Prague Action Week: Some lessons, and some replies to slander

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One of the first signs of a reawakening of the working class following the betrayal of its organisations and the first year of slaughter in the1914-18 imperialist war was the conference held in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in September 1915, which brought together a small number of internationalists from different countries. The conference was a forum in which many different views about the war were put forward – the majority of them tending towards pacifism, with only a minority on the left defending an openly revolutionary opposition to the war. But those on the left at Zimmerwald continued to push for clarification in this and subsequent conferences; and this work – combined with the revival of the class struggle on a more general level, culminating in the revolutionary outbreaks in Russia and Germany – was to give birth to a new world-wide political party based on clearly revolutionary positions - the Communist International founded in 1919[1].  

Today we are still far from the formation of such a party, above all because the working class still has a long road ahead of it before it can once again pose the question of revolution. But, faced with a world system that is lurching towards self-destruction, faced with the intensification and proliferation of imperialist wars, we are seeing small signs of a re-emerging consciousness about the need for an international and internationalist response to capitalist war. As we said in our previous article about the Prague “Action Week”[2], the gathering in Prague was one such sign – no less heterogeneous and confused than the initial Zimmerwald conference, and much more disorganised, but a sign nonetheless.

For ourselves, an organisation which traces its origins in the communist left of the 1920s, and prior to that, of the Zimmerwald Left around the Bolsheviks and other groupings, it was necessary to be present as far as possible at the Prague event in order to defend a certain number of political principles and organisational methods:

  • Against the prevailing disorganisation which turned parts of the “Action Week” into an active fiasco, the necessity for organised and open debate around definite agendas and aiming at clear outcomes. This means that meetings must be chaired, that notes should be taken, that conclusions are drawn, and so on.
  • Against the immediatist urge to talk only about “what can we do right now”, the necessity to discuss in a broader historical framework in order to understand the nature of the current wars, the balance of forces between the two major classes, and the perspective for future massive class movements.
  • Against the idea of “exemplary”, substitutionist actions by small groups with the aim of sabotaging the war efforts of different states, the necessity to recognise that it is only the massive mobilisation of the working class that can constitute a real opposition to imperialist war; and that, in the first instance, such movements are more likely to emerge from the struggle against the impact of the economic crisis (exacerbated, of course, by the growth of a war economy) than from direct mass action against war.
  •  In order to put forward such views, it has been necessary to oppose the intended exclusion from the proceedings of the groups of the communist left by the elements behind the organisation of the Action Week. We will return to this question below.

In our first article, which aimed to give an account of the chaotic outcome of the Action Week, and to suggest some of the underlying reasons for this, we also pointed to the constructive role played by the groups of the communist left, but also some other elements, in trying to build an organised framework for serious debate (what has been termed the “Self-Organised Assembly”). The ICC delegation supported this initiative but we had no illusions about the difficulties faced by this new formation, and even less illusions about the possibilities that there would be some kind of organised follow-up to the event – as a first step, the organisation of a website which could serve as a forum for debates that were not able to be developed in Prague. It now seems that even this minimal hope has come to nothing and that it will be necessary to start from scratch in order to define the parameters and possibilities of future gatherings.

Other balance sheets of the event

Since the Prague week ended, there have been very few attempts to describe what happened, still less to draw the political lessons from this evident failure. The Anarchist Communist Network has written a short account[3], but it seems to focus mainly on the problems caused by the division among Czech anarchists between “Ukraine defencists” and those seeking an internationalist position on the war. This was certainly one element in the disorganisation of the event but, as we argued in our first article, it is necessary to go much deeper than this – at the very least, into the activist approach that still dominates the anarchists who are opposed to the war on an internationalist basis.[4]

To our knowledge, the most words expended have been by those who are the most hostile to the groups of the communist left. First, a group from Germany which focuses on solidarity with prisoners[5] This group only attended at the end of the first day of the Self-Organised Assembly and part of the second, before heading for the official conference[6] which they tell us hosted some interesting discussions while telling us nothing at all about what was discussed. But they are very definite about who they blame for sabotaging the Action Week:

“We didn't realise it at that moment, but it was already clear that in the already chaotic situation groups were trying to blow up the meeting from the inside in addition to the attacks by NATO anarchists, where other conflicts between groups were being fought out at the time. First and foremost left-wing communist groups”.

So instead of trying to offer ways out of the chaotic situation bequeathed by the official organisers, the communist left groups were only there to make it worse!

The deformations and slanders of Tridni Valka

The most “substantial” account of what happened is provided by the Czech group Tridni Valka, who most people believed were involved in the organisation of the Action Week – and with good reason, since their website hosted all the announcements about it[7]. But what is most substantial about this article is the numerous deformations and slanders it contains. In our view, this article has three main aims:

 - They want to hide their own responsibility for the fiasco by blaming it on what they portray as a completely separate “Organising Committee” whose composition remains a mystery to this day. Tridni Valka claims it was in favour only of the non-public Anti-War Congress at the end of the week and thought that the organisers lacked the resources to handle an entire week of events. They are particularly critical of the “anti-war demonstration” planned for the Friday of the week, which the previous day had been rejected as meaningless and a threat to security by all the elements who pronounced in favour of boycotting the demo in favour of continuing the political debate (i.e, holding the Self-Organised Assembly).  And yet the announcement calling people to march in the demo can still be found on Tridni Valka’s website[8]. This confusion is the inevitable result of a political conception which avoids or rejects a clear political demarcation between different organisations and thus makes it impossible to make out which group or committee is responsible for what decision, a situation which can only spready confusion and distrust.

 - They aim to justify their policy of excluding the communist left from the Congress, first by mounting a terminological argument about the “Communist Left” label, then by throwing in a number of historical examples which accuse the existing groups of the communist left of trying to build a “mass party” on the Bolshevik model; assert that all groups of the communist left argue in favour of the Bolsheviks’ signing of the Brest Litovsk treaty in 1918 (“a real stab in the back for proletarians in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, a ‘betrayal’ some would say!”); denounce the Zimmerwald conference and the Zimmerwald Left, to which the communist left also refers, as nought but a bunch of pacifists, and even claim that “the so-called ‘Left Communism’ defends (more or less, depending on the shades favoured by each of these organizations) the position of the Third International on the colonial question”. All these arguments are offered in order to show that the positions of the communist left were incompatible with participation in the Anti-War Congress. We can’t answer all these arguments here, but one or two points certainly need to be made, since they reveal the depths of ignorance (or deliberate distortion) in Tridni Valka’s article: first, the critique of the social democratic idea of the mass party was developed in the first instance by none other than the Bolsheviks from 1903 onwards[9]; in Russia in 1918 it was precisely opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty that gave rise to the Left Communist fraction in the Russian party (although it’s true that later on some left communists, notably the Italian Fraction, argued – correctly in our view - against the position of “revolutionary war” which the Left Communists offered as an alternative to signing the Treaty); and as for the argument that today’s groups of the communist left all continue to defend the Third International’s position on the colonial question…..we can refer Tridni Valka to any number of articles on our website arguing the exact opposite.

- Finally, they want to definitively exclude the ICC from the proletarian camp. Why? Because we asserted that the group which has most strongly influenced Tridni Valka, the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, ended up flirting with terrorism and that TV have never clarified what differences they had with the GCI. TV’s response: “it’s very likely that the Czech (and other) State security services will delight in this kind of ‘revelation’ and ‘information’ about our group’s alleged links ‘with terrorism’. Thank you to the stoolies of the ICC, that would do better to rename itself ICC-B, with a B for ‘Bolshevik’ but above all for ‘Betrayer’! Fucking SNITCHES!!!”

On the contrary: the ICC long ago assumed its political responsibility by denouncing the GCI’s claims to be the nec plus ultra of internationalism by charting their increasingly grotesque support for terrorist actions and organisations as expressions of the proletariat: beginning with the Popular Revolutionary Bloc in El Salvador and the Shining Path in Peru, and culminating in seeing a proletarian resistance in the atrocities of Al Qaida[10].  Such political positions clearly expose all genuine revolutionary organisations to repression by the state security services, who will use it to make an equation between internationalism and Islamic terrorism. In addition, we have shown another facet of the GCI’s capacity to do the work of the police: their threats of violence against our comrades in Mexico, some of whom had already been physically attacked by Mexican Maoists[11].If Tridni Valka had any sense of responsibility towards the need to defend the internationalist camp, they would have publicly distanced themselves from GCI’s aberrations.

We have not said our last words on the lessons of the Prague event, nor on other attempts to develop an internationalist response to war, but we could not avoid answering these attacks. By presenting the tradition of the communist left as nothing but an obstacle to the effort to bring together today’s modest internationalist forces, the authors of these attacks reveal that is they that are opposed to this effort. In future articles we aim to respond to the CWO’s balance-sheet of the conference and to take up some of the key issues posed by the conference. That means, in particular, going deeper into why we insist that only the real movement of the working class can oppose imperialist war, why only the overthrow of capitalism can put an end to the mounting spiral of war and destruction, and why the activist approaches favoured by the majority of groups taking part in the Action Week can only lead to an impasse.

Amos

 

 

https://anarcomuk.uk/2024/05/31/prague-congress-report-part-2/

[4]The Communist Workers Organisation have also written a short report, but we want to respond to this in a separate article. Internationalist Initiatives Against War and Capitalism, Revolutionary Perspectives 24

[5] Das Treffen in Prag, der Beginn von einer Katastrophe

Soligruppe für Gefangene

6] That is to say, the non-public “Anti-War Congress” convened by the original Organising Committee, which excluded the groups of the communist left. This meeting gave rise to short common statement which can be found here: https://anarcomuk.uk/2024/06/15/declaration-of-revolutionary-internationalists/

9] See for example 1903-4: the birth of Bolshevism, International Review 116

 

Rubric: 

Struggle against imperialist war