We are re-publishing here the first part of an article written in 1998 for the Russian journal 'Proletarian Tribune', the aim of which was to give a brief history of the Communist Left for those who may not be well acquanted with the political tradition the ICC draws its heritage from. 

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

Marxism, an indispensable weapon for the working class

Internationalism, as part of the communist left, has never hidden its belonging to the political milieu which claim its adherence to marxism, the communist theory that has historically best expressed the movement of the working class towards its political and economic emancipation. Marxism has demonstrated its superiority over all other social theories by being able to offer a global understanding of the movement of human history and to predict the broad lines of its future evolution. Moreover marxism as the theoretical viewpoint of the revolutionary class in capitalism , is the most advanced point of human thinking about social reality. At the same time marxism is not a kind of neutral science that can be learned in the unie that can be learned in the universities for the sake of learning. Marxism is over all a weapon of combat of the working class in its revolutionary struggle against capitalism, a tool for the advance of proletarian consciousness through the exposure of bourgeoisie mystifcations and the expelling of all bourgeoisie’s ideological influences from the working class. For us only those political organizations which base themselves in Marxism can be truly meaningful in the struggle to overthrow capitalism by the working class.

Since the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, the anti-communist propaganda of the bourgeoisie - based on the 'greatest lie of the 20th century' that claims Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of Marxism - has obtained heights never before imaginable. But moreover, the influence of the classical theses of anarchism - this 'radical' petty bourgeois critique of Marxism-has itself widened, touching even those political circles that seek to link themselves up with Marxism once again. The bourgeois critique, like the anarchist criticism of Marxism, affirms - even in the case where Marx is not relegated to the same ranks as Stalin - that certain fundamental theses of Marxism, supposedly false, prefigured the rise of Stalinism. Notably, the Marxist conception according to which the proletariat has an historic task, a mission to complete, is considered a residue of idealism and even as a religious deformation of the scientific spirit. One finds such anarchist influences even among the declared partisans of historical materialism, for example the review Soziale Befreiung (SB), written by the Unabh�ngige R�tekommunisten (independent council communists) in Germany. This influence does not surprise us since SB declares itself partisan of a "post-Marxist communism" in its new brochure The Terror of Capital (vol. 1).

Introduction - Parliament is alien to the working class

Faced with another general election, and the calls by any number of so-called ‘socialists’ for the working class to chose between the capitalist parties standing for parliament, genuine communists have to reaffirm their total rejection of the whole ‘democratic’ circus.

In the “Theses on Decomposition” (published for the first time in International Review no 62 and republished in International Review no107) as well as in the article “The decomposition of capitalism” (published in the International Review no57) we argued that capitalism had entered into a new and final stage of its decadence, that of its decomposition, a phase characterised by the aggravation and culmination of all the contradictions of the system.

Having examined the various facets of man's alienation, the next task Marx took up in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was to criticize the crude and inadequate conceptions of communism which predominated in the proletarian movement of his time. As we showed in the first article in this series, Marx rejected the conceptions inherited from Babeuf and still propagated by the followers of Blanqui because they tended to present communism as a general leveling-down, as a negation of culture in which "the category of worker is not abolished but extended to all men"

I

In the period leading up to the First World War, then during the war itself, revolutionary Marxists were obliged not only to denounce the imperialist character of the war, but also to show that war was inevitable as long as capitalism remained the dominant mode of production in the world.

This text is not an attempt to deal with all the problems of the Marxist theory of crisis. It is aimed simply at providing a framework to the