mention the other countries of the Third World where permanent work never became a mass reality in the first place! Neither in the technologically “cutting edge” industries, or in the more traditional sectors, are workers guaranteed the means of survival.
Time and again we are told that the “casuals” are in a very different situation from those with “permanent” jobs: the latter can at least count on the safeguard of redundancy pay or unemployment pay. The truth is that such benefits are progressively being reduced, as has recently happened in Germany with the measures against the unemployed imposed by the “progressive” Social Democrats and Greens. As for redundancy payments or early retirement, they are nothing more than the deferred wages of workers exhausted by working for years in miserable conditions. It is also necessary to remember that very often these retired workers have to maintain or at least support their children and grandchildren whom capitalism condemns to unemployment, precariousness and the denial of access to a livelihood.
In the history of the proletariat we can only talk about a short period of time (from 1945 to the end of the 1970's) where it was true that there was “guaranteed work”. This has to be put into parenthesis because the economic reconstruction that followed the slaughter of the imperialist Second World War was an exception in the existence of successive generations of workers.
Yes, of course. Being subcontracted, casual or “on the pay roll”; being active or retired, working in the great factories of the capitalist metropolis or in the filthy workshops in the slums of the Third World, these are the conditions that capitalist exploitation imposes on workers. This means that whether active, unemployed, retired, casual, immigrant, in the most advanced or in the most underdeveloped countries, proletarians everywhere belong to the same class.
The exploiters and their ideology try to destroy this class identity through creating all kinds of confrontations and divisions between some workers and others. To workers with temporary contracts they say that their situation is caused by the “privileged” workers with “permanent” contracts. On the other hand, temporary workers are presented to the latter as “competitors” who drive down working conditions and put pressure on their wage levels. “Temporary” contracts are more abundant amongst the youngest workers: the capitalist propaganda machine seeks to use this situation in order to create a generational division, a confrontation between young and veteran workers, through recourse to stale “sociological” considerations. Not to mention the confrontation they want to create between workers of one country and their brothers that have emigrated there!
The whole class suffers the same slavery and insecurity: wage labour. The whole of the working class is the collective producer of the immense majority of the social wealth which is appropriated by our true enemy: the capitalists. No part of the working class lives at the cost of another.
This is another great lie with which they try to create new divisions between workers, whilst at the same time putting forward the idea that the unions “at least” defend one part of the working class. For decades, since capitalism became incapable of providing improvements and reforms to workers, the unions have been turned into an instrument of the bourgeois state destined to co-manage exploitation and to sabotage workers’ struggles. On the one hand, they are the accomplices of the bosses and state in the signing of the whole class to agreements that destroy our living and working conditions; on the other hand, whether their highly manipulated “strikes” and “demonstrations” are passive or “radical”, they have the same aim: the sabotage of workers' unity and fighting spirit. The two faces of union action have been shown to us yet again with the shipyard workers.
Only the real struggles of the working class can defend worker's interests. To call on the unions to help casual workers is to ask the fox to guard the hens. A “Union of Casual Workers” would integrate them into the same machine as the others, and stoke up even more opposition between them and permanent workers. The unions have underwritten the measures against permanent workers and helped to develop casualisation. When they cry crocodile tears about the “high level of temporary workers” they are demonstrating the cynicism that is typical of the class that they serve: the bourgeoisie.
It would appear that the unions, politicians, and the capitalists are “worried” about casualisation. In Catalonia there are negotiations between the unions, the government and bosses in order to put forward a pact in which “stability” of work is exchanged for the unions’ offer of “labour flexibility”. Nor is this a question of “made in Catalonia”, since the same things has recently taken place at Volkswagen in Germany. In fact this policy of “stability in exchange for flexibility” is presently very fashionable in German and French capitalism.
In reality the bourgeoisie knows full well that casualisation, the replacing of expert labour with temporary workers who continually come and go from the productive process, can only end up damaging productivity. Therefore the most intelligent parts of the bourgeois understand that they can further ratchet up exploitation through imposing more working hours for less pay. In order to bring this about they offer the dishonest present of “stability of work”.
There is only one way of putting an end to unemployment and the precariousness of labour: to put an end to capitalism
What allows capitalism, a social system condemned by history and one which will not stop causing endless suffering for the whole of humanity, to continue to survive is the division, confusion and disorganisation of the working class. There will have to be a hard struggle in order to overcome these divisions, which keep the working class tied hand and foot to exploitation.
In order to struggle against divisions within the working class it is necessary to break with the ideas that the unions always impose on the struggles: the struggle is to “save the business”, “to save the sector”, “to save the national economy”. The business, the sector, the nation are the framework through which the different factions of the bourgeois carry out their life and death struggle to divide up the world. To defend these entities is to accept the sacrifices demanded by their interests and to integrate oneself into the competitive struggle between the capitalists that are causing such havoc for humanity. The first aim of the struggle must be to achieve maximum solidarity and unity of the working class faced with divisions of contract, sector, nationality, race, etc. Only then will we all have the strength we need.
In order to struggle against confusion it is necessary to unmask false friends and alternatives. The Tripartite government in Catalonia and the Zapatero government are as much enemies of the working class as the Partido Popular (the previous right-wing government in Spain). The question is not to pressure them to “fulfil their promises” or to “take up the defence of the workers” but to impose a balance of forces against these agents of the capitalist system.
In order to struggle against the disorganisation of the workers it is necessary to take the struggles into our own hands and to start breaking with the unions and unionism. We can only organise our forces through general assemblies and elected and revocable committees that are responsible before all the workers. These organs, precursors of the revolutionary workers’ councils of tomorrow, can develop the unity and strength needed to successfully struggle against exploitation.
December 2004
On Bulletin 28 of the IFICC: Response to the shameful slanders of a small association of wreckers
In number 28 of the Bulletin of the so-called ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’, published on its website, readers can discover the latest offerings of this parasitic grouplet: it has given its wholehearted support to the repugnant activities of an adventurer who presents himself under the name of the ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’ [1] [16]. If we are now devoting an article to the IFICC Bulletin, it is because a group of the communist left, the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) has given its approval to the methods of this shady band: it has justified the latter’s theft of our political material (see our article ‘Lies and slander are no methods of the working class!). The article below has the aim of refuting some of the lies and slanders disseminated by the IFICC Bulletin, i.e. that:
- the Nucleo Comunista Internacional (NCI) in Argentina, with whom we have been holding discussions for some time and certain of whose texts we have published in our press, has “broken” with the ICC on account of its disagreements with the policies of our so-called ‘”liquidationist” leadership;
- this break has revealed the “failure” of the ICC’s policy of regroupment;
- we have used the methods of Stalin’s political police to sabotage the IBRP’s efforts at regroupment.
Since the IBRP is incapable of making the least statement of position on the IFICC’s Bulletin, we will give here our response to the shameful slanders of this little Parisian circle.
This Bulletin of the IFICC was put together a few days after we published on our Internet site the article ‘Imposture or reality? [17]’, in which we exposed the manipulative activities of Mr B (alias “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas”).
For the reader who has not followed this affair, we will briefly recall the facts.
As we have shown on our website and in WR 280, this so-called Circulo represents just one individual who was a member of the NCI and who:
- never expressed the slightest disagreement either with the positions of the ICC, or with the position adopted by the NCI in May 2004 [18] condemning the anti-proletarian behaviour of the IFICC;
- began, at the end of last summer, to make links with the IFICC in the name of the NCI, without informing either the other members of the NCI nor the ICC (even though our delegation was still present in Buenos Aires);
- set up, behind the backs of the other comrades of the NCI, a “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” (the plural being quite false because it only had one member – himself) which he presented as the ‘successor’ to the NCI;
- wrote by himself and unbeknownst to the other members of the NCI the three “Declarations” published on the Circulo website, which are a tissue of lies and slanders against the ICC. He claimed that these “Declarations” had been discussed and adopted “by the collective decision” and “unanimously” by all the militants of the NCI.
When it learned of the existence of this Circulo, and following the IFICC’s distribution of its first Declaration of 2 October (which expressed solidarity with the IFICC and rejected the statement condemning it, adopted by the NCI on 22 May), the ICC made contact with several members of the NCI by telephone, in order to obtain information about the Circulo.
And it was thanks to these phone-calls that we learned that the other members of the NCI had not been informed of the existence of this Circulo which was supposed to be the continuation of the NCI, nor of the declaration sent by Mr B to the IFICC: the latter had produced this text on his own and behind the others’ back!
When a member of the NCI asked Mr B for an explanation of the information communicated by phone by the ICC, this sad knight avoided the question and immediately took aim at our organisation: on 12 October he produced a second “Declaration” (also written in the name of the NCI and behind its back). This second text denounced our “nauseating methods” of making phone calls to the militants of the NCI with the aim –according to Mr B – of “destroying this small circle” and of “sowing seeds of mistrust” within it!
Mr B even had the nerve to write “On their unanimous demand, the comrades whom the ICC has called by phone …propose to all the members of the Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas the total rejection of the political method of the ICC, which they consider to be typically Stalinist”!
It was through the ICC (which sent them the “Declarations” of Citizen B by post) that the comrades of the NCI were able to verify for themselves the putrid lies and manoeuvres of this impostor. And they decided unanimously to address a short Declaration (adopted at the NCI meeting of 27 October) to all the groups of the communist left denouncing the unworthy methods of this element with whom they have now broken (after Mr B refused to explain himself in front of the NCI and the ICC delegation which recently went to Buenos Aires).
In our article ‘Imposture or Reality?’, we also drew attention to the links that this manipulating mythomaniac has established with the Stalinist site ‘Argentina Roja’, which gathers together a whole series of agents of the left and extreme left of the bourgeois state (see the Circulo’s website) [2] [19].
It was thus in full knowledge of the facts that, despite the warnings contained in our article, published 6 days before Bulletin no. 28, that the IFICC deliberately took the side of this adventurer. This is how the IFICC rabble addressed its little Argentine “comrade”: “Welcome comrades!” (We just want to point out a small typing error: there shouldn’t be an S in “comrades”!).
The fact that the IFICC should so quickly welcome such an adventurer who, having done his schooling in the parties of the counter-revolution, showed himself incapable of breaking with their revolting methods – this comes as no surprise: birds of a feather flock together.
We are only too well acquainted with these methods. They are the same methods as those of the elements of the IFICC when they were still members of our organisation: they also stabbed the organisation in the back, trying to get a maximum of comrades to break with the ICC and to join their confraternity: the little parasitic circle of Citizen Jonas (the so-called ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’).
Citizen B thus went to a good school and it’s perfectly natural for him to solidarise with his accomplices and tutors of the IFICC.
However, Mr B is just an amateur, a petty provincial adventurer, alongside his Parisian friends.
With frenzied haste, the IFICC published, in no. 28 of its Bulletin, the two totally false declaration of this adventurer (the one of October 2 and the one of October 12) denouncing the “nauseating methods of the ICC”. This is quite simply because it recognised its own methods in them.
Thus, in the work of the IFICC, we can find a number of analogies between the methods of this little circle from Paris and the methods of Citizen B: just as the latter, in order to make advances towards the IBRP, has made two contributions disappear from the website of the NCI (texts which took up the ICC’s analyses of the decadence of capitalism and the events of December 2001 in Argentina), we note that the IFICC included a nauseating text entitled ‘Ignominy has no limits’, which presented the first declaration by the Circulo when the IFICC put it on line on October 4. In this text, this band of hooligans launched a call for a pogrom against our militants, now described as bastards (“salauds”) [3] [20].
What is the reason for this strange disappearance?
In fact, there are several.
As we have already underlined (in our article ‘A new strange apparition’), the style and the terms used by the declaration of the Circulo of 12 October (published not only on the IFICC site but also in three languages on the IBRP site) are noticeably the same as used in this text by the IFICC. It’s almost a photocopy. One of the reasons that the IFICC made its text ‘Ignominy has no limits’ vanish was thus to prevent its complicity with the Circulo from being too obvious.
This ‘document’ of the IFICC was withdrawn following the publication by the IBRP of an article (‘Response to the stupid accusations of an organisation on the road to disintegration’), in which the latter criticises the alleged “extreme vulgarity” of our article ‘The IBRP taken hostage by thugs!’ published on our website.
And it was to avoid losing favour with the IBRP that the IFICC was obliged to do a little housecleaning by ‘discretely’ removing the proof of its “extreme vulgarity”.
Nevertheless, despite its quick bit of editing , the IFICC didn’t manage to regain its virginity. Thus, the IBRP might observe that these mighty persons have opened, in their Bulletin no. 28, a new ‘rubric’ of an “extreme vulgarity”: ‘The ignominies and bullshit (“saloperies”) of the liquidationist faction of the ICC’.
Pushed out the door, it comes back through the window! Here again, the IFICC uses the same procedure as the Circulo: it removes a text whose vocabulary, borrowed from the world of petty crime, might annoy the IBRP – but it forgets to erase the traces! [4] [21]
There is still a third reason explaining why the IFICC has removed this text from its French pages: it’s because we have shown that it contains almost as many lies as words, lies so enormous that they can only discredit their authors (notably the affirmation that the declaration made by the NCI on 22 May 2004 was written “under the dictation of the ICC”, whereas there was no ICC delegation in Argentina on that date! (See our article ‘A new strange apparition’).
This no. 28 of the IFICC Bulletin is a distillation of the highly manipulative nature of this “little circle”, a circle even more vicious than its Argentine clone. In it, we can find another big lie.
This Bulletin contains an ‘anomaly’: the third ‘Declaration’ of the ‘Circulo’ (dated 21 October and entitled ‘Response to the supplement to Revolution Internationale in France’, contrary to the two previous ones, was not translated and published by the IFICC (which, like the cowboy in the comic, usually shoots faster than its own shadow when it comes to exploiting slanders against the ICC! [5] [22].
Why is the IFICC hiding this declaration from its French and English readers?
This is the response the IFICC Bulletin gives us: this declaration by the ‘Circulo’ was not translated and published by the IFICC…due to “lack of space” on its Internet site: “The Circulo was obliged to publish a third declaration – available on its site – which we can’t reproduce here due to lack of space”!
This little extract shows that the IFICC projects its own faults on its readers: it really takes them for imbeciles! Unless the author of this text in Bulletin no. 28 is so ignorant about ICT that he doesn’t know that, on the Internet, you can have all the space you want?
Only the IBRP could still allow itself to be fascinated by the IFICC’s conjuring tricks and could believe in its good faith. In reality, these apprentice conjurors did not DARE translate and publish this third declaration by the Mr B. And this for a very simple reason: the content of this declaration shows that this individual’s mind is totally deranged [6] [23].
In our article ‘A new strange apparition’, we remarked that “only those who (like the IBRP and the IFICC) have not a ‘small nucleus’ but a pea instead of a brain” could believe in the night-time tales of the Circulo about the telephone calls we made to the NCI in Argentina and whose “nauseating content” nobody, neither Mr B, nor his Parisian friends, nor the IBRP, have been able to reveal.
Thus, Bulletin no. 28 doesn’t just reveal the striking stupidity of the members of the IFICC (which is so great that we might ask whether, like the Dalton brothers in the comic strip, they are more stupid than they are wicked!) [7] [24] It shows the same sick imagination as that of citizen B.
These impostors share the same megalomaniac logic: our Don Quixote of Argentina takes himself for a group of ‘Internationalist Communists’ all by himself; the “little circle” of Paris (whose members can be counted on the finger of one hand) presents itself to the whole world as…the ICC (ie an international organisation which exists in 13 countries and which publishes in 8 languages: “the Fraction IS the ICC…we, the Fraction, are the ICC”!
If the elements of the IFICC extend their welcome to the manipulating mythomaniac from Argentina, it’s because this band of degenerates inhabit the same universe of mental delirium! The little circle from Paris and the Circulo are Siamese twins: they make common cause in the same “firmament of political struggle” (to borrow an expression from the third “Declaration” of Mr B) to the single benefit of the bourgeois state.
We are tempted not to waste any more time in denouncing these impostors because they are very good at unmasking themselves. But once again, the reason we are devoting so much energy to showing up their sordid manipulations, it’s simply because they have managed to convince (incredible but true) a group of the proletarian camp, the IBRP, that they really are Jesus Christ and Napoleon. If we are forced to reply to their ignominies, it’s because the IBRP has given them its approval and reserved this “little circle” a place of honour at the table of the communist left.
The enthusiasm which with the IFFICists welcome adventurers like citizen B shows that these pure and valiant knights (as they like to present themselves) actually have no real political convictions and no principles: they are prepared to team up with anyone at all as long as they are part of the same “political line” of pouring lies and slanders on the ICC and bear witness to our so-called “nauseating methods”.
By extending so hearty a welcome to its Argentine “comrade”, the IFICC demonstrates once again that its methods are indeed, as we have said again and again to the IBRP, those of a woman of easy virtue: it has no qualms about sleeping with a crypto-Stalinist!
When reading this Bulletin, one is above all staggered by the disgusting hypocrisy of the IFICC who - in order to caress the IBRP’s fur – claim that they are in favour of introducing “the fresh air of fraternal political debate which has been tending to disappear in Paris”
Unfortunately, this Bulletin only gives out the fetid and nauseating effluvia of slanders and lies, now mixed with a “fraternal” salute to the new born in Argentina, which has all the characteristics of an abortion. This is further attested by the “embarrassed” silence of the Circulo, who has published nothing since we unmasked his imposture [8] [25].
Despite the evidence of the facts, the IFICC has not abandoned the scene. This is why its Bulletin 28 still gives a lot of space to making loud publicity for the “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” which only exists in its, and Mr B’s, fevered imagination. It waxes lyrical about the dirty work of this impostor and encourages him to go further.
Thus in the “rubric” devoted to the “ignominies and bullshit of the liquidationist faction of the ICC”, Bulletin 28 purports to show that “the ignoble policy of the ICC, which has been waged from 2001 internally against any opposition, is now being systematically waged against comrades outside the ICC, against the ex-NCI, the Argentine Circulo…”
The IFICC believed that the “Circulo” was a gift from heaven, as could be seen from the feverish excitement with which its members distributed the first “Declaration” by Mr B at the public meeting of the IBRP and on its Internet site. For several weeks, these prospectus-peddlers lived in a kind of ecstasy: after three years of hard work shovelling manure on our organisation, they had at last found a new group which has taken up the same rotten accusations against us. What’s more, this group had, at first, moved towards the ICC (which had obviously been a real nightmare for the members of the IFICC), even going as far as to denounce the ignoble behaviour of the IFICC and its slanders against our organisation. And now, according to what Mr B would have us believe, this same group has rejected its 22 May denunciation of the IFICC and turned it on the ICC instead. And to cap it all, the NCI, re-baptised as the Circulo, presented itself as a sumptuous gift for the “wedding list” [9] [26] in the idyll between the IFICC and the IBRP, since the Circulo now advertised its convergence with the positions of the latter. After such a long period of frustration, this truly was nirvana for the little gangsters of the IFICC.
And then, all at once, the ICC began to demonstrate that the Circulo was a fraud and that Mr B, this Prince Charming of the southern hemisphere, was no more than a vulgar crook, a mythomaniac and master liar. The members of the IFICC had to descend from their rosy cloud and it was all too much. They did not want to give up this marvellous make-believe world. They continued to believe in Father Christmas, even after we had proved his non-existence! [10] [27]
This is why the IFICC is posing, with a legitimate “perplexity”, the following question: “What happened with the Argentine group? What happened with the Nucleo Comunista Internacionalista, today the Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas, to make it break with the ICC and its positions?”
It’s precisely to respond to these questions that, as the IFICC says itself, “we leave to these comrades the task of presenting their political experience with the ICC and the evolution of their position”. But this response is being made not by the Circulo, which has been dumb for several months, but the NCI itself.
Thus, our readers can refer to the “Declaration of the NCI” of 27 October [28], published on our website and in our territorial press (see WR 280 and Internationalism 13), in which the comrades of the NCI give an account of their recent “political experience”:
- they were not informed of the existence of this Circulo, which is supposed to be the “successor” of the NCI;
- it’s thanks to the ICC that they discovered the lying declarations which Mr B had written behind their back and in their name;
- they have not broken with the ICC: they gave a very warm welcome to the ICC delegation which went to Argentina recently and was able, thanks to their support, to hold an ICC public forum in Buenos Aires (see the article ‘the NCI has not broken with the ICC’ on our website);
- they want to “continue discussion with the ICC in order to clarify themselves”.
These comrades also give an account of the “evolution of their position”; in particular they affirm that the NCI “maintains its statement of May 2004 condemning the behaviour of the IFICC” (NCI declaration 27 October).
Our readers can thus recognise that the IFICC takes its dreams for reality by spreading the enormous lie fabricated by Mr B: its Bulletin claims that, when our delegation stayed in Argentina last August, “the Argentine comrades expressed serious disagreements with the political positions and militant practises of liquidationism…the ICC multiplied the publication of old positions with which the militants of the NCI are no longer in agreement with today”.
If they want to verify what really happened, our readers can always ask the question to the Circulo, which to this day has not published any denial of what we have said on our website and in our press. Instead, it has “unanimously”, and by the “collective decision of all its members” decided to play dead.
Unmasked, our impostor apparently doesn’t know what lie to invent next to regain his credibility. Perhaps the mythomaniac is waiting for his Parisian accomplices to suggest a fourth declaration in which new “revelations” will appear.
Bulletin 28 of the IFICC loudly denounces the “ignominies and bullshit of the liquidationist ICC” aimed at sabotaging the IBRP’s politics of regroupment. We are told that the ICC is trying to “get its dirty hands on the new elements” by keeping “other communist political groups outside the process of clarification and discussion” and by introducing “into the proletarian camp bourgeois methods of competition, of ‘clientism’, of ‘ownership’”. On this point we would like to make three small remarks:
1) Once again, these degenerated elements attribute their own approach to the ICC. Their real state of mind can be seen in the profound disdain they show towards the “new elements”. The latter are seen as objects which “you can get your dirty hands on”. Or is it because these petty thieves got their dirty hands on the money and material of the ICC that they think they can now get their dirty hands on the militants of the NCI?
2) The IBRP knows quite well that the ICC has never tried to keep other groups of the communist left “out of the process of discussion and clarification” as the IFICC claims (and in any case, it’s hard to see how we could have done so). Thus, very recently – and the IBRP can confirm this – in response to the emergence of new elements in Russia, we proposed to the IBRP that they should participate in the discussion forum which we have set up with a number of political groups in this country: the IBRP refused!
And as far as the NCI is concerned, we would like to point out that on 11 December 2003, the later addressed to all the groups of the communist left an “Appeal to the proletarian camp for the convocation of an international conference”. The ICC gave its support to this initiative by the NCI. On the other hand the IBRP again responded (in a letter to the NCI) with a refusal, arguing, among other things, that “the proletarian political camp no longer exists. That is to say it’s not true that the future international party of the proletariat will be born out of the regroupment or clarification between the groups that compose it” (the IBRP, the ICC, and the Bordigist groups).
Furthermore, it’s not the ICC but the IBRP which has tried to keep other groups of the communist left “out of the process of discussion and clarification” in its relations with the NCI. In the same letter, the IBRP, while rejecting the NCI’s proposal, wrote: “We are engaged in an international work and we remain open to any discussion with you and with all the vanguards that may appear in the world, precisely with the perspective of building the international party”.
Thus it is clear that the IFICC has knocked on the wrong door. It’s the IBRP and not the ICC it should be criticising. It’s the IBRP and not the ICC which, by seeking to keep out the other groups of the communist left (described in its letter to the NCI as “political cadavers”) which is introducing competition and ‘clientism’ into the proletarian camp.
3) Finally we would like to reassure our readers about our supposed “bourgeois methods of clientism”: if the IFICC or the IBRP want to regroup with the Circulo we are not going to compete with them and wish them much pleasure in it. The ICC is absolutely not interested in this mythomaniac chameleon and still less by his “nauseating methods” [11] [29]
By proclaiming that “the NCI’s break marks the bankruptcy of the policy of regroupment being carried out today by the ICC” the IFICC is once again taking its desires for reality.
This little circle from Paris has, it claims, proof of its brilliant success. In less than a month, it has accomplished the tour de force of precipitating, by use of forceps, the birth of a fictitious group, constituted by a single individual, who makes publicity for the Stalinist agents of the Argentine state and who, today, seems to have sunk into a deep coma, as can be seen from the fact that his website hasn’t moved since 21st October. The encephalograph of the Circulo is quite flat.
The IBRP should give the IFICC a medal: it’s thanks to its success with the Circulo that the IBRP has experienced a false birth.
And the IFICC can promise it more successes of the same kind, since it tells us that “the dynamic today is taking place around the IBRP and is part of the process of regroupment and constitution of the world party of the proletariat” (sic). If we were in the IBRP’s shoes, we’d be worried: judging by the recent exploits of the IFICC, a lot more abortions are in store!
One of the reasons why the IFICC is today frothing with rage against the ICC is that the policy it has carried out hand in hand with Mr B to destroy the NCI has been a failure. The proof of its failure is that the NCI has not broken with the ICC.
At the same time the failure of IFICC’s “liquidationist” policy of regroupment is revealed in the fact that, since it was formed, this little parasitic group has not grown in the slightest.
Certainly, it has made a new recruit, but numerically this doesn’t make up for the defection of one of its members (who left the IFICC because of “disagreements”). And then, what a recruit! The participants at the IBRP’s public meeting in Paris could get some idea of his talents and political physiognomy: in response to our interventions, his contribution to defending the positions of the IFICC (which presents itself as the real ICC) was based on particularly incisive arguments: chortles (irrefutable!) and giggles (which really went to the root of the issues). [12] [30]
Furthermore, among the members of the IFICC, there is one (the element Jonas) who, by all the evidence, prefers to stay by the fire in his slippers: while the other members of the IFICC expressed their unflagging solidarity with him, he didn’t make the effort to support his “comrades” at the IBRP public meeting.
As for the sympathisers this little circle has managed to group around it, they add up to two (and one of them is an ex-member of the IFICC).
In short, we can only be struck dumb with admiration for the remarkable success of the IFICC’s “policy of regroupment”!
Bulletin 28 is a real gold mine. It once again shows the real character of this small association of wreckers which, with all its dirty deeds, resembles the Pieds Nickeles gang more than the Bonnot gang. [13] [31]
Bulletin 28 contains another very “interesting” text: the account of the public meeting that the IBRP held in Paris on 2 October. You can see here that the ICC made a “takeover by force” to “show its muscles” when it sent to this public meeting a “massive delegation” of twenty militants, accompanying the “hired mob” (“claque”) of the ICC’s sympathisers which had come to “cram full” some “¾ of the room”! A “claque” so “imposing” that it is even compared to those of Trotskyist groups!
It is less strange that, in the publicity for this public meeting the IFICC forget to warn against the ICC “claque”: in fact they said the opposite; the ICC have no “claque” in Paris since (according to the IFICC) its public meetings are “deserted”.
This is a contradiction: either the Paris section of the ICC has no close sympathisers (and that’s why our public meetings are “deserted”), or the ICC in the French capital has a big enough number of sympathisers to “cram full rooms”!
Why is the IFICC obliged to expose its own lies (and admit that the public meetings of the ICC are not “deserted” as it wanted to make the IBRP think)? It is simply because the IBRP had published (before the IFICC) its own account of this public meeting in which it “corrected” the lies peddled in the advance publicity of the IFICC (see the Battaglia Comunista website)?
Our readers can still see, by reading the IFICC’s “thrilling” account, how the ICC came to this public meeting to “show its muscles”. We are told here that “an advance scout appeared surreptitiously without doubt to note and inform on those present (…) waiting in a ‘secondary’ meeting place (…)” and that “twenty or more militants and sympathisers arrived, almost as a demonstration, with a determined air (…) at its head the most strapping militants, with clenched jaws and with tense features. Real tough guys. A veritable commando unit.” [14] [32].
This account (which caused the militants and sympathisers of the ICC who had been present to burst out laughing!) is closer to the scenario of a horror film, or rather a spy thriller (you can see here in full effect the detective reasoning characteristic of the Bulletins of the IFICC!) than a political report.
In this sense, it is necessary to recognise that the account published by the IBRP of the arrival of the ICC’s “massive delegation” is a little less eccentric and a little more close to reality.
If the IFICC had not wanted the militants of the ICC to come in such numbers, then why did it make such noisy publicity for this meeting (particularly with the advertisement that they put on their website)?
Why did it distribute a leaflet publicising this meeting to all our militants and sympathisers at the entrance to our own September meeting in Paris? Why did it send this letter by post to the private addresses of our militants and subscribers?
Why, finally, did it address a letter of invitation to the central organ of the ICC, that is to say to those that the IFICC calls the “liquidationist leadership”?
The indignant protests that they display today against our “demonstration of force” (trying to “sabotage” the IBRP’s public meeting) only reveals once again the duplicity of this small parasitic group: if the IFICC made such a noise about the IBRP’s public meeting, it was not because (as you might have thought from its propaganda campaign) that they wanted the militants and sympathisers of the ICC to come and participate in a debate. On the contrary! In pulling out all the stops the IFICC hoped to dissuade us from participating at the IBRP’s public meeting.
To the extent that we have banned the members of the IFICC from entering our own public meetings because of their thuggish behaviour (see WR 267 [33]), these parasites thought that we would not come to that of the IBRP because of their presence.
The IFICC itself reveals its real thinking when it deplores “the presence of more than twenty militants and sympathisers when the liquidationists know very well that our Fraction was going to be present at this meeting, reveals clearly that our prohibition from the public meetings of the ICC under the pretext that we are police thugs representing a danger is only a pretext that they don’t believe themselves”.
In trying to dissuade us from participating at this public meeting, these specialists in secret diplomacy hoped to create the conditions for the IBRP to bring to Paris “the fresh air of fraternal debate” behind the back of and against the ICC! They have nevertheless forgotten that you can’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs!
But, more fundamentally, this gang of good-for-nothings had not foreseen in its “plan of action” that the “current liquidationist ICC” is going to adopt the same policy as the “old ICC” consisting in participating (and encouraging our sympathisers to participate) in the meetings of other political groups.
This is the same so-called “shitty tactic” (according to the terms of the IFICC’s Bulletin no. 28) that the ICC used in participating in the IBRP public meetings in Berlin [34].
If the ICC came in numbers to the IBRP meeting in Paris, this was because it was an “historic event”, a “first” as the IFICC itself announced. And just because the IBRP accept the presence of thugs at its public meetings, that doesn’t mean we’re going to boycott them (even if, for our part, we continue to bar thugs from entering our own meetings).
Our crafty “little circle”, in a raging temper, was eager to inform its clone in Argentina and encourage him to denounce our “nauseating political behaviour”: in his third “Declaration” (that of 21 October), Mr B accuses the ICC of having “used all sorts of tricks” in the public meeting of the IBRP to sabotage its attempts at regroupment[15] [35].
In reality it’s not the ICC but the IFICC, like the fox in the story by Jean de La Fontaine, that has used “all sorts of tricks” to dissuade us from coming to this public meeting. It is the IFICC that used “all sorts of tricks” to get the IBRP involved (with among other things the theft of our subscribers’ address list) even if the IBRP doesn’t want to recognise that it has been the biggest dupe in history!
The IFICC has always had the habit of attributing its own base acts to the ICC. It is because of this that, under the “heading” of the “big lies of the IFICC”, we are now going to examine the accusations of these professional manipulators who assert, in its Bulletin, that the ICC is infiltrated by elements belonging to all the agencies of the bourgeois state.
The whole history of the workers’ movement is marked by episodes when revolutionaries have been the object of campaigns of slander on the part of elements playing the game of the ruling class or directly working on its behalf.
So, in 1859, Marx devoted a year of his life to demolish with a scientific method the slanders of Herr Vogt (who was later shown to have been an agent in the pay of Napoléon III). He devoted an entire book, Herr Vogt, that Engels praised as Marx’s best polemical work (a work that he thought even surpassed The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte).
Lenin (and the Bolshevik party), particularly in July 1917, were also the target of repugnant calumnies: he was accused by the forces of the counter-revolution of being an agent of German imperialism (Trotsky, in his History of the Russian Revolution [36] described July 1917 as “the month of the great slander” (Chapter 27 [37])).
Rosa Luxemburg, before the First World War, was also denigrated and accused of being an agent of the tsarist police, the Okhrana, by members of the right wing of the SPD. It was members of the SPD right (and therefore old “comrades” of Rosa) who, following these denigrations, orchestrated a hysterical campaign of slanders and a real manhunt against the Spartakusbund: to decapitate the revolution in Germany they called for a pogrom and assassinated Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919.
Trotsky, in the 1930s, was in his turn the object of the same type of slanders on the part of his old “comrade” Stalin: he was accused of being an agent of Hitler. This campaign of slanders, like that unleashed against Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartakusbund, ended in the assassination of Trotsky, commissioned by Stalin.
These tragic episodes in the history of the workers’ movement show that slander is the bourgeoisie’s weapon of choice to destroy the revolutionary movement. They reveal that the lie has always preceded and prepared the ground for the physical liquidation of communist militants. And this has always been denounced and fought publicly by revolutionaries as a weapon of the bourgeois state aiming to discredit communist organisations. [16] [38]
It is also because of this that, faced with slander, revolutionaries have the duty and the responsibility to appeal to Juries of Honour [17] [39] (as was the case with the “Dewey Commission [40]”, constituted in 1937, in the face of the accusations brought against Trotsky by the Stalinists).
It is this tradition of the workers’ movement that the Gauche Communiste de France (from which the ICC traces its origins) continued when (faced with discreditable behaviour in its ranks) it adopted, at its Conference of July 1945, a resolution condemning theft and calumny in these terms:
“Approving the resolution of the general meeting of 16 June which recorded the break of these elements with the organisation, the conference renews its protest against the taking by these elements of the organisation’s material and demands the complete return of machines and material belonging to us, and denounce this way of acting without any reservation.
The whole conference stands particularly against the campaign of base calumny that has become the preferred weapon of these elements against the organisation and against individual militants.
In resorting to such methods, these elements, thoroughly demonstrating their so-called politics, create a poisoned atmosphere by introducing suspicion, the menace of pogroms (according to their own expression) and gangsterism, thus continuing the vile tradition which up till now was the prerogative of Stalinism.
Considering it urgent to put an end to this, and not to allow slander to have a place in political debates in the relations between revolutionary militants, the conference decides to address itself to other revolutionary groups, asking them to set up a tribunal of honour, pronouncing on the revolutionary morality of slandered militants, and to bar the right to slander or to slanderers in the ranks of the proletariat.”
And it is in the continuity of this tradition of the workers’ movement that the ICC has done everything to push for the establishment of a Jury of Honour, on this occasion to examine the various disgraceful slanders by the IFICC against the ICC and its individual militants.
It is this “vile tradition”, the “prerogative of Stalinism” that the IFICC still perpetuates in its Bulletin no 28.
We learn here that the “liquidationist faction” of the ICC, to “sabotage” the IBRP’s regroupment policy, has used the methods of Trotskyists, Lambertists, freemasonry, the GPU, the CIA and of all sorts of dubious elements, adventurers, mystics and the rest. Hang the expense! You have the right to the whole panoply. This bulletin is a veritable supermarket where you can choose from the shelves the product which offers the best value for money.
The prose of the IFICC is of the same vintage as the third “Declaration” of the “Circulo” (see our article ‘Imposture or reality? [17]’). You find with these slanderers the same tonality, the same pathological frenzy that only shows one thing: the IFICC (just like its little clone in Argentina) wants to make us believe something that doesn’t exist. It has a “dossier of irrefutable charges” against our “liquidationist faction” which is only the fruit of its sick imagination!
This is why the IFICC doesn’t want to submit the “conclusions” of its “investigations” before a Jury of Honour: the “proofs” that our little Sherlock Holmes have gathered in the sewers and which they don’t stop alluding to (in Bulletin 28 as in the previous issues) only reveal the depraved mentality of these blackmailers. [18] [41] They are above all an act of accusation against themselves and against their disgraceful methods.
Thus, in the section entitled “We accuse!” we learn (among other dreadful things!) that in order to destroy the IBRP’s attempts at regroupment, “against the new revolutionary elements which are appearing and against the existing communist groups”, the “liquidationist faction” of the ICC has used methods which “belong to those suffered by the Trotskyist opposition in the 1930s (…) gangrened (…) by adventurers and dubious elements, when they didn’t belong directly to the secret police of Stalin, the GPU.”
However, our slanderers have forgotten to try to convince readers by demonstrating what precisely the methods of the GPU consist of.
What obliges us to set the record straight is that it wasn’t the ICC but this band of thugs who, in trying to destroy the ICC, resorted to the methods of the Stalinist secret police. And the inflammatory accusations of Bulletin no 28 are of the same tone as the “lyrical” poetry of citizen B who has ended up by rejoining Stalin, Mao and Fidel Castro in the “firmament” of the “Argentina Roja” website. [19] [42]
As well as the campaigns of slanders against Trotsky (accused by the Stalinists of being an agent of Hitler) and pogromist appeals, the GPU also tried to destroy the Trotskyist movement from the inside, circulating rumours to sow suspicion between militants.
Must we remind our white knights of the IFICC that this is exactly the same policy that Citizen Jonas, one of their number, undertook within the organisation? That is why the ICC excluded him from its ranks [43] for “behaviour unworthy of a communist militant”: in circulating the rumour that a member of the organisation “is a cop” he tried to destroy the organisational tissue. [20] [44] This behaviour worthy of agents provocateurs has been fully taken up by the other members of the IFICC (as the loathsome texts of its Bulletins reveal).
Furthermore, among the methods used by the agents of the GPU to destroy the Trotskyist movement, it is necessary to recall that they tried to set militants against each other.
Our readers can easily recognise these methods in a dubious text entitled “Weights and measures” (published in Bulletin 7 of the IFICC). This particularly nauseating “document” aims at sowing ill feeling between the militants of the ICC in using in a fraudulent fashion (as with the famous “History of the IS”) the minutes of minutes of meetings of the central organ stolen by a member of the IFICC (who also stole our subscription address list).
It is clear that it is not the ICC (and its “liquidationist faction”) but the elements of the IFICC who have taken up not only the methods of the GPU, but also that of the Okhrana [21] [45] (by insidiously putting it about that such a comrade has said something malicious against another comrade, and spreading rumours that a militant “is a cop”).
On the other hand, faced with the failure of its policy aiming to “convince” the militants of the ICC to fight against the so called “liquidationist faction”, the IFICC has now fallen into a rage against the militants who didn’t want to rally to its banner. Let’s see how these elements, frustrated at not being “in command” (according to the expression employed by Citizen Jonas) and not having being able get their hands on our central organs, treat the militants of the ICC who did not want to “follow” them!
This Bulletin in particular unleashes disgusting slanders against militants recently integrated into the ICC insinuating that our young comrades “often linked by family relations” [22] [46] are “adventurers”, “careerists” or “provocateurs”: “Without condemnation of the Fraction and without refusing to discuss and clarify the political positions that they defend, which are none other than those of the ICC, no integration. This says a lot about the political and militant ‘quality’ of these militants. The more this policy develops, the more the liquidation is going to lean on elements that are hardly reliable politically or as militants. Have we not learnt from the experience of the 1920s in the CI and the PC? Before the expulsion or departure of the oppositions and left fractions, the opportunists, the Bolshevisers and Stalinists, had increasing recourse to integrations that were not only hasty (quick, without a real profound political clarification) but also of people increasingly dubious, capable of accepting opportunist politics in exchange for a mess of potage… This policy is the equivalent to opening the doors to all sorts of adventurers, careerists and provocateurs.”
All the militants of the ICC denounce this disgusting attack which is a veritable stab in the back for the new generation of militant communists!
They angrily protest against the intolerable and disgraceful support that the IBRP has given to these slanderers who have no place in the proletarian camp!
Once more it is not by accident if the IFICC, in perpetuating the “vile tradition of Stalinism” and of the “base slander” (as the comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France put it), have warmly saluted the appearance and the base methods of the “Circulo” whose business with the Stalinist site of the Argentinean state “Argentina Roja” sticks out a mile!
Moreover, we note that in using the “nauseating methodology” of trying to sow ill-feeling between militants, the IFICC is not content to limit itself to the ICC. It has extended its sphere of activity to seeking to set the groups of the communist left against each other. It has tried to recruit the PCI (Le Proletaire) into its anti-ICC crusade [23] [47]. But above all it has succeeded in sowing ill-feeling between the IBRP and the ICC.
Thus, the IFICC used its “postal service” to compromise the IBRP in the theft of our subscribers’ address list (see our article ‘The IBRP taken hostage by thugs! [48]’); and the latter felt obliged to produce an absolutely shameful “political justification” for this act of robbery!
The IFICC has revealed all the perversity of its methods in drawing our attention to the minutes of its “conversations” with the IBRP. Thanks to the notes taken by the IFICC (published in its Bulletin no 9) we discovered the intention of the IBRP to “do everything to push for the disappearance” of the ICC [24] [49] (see our article ‘Theft and slander are not methods of the working class!’) .
It is not therefore surprising that some of our readers have said, having read the IFICC’s Bulletin, that “these people are cops”. [25] [50]
The members of the IFICC can be scandalised and protest against our so-called “bullshit”; they can play their violin and pour out fine “melodramatic” tirades: “What was the accusation brought by the ICC against comrade Jonas, who was condemned before all the proletariat and the international revolutionary camp, an accusation which, in other historic circumstances would have forced him into clandestinity, death, even public lynching?”
The IFICC’s Bulletin is not going to make our readers cry. Its grotesque theatrical style is rather more Grand Guignol (which had its heyday in the 19th Century) than Shakespeare.
In refusing to defend their honesty before a Jury of Honour, according to the tradition of the workers’ movement, these clowns can only reinforce readers’ convictions: they have no honour to defend and have provided the evidence of their “infamy”.
The response of the Bulletin to the letter of the ICC to members of the IFICC (published on our website) which proposes to them, once again, to appeal to a Jury of Honour to refute the “ignominies” and “bullshit” of which they claim to be victims is revealing: “Be clear once and for all: that they [the militants of the ICC] can go to hell with their commissions and other Juries”. QED!
So what are the motivations behind the actions of these miserable impostors (who pretend to defend the principles of the “real ICC”)? We reassert that the methods of the IFICC, like those of Mr B., are practices of the bourgeoisie and not the working class.
This more than vicious little circle has no right to be considered part of the proletarian camp.
Its nauseating methods reveal only one thing: this so-called “Fraction” is not an historic emanation of the proletariat. It is nothing other than a band of thugs, a vulgar little association of gangsters and a pure product of the decomposition of bourgeois society. [26] [51]
In working hand in hand with citizen B and launching a pogromist appeal against our militants (the so-called “bastards” of the “liquidationist faction” of the ICC) these slanderers show what their trajectory is: they are taking the same route as the assassins of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht! You can be sure that they will not hesitate tomorrow in playing the same role as the “bloodhounds” of their predecessors Noske and Scheidemann. [27] [52]
And the ICC denounces them as such today in front of the whole proletarian political milieu.
ICC (7 December 2004)
[1] [53] See the articles published on our website:
- “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas: une étrange apparition” (Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas: a strange apparition”);
- “Une nouvelle étrange apparition” (A strange new apparition);
- “Imposture or reality? [17]”;
- “Presentation of the NCI declaration concerning the Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas [54]”.
[2] [55] Mr B’s ‘diplomatic’ commerce with Stalinist groups in Argentina is so obvious that, alarmed by this ‘discovery’, a groups of comrades in Latin America with whom we are in contact immediately posed us the question: “Could the NCI (of which the ‘Circulo’ pretends to be the ‘continuator’) have hatched a Stalino-Maoist egg?”
[3] [56] If this text is still displayed on the IFICC website in English and Spanish it is because their Bulletin no. 28 has not been translated into these two languages. So the IFICC could not (decently) remove the text announced by an enormous yellow box on its home pages in Spanish and English! [At the last minute, as we were putting this article on line in French, the Spanish version of Bulletin 28 had just come out: the delicate IFICC text mentioning the “bastards” of the ICC had also disappeared from this!]
[4] [57] It is precisely because we have revealed the deception of the “Circulo” that the “little circle” from Paris is pouring all its venom against the ICC into Bulletin no 28. Short of “arguments”, it is more and more reduced to revealing its thuggish nature. There is still evidence of this in the “literary style” of the latest issue of their Bulletin: the politics of the ICC makes one “sick” (and no longer makes one “vomit”), the ICC uses “dirty tricks”, etc.
[5] [58] We have been “fascinated” by the rapidity with which the IFICC has distributed Mr B’s first “Declaration”: this “declaration”, written in Buenos Aires on the 2nd October, was in the hands of the IFICC the same day at 2pm (that is 10am in Argentina) with many copies at the IBRP public meeting on 2nd October when we first saw it (the IFICC distributed it at the end of the meeting). So, in a few hours, Mr B had the time to write the text, to get it adopted “collectively” and “unanimously” by all the members of the NCI (who did not know of its existence!), to send it to Paris in order for it to be reproduced and distributed in the form of a leaflet by his Parisian accomplices. Two days later, on the 4th October, this “declaration” had been translated into two other languages by the IFICC and put on its website. The IFICC can now go to the Olympic Games: it has become a real record breaker, among the speediest of champions!
[6] [59] For our part, we have translated this Declaration into French and we can send it to our readers in this language should they request it.
[7] [60] Of all the members of the IFICC, Jonas is most like Joe, the least stupid of Dalton’s brothers, but with the worst temper. As for the IFICC’s latest recruit, who has immediately responded to his master’s voice, he takes more the role of Rantamplan, with one small difference: the dog in the gang of cartoon characters is a much more loyal and likeable mongrel!
[8] [61] So, since the 21st October (the date of the third “Declaration”), its website has not changed at all (when our Webmaster, Mr B, had shown a febrile agitation during the first three weeks of October, with new texts appearing or disappearing every day). It seems from all the evidence that this impostor has great difficulty in confirming (and with good reason!) the “news” which he announced to the whole world (thanks to the IFICC and the IBRP who have served as his publicists) according to which the NCI of Argentina has “broken with the ICC” in order to form a new “group”: the “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas”. Our impostor also seems to have the greatest difficulty in making public the content of our telephone appeals to the members of the NCI which, he says, are the confirmation of our “nauseating methods” aiming to destroy this little “nucleus” in Argentina! (See our articles on the website and in WR 280).
[9] [62] We hope that the IBRP will not be shocked that we use such a “vulgar” term as “wedding presents” one more time (if one believes their ‘Response to the stupid accusations of a disintegrating organisation’)!
[10] [63] So, more than three weeks after we put the NCI Declaration of 27th October on our website in all languages (as well as our article “The NCI has not broken with the ICC!”), the IFICC is still refusing to recognise reality. Its Bulletin no. 28 has just gone on line in Spanish (7th December). The IFICC reveals that it is suffering from delusions: the “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” only exists in its sick imagination (even he IBRP, which has started to remove Mr B’s “Declaration” from its website, has been forced to accept the evidence). In putting the texts of its Bulletin no. 28 on its website in Spanish today (and awaiting the English version), not only does the IFICC continue to hawk an ENORMOUS lie, but it is persisting in and marking its unshakeable support for the repugnant methods of an adventurer who the ICC and the NCI have denounced publicly. Bravo!
[11] [64] If the IBRP wants to make itself ridiculous by taking charlatans for “serious” elements and if it wants to swallow all their twists and turns (in affirming that its links with the IFICC “exist and endure”!), no-one can stop them. However, we invite them to stop making the Left Communist current ridiculous by presenting itself as its only “serious pole of regroupment”.
[12] [65] The particularly twisted state of mind of this new and only “recruit” to the IFICC is not a new discovery for the ICC. Already at the time of the preceding crisis, in 1993, this ex-militant of the ICC gave us a little insight into his propensity for warped moves and manipulation. And it is precisely because we had discovered his little schemes that he “resigned”. In reality he had gone to sleep until the constitution of the IFICC woke up his… “militant conviction” (as shown by the enthusiasm with which he distributed the first Declaration of his little Argentinean pal at the end of the public meeting of the IBRP!) It is worth noting that another “founder” member of the IFICC had also participated in activity behind the back of the organisation in 1993. And if the militants of the ICC gave her their confidence once again (to the point of putting her on the central organ), it is because she had (or seemed to have?) made an apology. Lastly, we must recall that these two members of the IFICC had been involved in little intrigues alongside the element Simon who we excluded in 1995 for, among other things, proselytising the ideology of Freemasonry within the ICC, going as far as to give the impression that Rosa Luxemburg was “probably a Freemason”. Today we find the same insinuations in the IFICC Bulletin: the ICC is probably infiltrated by Freemasons!
[13] [66] The “Pieds Nickelés” were characters in a famous band of French cartoon characters at the beginning of the 20th Century who told the tale of the misadventures of three crooks (Cronquignol, Filochard and Ribouldingue) whose “backstabbing” regularly resulted in failure.
[14] [67] Now that their “trickery” has been uncovered, these elements show that they have not outgrown the game of cowboys and Indians. Their infantile and completely distorted mental universe leads them to tell themselves terrifying tales to give themselves the shivers. Obviously, it is not something that has always been part of the IFICC: if the elements of this “little circle” take themselves for the heroes of the cartoon band, they don’t have to take the militants of the ICC for cartoon characters. The force of revolutionaries does not reside in their “muscles” but in the accuracy and the coherence of their arguments! And it is precisely this force, the strength of thought, that is cruelly lacking in the IFICC. That’s why when they saw the ICC delegation arrive, they believed they had seen Tarzan appear in person (and they wanted to compete with his “muscles” to impose the law of the jungle on the proletarian camp)! The IFICC uses the same magnifying glass to seek to “terrify” the readers of this Bulletin by relating how one of its members was brutalised at the entrance to our public meeting in September in Paris: a huge ICC “muscle man” (sic!) “the said Bruno, bravely hitting him on the back and repulsing him violently”. The reality is quite otherwise: the element Juan (who perhaps deserves a good spanking!) was very gently shown out by the collar when he tried to be smart and edge his way between our “anti-informer pickets”. The members of the IFICC can always go snivelling to the IBRP and ask to have their (purely imaginary!) “injuries” dressed: the ICC will continue to defend its principles with the greatest firmness.
[15] [68] We are thus witnessing a comical phenomenon: the IFICC and the “Circulo” (Mr B in his false nose) are both fantasists and inveterate liars; this is also one of the reasons for their rapprochement and their cooperation when it is a question of slandering the ICC. The problem is that they have become so “addicted” to lies that they can no longer help lying even to their acolytes; the result: from the great distance of Argentina, Mr B has denounced the ICC “sabotage” of the IBRP meeting in Paris that no-one saw. He has even gone so far as to affirm (in his declaration of 21st October) that, before the adoption of the “Declaration” of 2nd October, “we consulted with our closest contacts [who] have rejected the ICC’s attitude and way of behaving in the [IBRP] public meeting in Paris” which is truly wonderful since this meeting took place AFTER the publication of this declaration. Here is a blunder that Mr B would have been able to avoid if the IFICC had not told him a lot of balderdash. Conversely, Mr B’s lies have literally sent the IFICC to Paradise, they will make the sad reality of the non-existence of the “Circulo” and the survival of the NCI, which is pursuing its combat linked to the ICC, seem like a veritable Hell.
[16] [69] See our article “Revolutionary organisations struggle against provocation and slander [70]” (WR 252).
[17] [71] See our article “Le Jury d’Honneur: arme de défense des militants et des organisations revolutionaries” (The Jury of Honour: a weapon for the defence of militants and revolutionary organisations).
[18] [72] These blackmailers once again revealed their petty crook’s methods by renewing their “threat” to publish their detective story called the “History of the IS” if the ICC bring out a pamphlet making public the proceedings of their secret meetings (which accidentally fell into our hands), held while they were members of the organisation (why does the IFICC dread the publication of these proceedings and why do they hide them from their readers?): “The publication of the concrete elements which led to our exclusion, and most particularly the production of the ‘History of the IS’ which traces the origin of the crisis of 2001 through the notes of its meetings, was blocked by the liquidationists. We have been “threatened”, when we were still in the ICC, with a pamphlet on the organisational crisis of 2001. We continue to await it. Manipulation and destructiveness always fear to be brought into the light”. We continue to point out that the ICC does not give in to blackmail. If we have not yet published this pamphlet, it is simply because we have other priorities. The IFICC, which takes itself for the centre of the world, has forgotten that in the last two years there have been important events internationally (such as the Iraq war, and the social movements in Spring 2003) which we had to devote our energies to, as well as to other tasks, in order to carry out our responsibilities. On the other hand, the publication of this pamphlet seems much less urgent as the “revelations” in the Bulletin of this small parasitic group have had no negative impact on our readers. On the contrary. The noticeable increase in the number of our new subscribers (as well as the loyalty of the old ones) has shown that the IFICC has not achieved its ends: its “literature” has not succeeded in creating a vacuum around the ICC. It has more had the tendency to “fill” the space around the ICC as shown by the increase in the number of our sympathisers (as well as those asking to join the ICC). As for this sword of Damocles that these blackmailers are brandishing to try and “block” us (the publication of its “History of the IS”), it has largely contributed to making its authors ridiculous. This “document” has been a repulsive force for some serious elements of the political milieu to whom these sneaks and blackmailers sent it: “this text is completely delirious!”, we were told. The IFICC will excuse the “lateness” of the promised pamphlet which, contrary to what they imagine, has nothing to do with the ICC being “blocked” by its attempts at intimidation or vile blackmail.
[19] [73] In its vast and prolific megalomaniac delirium, this “little circle” from Paris is not content to just affirm that “the Fraction is the ICC”. It finds itself in the same “firmament” as its Argentinean clone in continuing to claim that the IFICC represents the “whole history of the workers’ movement”: “the whole history of the workers’ movement condemns the practices of the liquidationist faction and has pronounced the sentence.”
[20] [74] In this Bulletin the IFICC publish two letters that the ICC sent to the ex-militant Michel who had participated actively in the secret meetings and manoeuvres of those who went on to form the IFICC. This publication shows once again the vileness of these little thugs. In denouncing their “comrade” Michel (with incredible hypocrisy!), their objective was to “whitewash” citizen Jonas: the letters “clearly exonerate – from the very hand of the liquidationists themselves – our comrade Jonas from the same accusations they were publicly making against him…” Several of our readers have given us their opinion: they found these two letters very good and can’t see how they are an “infamy” against Michel, as the IFICC pretend. On the contrary, what they see is the sordid methods of the members of the IFICC who publicly “throw out” one of their old “pals” who refused to join the IFICC and to follow their policy of slander.
[21] [75] See George Vereeken’s book The GPU in the Trotskyist movement and Victor Serge’s What everyone should know about state repression [76].
[22] [77] So, the IFICC consider the fact that several of our militants belong to the same family is a “defect” of the ICC. It should be noted that almost half the members of this “little circle” from Paris is made up of elements belonging to the same family (a couple). What should we think of the “family faction” if the IFICC? On the other hand, what do the IBRP militants think of this IFICC attack on our young comrades when several members of the IBRP are also sons of militants and belong to the organisation (the PCInt) formed by their own fathers? We recall that in the tradition of the workers’ movement revolutionary organisations often had fathers and sons as militants. This does not constitute a “defect” in any way; it is part of the transmission of militancy from one generation to another and so of the historic continuity of the workers’ movement. However, we think it would be better if the children of the members of the IFICC avoid following the bad example of their parents, if they want to preserve their “moral health”!
[23] [78] See our article ‘The Parti Communiste International trails behind the ‘Internal Fraction’ of the ICC [76]’.
[24] [79] Thanks to its “little shrewdness” the IFICC has caught the IBRP in an adventure without any future. And if our Pieds Nickelés have won a “nice coup” this time, it is because they have found someone more stupid than they are: they have succeeded in pushing the IBRP to declare war on the ICC with the IFICC’s weapons. Today the IBRP looks like an organisation being dragged along by this “little circle” from Paris!
[25] [80] We have just received a letter from a new sympathiser who wrote, before meeting us “from the polemic by the provocateur element B in Argentina, taken to heart by the poor little cops of the IFICC and sadly by the IBRP (proof of the mediocrity of the analysis of these comrades). I send you my full support and remain in solidarity with your communist positions, which are proletarian and revolutionary!” Yet one more time, some of our subscribers have reached such a judgement not on the basis of the ICC’s statements (which can only defend the principles of the workers’ movement in denouncing the method of slander), but from reading the IFICC Bulletins.
[26] [81] Because the morals of the IFICC are those of the lumpen (which has always constitutes a mass for manoeuvre from which the counter-revolution draws its forces of repression) we have received an anonymous threatening letter signed “A lumpen”. With the same “literary style” as the IFICC this element expresses his “solidarity” with the “Circulo”, the IFICC and even the IBRP (see our “Reply to an anonymous letter”)! See what sort of “element searching for clarity” the IFICC is able to draw towards the IBRP. In continuing to sanction these methods, the IBRP risks ending its political career as the main “pole of regroupment” for all the scum which grows like a fungus on the dung heap of capitalist decomposition.
[27] [82] The conditions for these brats to play the role of “bloodhounds”, like Noske and Scheidemann, do not yet exist. Their Bulletin no 28 shows that the members of the IFICC are more like nasty little lap-dogs: the smaller they are, the louder they bark!
At the time of its 15th international congress, in April 2003, the ICC excluded from its ranks several elements who had openly behaved like informers and who, under the name of "Internal Fraction of the ICC", had gathered around the individual Jonas (himself excluded from our organization for "behaviour unworthy of a communist militant", see 'A communique to our readers [43]'). With regards to the attitude of Jonas and the members of the "FICCI", which consistied of refusing to defend oneself in front of the Congress of the ICC, our organisation, in accordance with the tradition of the workers' movement, had applied a policy of the defence of proletarian principles: it had proposed to them to call upon a Jury of Honour (which they refused) composed representatives of other organizations of the Communist Left, in order to make clearn the nature of their behaviour and the causes of their exclusion.
Today, the members of this alleged "Internal Fraction of the ICC" present themselves to the whole world as the victims of our "policy of liquidation" (and persist in demanding their reintegration into our organisation). To put an end to at all this din, the ICC made the decision to publicly require of the members of the IFICC to call upon a Jury of Honour of the proletarian political milieu, which could have all the elements enabling it to come to a conclusion about the cogency of our charges. The article that we republish below (from WR 205, June 1997) points out why the workers' movement always considered Juries of Honour as being a weapon of defence of comminst militants and organisations communist. Alongside this article, we publish the letter which we addressed to the Parisian members of the "IFICC".
At its April 95 11th International Congress, the ICC had to take the grave decision to exclude one of its militants, the ex-comrade JJ, for his destructive behaviour incompatible with belonging to a communist organisation, notably the constitution within the ICC of a secret network of adepts of Masonic ideology. This exclusion led our organisation to publish a warning to our readers (see “Statement of the ICC” in WR no.194) in order to put the whole proletarian political milieu on guard against the actions of this element. JJ rejected the arguments given for his exclusion, notably the conscious and deliberate character of his actions, by attributing to the judgement of the ICC a “collective delirium” and an “interpretive paranoia”. Faced with this attitude the ICC, conforming to the tradition of the workers movement, applied a policy of the defence of proletarian principles by urging this ex-militant, following his exclusion, to appeal to a Jury of Honour composed of representatives of other organisations of the revolutionary milieu, so as to throw the greatest light on the nature of his behaviour and the causes of his exclusion.
The necessity for militants to defend themselves against slanders and accusations has always been part of the principles regulating the life of revolutionary organisations. The latter cannot, in fact, tolerate suspicion within their ranks. Confidence between comrades, loyalty of militants towards the organisation and their engagement to serve the interests of the working class alone, are basic organisational principles of the avant-garde of the proletariat. This political confidence between militants and of each militant towards the organisation is the precondition for the unity and solidarity between fighters for the communist cause. It is for this very reason that one of the weapons used by the bourgeoisie to destroy revolutionary organisations is the infiltration of adventurers or agents provocateurs whose function consists of destroying this confidence (notably by circulating rumours and lies against-the organisation, against its militants and against its central organs elected by the congress).
Faced with this danger which has always threatened communist organisations, the latter have had the responsibility to nominate a special commission charged with undertaking an investigation each time that they have found themselves confronted with destructive behaviour from within. This was the case in the First International which, at the Hague Congress of 1872, nominated a special commission of inquiry to examine the case of Bakunin and his Alliance.
When a militant is the object of serious accusations, he has the duty and responsibility to show the loyalty of his engagement by making an appeal to a jury of comrades charged with leading an in depth inquiry into his trajectory and actions. Any member of a communist organisation who, faced with these accusations, refuses to defend his militant communist honour can only give credence, through this attitude of capitulation, to the suspicions which weigh on him, and thus assist the dissemination of the poison of mistrust within the organisation. In fact, one of the criteria permitting a judgement on the loyalty of a militant is rightly his determination to want to throw as much light as possible on the nature of his behaviour in front of a Jury of Honour.
But the necessity to appeal to a Jury of Honour (or Revolutionary Tribunal) is not imposed solely to safeguard militants or for the moral health of the organisation. This political process equally constitutes a weapon for the defence of the proletarian political milieu faced with disturbing elements, whether agents of the state or simple adventurers acting on their own account.
In fact, when a revolutionary organisation discovers the existence of such elements within itself, it is its responsibility to assure the protection of other organisations of the proletarian political milieu. The holding of a Jury of Honour thus aims to prevent these other organisations themselves becoming victims of the destructive behaviour of such elements.
The history of the workers’ movement, notably at the beginning of the century, is rich with examples where, faced with certain situations putting the life of revolutionary organisations or the reputations of militants at stake, revolutionary tribunals have been constituted, either on the request of the Party, or on the initiative of the militants who were victims of campaigns of slanders (as was the case with Trotsky in 1937 who was accused by the Stalinists of being an agent of Hitler).
We will cite here only two examples of a Jury of Honour among those known in the history of the workers movement: that requested by the Social Revolutionaries (SR) in 1908 concerning the case of Azev and that organised in 1912 by the SDKPiL (Polish and Lithuanian Social Democratic Party) charged with pronouncing on the “Radek affair”.
Concerning the case of Azev, who was an agent of the Tsarist police (Okhrana) infiltrated into the SR Party, it was a journalist and historian, a fellow traveller of the SR, Bourtzev, who unmasked Azev following an inquiry personally undertaken by him on the trajectory and actions of the latter (Bourtzev was in fact a specialist in the research of Okhrana agents infiltrated into revolutionary organisations in Russia). When these suspicions were confirmed, thanks to a confession from an old boss of the Okhrana office in Warsaw who had just resigned, Bourtzev presented himself to the Central Committee of the SR and warned the Party. The latter accused Bourtzev of wanting to discredit the Party by throwing mud at the exemplary militant Azev. Not for one second did the possibility of Azev’s guilt cross the mind of the Central Committee who considered Bourtzev’s revelations as a manoeuvre aimed at destabilising the Party.
In his book ‘What every revolutionary should know about repression [76]’, Victor Serge recalled the attitude that revolutionary organisations must adopt when faced with suspicions which could arise about their militants: “It is necessary - and it is moreover the preliminary condition for a victorious struggle against a real provocation for any slanderous accusation made against a militant - that a man is not accused lightly, and that an accusation formulated against a revolutionary is never pigeonholed. Each time that the least suspicion is aroused, a jury of comrades must pronounce and rule on the accusation or on the slander. Simple rules to observe with an inflexible rigour if one wants to preserve the moral health of revolutionary organisations.” Thus, the Central Committee of the SR took the decision to convoke a Jury of Honour composed not only of SRs but equally of militants known to belong to other political organisations (including the anarchist Kropotkin). This Revolutionary Tribunal had the principal objective of clearing Azev of all suspicion and denouncing Bourtzev who had just published an article in his paper Byloe (“The Past”) in which he made public the accusations against Azev. With the appearance of this article, Azev, apprehensive about the verdict of the Jury of Honour, asked General Guerassimov of Saint-Petersburg to release him from his functions in the service of the Okhrana. But this resignation of Azev wasn’t sufficient to shake off the suspicions surrounding him. So in order to maintain the confidence of the SR and continue to dupe it, he decided to foment an attack against the Tsar. This manoeuvre allowed Bourtzev, along with the old Director General of the police, Lupukin, dismissed for his lack of grip in the repression of workers’ demonstrations in 1905, to denounce Azev as a double agent. Following a confidential conversation with Lupukin in September 1908, which confirmed that Azev really was an Okhrana agent, Bourtzev convinced the revolutionary tribunal of Azev’s unquestionable guilt and thus refuted the indictment borne against himself by the SR (Lupukin, although having refused to bear witness in front of a Revolutionary Tribunal, nevertheless agreed to sign a letter compromising Azev which was subsequently published by the SRs).
This responsible attitude of the SRs, consisting of convoking a Jury of Honour faced with the accusations against Azev, unfortunately wasn’t shared by Lenin in 1914 when faced with the case of Malinovski. When Malinovski was suspected of working for the Okhrana, the Bolsheviks proposed treating his case in front of a Revolutionary Tribunal. Lenin rejected this on the basis of a totally subjective belief that Malinovski was a militant entirely devoted to the cause of the proletariat. It was only after the revolution of October 1917 that it was proved, thanks to the opening of the Okhrana’s archives, that Malinovski really was an agent of the Tsarist police infiltrated into the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and whose mission consisted of establishing links of affinity with Lenin in order to gain his confidence.
Thus, even Lenin, who had the greatest rigour on organisational questions, let himself be fooled by the apparent “sincerity” of the worker Malinovski.
It was quite another situation concerning the Jury of Honour charged with treating the Radek affair. This jury did not have the mission of clearing a militant suspected of being a state agent, but of penalising the political behaviour of Radek within the Party. In December 1911, the SDKPiL nominated a commission responsible for examining the case of Radek, who was accused of several thefts: of the clothes of a comrade, of books belonging to the Party library, and of money. This commission led to nothing (although Radek ended up admitting having stolen the books and clothes) and was dissolved July 30, 1912. In August 1912, a Revolutionary Tribunal of the Party was set up and expelled Radek not only because of the thefts he was accused of but above all because of his trouble-making, in particular exploiting on his own account the dissensions within Social Democracy.
Within the SDKPiL, Jogiches and Rosa Luxemburg were the most determined to exclude Radek. The leadership of the German Party (SPD) of which Radek was also a member, was immediately informed of this exclusion and Rosa Luxemburg, despite her disagreements with Jogiches on how to treat this affair, obtained the authorisation to send to the SPD a resume of the dossier on the accusations against Radek. At the Jena Congress of 1913, the SPD in its turn had to pronounce on the exclusion of Radek. The severity of this sanction revealed the intransigence that revolutionary organisations of the past could have faced with questions of political behaviour. Thus, in April 1912, Rosa Luxemburg, several months before the meeting of the Party Tribunal, advised her friend in the SPD, Zetkin, not to trust Radek in the following terms: “Radek is a type of whore. Anything can happen when he’s around; it’s much better to keep him out of the way”.
Whatever the political positions of Radek (which, in 1912, were very close to those of Rosa Luxemburg on the question of imperialism) and the service he sincerely gave to the cause of the proletariat, notably within the Bolshevik Party during the revolutionary period, his anti-organisational behaviour within Social Democracy, his actions worthy of a petty crook, incompatible with those of a communist militant, merited being judged and penalised through a Party trial.
These two examples show the different circumstances in which a Revolutionary Tribunal can and must be convoked. It is not only the honour and loyalty of militants upon which a Jury of Honour must pronounce, but equally the defence of the organisation against the infiltration of state agents or against destructive behaviour which could induce distrust and undermine organisational tissue.
This type of political process can either be constituted within one organisation, or be composed of members of several organisations, particularly when the fear of a bias exists or when the destructive behaviour of a militant could mean a threat to other revolutionary organisations.
Thus, it is in reappropriating this experience of the workers’ movement that the ICC, confronted with the case of JJ, has urgently invited this ex-militant, inasmuch as he contested the motives of his exclusion with the argument that this decision revealed “the serious drift of the ICC”, to appeal to a Jury of Honour composed of several revolutionary organisations. In the second part of this article, we will see how JJ reacted to our proposal of a Jury of Honour, and we will then look at the response of the groups of the Communist Left.
The ICC (December 21, 1996).
At its 11th Congress in April 1995, the ICC took the grave decision to exclude one of its militants, the ex-comrade JJ, for destructive behaviour incompatible with membership of a communist organisation, notably his attempts to create within the ICC a secret network of adepts of the ideology of freemasonry (see WR 194). JJ rejected the arguments given for his exclusion, claiming that this decision was the result of a “serious deviation” by the ICC, the result of a “collective paranoiac delirium”. Faced with this “alternative analysis”, the ICC, in conformity with the traditions of the workers’ move-meat, has for two years continually attempted to push this ex-militant to defend himself by calling for a Court of Honour composed of representatives of other revolutionary organisations in order to allow the proletarian milieu to pronounce on the validity of this exclusion and to shed as much light as possible on JJ’s actions.
In the first part [12] of this article, published in WR 201, we provided various historical examples to show that calling a Court of Honour is part of the tradition of the workers’ movement. We pointed out that any militant, when he considers that he has been unjustly accused of faults that he has not committed, has the duty and responsibility to defend his honour as a communist militant, by appealing to a revolutionary tribunal.
Any militant who refuses to engage in such a public political confrontation can only confirm the validity of the accusations raised against him.
When JJ’s secret propaganda for Masonic ideology (in particular among comrades who had recently been integrated into the ICC) was first discovered, in autumn 1994, the organisation did not immediately take the decision to exclude JJ from its ranks, but suspended him from all militant activity . This suspension was accompanied by a demand that he must pronounce in writing on an ICC resolution which affirmed that the esoteric ideologies he had disseminated in the organisation were totally alien to Marxism. For four months JJ remained silent, refusing to make a political critique of his actions, refusing to take a written position on the class nature of the ideology and methods of freemasonry, with the one and only argument: “I have a block about writing”.
At the same time, while recognising a certain number of the overwhelming facts revealing his destructive policies towards the organisation, he rejected the accusations of the ICC with the sole argument that he had acted in a completely “unconscious” manner. His denials were accompanied by attacks on the ICC, which he accused of making him into a scapegoat. It was not his own activities, notably those in favour of Masonic ideology, which represented the serious deviation from Marxism, but the extremely firm reaction of the ICC in defence of the class principles of the proletariat which had to be denounced and attacked as a “collective paranoiac delirium” and as a neo-Stalinist deviation.
Faced with JJ’s disagreements with our analysis of his anti-organizational behaviour, the ICC kept on exhorting him to defend himself within the organisation, notably by opposing our “interpretive paranoia” with his own interpretation of the charges against him. In particular, in conformity with the statutes of the ICC, he was called upon to appeal to the 11th Congress of the ICC if he considered that his suspension was unjustified. Unfortunately, JJ refused to present himself at our Congress to refute the political arguments which had motivated this sanction. He preferred to send the ICC a letter of resignation which called on the Congress not to pronounce his exclusion because such a decision “would be very grave for the ICC”.
On 17 April 1995, just after his exclusion, unanimously voted by the Congress (following a long debate in which all the sections of the ICC took up very detailed positions), the ICC continued to demand that JJ, given his disagreement with the decision of the Congress, should assume his own defence by calling for a Court of Honour composed of groups of the proletarian political milieu in order to remove any suspicion of partiality. JJ categorically refused to do this, putting forward the following two arguments:
1. “In any case, the ICC has a thick dossier on my account” (interview between JJ and the ICC, June 95);
2. “I have no illusions in the proletarian political milieu. The milieu will say the same about me as the ICC” (interview between JJ and the ICC, 17 April 95). Why such certainty? JJ knew quite well that any proletarian organisation worth its name would not tolerate in its ranks an element who had made secret propaganda for Masonic ideology, and that it would be impossible to convince the revolutionary milieu of the unconscious nature of such activities.
But JJ was not content to just play dead and refuse to assume his defence. Through his very noisy and active silence, he carried on with a policy aimed at the destruction of the organisation. Since his suspension, this individual had been putting considerable pressure on his closest friends within the ICC. By constantly presenting himself as the victim of a degenerating organisation, he was using the emotional ties with those close to him to get them to take up his cause against the ICC, to assume his defence in place of him. Thus, while refusing to come to the 11th Congress of the ICC, JJ was pressurising his two closest friends by explicitly calling on them to “defend their divergences” and to not “submit” to the ICC’s analysis of his case. Apart from the evident political cowardice of such behaviour, it is clear that this was a very skilful example of manipulation and emotional blackmail aimed at pushing militants to adopt JJ’s thesis: the ICC, having fallen prey to a “collective paranoiac delirium” had entered into a phase of degeneration that had to be fought. His exclusion was a sort of “purge” comparable to the Moscow Trials.
Such an attitude of ‘sentimental solidarity’ was to lead certain JJ loyalists not to constitute a minority or oppositional tendency on clear political bases, but to attack the ICC from the inside then to desert its ranks in order not to betray friendships[1] [88]. And JJ was perfectly well aware of this!
It was not until over seven months after his exclusion that, under permanent pressure from the ICC, JJ finally yielded by writing to the IBRP[2] [89], as we had vigorously advised him to do, a letter asking them to participate in a Court of Honour: “I am writing this letter to you in order to ask for the holding of a Court of Honour, in conformity with the traditions of the proletarian political milieu, precisely in order to defend my political honour in the face of the suspicions and harassment of the ICC towards me” (letter from JJ to the IBRP, 21.11.95).
The very manner in which JJ describes the reasons which motivated his call for a Court of Honour reveals all the duplicity of this person, who by a skilful use of rhetoric was trying to sow trouble in the direction of the IBRP, saying not one word about those long months of “harassment” in which he had resisted the ICC’s proposal that he call for a Court of Honour.
Contrary to his claims, it was certainly not in order to remain faithful to the tradition of the proletarian political milieu that JJ finally yielded to this persecution by the ICC. The only thing that forced him to write this letter to the IBRP was the fact that, by refusing to call for a Court of Honour to defend himself against the accusations of the ICC - which he continued to reject energetically - certain of those close to him began to doubt his loyalty and to distance themselves from him (notably his own partner, who is still a member of the ICC). In effect, it was obvious to all the members of the ICC that such behaviour was unacceptable and incomprehensible on the part of a communist militant. JJ thus had no choice: if he was to maintain his hold over certain comrades and convince them of his sincerity, he had to risk playing his cards. This very late request for a Court of Honour was the only way JJ could regain any credit and influence among those militants who, unable to throw off the weight of the circle spirit, continued to put personal friendship links above the defence of political principles. JJ’s request to the IBRP for a Court of Honour was nothing but a new manoeuvre aimed at creating trouble and at carrying on, outside the ICC, his policy of destruction, by regrouping around himself a maximum of elements trapped by his sentimental manipulations.
After writing this tardy letter to the IBRP, JJ did all he could to prevent the Court of Honour being held. Thus, in April 96, the IBRP sent a letter to JJ asking him, in particular, if he still wanted a Court of Honour to be held. To the extent that this organisation did not want to constitute this body on its own, it also suggested to JJ that he appeal to the Bordigist group Programma Comunista. 0n 23 May 96, an ICC delegation met JJ to find out if he had replied to the questions posed by the IBRP. JJ’s reply: “I have a block about writing”. It was clear that JJ was in no hurry to defend his “political honour in the face of the suspicions and harassment of the ICC”; that he was above all trying to gain time. During a meeting between the ICC and the IBRP on 26 May 96, we learned that the latter had given JJ a deadline: if he did not reply to them by the end of May 96, the IBRP would consider that he no longer maintained his request for a Court of Honour, and would consider the matter to be closed. It is obvious that if JJ had not replied to the IBRP’s letter, and if he had rejected their proposal to appeal to Programma Comunista, it would have shown clearly that his request for a Court of Honour was just a bluff. JJ therefore had no choice but to “unblock” himself. He finally sent his reply to the IBRP, after the deadline had passed (perhaps hoping that the IBRP had already closed the case), renewing his request for a Court of Honour, accompanied by a letter to Programma Comunista asking them to participate.
Following Programma’s negative response, which we heard about several months later through the IBRP[3] [90], the ICC again exhorted JJ to show more determination in his approach to the groups of the communist left. Thus, on 10 December 96, the ICC sent a letter to JJ which said: “We would like to know whether, faced with this situation, you are definitively renouncing your request for a Court of Honour or whether you intend to approach another group of the proletarian political milieu in order to compensate for the defection of Programma”.
JJ’s response to this letter was to indulge in a real conjuring trick. He totally avoided responding to our question, restricting himself to expressing his “surprise” at “learning” that the IBRP was no longer intending to meet with his request (this new contortion, a particularly dishonest one, shows the level of the duplicity of this element who had known for more than six months the conditions posed by the IBRP - not to be the only group to have to sit in on his case!)[4] [91]. In the same letter to the ICC, JJ announced his intention to write to the IBRP to ask its position about participating alone on a Court of Honour given Programma’s refusal.
Unfortunately, and contrary to what he had announced to the ICC, JJ never sent this letter to the IBRP. In order to push JJ to put into practice his “will” to call for a Court of Honour, the ICC sent him a second letter on 15 January 97, reiterating the same question and pointing out his flagrant lack of determination.
JJ finally decided to respond to our question (after a month and a half of avoiding it) in a letter dated 24 January: “I confirm by this letter my will to maintain my request for a Court of Honour. Programma Comunista’s refusal to participate in such a Court of Honour unfortunately expresses the present situation of weakness of the political milieu. As political organisations, the Bordigist groups will make the same response as Programma. Among the remaining groups, such as for example the FOR or the EFICC, I don’t think that the ICC would be ready to accept their participation on the Court of Honour. In the meantime, I therefore intend to ask the IBRP whether it would be prepared to participate in a Court of Honour with independent personalities of the proletarian milieu.” (JJ’s letter to the ICC, 24.1.97).
This letter calls for a number of comments:
1) It first of all reveals that JJ’s “will” to call for a Court of Honour is nothing but a pious wish because, from the start, even before making the slightest approach to other groups of the communist left, he considers it impossible for such a body to be set up within the proletarian political milieu (owing to the latter’s “weaknesses”, as revealed by Programma’s refusal);
2) JJ affirms that he intends to propose to the IBRP a Court of Honour made of “independent personalities of the proletarian milieu”. Unfortunately, once again, JJ’s “intentions” were not followed up by any action: he never wrote to the IBRP to make this proposal;
3) Concerning the FOR and the EFICC, JJ says that “I don’t think that the ICC would be ready to accept their participation on the Court of honour”. Now, on 7.3.97, two months after receiving a letter from the IBRP announcing that it did not intend to follow up JJ’s request (since the latter had taken no initiative to make up for Programma’s defection), he made a proposal that he himself had considered would not be acceptable to us... the EFICC and the FOR (as well as other elements hostile to our organisation, such as Henri Simon)! Thus it is clear that JJ has done everything possible to sabotage any chance of a Court of Honour being held within the proletarian political milieu. Concerning his last proposal, it is with the IBRP (and not with his “accusers”) that he has to negotiate the participation of groups and “personalities” hostile to the ICC. Finally, it is worth pointing out that in his letter of 24.1.97, JJ himself recognised that he had lacked determination in his approach to the Court of Honour: “I would have preferred to have had the energy to act with more determination. This was not the case. And this is still not the case”. At least things are clear.
One other fact, among many others, showing that JJ has no interest in shedding light on his activities in front of a Court of Honour, even though he says the opposite. In the same letter he writes: “...in the concern to assume my defence as well as possible... I reiterate to you my request that you communicate to me the dossier of accusation you have compiled”.
The ICC, in a letter dated 8.2.97, proposed that he should consult this dossier in the presence of a delegation of our organisation. There was no reply to this letter. The ICC sent two more letters to JJ (the last dated 19 March) asking him whether he agreed with this proposal. On this point our organisation has met with total silence (perhaps he is still “blocked”?). By all the evidence, JJ doesn’t even want to prepare his defence in front of a Court of Honour because he hopes that such a body will never be set up, as demonstrated by all his evasions over the past two years.
For our part, we are still just as determined (as good Stalinists!) to make things clear by patiently insisting that JJ “unblocks” himself and decides to appeal to other groups of the communist left. We consider that only an open political confrontation in front of a body setup by the proletarian political milieu can cut short the rumours (put about, among others, by the “supporters” of JJ) which fuel the campaigns of the bourgeois state that identify communist organisations with Stalinism.
Just as Marx and his comrades made public the intrigues of Bakunin and his “Alliance” against the General Council of the First International, so the ICC remains determined to bring out into the light of day, in front of a Court of Honour, all the manipulations of the individual JJ[5] [92].
In his last letter to the ICC, dated 7.3.97, JJ said that he had not written to any other group of the political milieu asking them to take part in a Court of Honour because, being once again “blocked”, “I have not managed to keep to the deadlines that you (the ICC) want to impose on me”.
For more than two years now the ICC has been trying to push JJ to prove in practise his “will” to call for a Court of Honour in order to defend in front of the working class his “thesis” that his exclusion from the ICC is the result of a “paranoiac delirium”, symptomatic of an internal degeneration of our organisation. JJ’s repeated “blocks” about writing to the groups of the proletarian political milieu, his multiple contortions and his double language (which is not at all “unconscious”) that he uses to hypocritically affirm his “will” to call for a Court of Honour while at the same time manoeuvring very intelligently to ensure that it will not take place, only reinforce our conviction. Not only does this element have no place in any revolutionary organisation, but he also constitutes a danger for the proletarian political milieu, as shown by this statement in his last letter to the ICC (7.3.97): “I have not abdicated my political will”.
We are profoundly convinced of this and would not be at all surprised to see the revolutionary milieu one day confronted with a new anti-ICC “theoretical” publication produced by JJ’s “allies” and inspired by him.
The ICC, May 1997.
[1] [93] Including one of those close to him who, after a long debate, was convinced by the political arguments developed by the congress, and voted his exclusion, declaring in front of the organisation: “Nor to exclude JJ would show contempt for the idea of what it means to be a militant of our organisation, a contempt for our organisation”. Unfortunately, after returning from the Congress, this “friend” of JJ was once again subjected to sentimental pressure aimed at making him feel guilty and at pushing him to again close ranks around JJ.
[2] [94] International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party: Communist Workers’ Organisation in Britain and Battaglia Comunista in Italy
[3] [95] Here we can only welcome the responsible attitude of the IBRP (that of accepting the very principle of participating in a Court of Honour) and deplore the incomprehensions of Programma Comunista concerning a question as crucial as that of the defence of revolutionary groups and of proletarian principles of organisation. Unfortunately, it has to be recognised that such an attitude on Programma’s part simply gave the individual JJ a free hand to continue his manoeuvres, in particular those aimed at spreading the idea that if a Court of Honour doesn’t take place it’s solely because of the weaknesses of the proletarian political milieu. This can only discredit the left communist current, making it appear that it doesn’t care about the honour of militants who have been unjustly excluded from their organisation.
[4] [96] In mid-January, JJ received a copy of the letter that the IBRP had sent him previously (and which he says he never received), confirming that it did not want to appear on its own in a Court of Honour.
[5] [97] Let’s recall that when confronted with the intrigues of Bakunin and his friends, Marx wrote an internal circular for the General Council of the International, ‘The so-called splits in the International [98]’. After this, the 1872 Hague Congress decided, given the campaigns and rumours the bourgeoisie was utilising against the International and the General Council, to publish the report of the special commission nominated by the Congress to examine the case of Bakunin and the Alliance.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/asian-tsunami
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/barikad#_ftn1
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/barikad#_ftn2
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/barikad#_ftn3
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/barikad#_ftnref1
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/barikad#_ftnref2
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/120_holocaust.html
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/barikad#_ftnref3
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/hungary
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/13/marxism-theory-revolution
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internationalist-anarchism
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_01
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internal-fraction-icc
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn1
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_imposture.html
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_nci_reso.html
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn2
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn3
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn4
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn5
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn6
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn7
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn8
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn9
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn10
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_dec_nci.html
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn11
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn12
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn13
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn14
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/267_snitches.htm
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/277_ibrp_tedesca.htm
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn15
[36] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/index.htm
[37] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch27.htm
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn16
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn17
[40] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/index.htm
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn18
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn19
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/252_jonas.htm
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn20
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn21
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn22
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn23
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/279_ibrp_paris_1_thugs.htm
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn24
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn25
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn26
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_edn27
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref1
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_pres_nci.html
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref2
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref3
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[61] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref8
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[63] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref10
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref11
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref12
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[67] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref14
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[70] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/200412/678/revolutionary-organisations-struggle-against-provocation-and-slander
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[74] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref20
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref21
[76] https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1926/repression/index.htm
[77] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref22
[78] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref23
[79] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref24
[80] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref25
[81] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref26
[82] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2005_wreckers#_ednref27
[83] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[84] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[85] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/first-international
[86] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[87] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[88] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_edn1
[89] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_edn2
[90] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_edn3
[91] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_edn4
[92] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_edn5
[93] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_ednref1
[94] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_ednref2
[95] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_ednref3
[96] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_ednref4
[97] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/jury_of_honour_02#_ednref5
[98] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/03/fictitious-splits.htm
[99] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/parasitism