The ICC has just excluded one of its members. Such a measure is not often taken by our organisation. The last exclusion of a member of the ICC goes back to 1995 and the previous one took place in 1981. We only apply such a sanction when we are faced with extremely serious faults, and this is why we generally accompany it with a communiqué in the press because we consider that the element being sanctioned represents a danger not just for our organisation but for the whole proletarian political milieu and the sympathisers of the communist left.
The element who is being excluded, Jonas (who also signed articles in our press with the initials JE) has in fact behaved in a way totally unworthy of a communist militant. We reproduce here extracts from the resolution the organisation has adopted on this matter:
“Jonas presented his resignation in May 2001 with the argument that his health did not permit him to carry on the political combat in our organisation when the latter was, according to him, threatened by an ‘enterprise of demolition’. In reality, the ICC has noted that while Jonas retired from the organisation, he by no means ceased all activity towards our organisation. On the contrary, it has been established that this ‘retirement’ was only a means to carry out, secretly and with impunity, an activity hostile to the ICC, in particular:
- blaming its militants and setting them against each other, by attributing some of them and the central organs with the responsibility of aggravating his health problems;
- taking advantage of his political authority and the sympathy he had acquired to incite a certain number of the organisation’s militants to rebel against its decisions and discipline, pushing them into a destructive and suicidal political dynamic;
- circulating, both inside and outside the ICC, a whole series of extremely grave accusations against a certain number of militants, while at the same time refusing to meet with, or even recognise, the commission charged with examining accusations of this type;
- refusing to meet any delegation of the organisation charged with communicating the accusations against him so that he could present his defence, while he had nothing more to say about a document transmitted to him at the beginning of December 2000 which already described behaviour on his part which was absolutely unacceptable and hostile to the ICC”
One of the most intolerable and repulsive aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign he has waged against a member of the organisation - accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people outside the organisation of manipulating those around them and the central organs on behalf of the police, and of only having participated in previous combats for the defence of the organisation to divert suspicions, while in fact being an accomplice of Simon (an adventurer expelled from the ICC in 1995), with whom in some way there was a “division of labour”.
It can happen that a sincere militant of a communist organisation, rightly or wrongly, can have suspicions towards another militant. It is then up to that militant to raise the issue with the organs which the organisation has given itself to deal with questions of this type and which can then examine the elements upon which the suspicion is based with a maximum of attention, prudence and discretion. But this was not the attitude of Jonas. In fact he categorically refused to meet the commission charged with examining this kind of problem while continuing to distil his poison.
We should make it clear that the ICC member accused by Jonas of being a “cop and an accomplice of Simon” asked that there should be a detailed inquiry about them, in order to be able to continue as a militant in the ICC’s ranks. This inquiry came to the formal conclusion that there was absolutely no basis for the accusation and exposed its lying, malicious character. This did not prevent Jonas from carrying on with his slanders.
“The fact that Jonas refused to meet the ICC to explain his behaviour in itself constitutes proof that he is conscious of having become an enemy of our organisation despite his theatrical declarations to ‘his comrades’, whom in reality he presents (with the exception of those he has dragged along with him) either as ‘cops’, or as ‘Torquemadas’ or as poor ‘manipulated’ cretins”.
Today Jonas has become a bitter enemy of the ICC and is behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur. We don’t know what his underlying motives are, but we are quite sure that he represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu.
ICC, 24/2/02
The official meaning of the war in Afghanistan: the defence of the civilised, democratic world against terrorism and Islamic fanaticism, fought by the civilised and democratic states standing shoulder to shoulder with the USA.
The real meaning: an imperialist conflict where the official enemy is only a scapegoat and the real enemies pose as friends.
Ever since the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc at the beginning of the 1990s, the USA has been faced with a growing challenge to its world domination. Not just from the minor enemies (also former friends in most cases) who have been the target of US bombs � Saddam, Milosevic, bin Laden and the Taliban; not just from second and third rate powers, once loyal clients, who are more and more ready to follow their own immediate aims, like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel; but also, and above all, from the major powers who were once the mainstay of the western bloc, but who, now that the Russian bear is no threat, are themselves pursuing their own imperialist ambitions: France, Germany and Britain.
Three times in the last decade the USA has had to resort to massive displays of military force to remind all its former vassals who is the world’s boss. Each time its success in dragooning its rivals into US-run military ‘coalitions’ has been far outweighed by the sharpening of conflict that followed soon afterwards. Not long after the Gulf war, in which Germany was given a role only as a moneybags, German imperialism revived its historical ‘drive to the east’, provoking the war in Yugoslavia by supporting the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. After nearly a decade of war and massacre in the Balkans, the USA was compelled to launch its air war against Serbia � on the surface to defend the oppressed Kosovans, in reality to enable the US to implant itself in a region previously dominated by Germany, France, Britain and Russia.
The Afghan war takes this pattern to a new level. Presented as a justified response to the horrible slaughter of September 11, the war had in fact already been planned: in July 2001 the US warned Afghanistan that an attack was being prepared, and it had already set up military bases in Uzbekistan. The real motive behind the war was once again to ‘restore order’ in a world where the dominant rule has become ‘every man for himself’. The rows over America’s rejection of the Kyoto treaty, over the ‘Son of Star Wars’ anti-missile programme, over the ‘Euro-army’, helped to swell a growing tide of anti-American propaganda in Europe. September 11 and the campaigns about ‘solidarity with the USA’ called a temporary halt to this, but even while the majority of the European powers claimed to back America’s ‘anti-terrorist’ assault on Afghanistan, the differences were always visible. Most of Europe’s governments officially supported the war, but there was plenty of scope for the expression of doubts and criticisms. For its part America was quite determined to give its allies a minimal role in the fighting. Britain in particular was systematically humiliated, the role of its troops in the actual combat being embarrassingly below the level of Blair’s grand military posturing. This US ‘unilateralism’ has been attacked more and more vociferously by European experts and diplomats who claim that even NATO � which the US formerly used as a cover for its interests against the squabble-prone United Nations � is virtually redundant. “Will the Americans ever fight a war through NATO again? It’s doubtful. The US reserves the right to itself to wage war, and dumps on others the messy, expensive business of nation-building and peace keeping” (former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, quoted in The Observer, 10 February 2002).
In the last month or so the divisions between the US and its ‘allies’ have once again got the press talking about a ‘new low in US-European relations’. First we had Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech which brought forth a storm of polemics from the French, the Germans, even ex-Tory ministers like Chris Patten, who insisted that none of the countries of the ‘axis’ (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) could be proven to have any direct links with al-Qaida. They were especially incensed by the inclusion of Iran in the axis: had Germany and Britain not been wooing Iran since September 11? The US targeting of Iran was partly a response to Iran’s efforts to procure a sphere of influence in the new Afghan carve-up by backing its own choice of war-lords and armed gangs. But it is even more a way of issuing a warning to the likes of Germany and Britain. The naming of North Korea serves a similar purpose in the Far East in relation to the ambitions of China and Japan.
More recently, the press in Europe has revealed America’s determination to launch an attack on Iraq and topple Saddam. According to a US state official cited in The Guardian (14 Feb), it was very unlikely that the Iraqi regime would accept the stringent programme of weapons inspections the US will demand. “As the American intelligence source put it, the White House ‘will not take yes for an answer’, suggesting that Washington would provoke a crisis”. An article published on 5 February in the same paper observes that Germany had led the chorus of protests by European states against the ‘axis of evil’ speech. The words of Berlin’s deputy foreign minister, Ludger Vollmer, were particularly significant “We Europeans warn against it. There is no indication that Iraq is involved in the terrorism we have been talking about for the last few months� this terror argument can be used to legitimise old enmities”.
At the same time the US announced a new defence budget of unprecedented proportions: a 15 percent increase, the biggest in 20 years, and more than double the military spending in all the European Union. Over the next five years the total budget is planned to rise to two trillion dollars. This means that America’s share in the world’s arms expenses will be as big as the next 25 biggest budgets put together. And the gap is not merely financial. It is also technological � no European state can come anywhere near the US in the use of pilotless attack aircraft, satellite information systems, speed and scale of military transport, and so on. And it is strategic: “�the Afghan war has fundamentally reshaped the architecture of international alliances. Central Asia is splattered with new American fortresses, the Pacific and Indian oceans are patrolled by aircraft carriers and fleets of awesome size” (Observer, 10 February, ’Armed to the teeth’ by Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy. ) This article points out how alarmed the Europeans are at all this: “Lord Robertson, the usually unflappable (NATO) secretary general, has been moved to warn some members that unless the declining European defence expenditure is reversed then Europe � and the Europeans in NATO � are in danger of becoming military pygmies”.
Thus we can see the emerging contours of a new arms race, of a new period of rising imperialist tensions between the most powerful states in the world. The ‘war against terrorism’, Bush has always insisted, has the whole world for its stage and will continue indefinitely. That is because its real aim is not to combat terrorism but to permanently terrorise the world into submission to US diktats. The European powers know this, and their opposition to the US has nothing to do with concern for those who will die as a result of thus lurch into unending warfare. It is based solely on the calculation of their own imperialist interests.
Does this mean that we are heading towards a third world war? Not for the foreseeable future. To fight a world war you need more than just temporary alliances or largely economic conglomerations like the EU. You need fully formed imperialist military blocs. The road to the formation of such blocs can only go so far today for a number of reasons. The tendency for each country to pursue its own national-imperialist interests not only causes problems for the US � it also makes it very difficult for the major European powers to sink their own rivalries and enmities and come to together as a single anti-US bloc under the leadership of the most powerful European nation (this, of course, is Germany, whose very history demonstrates the problem). No less important is the vast military imbalance we have already referred to. The war in Afghanistan, while sharpening tensions between the US and its rivals, has underlined this imbalance even more. As Beaumont and Vulliamy put it, “The reality � even before the latest proposed increases in military spending � is that America could beat the rest of the world at war with one hand tied behind its back”. Conflict between European powers and America will continue and indeed worsen, even taking the form of proxy wars fought through local gangs or even nation states. But it cannot yet be an overt confrontation.
But there is another reason why a third world war is not on the agenda. Imperialist blocs require an ideology if they are to mobilise their populations, and above all their proletariats, for war. The US bourgeoisie has certainly achieved a good measure of success in whipping up a massive campaign of nationalist hysteria after the September 11 attacks, and even gives us a glimpse of what capitalism would need to do on an even bigger scale to drag the proletariat off to war. But a war against the Taliban is one thing; even the US bourgeoisie is not ready to mobilise its workers to make war on ‘democratic’ Europe. And in Europe itself, even the ‘war against terrorism’, while creating negative feelings of disorientation and fear, did not at all actively mobilise the proletariat. Underlying this is the fact that the working class today � in contrast to the 1930s � has not been subjected to a massive defeat and is still ready to defend its class interests rather than sacrifice itself on the altar of war.
And this is precisely why the big wars of today are still aimed at scapegoats rather than at the real enemy. The bourgeoisie is still unable to pursue its imperialist rivalries to their ultimate conclusion. But this is no reason to fall into complacency. The efforts of the USA to impose ‘order’ on a world sliding into chaos can succeed only in aggravating and extending that chaos; humanity is even more menaced by a spiral of local and regional wars than by a single world holocaust. Even more dangerous is the fact that such a spiral could take place without the bourgeoisie having to defeat the workers of the central capitalist countries in a direct confrontation. We could be defeated piecemeal, gradually succumbing to the loss of our class identity, by the creeping rot of a disintegrating social system, making it increasingly impossible for the working class as a class to take power and save society by organising it anew.
And still the working class remains the only force capable of preventing this slide into the abyss. Its current struggles may seem puny in the face of the relentless attack on its living standards demanded both by the deepening world economic crisis and the huge growth in military spending and preparations for war. But the simultaneity of these two elements is no accident; they spring from the same source � the decadence and obsolescence of the capitalist system � and they mutually reinforce each other. In struggling against both crisis and war, the working class can come to recognise their intimate connection, and thus to understand the necessity for its own revolutionary alternative.
WR, 2/3/02.
The new outburst of violence between Hindus and Muslims in India that began on 27th February with the burning to death of 58 Hindus on a train has now claimed the lives of at least 295 people. The true figure may be far higher. Men, women and even young children have been the victims of brutal massacres in several parts of the state of Gujarat, some of them being doused in petrol and set alight. The papers have been quick to describe this as the fruit of “deep-rooted sectarian grievances” (Guardian 1/3/02), explaining that the Hindus on the train were returning from a ceremony in Ayodha to dedicate the building of a new temple on a disputed religious site. In 1992, Hindu nationalists destroyed the Ayodha mosque and in the violence that followed some 3,000 people died.
The Indian Government and opposition parties issued a joint statement calling for peace, while troops were sent in to keep peace and a strict curfew was imposed. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee has cancelled plans to attend the Commonwealth summit in Australia in order to deal with the situation. However, the Indian state is not quite the shocked onlooker it presents itself as. In the first place, many of the Muslims, who have been the principle target of the riots since the burning of the train, have had their pleas for help ignored by the police. In city of Ahmedabad, the centre of the violence, all of the inhabitants of one Muslim enclave were burnt to death. To date only 900 troops have arrived to police this city of some 5 million people. In the second place, the current government is dominated by the BJP, which came to power by provoking Hindu sectarianism against Muslims. While the leadership of the BJP today appeals for restraint, in 1992 many of them participated in the destruction of the Ayodha mosque.
However, the violence in India today is no more the simple reflection of ‘deep-rooted sectarian grievances’ than is the case in the former Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland. While such tensions are a historical reality, they are subordinate to the forces that shape the capitalist system that dominates the globe. Sectarian violence, wherever it appears and whatever its original causes, is always subsumed within the political and imperialist struggles of the ruling class. In the Indian sub-continent, one of the determining factors has been the rivalry between India and Pakistan which, since their independence from Britain in 1947, have remained in a state of open or covert war. This reached a new peak in the new year when it seemed that open war was possible, as India piled the pressure on Pakistan following the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13th. However, this situation itself was but a result of the global imperialist struggle which, since the USA’s declaration of the ‘war against terrorism’ has seen changes in the balance of political forces in many parts of the world, even when apparently unconnected with Afghanistan. In the sub-continent, as we showed in this paper last month (see WR 251, ‘Against capitalism’s war drive in India and Pakistan’), this has been expressed in a weakening of Pakistan’s position because of its support for the Taliban, a situation which the India government has sought to exploit.
The Indian and Pakistani governments may or may not have directly orchestrated the latest violence, but it is their imperialist rivalry that sets up the dynamic that produces such violence; meanwhile, behind these third rate powers stand those of the second and first ranks whose manoeuvrings determine the whole global situation.
And while the bourgeois factions and nations manoeuvre, it is the exploited and the oppressed who pay the price. The vast majority of those burnt and beaten to death are the poor, the slum-dwellers, the proletarians. What is more, every religious or racial slaughter is a blow against the ability of the working class to unite and fight back against growing poverty and war. Indeed, it is a prefiguration of the dark future that capitalism in its death agony offers humanity, a world where the exploited have lost all hope and plunge into hell with their hands round each others’ throats. But that future is not yet assured; and we who raise the flag of workers’ unity are not idle dreamers, but the only ones who point to an alternative future for mankind.
North, 2/3/02
Since its origins, the workers’ movement has had to face up to repression from the bourgeoisie. However, it would be a serious error, a real expression of naivety, to think that such repression only takes the form of physical repression directed against workers’ strikes or uprisings.
The proletarian revolution is the first in history whose success fundamentally depends on a revolutionary class consciousness about its own goals, about the final aims of its combat against capitalism: communist society. Inevitably, in capitalist society, this historical consciousness develops in the proletariat in an uneven way; and this is why revolutionary class consciousness is initially crystallised in the political organisations of the proletarian vanguard.
It is an irony of history that the bourgeoisie has often shown itself to be more far-sighted than the working class masses on the crucial role of revolutionary organisations. The ruling class has always paid particular attention to the political organisations that defend the need for a communist revolution, even in periods in which they are an extreme minority, even completely unknown to the vast majority of the working class. This remains true whatever the political regime of the day. To give just two examples that concern ourselves directly:
Only once in history have the methods of the political police been examined in an exhaustive manner by revolutionaries: after the October revolution in Russia, when the archives of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks. It was on the basis of these archives that Victor Serge wrote his book What Every Revolutionary Should Know About Repression, which to this day remains a very valuable expose of police methods. As Serge put it, the Okhrana was “the prototype of the modern political police”. However, as we shall see, spying and police provocation weren’t born with the Okhrana, and revolutionaries didn’t wait until Serge’s book before understanding that they were the subject of police interest.
What is the aim of this police interest? It’s not simply to spy on, repress and destroy revolutionary organisations. The bourgeoisie and its political police know very well that the political organisations of the proletariat are not generated in the heads of the individuals who compose them, but by the very conditions of the class struggle, the permanent opposition between the working class and capitalist society.
It’s therefore no accident if the figure of the agent provocateur has always been so abhorred in the workers’ movement, both in its political organisations and the organs the class gives rise to during the course of its struggles (general assemblies, factory committees, etc). From their beginnings the political organisations of the working class have tried to protect themselves against the activities of agents provocateurs. Thus in the 1795 statutes of the London Corresponding Society, one of the first working class political organisations, we have the following rule: “Persons attempting to trespass on order, under pretence of showing zeal, courage, or any other motive, are to be suspected. A noisy disposition is seldom a sign of courage, and extreme zeal is often a cloak of treachery” (cited in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1968 Pelican edition, p 539). In the same way, the Communist League (for which Marx wrote the famous Communist Manifesto in 1848) stated in its article 42: “individuals who have been kept at arms length or excluded, as well as suspicious elements in general, must be watched by the League and placed beyond the pale” However, the effectiveness of police provocation has its limits. As Victor Serge put it: “Provocation can only wipe out individuals or groups and is almost impotent against the revolutionary movement as a whole. We have seen how an agent provocateur became responsible (in 1912) for bringing Bolshevik propaganda into Russia; how another (Malinovski) gave speeches written by Lenin in the Duma (...) Whether a revolutionary leaflet is handed out by a secret agent or a devoted revolutionary, the results are still the same: the essential thing is that it should be read (...) When the secret agent Malinovski acted as Lenin’s voice in the Duma, the Minister of the Interior was wrong to rejoice over the success of his hired agent. Lenin’s words were far more important to the country than the mere voice of a wretch like him”.
Much worse than provocation in itself is suspicion, the distrust that can grow up in an organisation when its members feel themselves to be the target of provocation. This is all the more the case because - apart from this unique case when the Okhrana archives were seized - revolutionaries obviously aren’t in a position to find proofs in the police archives, while the police themselves do all they can to cover their tracks and protect the real spies. The worst thing is that often the police don’t actually need to do anything; they can just let suspicion and distrust take root and gather the fruits: the paralysis or even the break up of the revolutionary organisation. Thompson’s book The Making of the English Working Class gives us a striking example of this kind of paralysis: “In 1794 one Jones, of Tottenham, was accused (mistakenly) of being a spy, because of his violent resolutions which were alleged to be for the ‘purpose of entrapping the society’. Jones (the genuine informer, Groves, reported with wry relish) complained: ‘If a Citizen made a Motion which seemed anyways spirited he was set down as a Spy sent among them by the Government. If a Citizen sat in a corner and said nothing he was watching their proceedings that he might better report it (...) Citizens hardly knew how to act’” (op cit.).
While distrust within a revolutionary organisation can bring about paralysis and disintegration, suspicion is a burden which often proves unbearable for the individual militant (Serge cites examples of militants who committed suicide, or carried out desperate acts, because they were unable to clear themselves of an unjustified suspicion). A communist militant sets himself in opposition to the whole of bourgeois society; he is placed outside the normal order of things, accused by the bourgeois propaganda machine of being a fanatic or a bloody criminal. He can be hunted down like a wild beast. To keep his head held high, a communist militant must not only maintain an unquenchable conviction in the historic cause of the proletariat, in the future of humanity, in the necessity and possibility of a communist revolution; he must also preserve his honour as a militant, the respect and confidence of his comrades in arms. There is no worse shame for a communist militant than to be designated a traitor. Suspicion is terribly easy to sow, and very hard to wipe out. This is why communist militants have the duty to defend their dignity faced with suspicion and slander, just as the organisation has the responsibility not to tolerate these poisons, which can only destroy its unity and solidarity between comrades.
It was not for nothing that in 1860, Karl Marx published his denunciation of Karl Vogt, a spy in the service of Napoleon III, who himself accused Marx of being a police agent. ‘Well-meaning’ bourgeois commentators often see this text as a weakness of Marx’s, a distraction from his ‘philosophical’ work, a futile attack on a pathetic individual. It has also been claimed that the text, with its minute attention to Vogt’s most lamentable activities, is an example of Marx’s ‘authoritarianism’, his inability to take criticism. This is to understand nothing of Marx’s motives. Marx hated talking about himself or his personal affairs in public, but he felt obliged to devote a year to this indispensable work in order to defend both his personal honour as a revolutionary, and also and above all the movement of which he was a part.
Victor Serge was quite correct to write: “There is a tradition of it: the enemies of action, the cowards, the well-entrenched ones, the opportunists, are happy to assemble their arsenal... in the sewers! Suspicion and slander are their weapons for discrediting revolutionaries”.
The danger of uncontrolled suspicion within the organisation was well understood by revolutionaries of the past, as we can see from the statutes of the League of the Just, the predecessor of the Communist League (these draft statutes are from 1843): “If someone wants to complain about someone or some question connected to the League, they must do so openly in the (section) meeting. Denigrators will be excluded” (point 9).
Towards the end of the 19th century, this basic position was further refined. It was not enough to expel the denigrator; it was necessary to deal with unfounded accusations so that they wouldn’t undermine the organisation. This method of the workers’ movement was formulated in the statutes of the Berlin section of the German social democratic party, which in 1882 (when the party was working in illegality) declared: “Every militant - even when it’s a well-known comrade - has the duty to maintain discretion about the subjects discussed in the organisation, whatever the issue. If a comrade hears an accusation about another comrade, he has the duty in the first place to deal with it confidentially, and he must demand the same from the comrade who informed him of the accusation; he must establish the reasons behind the accusation and know what lies behind it. He must inform the secretary (of the section), who must clarify the question in a confrontation between the accused and the accuser (...) Any other action, as for example the sowing of suspicion without definite proofs attested by the secretaries (ie those responsible to the section) can cause considerable damage. Since the police have an obvious interest in promoting divisions in our ranks by spreading denigrations, any comrade who does not stick to the procedure described above runs the risk of being considered as someone working for the police” (cited from Fricke, History of the German Workers’ Movement 1869-1917).
It is evident that in the conditions of illegality of that time, revolutionaries were preoccupied on a day to day basis by the danger of police infiltration. But suspicion within the organisation is not always the work of police action; it can arise without the slightest provocation from the state. Even when accusations are launched with the best intentions of protecting the organisation, the distrust they sow can be even more dangerous to the health of the organisation, and to the security of its militants, than real provocation. This is what Serge again draws attention to: “Accusations are murmured about, then said out loud, and usually they cannot be checked out. This causes enormous damage, worse in some ways than that caused by provocation itself (...)This evil of suspicion and mistrust among us can only be reduced and isolated by a great effort of will. It is necessary, as the condition of any real struggle against provocation - and slanderous accusation of members is playing the game of provocation - that no-one should be accused lightly, and it should also be impossible for an accusation against a revolutionary to be accepted without being investigated. Every time anyone is touched by suspicion, a jury formed of comrades should determine whether it is a well-founded accusation or a slander. These are simple rules which should be observed with inflexible rigour if one wishes to preserve the moral health of revolutionary organisations”.
In the first part of this article, we have tried to show:
The communist organisation does not have a ‘natural’ place in bourgeois society; on the contrary, it is a foreign body within it. The antagonism between communist principles and bourgeois ideology is played out not only outside the organisation, but inside it as well. The infiltration of ideologies alien to the proletariat can take the form of opportunist political positions being taken up by a part of the organisation, but also and much more insidiously through forms of individual behaviour which are passed on from the ruling class (or from certain social strata with no historical future) and which are diametrically opposed to what should be the comportment of a communist militant.
The ICC has always insisted that the question of the political behaviour of militants is a question linked to the principles of a class which is the bearer of communism. Against the poison of distrust and suspicion, we say in our platform that “the relations between the different parts of the organisation and the ties between militants necessarily bear the scars of capitalist society and therefore cannot constitute an island of communist relations within capitalism. Nevertheless, they cannot be in flagrant contradiction with the goals pursued by revolutionaries, and they must of necessity be based on that solidarity and mutual confidence which are the hallmarks of belonging to an organisation of the class which is the bearer of communism”. Similarly our statutes say that the behaviour of a militant cannot be in contradiction with the aims we are fighting for, and that debates in the organisation “are carried out with the greatest political rigour, while avoiding personal attacks which cannot take the place of coherent political argument”. To forget these rules of behaviour, to allow oneself to be carried away by the spirit of competition which is inculcated by bourgeois society, can lead one further and further away from the terrain of debate between communists; in certain circumstances (for example when militants are in a minority and are short of political arguments) it can lead them to launching campaigns of slander against their comrades, who are seen as enemies to bring down.
The use of campaigns of slander against militants within revolutionary organisations has dotted the history of the workers’ movement since its origins. We only have to recall Bakunin’s slanders against Marx within the First International, where the latter was accused of being a “dictator” (as a result of being a Jew and a German!); the calumnies spread after the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party by the Mensheviks against Lenin, who was accused of wanting to introduce a reign of terror in the party, like Robespierre. We can also cite the extreme case of the campaigns of denigration aimed against Rosa Luxemburg by the opportunist elements in German social democracy, who were to betray the principles of the working class in 1914. Thus in the corridors of the party Luxemburg was accused of having the morals of a libertine, and even of being an agent of the Okhrana, by militants who a few years later, in January 1919, would organise her murder: we refer to the ‘bloodhound’ Noske and his accomplices Ebert and Scheidemann.
To give one last example, our predecessors in the Gauche Communiste de France also had to deal with slanders inside the organisation, as we can see in this resolution adopted at the GCF conference in July 1945:
“Approving the resolution of the general assembly of 16 June which registered the break from the organisation by these elements, the conference raises its voice in particular against the campaign of base slander, which has become the preferred weapon of these elements against the organisation and against its militants as individuals.
By resorting to such methods, these elements, while exposing their real policies, create a poisonous atmosphere by introducing suspicion, the threat of pogroms (to use their own expression), gangsterism, thus perpetuating the infamous tradition which up to now has been the speciality of Stalinism.
Considering it urgent to put an end to such slander, to prevent it from taking the place of political debate in the relations between revolutionary militants, the conference decides to address itself to the revolutionary groups, requesting that they institute a court of honour which will take position on the revolutionary morality of the militants who have been slandered, and to refuse entry into the proletarian movement of slander and slanderers”.
Thus our organisation, by rejecting slander and slanderers, is in full continuity with the combat of past revolutionaries for the defence of the organisation against all the efforts to destroy it. Slander not only has no place in the ranks of the proletariat, but is one of the preferred weapons of the bourgeoisie for discrediting communist organisations and sowing generalised distrust towards the positions they defend. To be convinced of this we only have to recall the campaign of slander against Lenin (accused by the Kerensky government of being an agent of the Kaiser and German imperialism) on the eve of the Russian revolution, with the aim of discrediting the Bolshevik party; and those waged against Trotsky (accused of being an agent of Hitler and of fascism) to discredit any struggle against Stalinism in the 1930s.
The fight against slander is not only a vital necessity for militants and the organisations they belong to. It concerns all the organisations of the communist movement. This is why, when faced with destructive behaviour of this kind, which can only play the game of the bourgeois state, the ICC has always alerted the whole proletarian political milieu: “When such behaviour comes to light, it is the duty of the organisation to take measures not only in defence of its own security, but also in defence of the security of other communist organisations” (‘Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation’, International Review 33).
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internal-fraction-icc
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/61/india
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/parasitism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current