50 years of struggle to defend and build the organisation

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As we noted in the introduction to this series, the ICC was founded in January 1975 at an international conference during which several political groups, from different countries and in close contact for several years, decided to unite within a centralised organisation that was international in scope from the outset. This major event demonstrated the conscious determination of a very young generation of revolutionaries to build an organisation that would be in line with the programmatic and organisational continuity of the Communist Left, with a view to laying the foundations for the future world party. The aim of this second part of the series is therefore to set out the political approach through which the ICC has equipped itself to assume the political role for which the working class has brought it into being[1].

I – The process of the ICC’s formation in the continuity of the revolutionary movement

The first organised expression foreshadowing the founding of our current emerged in Venezuela in 1964 with the formation of the group Internacionalismo. It consisted of a small core of very young members who began to develop class positions through discussions with an older comrade (Marc Chirik), who had a wealth of militant experience behind him, first within the Communist International, then within the Italian Fraction centred on the journal Bilan, and finally within the Gauche Communiste de France (Communist Left of France) until its dissolution in 1952. From the outset, this small group adopted an open attitude and sought to establish contacts. Thus, the Internacionalismo group established, or sought to establish, contacts and discussions with the News and Letters group in the United States, as well as in Europe, with a whole range of groups taking a class-based stance, and with Battaglia Comunista. It was also in this way that, in May 1968, three members of Internacionalismo took an active part in the social movement that erupted in France, engaging in intense discussions with several groups as well as individual militants. However, the debate on the historical significance of May ’68 and the lessons to be drawn from it revealed the great confusion prevailing amongst most of the pre-existing groups. It was therefore necessary to consider forming a new political group based on coherent positions such as those developed and defended by Internacionalismo. It was under these circumstances that Révolution internationale (RI) was formed in July 1968 on the basis of a statement of principles. RI became a genuine driving force in the process of uniting revolutionaries both in France and internationally.

Thus, as early as 1969–1970, ongoing contacts and discussions with News and Letters in the United States led two of its members to align themselves with the positions of the Communist Left. During 1970, joined by a third member, they formed a group by publishing their own ‘Declaration of Political Orientation’: the first issue of Internationalism was published. And the process gained momentum in the early 1970s, during which RI militants travelled the length and breadth of Europe to meet readers and correspondents, showing no hesitation whatsoever in initiating contact in a world where the internet and new means of communication did not yet exist[2] . Recognising the need to formalise and strengthen relations between revolutionary groups, Internationalism and Révolution internationale took the initiative to call for a series of conferences and meetings between 1973 and 1974, during which a process of clarification and consolidation took place, resulting in particular in the evolution of the World Revolution group in England (which had split from Solidarity London) towards the positions defended by RI, Internationalism and Internacionalismo. Above all, however, these various meetings laid the foundations for the formation of the ICC a year later. During this same period, RI continued to establish contacts and hold discussions not only with organised groups but also with individual readers of its publications and those sympathetic to its positions. This work led, in particular, to the formation of small nuclei in Spain and Italy, which began publishing the journals Accion Proletaria and Rivoluzione Internazionale respectively from 1974 onwards. Thus, at the conference in January 1975, the six groups, recognising that their platforms were based on the same positions, decided to unite into a single organisation with an international central organ and publishing a quarterly journal (the international Review) in three languages (English, Spanish and French). A major step had just been taken. The founding of the International Communist Current marked the culmination of intensive work involving contacts, discussions, the comparison of positions, clarification and refinement, all based on well-defined political criteria. It must be emphasised that throughout this period, the proletarian political movement could not count on the contribution of the historic organisations of the Italian Left that had survived the Second World War. Indeed, both the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia) and, above all, the PCI/Programma rejected all proposals for a meeting[3]. For them, May ’68 had no historical significance and amounted to nothing more than a mere student revolt.

This ‘splendid isolation’ stood in stark contrast to the approach of the pre-war Italian Left.

This is why the Report on the Question of the Organisation of Our International Communist Current[4], presented at the January 1975 conference, openly argued that the formation of the Current signified a genuine restoration of historical continuity with the entire legacy of the Communist Left prior to the Second World War: “If the workers movement had not gone through the 50 yr. break which separates the Communist International from today, it is without doubt the ‘left’ of the latter (German left, Italian left) which would have assumed the task this time. From the standpoint of political positions there is no doubt that the next International will be a continuity of the ‘left’; but from the organizational point of view this pivot has still to be built. Since the recent resurgence of the class struggle, our international current has taken on an organizational practice based on the proletariat’s class positions. That is to say that its praxis has become, with all its weaknesses and errors, the heritage of the proletarian struggle. The current has thus recreated a new source of organic continuity, by being the only organization to have assured a continuity in its practice within the framework of class positions”. [5]

Consequently, the ICC did not see itself so much as a ‘new branch’ within the Communist Left, but rather as the embodiment of the critical synthesis between the best of the Italian Left and the German-Dutch Left. But this ‘historical thread’ could not have been woven anew without comrade MC (Marc Chirik) being there to defend and pass on the best of the entire experience accumulated by the workers’ movement to the young generation of post-68 revolutionaries[6]. In 1975, Marc was 68 years old and had nearly 50 years of political activity behind him. He was the only one to have taken part in the revolutionary wave that began in Russia in October 1917. By contrast, the vast majority of ICC militants were very young (in their twenties) and, above all, had no experience of revolutionary militancy. One of the first major challenges in the ICC’s early phase was therefore to take on board and thoroughly assimilate the theoretical, political and organisational achievements of the workers’ movement following four decades of a break in the organic continuity that had linked organisations since the Communist League (1847–1852)[7].

II – Founding and building the ICC on the basis of a clear demarcation of class positions and proletarian principles

Whilst the ICC is the first revolutionary organisation to have emerged from the outset on an international scale (even though, due to historical conditions, the ICC’s expansion initially took place in Europe and North America), one of the first major challenges was precisely that of having to defend the principle of international centralisation. That is to say, learning to coordinate militant forces across several countries so that the organisation could develop a genuinely unified political life and speak with one voice within the working class and the revolutionary movement. However, none of this was at all self-evident. Profound obstacles stood in the way of the new generation of revolutionaries.

In 1984, as part of the struggle against the councilist tendencies within the ICC, our comrade Marc Chirik wrote a contribution in which he traced the “prehistory of the ICC”. The conclusion of his argument demonstrated the extent to which the organic break with the revolutionary movement of the past constituted a profound obstacle to the process of regrouping revolutionary forces after 1968:

“When examined with a certain degree of hindsight, one gets the impression that we are witnessing the beginning of the history of the working class’s political movement, such is the sheer number of trial-and-error attempts and confusions that each of the groups carries with it. It is as though the working class’s political movement were afflicted by a long crisis of amnesia, from which its memory is slowly and painfully emerging. Given the absence of any capacity on the part of the groups emerging from the Italian Left to represent theoretical and political continuity, it will take the new groups — which are springing up with the resumption of the proletariat’s open struggle — years and years to find their way out of this labyrinth represented by half a century of ‘darkness’ and regression in the class struggle: to reclaim the theoretical, political and organisational achievements of the past and re-establish the link with the revolutionary movement of the past, and whilst integrating and assimilating it, critically transcend it.

Undoubtedly, with the formation of the ICC, a great step will be taken, but it would be presumptuous to think that, with its first congress, the ICC has definitively left its prehistory behind. Too many weaknesses, too many shortcomings, too many ‘gaps within the shortcomings’ will still persist, weighing heavily on its development. The entire history of the ICC will be marked by the difficulty of ridding itself of many misconceptions propagated during its formative period.”

Thus, from the outset, the Current had to contend with the pernicious influence of the revolt of the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie, an influence that was particularly acute after 1968 in the wake of the student movements. Individualism, impatience, a focus on the immediate, spontaneism and mistrust of revolutionary organisations (particularly those of the Communist Left) were powerful poisons hindering the development of a genuine, organised and centralised political life. Added to this was the weight of affinity-based relationships and a circle mentality that was entirely at odds with the strengthening of genuine political ties between militants — ties that would have enabled the construction of a framework of functioning within which the WHOLE (the organisation’s needs) would always take precedence over the concerns of its constituent parts.

But faced with all the problems stemming from the weaknesses in which the working class had found its way back to struggle from the late 1960s onwards, the ICC refused to make any compromises within its own ranks.

On the contrary, it adopted the method that the marxist wing of the workers’ movement has always defended, namely basing the organisation on a clear demarcation of organisational principles and programmatic positions. Consequently, in 1976, the ICC’s First Congress adopted the organisation’s Statutes in continuity with the organisations of the past.

But as we already pointed out in 1976, “the statutes of the various political organizations of the class were, as well as being instruments of political struggle, a mirror of the conditions in which that struggle took place. And in particular they carried within them the weaknesses and the immaturity of the proletariat at different stages of its history. The statutes of the ICC are no exception to this rule. They are a product of their time and it is because the general movement of the class has progressively overcome its immaturity that they can, in their turn, go beyond the weaknesses of the statutes that we have examined.”[8] These statutes also had to address the political questions and problems characteristic of the period in which the organisation had emerged. This is why one of their essential characteristics lies in the strong emphasis on the organisation’s unified and globally centralised nature. “Elsewhere, in the light of the experience of the degeneration of the IIIrd International, in which administrative measures were used against the revolutionary fractions, it was judged necessary to insert into the present statutes points clarifying the conditions under which divergences can and must be expressed within the organization”.

It was also during the First Congress that a political platform was adopted, the main objective of which was to summarise the class positions. This document expressed the degree of clarity its militants had achieved after seven years of discussion, reflection and engagement with the working class. Whilst this platform was firmly rooted in the achievements inherited from the organisations of the Communist Left, the ICC did not regard it as an absolute dogma. The platform was revised or updated on several occasions in line with the evolving understanding of the historical period.

Thus, these two documents (Statutes and Platform) served as the basis for new members joining the organisation[9]. But very quickly, the ICC was to learn that it was not enough simply to have a coherent political framework; it was also necessary to be able to defend it constantly against all tendencies seeking to call it into question.

III – A tireless struggle to defend the organisation

As we discussed at length in the first part of this series[10], the organisation of revolutionaries constitutes a ‘foreign body’ within capitalist society. As such, it is never immune to the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies, which foster hostile and destructive views and behaviours within a proletarian organisation. Difficulties and episodes of crisis are, in a sense, inevitable. Over the last fifty years, the ICC has experienced several political crises, some of which directly threatened its very survival as a revolutionary organisation. We cannot recount here in detail the origins and course of these various episodes. The real question lies rather in the method by which the ICC has waged the struggle to defend the integrity of its organisational principles.

Firstly, the ICC has always considered that challenges to its mode of functioning, raised by certain militants, were first and foremost a manifestation of the weaknesses of the organisation as a whole.

Consequently, adopting the method inherited from the Italian Fraction and the Communist Left of France, the ICC has always endeavoured to tackle organisational problems:

- As consciously as possible, in order to identify their root causes and equip itself to overcome them.
- Through an uncompromising and unyielding defence of organisational principles.
- By avoiding, as far as possible, splits or premature or unjustified departures by militants.
- Collectively, through the broadest possible debate across the ICC as a whole, in order to compare positions and clarify the essential political issues at stake.

This is why international congresses[11] or the convening of extraordinary conferences (such as those of January 1982, April 2002[12] and May 2014[13] were very often crucial moments during which the entire ICC had to wage a determined struggle to defend its principles and its framework of functioning. These intense periods of debate and struggle usually resulted in the production of texts that enabled the ICC to draw as many lessons as possible and to deepen its understanding of organisational issues. For example, following the crisis that shook the ICC between 1981 and 1982 (the loss of half the section in Britain, and the exodus of around forty members from the organisation), the Extraordinary Conference of January 1982 adopted two reports: one on “The Function of the Organisation”[14] and the other on “The Structure and Functioning of the Revolutionary Organisation”[15]. These two documents remain (even today) significant contributions. In particular, they helped to deepen the foundations upon which the ICC had been established (the historical role of the organisation, the relationship between the organisation and the working class, centralisation, relations between militants and the organisation, etc.). The text on the “Question of Organisational Functioning in the ICC”[16] (adopted at the 11th International Congress, following the struggle waged over many years against the persistence of the circle spirit and clannism) built on the contribution of the 1982 texts, notably by reclaiming Lenin’s struggle against circle spirit at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903.

Finally, the ICC has always been committed to, and capable of, publicly setting out within the working class the lessons of its own struggles. The texts just referred to were all published in the International Review.

Of course, this does not mean that we have always succeeded in getting to the root of the difficulties. As we later realised, the lessons learnt often remained superficial or were poorly assimilated.

At times, even, the analysis was steered down the wrong track or was limited to addressing the symptoms of the problems rather than identifying their deep-rooted causes. For example, the struggle against the circle spirit and clannism in the 1990s was not pursued thoroughly, and these harmful elements resurfaced in 2000–2001.

But what must above all be borne in mind is that, far from cultivating blindness and a code of silence, the ICC has always endeavoured to respond to the organisational problems it faced with lucidity and a commitment to clarification. Furthermore, the ICC has always endeavoured to combat all forms of opportunism (both within its own ranks and across the Communist Left as a whole), even if this meant making it ‘unpopular ’. Indeed, following the 15th Congress, the ICC gave a very firm response to those who claimed that the numerous crises our organisation had gone through were proof of its failure or its ‘paranoia’: “it is because the ICC does struggle against any penetration of opportunism that it seems to have such a troubled life, that it has gone through so many crises. It is because it defended its statutes and the proletarian spirit that animates them without any concessions, that it was met with such anger by a minority which had fallen deep into opportunism on the organisation question. At this level, the ICC was carrying on the combat of the workers’ movement which was waged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in particular, whose many detractors castigated their frequent organisational struggles and crises”.[17] It is therefore on the basis of a living thought, inspired once again by the method of the Italian Fraction, for whom “knowledge can tolerate neither taboos nor ostracism”, that the ICC has always accepted its role as an organisation that must be willing to swim against the stream, exercising the utmost vigilance regarding the internal life of the organisation and all forms of concessions undermining proletarian principles.

IV The ICC’s ability to develop a lucid and coherent analysis of developments in the historical period

It is with this same approach that the Current has endeavoured to develop a coherent and lucid analysis both of capitalism’s descent into its phase of decadence and of the evolution of the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Here too, whilst drawing on the contributions and achievements inherited from past organisations (particularly regarding the understanding of the decadence of capitalism), the ICC was able to continually update and enrich the marxist analytical framework needed to grasp the changing historical conditions in which the proletariat had to wage its revolutionary struggle. In fact, it is our Current’s ability to avoid being confined by the paradigms of the past that has often enabled it to discern major shifts in the dynamics of capitalist society, long before they became too obvious to be denied.

Whilst the Communist Left of France saw no possibility of the proletariat rising up except in and during a Third World War, in 1967 the Internacionalismo group revised this view by sketching out an analysis of the historical trajectory towards class conflict based on the deepening economic crisis. This analysis was confirmed a few months later by the outbreak of the May ’68 movement in France. Faced with the scepticism of the long-established groups of the Communist Left, who saw ‘nothing new under the sun’, our current also set itself apart by grasping the historical significance of these events.

Building on the analysis of Internationalismo, the group Révolution internationale demonstrated in the article ‘Understanding May’, published in issue no. 2 of the journal Révolution internationale, that May ’68 was not merely a fleeting event involving the working class in France, but the expression of a historic and international movement: the end of the counter-revolution and the return of the proletariat to the stage of history. It was therefore on the basis of a profound understanding of the development of this historical period that the First Congress of the ICC, in 1976, also adopted its first Manifesto.

The very purpose of this text was to set out for the working class the perspective of the struggles it had already embarked upon, to remind it of the lessons of its past so that it might forge its own future, and also to identify the tasks facing revolutionaries themselves as both the fruits and the driving forces of this renewal of the proletariat’s struggle.

It is precisely because the ICC conceives of marxism as a living theory that it is committed both to exploring and deepening the lessons of the past and to seeking to grasp the major developments or new phenomena associated with the historical period. This is broadly what it was able to do, in the years and decades that followed, by producing major contributions to the deepening of class consciousness:

- In July 1979, the 3rd Congress adopted a resolution on ‘the state in the transitional period’ as well as a report on the ‘historical course’[18]
- Following the mass strike in Poland in 1980, the texts on the struggle of the proletariat in the decadence of capitalism[19] and on the critique of the weak link theory[20] clarified and deepened our analysis of the present and future conditions of the proletarian struggle towards revolution.
- Similarly, it is necessary to highlight the insights provided by our various pamphlets on The Trade Unions Against the Working Class, The Decadence of Capitalism, Nation or Class, and Communist Organisations and Class Consciousness.

Whilst the late 1970s and the 1980s were marked by a high intensity of workers’ struggles, in which the ICC played an active role, this was accompanied by the need to learn the lessons of past defeats. Thus, in order to understand the defeat of the mass strike in Poland in 1980, the organisation carefully examined the specific characteristics of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. It was notably this analysis that enabled the ICC, nearly two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, to predict the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR, whilst many groups were still analysing what was happening in the USSR and its buffer zone (‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’, and Solidarnosc’s rise to power in Poland during the summer of 1989) as a policy aimed at strengthening that bloc. Similarly, the ability to confront the working class’s defeats with clear-sightedness enabled us, even before the events of autumn 1989, to foresee that they would cause a profound setback in the consciousness of the proletariat. It should be noted in passing that this analysis was not unanimously accepted within the Communist Left, and many believed that the shameful demise of Stalinism, given that it had spearheaded the counter-revolution, would pave the way for a growth in the proletariat’s consciousness and fighting spirit.

The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (the forerunner of the Internationalist Communist Tendency) even went so far as to say that the coup against Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania had created “all the objective conditions and almost all the subjective conditions necessary to transform the insurrection into a genuine and authentic social revolution.”

Above all, however, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and of Stalinism, as well as the difficulties this would cause for the working class’s struggle, were only fully understood by our organisation because it had been able to identify the final phase into which the decadence of capitalism had entered: that of decomposition, the dynamics of which, unless countered by the victory of the proletarian revolution, lead inexorably to the destruction of human civilisation[21] . Many of our detractors reduce the analysis of decomposition to a sort of mantra, a simple, ready-made answer to the ‘complexity of the world’. This is not the place to enter into that controversy here. Indeed, it seems to us impossible to grasp the multiple manifestations of capitalism’s deadly dynamics without situating them within the overall framework of the decomposition of capitalism. Nevertheless, this has never been a reason to shirk the need to update or refine the analysis whenever we deemed it necessary. This was the case in 2017, when the 22nd International Congress adopted an update to the ‘Theses on Decomposition’[22]. Furthermore, over recent years, we have sought to demonstrate how the ‘20s’ of the 21st century represented a qualitative worsening of the destructive spiral (‘whirlwind effect’) into which capitalism in decomposition is plunging the whole of humanity.

Of course, none of this means that the ICC has not been capable of making errors of judgement or that its analyses have been free from shortcomings. This was, in fact, acknowledged at the 21st International Congress (marking the organisation’s 40th anniversary), one of the main aims of which was to carry out a critical assessment of the analysis of the international situation[23]. Similarly, in 2022, having underestimated Russia’s ambitions to declare war on Ukraine, the ICC deemed it necessary to update the text ‘Militarism and Decomposition’, produced in the early 1990s[24].

V. What is the assessment after half a century of existence?

If, after five decades of political activity, the ICC is still able to fulfil the role for which the working class brought it into being, this is first and foremost due to its ability to fully embrace the political approach developed by the Italian Fraction and the Communist Left of France. It is because, like these predecessors, the ICC is committed to combating routine, intellectual laziness and accommodation to capitalist society, that it has always found the resources to defend its integrity as a revolutionary organisation of struggle. It is by embracing this determination to remain constantly alert to historical events, rejecting the notion that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ or that ‘the proletariat’s positions have remained unchanged since 1848’ (as the Bordigists claim), that it has been able, to this day, to ‘stay the course’ in the defence of class positions.

But we would be acting inconsistently if we were unable to take a genuinely critical look at 50 years of organisational life in order to identify the efforts that need to be pursued so that we may rise to the challenge.

Having a framework for internal functioning (embodied in the Statutes) based on coherent political principles and positions (the Platform) is by no means a guarantee of the organisation’s ability to build and develop itself. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, the ICC has found it very difficult to understand, assimilate and resolutely implement the perspective that had nevertheless been set out by the founding conference: “The idea that revolutionary organization builds itself voluntarily, consciously, with premeditation far from being a voluntarist idea is on the contrary one of the concrete results of all Marxist praxis”. This approach required the development of a genuine long-term vision of the historical role that the ICC was to assume. However, amongst the generation of militants who founded the ICC, many believed that the revolution was a matter of years and that they themselves would witness the first clashes with the bourgeois state. With the retreat of the class struggle from the late 1980s onwards, these dashed hopes constituted one of the main reasons for the resignation of many comrades. But these departures above all reflected a much more general weakness within the ICC as a whole: a profound failure to understand that commitment to revolutionary militancy rests first and foremost on the ongoing necessity of revolutionary organisation and the vital role it must play in the revolutionary future. And not on the vagaries of the class struggle or on whether or not the proletariat is capable of putting an end to capitalism. This loss of sight of the long-term vision was long reflected in a truncated view of the ICC’s function; that of a sort of ‘mini-party’[25] whose main task would be to intervene in the immediate struggles of the working class. It was not really until 2015 that the ICC truly began to understand that its historical role consisted of undertaking work similar to that of a fraction[26].

As we emphasised at the end of the first part of this series, the ability to develop a ‘conscious’ conception of organisational construction has always been a challenge in the history of the revolutionary movement. This challenge remains as relevant as ever for the ICC today, given that it has for so long neglected the entire approach developed by Lenin on this issue in the pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, which he wrote in 1902.

The ICC is 50 years old and must now begin to prepare for the decades ahead under increasingly chaotic and uncertain historical conditions, where decisive class confrontations remain a distant prospect fraught with pitfalls. How can we prepare for the future? It is this question that the third and final part of this series will attempt to answer.

The ICC, 31 July 2026.

 

[1] It is not possible to recount five decades of political life in detail here; that would require writing a book. We therefore refer the reader to articles already published in our press covering the various significant episodes in the history of the ICC.

[2] Thus, in 1972, after receiving a request from a bookshop in Barcelona to send copies of the publication, three RI militants set off for Franco’s Spain to find a way to meet these readers, which they succeeded in doing. A few months later, following several discussions that clarified their positions, this small nucleus went on to form the first Accion Proletaria group.

[3] For example, in July 1968, Marc Chirik and C. Bitot (who had just left the PCI) travelled to Italy to urge Battaglia to take the initiative in organising a conference of Communist Left groups. This proposal was rejected.

[5] ibid

[6] ‘Marc, Part 1: From the Revolution of October 1917 to World War II’, International Review 65

[7]   50 years of the International Communist Current: ‘How to contribute to the future revolutionary party?’

[8] ‘The historical context of the ICC Statutes’, International Review no 5

[9] This is, of course, still the case today.

[10] 50 years of the International Communist Current: ‘How to contribute to the future revolutionary party?’

[11] For the ICC, the International Congress constitutes the organisation’s highest organ

[12] ‘ICC Extraordinary Conference’, International Review np.110

[13] ‘News of our death is greatly exaggerated…’ International Review, second semester 2014

[16] ‘The question of organisational functioning in the ICC’, International Review no.109

[18] ‘Resolution on the State in the Transition Period’, International Review no. 18

[19] ‘The proletarian struggle under decadence’, International Review no.23

[21] ‘Theses on decomposition’, International Review 20

[23] ‘40 years after the foundation of the ICC’, International Review no. 156

[24] ‘Militarism and Decomposition (May 2022)’, International Review no.168

[25] This notion of a ‘mini-party’ or ‘party in miniature’ implies that even in periods when the working class is not waging large-scale struggles, a small revolutionary organisation could have an impact of the same kind (on a smaller scale) as a party in the full sense of the term. As we explained in the introduction to this series, such an idea is in complete contradiction with the analysis developed by Bilan, which emphasises the fundamental qualitative difference between the role of a party and that of a fraction.

[26] ‘Report on the role of the ICC as a “fraction”’, International Review no. 156

 

 

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50 years of the International Communist Current (Part II)