The marxist foundations of the notion of political parasitism and the fight against this scourge

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Marxism and the history of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) attest to the validity of the concept of parasitism to characterise destructive behaviour within the political organisations of the proletariat – behaviour totally alien to the methods of the working class.

 

A. Political parasitism is by no means "an invention of the ICC",
Marxism fought it in the IWA

As highlighted in our Theses on Parasitism[1] - from which many of the following developments are borrowed - parasitism historically emerged in response to the founding of the First International, which Engels described as “the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all these minor sects” (Engels, Letter to Florence Kelly-Wischnewetzky, 27 January 1873. The IWA was in effect an instrument forcing the various components of the workers' movement to engage in a collective and public process of clarification, and to submit to a unified, impersonal, proletarian, organisational discipline. Indeed, "Drawing the lessons of the revolutions of 1848, the proletariat no longer accepted the leadership of the radical wing of the bourgeoisie, and was now fighting to establish its own class autonomy. But this autonomy required that the proletariat overcome the domination, within its own organisations, of the theories and organisational concepts of the petty bourgeoisie, Bohemian and declassed elements etc.”[2].

But the advance of the proletarian struggle needed this movement, which implied the dissolution on an international scale of all non-proletarian programmatic and organisational particularities and autonomies. It was primarily in resistance to this movement that parasitism declared war on the revolutionary movement. It was the IWA which was the first to be confronted with this threat to the proletarian movement, which identified it and fought against it. It was the IWA, beginning with Marx and Engels, which characterised as parasites those politicised elements which, while claiming to adhere to the programme and organisations of the proletariat, concentrate their efforts on the struggle, not against the ruling class, but against the organisations of the revolutionary class. The essence of their activity is, in fact, to denigrate and manoeuvre against the communist camp, while claiming to belong to it and to serve it. This is summed up in this sentence from the report on the Alliance[3]: “for the first time in the history of the class struggle, we are confronted with a secret conspiracy at the heart of the working class, and intended to sabotage not the existing regime of exploitation, but the Association itself, which represents the most bitter enemy of this regime". As for the recommended remedy, it is unambiguous: “It is time once and for all to put a stop to those internal quarrels provoked every day afresh within our Association, by the presence of this parasitic body.” (The General Council to All the Members of the International Working Men’s Association)[4].

 

B. The resurgence of parasitism since the 1980s

As was the case with the Alliance in the IWA, it is only in periods when the workers' movement passes from a stage of fundamental immaturity to a qualitatively higher, specifically communist level, that parasitism becomes its principal opponent. In the present period, this immaturity is not the product of the youth of the workers' movement as a whole, as it was at the time of the IWA, but above all the result of the 50 years of counter-revolution which followed the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Today, it is this break in organic continuity with the traditions of past generations of revolutionaries which explains, above all, the weight of petty-bourgeois anti-organisational reflexes and behaviour among many elements who claim to be marxists and Left Communists.

Parasitism targets elements in search of class positions who have difficulty distinguishing between genuine revolutionary organisations and parasitic currents. This is why, since the 1990s and especially the 2000s, the action of parasitism has become more destructive. We are currently faced with a multitude of informal groupings, often operating in the shadows, which claim to belong to the camp of the Communist Left, but which devote their energies to fighting the existing marxist organisations rather than the bourgeois regime. As in the time of Marx and Engels, the function of this reactionary parasitic wave is to sabotage the development of open debate and proletarian clarification, and to prevent the establishment of rules of conduct binding on all members of the proletarian camp.

It was significantly fuelled by all the splits which took place in the history of the ICC. Neither motivated nor justified by political differences, these were the result of non-marxist, non-proletarian organisational behaviour, like that of Bakunin in the IWA and the Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, which expressed resistance to organisational discipline and collective principles.

Faced with the working class and the proletarian political milieu, the ICC has never hidden the difficulties it encountered. At the beginning of the 1980s, it expressed itself in these terms: "when a revolutionary organization publicizes its problems and internal discussions, this is a choice dish for all the adversaries waiting to denigrate it. This is also, and even especially the case for the ICC. Certainly, we won't find any jubilation in the bourgeois press over the difficulties that our organisation is going through today: the ICC is still too small, both in its size and in its influence amongst the working masses, for the bourgeoisie to have any interest in talking about it and trying to discredit it. It is preferable for the bourgeoisie to erect a wall of silence around the positions and even the existence of revolutionary organisations. This is why the work of denigrating them, and sabotaging their intervention, is undertaken by a whole series of groups and parasitic elements whose function is to drive away individuals who are coming towards class positions, to disgust them with any participation in the difficult task of developing a proletarian political milieu.." (Resolution adopted by XIth ICC Congress: Combat to Defend and Build the Organization, International Review n° 82).

All communist groups have been confronted with the misdeeds of parasitism, but it is the ICC, because it is today the most important organisation in the proletarian milieu, and also the most rigorous in terms of respect for principles and statutes, that is the object of particular attention from the parasitic milieu. The latter included, and in some cases still includes, groups formed and all stemming from the ICC, such as the "Internationalist Communist Group"(ICG) and its splinters like "Against the Current", the now defunct "Communist Bulletin Group"(CBG) or the former "External Faction of the ICC" or the "Internal Faction of the ICC", which a few years later mutated into the "International Group of the Communist Left" (IGCL), all of which were formed from splinters of the ICC.

But parasitism is not confined to such groups. It is also carried by unorganised elements, or those who meet from time to time in ephemeral discussion circles, whose main preoccupation is to spread all sorts of gossip about our organisation. These are often former militants who, yielding to the pressure of petty-bourgeois ideology, did not have the strength to maintain their commitment to the organisation, who were frustrated that the organisation did not "recognise their merits" to the extent that they themselves had imagined, or who could not stand the criticism to which they were subjected. There are also former sympathisers whom the organisation did not want to integrate because it judged that they did not have sufficient clarity or who gave up their commitment for fear of losing their "individuality" in a collective framework (this is the case, for example, of the now defunct "Alptraum Collective" in Mexico or "Kamunist Kranti"in India). In all cases, these are elements whose frustration at their own lack of courage, spinelessness and powerlessness has turned into systematic hostility towards the organisation. These elements are obviously absolutely incapable of building anything. On the other hand, they are often very effective, using their petty agitation and concierge chatter to discredit and destroy what the organisation is trying to build.

 

C. The main parasitic groups since the 1980s

We will limit ourselves here to the following groups: the Communist Bulletin Group (CBG), the External Fraction of the ICC (EFICC) and the Internal Fraction of the ICC (IFICC).

C.1 The Communist Bulletin Group (CBG)

The struggle against the clans, which the 11th Congress of the ICC had unanimously supported, is transformed by the CBG into a struggle between clans. The central organs are inevitably "monolithic", the identification of the penetration of non-proletarian influences, the primordial task of revolutionaries, is presented as a means of breaking up the "opponents". The methods of clarification of proletarian organisations - open debate throughout the organisation, publication of its results to inform the working class - become the "brainwashing" method of religious sects.

It's not just the ICC that's concerned:

"It is not only the whole present day revolutionary milieu which is being attacked here. It is the entire history and all the traditions of the workers' movement which are being abused.

In reality, the lies and slanders of the CBG are perfectly in line with the campaign of the world bourgeoisie about the alleged death of communism and of marxism. At the center of this propaganda is the greatest lie in history: that the organizational rigor of Lenin and the Bolsheviks necessarily led to Stalinism. In the CBG's version of this propaganda, it is the Bolshevism of the ICC which ‘necessarily’ leads to its alleged ‘Stalinism’. Evidently, the CBG neither knows what the revolutionary milieu is, nor does it know what Stalinism is about" (Political Parasitism: The "CBG" Does the Bourgeoisie's Work; International Review n° 83.

C.2 The External Fraction of the ICC

In an article in our International Review in 1986 we wrote:

"The proletarian political milieu, already strongly marked by the weight of sectarianism, as the ICC has often shown and deplored, has just been ‘enriched' by a new sect. There is a new publication entitled Internationalist Perspectives, organ of the ‘External Fraction of the ICC' (EFICC) that ‘claims a continuity with the programmatic framework developed by the ICC’. This group is composed of comrades who belonged to the ‘tendency' formed in our organisation and who left it at its Sixth Congress[5] to ‘defend the ICC's platform’. We've already met many forms of sectarianism among revolutionaries today, but the creation of an ICC-bis with the same programmatic positions of the ICC constitutes a never - before -attained peak in this domain. They have also reached a peak in the amount of mud thrown at the ICC: only the Communist Bulletin (also formed of ex-ICC members) has gone so far. From its creation, this new group thus places itself on a terrain that only political gangsters (who distinguished themselves by stealing material and funds from the ICC) have exploited with such fervour. Even if the members of the ‘Fraction' have in no way been involved in such acts of gangsterism, we can say that its sectarianism and predilection for gratuitous insults don't augur well for the future evolution of this group and its capacity to make a contribution to the proletariat's efforts to develop its consciousness. In fact, the little games of the EFICC express one thing: a total irresponsibility towards the tasks facing revolutionaries today, a desertion of militant combat" (The “External Fraction” of the ICC, International Review n° 45).

C.3 The Internal Fraction of the ICC (2001), which mutated into the IGCL (Internationalist Group of the Communist Left) in 2013, is undoubtedly a further step in ignominy, justifying the dedication of a significant part of this text to it.

The IFICC (ancestor of the IGCL), an extreme form of parasitic grouping

We report here on part of the chain of events which led to the formation of IFICC (Internal Fraction of the ICC), the crystallisation within the ICC of a foreign body, by quoting from a communique to our readers reporting on the actions, within and outside our organisation, of members of our organisation:

“What is a problem however, is the fact that since then a certain number of militants in our French section have adopted a policy of systematically violating our organisational rules. Reacting out of ‘wounded pride’, they adopted an anarchistic attitude of violating the decisions of the Congress, of denigration, slanders, bad faith, and outright lies. After several violations of our organisational rules, some of them serious to the point of forcing the organisation to react firmly, these comrades held a series of secret meetings during August 2001. The organisation has since acquired a copy of the proceedings of one of these secret meetings something the participants would have liked to avoid. These proceedings demonstrated clearly to the other members of our organisation that these comrades were fully aware that they were fomenting a plot against the organisation, demonstrating a total lack of loyalty towards the ICC, which was expressed in particular through:

  • the creation of a strategy to deceive the organisation and impose their own policy on it;
  • a putschist, leftist approach, which posed the political problems we were confronting in terms of ‘recovering the means of functioning’ (in other words, control of the central organs);
  • *the creation of an ‘iron solidarity’ among the participants and against the central organs, clearly turning their backs on the freely accepted discipline of a proletarian organisation” (A parasitic attack intended to discredit the ICC, World Revolution n° 253, April 2002)

Since its formation, IFCCI has always presented itself as the best defender of the platform and positions of the ICC, with the exception, however, of the "analysis of the ultimate phase of decadence, that of decomposition", and the "theses on political parasitism". The purpose of the first exception was to be more in tune with the other groups in the proletarian political milieu who did not share the analysis of decomposition. The second made it easier for the IGCL to refute the fact that it was itself a parasitic grouping, even though its members had until then been convinced defenders of the need to fight against parasitism.

A reminder [6] of the IFICC / IGCL group's service records

IFICC members deliberately placed themselves outside our organisation as a result of the following behaviour:

  • Repeated breaches of our statutes, in particular the refusal to pay their dues in full and their refusal to commit to respecting them in the future;
  • Refusal to appear to defend their behaviour in the organisation in the face of our criticism of it, despite the fact that the ICC had organised an extraordinary conference with this issue specifically on its agenda;
  • Theft of money and ICC material (address files and internal documents).

IFICC as a police-like group

In the end, the members of the IFICC were expelled from our organisation, not because of their intolerable behaviour, but because of their activities as informers, which included several acts of snitching. For example, they published on their website the date of an ICC conference to be held in Mexico, attended by militants from other countries. This repugnant act by the IFICC of facilitating the work of the forces of repression of the bourgeois state against revolutionary militants is all the more despicable in that the members of the IFICC knew full well that some of our comrades in Mexico had already, in the past, been direct victims of repression and that some had been forced to flee their countries of origin.

But the snitching behaviour of IFICC members is not limited to this episode. Before and after their exclusion from the ICC, they systematically spied on our organisation and regularly reported on the results in their Bulletin (see in particular IFICC Bulletins no. 14, 18 and 19).

Their sordid collection of information is entirely indicative of the way in which these people conceived their "fraction work" (gossip, police reports). Indeed, the display of such information was also aimed at the ICC as a whole, with a view to putting pressure on its militants by making them understand that they were "under surveillance", that nothing they did would escape the vigilance of the "Internal Fraction".

Just because it emanates from the sick minds of obsessive persecutors doesn't mean that we shouldn't take seriously this kind of work to keep tabs on our organisation and, more specifically, on some of its members.

To conclude on the police-like behaviour of the IFICC, it is worth mentioning its publication of a 118-page text entitled The History of the ICC International Secretariat. According to its subtitle, this text claims to tell the story of "how opportunism gained a foothold in the central organs before contaminating and starting the destruction of the entire organisation...".

This document once again illustrates the police-like nature of IFICC's approach. It explains the alleged "opportunistic evolution" of the ICC by the "intrigues" of a number of evil characters, in particular the "chief's companion" (presented as an agent of the state exerting its control over the "chief"). It is as if the degeneration and betrayal of the Bolshevik Party had been the result of the action of the megalomaniac Stalin and not the consequence of the failure of the world revolution and the isolation of the revolution in Russia. This text is the purest police conception of history, which marxism has always opposed.

But the most odious aspect of this text is the fact that it discloses numerous details about the internal workings of our organisation, which are a godsend for the police.

The IFICC’s "cordon sanitaire" policy against the ICC

Having failed to convince the militants of the ICC of the need to exclude the "leader" and the "leader's companion", this small parasitic group set itself the objective of dragging the other groups of the Communist Left behind its slander in order to establish a cordon sanitaire around the ICC and discredit it (see below the episodes of the "IBRP public meeting in Paris" and the "Circulo"). In fact, it was all the places where the ICC was active (contact meetings, public meetings, etc.) that the IFICC targeted, even though we had forbidden its members access to them because of their snitching activities[7]. While we were enforcing our decision to keep them out of such places, we sometimes had to deal with threats (including a loud threat to slit the throat of one of our comrades) and attacks by these thugs.

The “opportunist degeneration” of the ICC, proclaimed but never demonstrated by the IFICC!

The IFICC presented itself as "the true successor of the ICC", which had undergone an "opportunist" and "Stalinist" degeneration. It declared that it was continuing the work, which it said had been abandoned by the ICC, of defending in the working class the "real positions of this organisation", which were threatened by the development of opportunism within it, primarily affecting the question of its functioning. We have seen in the practice of this group its own conception of respect for the statutes and even for the most elementary rules of behaviour of the workers' movement: claiming adherence to them while in fact furiously trampling them underfoot.

The method, which consists of making insinuations while avoiding the fundamental political problem, appealing to "popular common sense" and the witch-hunting methods of the Middle Ages.

As a result, the ICC has been the target of numerous other accusations by the IFICC, which have not been mentioned until now: the ICC has been stigmatised by "a gradual move away from marxism and a growing tendency to promote (and defend) fashionable bourgeois and petty-bourgeois values - cult of youth, feminism and above all ‘non-violence’)"; the ICC also "plays into the hands of repression".

The IFICC's use of an IBRP public meeting for its own purposes

The IBRP[8] was the target of a daring manoeuvre on the part of IFICC, which consisted in organising a public meeting in Paris on 2 October 2004 on behalf of the IBRP. In fact, it was a public meeting designed to serve the reputation of the IFICC, to the detriment of that of the IBRP, and with a view to attacking the ICC.

The announcement of this meeting by the IBRP indicated that its theme was the war in Iraq. On the other hand, the announcement made by IFICC underlined the importance of its own initiative: "On our suggestion and with our political and material support, the IBRP will be holding a public meeting in Paris (a meeting which, we hope, will be merely the first) in which we call on all our readers to participate ". What emerges from this appeal is the claim that, without this IFICC, this organisation of the Communist Left, which exists on an international scale and has been known for decades, would not have been able to take the initiative and organise the public meeting!

In fact, this parasitic group used the IBRP as a "front man" for its own publicity in order to obtain a certificate of respectability, the recognition of its membership of the Communist Left. And these unabashed thugs did not hesitate to use the address book of ICC contacts (which it had stolen before leaving the organisation) to publicise its call for this public meeting.

IFICC's alliance with an adventurer (citizen B) in 2004

In 2004, the ICC had entered into a political relationship with a small group in Argentina, the NCI (Nucleo Comunista Internacional). At the end of July 2004, a member of the NCI, Mr B., tried a daring manoeuvre: he demanded the immediate integration of the group into the ICC. He imposed this demand despite the resistance of the other comrades in the NCI who, even though they had also set themselves the objective of joining the ICC, felt the need to first carry out a whole in-depth process of clarification and assimilation, as communist militancy could only be based on solid convictions. The ICC rejected this demand, in line with our policy of opposing hasty and immature integrations, which can run the risk of destroying militants and are harmful to the organisation.

At the same time, an alliance had been forged between the IFICC and adventurer B, certainly on B's initiative, in the service of a manoeuvre against the ICC using, unbeknown to them, the NCI. The manoeuvre consisted in circulating within the proletarian political milieu a denunciation of the ICC and its "nauseating methods". This text seemed to emanate indirectly from the NCI, since it was was signed by a mysterious and fictitious "Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas" (or "CCI" for short!), led by citizen B and which, according to him, was supposed to constitute the "political transcendence” of the NCI. These slanders were spread by means of a "Circulo" leaflet distributed by the IFICC on the occasion of the IBRP's public meeting in Paris on 2 October 2004. They were also posted online in various languages on the IBRP website. As well as directly targeting the ICC, the leaflet in question defended the IFICC, totally calling into question a position taken by the NCI on 22 May 2004, which had denounced this group.

The way in which citizen B was led to develop his manoeuvre is typical of an adventurer, of his ambitions and of his total lack of scruples and concern for the cause of the proletariat. The IFICC's use of the services of an adventurer to satisfy its hatred of the ICC and to attempt, through public denigration, to politically isolate our organisation, is worthy of the petty and despicable characters who populate the world of the petty bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie.

The IGCL's police-like use of the ICC's internal bulletins

The IGCL, having obtained internal bulletins of the ICC through a means unknown to us, made a big fuss about this event, seeing it as proof of an ICC crisis. The message that these patent snitches were trying to get across was very clear: "there is a 'mole' in the ICC who is working hand in hand with the ex-IFICC! This was clearly police work with no other objective than to sow widespread suspicion, unrest and mischief within our organisation. These were the same methods used by the GPU, Stalin's political police, to destroy the Trotskyist movement from within in the 1930s. These are the same methods used by the members of the ex-IFICC (and in particular two of them, Juan and Jonas, founding members of the "ICGL") when they made "special" trips to several sections of the ICC in 2001 to organise secret meetings and spread rumours that one of our comrades (the "wife of the head of the ICC", as they put it) was a "cop".

ICGL support for Nuevo Curso and Gaizka[9]

The ICC had denounced an attempt to falsify the real origins of the Communist Left by a blog called Nuevo Curso and orchestrated by an adventurer, Gaizka, whose aim is not to help clarify and defend the positions of this current but to "make a name" for himself in proletarian politics. This attack on the historic current of the Communist Left aims to transform it into a movement with blurred outlines, stripped of the rigorous proletarian principles which presided over its formation, which constitutes an obstacle to the transmission to future generations of revolutionaries of the gains of the struggle of the left fractions against opportunism and the degeneration of the parties of the Communist International.

As for the adventurer Gaizka, we have provided a great deal of information on him, which has not yet been refuted, concerning his relations with the world of bourgeois political figures (mainly left-wing but also right-wing). It is a behaviour and a personality trait that he shares with adventurers - even if he is far from having the stature of these characters - better known in history as Ferdinand Lassalle and Jean Baptiste von Schweitzer who operated within the workers' movement in Germany in the 19th century.

It was with great enthusiasm and sycophancy that the IGCL welcomed the entry of the Nuevo Curso blog onto the political scene: "All the positions it defends are very clearly class positions and are within the programmatic framework of the Communist Left (...)". What's more, once our organisation had provided readers with sufficient information to characterise Gaizka (the main leader of Nuevo Curso) as an adventurer with the peculiarity of having maintained relations, in 1992-94, with the most important party of the bourgeoisie in Spain at that time, the PSOE, there was no longer any doubt as to the meaning of Nuevo Curso's approach aimed at distorting the Communist Left. However, it was not this information, available to all (and denied by no one, we repeat) that prevented the IGCL from flying to the aid of the adventurer Gaizka, in the face of the denunciation we made of him: “we should point out that to date we have not noted any provocation, manoeuvring, denigration, slander or rumour, launched by members of Nuevo Curso, even as individuals, nor even any policy of destruction against other revolutionary groups or militants"[10].

It is highly revealing that, in order to rule out any suspicion of adventurism in relation to Gaizka, the IGCL's animator takes as a criterion a set of political traits which characterise himself first and foremost, but not necessarily Gaizka in particular: provocateur, manoeuvrer, denigrator, slanderer, destroyer of reputations, ... As for Gaizka, although he was not of the stature of a Lassalle or a Schweitzer, he "tried to play in the court of the greats" and even managed to gain recognition from a number of them thanks to some of his intellectual abilities, even if he didn’t manage to place himself on an equal footing with the leading figures of the ruling class, as was the case with Lassalle with Bismarck[11].

On his own small scale, Gaizka imagined he could play a role as the representative of a branch of the Communist Left (the Spanish Communist Left), which he had invented himself. For its part “Mr IGCL's” great ambition is to cover the ICC in rubbish.

E. By way of a (provisional) conclusion

To illustrate our analysis of the phenomenon of political parasitism, we have mainly used the example of the IGCL (formerly IFICC). The fact that this organisation constitutes a kind of caricature of parasitism has enabled us both to denounce once again its villainy and malfeasance and also to bring out more clearly the major features which characterise this phenomenon and which can be found in other groups or elements whose activities are part of a parasitic approach, even if in a less obvious and more subtle way. Thus, the IGCL-IFICC is, to our knowledge, the only group which has deliberately adopted an attitude of snitching, of being a conscious agent of capitalist repression. However, in adopting this attitude of conscious (if unpaid) agent of the bourgeois state, this group is merely expressing in the most extreme way the essence and function of political parasitism (and which had already been analysed, as we have seen, by Marx and Engels): to wage, in the name of the defence of the proletarian programme, a determined struggle against the real organisations of the working class. And this, of course, for the greater benefit of its mortal enemy, the bourgeoisie. And if certain groups refrain from the outrages of the IGCL, preferring to practise a "soft", more subtle parasitism, that doesn't make them any less dangerous, quite the contrary.

Just as the true organisations of the proletariat will only be able to assume the role entrusted to them by the workers' movement, as the entire history of the movement has shown, by waging a determined struggle against the opportunist gangrene, they will only be able to live up to their responsibility by waging an equally determined struggle against the scourge of parasitism. Marx and Engels fully understood this from the end of the 1860s, and particularly at the Hague Congress of the First International in 1872, even though a large number of marxists who were leading the fight against opportunism, such as Franz Mehring, did not understand the meaning and importance of the fight against Bakunin's Alliance. This is probably one of the reasons (alongside naivety and opportunist shifts) why the question of parasitism is not understood in the proletarian political milieu. But there can be no question of using the weaknesses of the workers' movement as an argument for refusing to see and confront the dangers which threaten the historic struggle of our class. It is fully in the spirit of this sentence of Engels quoted at the beginning of the article that we claim: “It is time once and for all to put a stop to those internal quarrels provoked every day afresh within our Association, by the presence of this parasitic body.”

ICC, 07-08-23

 

[1]  Theses on parasitism. International Review n° 94

[3] "Alliance of Socialist Democracy", founded by Bakunin, which was to find fertile ground in important sectors of the International because of the weaknesses which still weighed on it and which resulted from the political immaturity of the proletariat at that time. This was a proletariat which had not yet completely cleared itself of the vestiges of the previous stage of its development, and in particular of the sectarian movements.

[4] "Before he joined the IWA, he explained to his disciples why the International was not a revolutionary organisation, the Proudhonists having become reformist, the Blanquists old, the Germans and the General Council which they allegedly dominated being ‘authoritarian’. It is striking how Bakunin considered the International to be the sum of its parts. What was above all lacking, according to Bakunin, was ‘revolutionary will’. It was this which the Alliance intended to provide, by walking roughshod over the International's programme and statutes and deceiving its members. For Bakunin, the organisation which the proletariat had constructed through years of hard work was worth nothing. What were everything to him were the conspiratorial sects which he himself created and controlled. It was not the class organisation which interested him, but his own personal status and reputation, his anarchist ‘freedom’ or what is today known as ‘self-realisation’. For Bakunin and his like the workers' movement was nothing but a vehicle for the realization of his own individual, individualist plans."(The 1st International and the Fight against Sectarianism." International Review n° 84).

[5] In International Review n°44, the article devoted to the 6th Congress of the ICC reports on the departure of these comrades and their constitution as a "Fraction". Readers may wish to refer to this, as well as to the articles published in Reviews 40 to 43 reflecting the evolution of the debate within the ICC.

[6] The information published below is a summary of part of an article, The adventurer Gaizka has the defenders he deserves: the gangsters of the IGCL, which gives a more detailed account of the nuisance caused by this parasitic group.

[7] The ICC doesn't allow snitches into its public meetings, World Revolution n° 267, September 2003.

[8] IBRP: International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Group founded in 1984 by the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista) and the Communist Worker's Organisation (CWO). In 2009, the group changed its name to Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT).

Rubric: 

Defence of the Communist Left