Parasitism

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Since its formation, this organization, made up of former members of the ICC, has engaged in a campaign of calumnies against our Current.

Visitors to our internet site will be aware that in the recent period the ICC has had to confront a slanderous and shameful campaign mounted by the so-called Internal Fraction of the ICC (IFICC) and the Argentine Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalistas. One avowed purpose of this campaign has been to isolate our organisation and to discredit it in the eyes of all those who identify with the Communist left. The excerpts of letters that we publish here, are a clear demonstration of the failure of this campaign

In recent months militants and sections of the ICC have received threats or thinly veiled calls for their assassination.

In December the UHP-ARDE published on its website a text titled ‘The science and art of blockheads’ which continues a call for the assassination of our militants via a macabre chain of syllogisms, which begin by openly accusing us of being “racists” and of defending bourgeois politics in a veiled way

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.

The ICC is not the only organization in the communist left milieu to find itself under parasitic attack in the current period. A similar attack has been launched by the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) against the International Bureau of the Revolutionary Party (IBRP). All of this follows the collapse of the IBRP's American affiliate that had been inaugurated at a conference of IBRP North American sympathizers in Montreal in April 2000. The IBRP-sympathizing section was a regroupment of the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) with another sympathizer (AS), then based in Wisconsin, now in Indiana. This US regroupment, which organized around the name Internationalist Notes (a newsletter published for several years by AS), quickly began to unravel.

What is New Democracy?

Reading the extensive propaganda published by this group (if it is really a group) in Discussion Bulletin and on its Web site, one would hope to find some references regarding its origins, political evolution or some claim of political affiliation. Wishful thinking! ND actually seems to have come from nowhere with some ready-made ideological remedies to the problems of today’s society. This political attitude of hiding one’s past, or pretending to be discoverers of political principles, is already quite suspect about the real political motivations of this group, mistrust that only grows as one goes to the essential content of its printed materials.

The parasitic group which calls itself the 'Internal Fraction of the ICC', formed around the individual Jonas who was expelled from the ICC for behaviour unworthy of a communist militant (see our communique in WR 252), is now openly revealing its true nature. The method of informers

In its number 463 (August-September 2002), the newspaper Le Proletaire, organ of the Parti Communiste International (PCI) published an article entitled: 'In connection with the crisis in the ICC' which deserves a certain number of corrections. Initially, the article affirms that one of the members of the so-called 'Internal Fraction' ('IFICC') which had been constituted in the ICC "is denounced ... as a probable 'agent provocateur'." Here is what we wrote in World Revolution 252 concerning the exclusion of Jonas (to which Le Proletaire refers implicitly):

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 concept of "political parasitism" is not an invention peculiar to the ICC, but a definition which existed already at the time of Marx and Engels, of a particular form of political behaviour that expresses the penetration of alien ideologies within the workers' movement. In these Theses, the ICC laid down guidelines for understanding this phenomenon in the present period.