The ICT and the Varna Conference: a policy of excluding the most consistent internationalists

Submitted by ICConline on

In April this year, the Varna 26 Organising Committee, linked to the Konflikt group in Bulgaria[1], called for groups and individuals to register for an internationalist conference to be held in September in Varna:

“In the chaos and uncertainty of today’s world, it seems more vital than ever that internationalists start to find common ground, and begin to work on strategies to build working class resistance against war, and the attacks on workers living standards that accompany it. To that end, we are inviting you to a conference of internationalists, against all wars, and against all states. The conference will provide a possibility for internationalists across the continent, and beyond to meet, network, and discuss about how to go forward.

Who’s organising it?

The event is being hosted by the Bulgarian group Konflikt, who have experience of organising big international events before, but it has the involvement of many internationalist groups. For example, the IWA International Secretariat is supporting the event, and there will also be groups from the IFA in attendance, as well as members of the NWBCW initiative supported by the ICT.

What can we expect there?

The conference will include special sessions on the major wars going on today, such as the Russia-Ukraine war, and the chance to listen to comrades from those countries about their involvement in the struggle against war. There will also be a session on operating in countries with ‘national liberation’ movements, where we will hear comrades from Ireland talking about the situation there, from Turkey talking about the Kurdish question, and militants from both sides of the line from Cyprus. Also there will be sessions on workers actions against war, the increasing militarisation of society, and the move to a war economy, as well as the chance to hear what different groups think is the best strategy today….”

A comrade from the ICC wrote to the Committee and expressed our interest in taking part in this conference. We received the following response, dated July 30

“We read your letter. We feel unable to invite your organisation. You have a reputation for disrupting the meetings of other groups and organisation, and we don’t think your presence would be conducive to what we are trying to achieve”.

In response the ICC wrote to the organising committee as follows:

 “Dear comrades 

We have received your message of 30 July 2026.  

 We think that your letter is in contradiction with the stated goal of the conference, which is to bring together all genuine internationalists to have a wide-ranging discussion about the accelerating war-drive of capitalism; and at the same time, offering no concrete evidence whatsoever, you propose to ban an organisation which has consistently defended internationalism for over 50 years. It seems that your allegations about our disruptive attitude are based purely on ‘what you have heard’, on our ‘reputation’. Have you yourselves witnessed any such behaviour from the ICC?  We thus urge you to reconsider the ban, or at the very least provide serious evidence demonstrating our disruptive behaviour at previous meetings, particularly at other attempts to bring internationalists together, such as the Prague Conference of 2024.   

We look forward to your response 

ICC”

To date, the Varna Organising Committee has not replied to our letters.

At the same time, we sent a letter to the Communist Workers Organisation/Internationalist Communist Tendency, containing Varna’s letter and our response, and posing the following questions to the ICT:

“We are sending you recent correspondence between ourselves and the hosts of the Varna conference in September. As you can see, we have been banned from this meeting and are contesting the decision.
The initial statement by the organisers says that the conference is supported, among others, by ‘members of the NWBCW initiative supported by the ICT’. Since the ICT is thus involved in the organisation of the conference at some level, we are writing to you to ascertain your attitude to this ban and, if you oppose it, what course of action would you propose?
You know our position: we consider that the communist left is the only historic current which has demonstrated a consistent capacity to defend internationalism in the face of imperialist war, and we thus affirm the imperative necessity for solidarity among the genuine groups of the communist left against any attempt to exclude them from debate among those searching for political clarity on the question of war.
We look forward to your response
Fraternally
The ICC”


This was the response from the ICT, received on 12 August:

”The Varna conference is being organised by Konflikt in Bulgaria, in conjunction with unaligned individuals from what might loosely be called 'the revolutionary milieu' in Europe. The ICT is not organising the conference. We have been invited to make a presentation at one session, and a delegate from the ICT has attended some preliminary meetings to discuss technical aspects, but the conference is not in any way sponsored, paid for, directed or otherwise organised by the ICT. We have no control over who is invited or who the other speakers are. We are attending because we think that meetings of revolutionaries are important, and Varna appears to us to be such a meeting; we are presenting because we were asked to speak about our experiences in the No War but the Class War committees, which we see an important tool for revolutionaries to come together to build a way of working for the future.

We will not be pleading your case with the Varna organisers. We support their decision to exclude from the conference potentially disruptive elements. And we have no confidence that you would not act in that manner, given how you behaved at our meetings in Paris and Nantes in 2023.

We will not communicate with you further on this matter.

Dave L for the International Bureau of the ICT”

A history of exclusions against the communist left…

This is not the first time we have been banned from meetings of those who claim to be internationalists. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the ICC was manoeuvred out of meetings of the original anarchist-inspired No War But the Class War group[2] - not because we were disrupting the meetings but essentially because of our criticisms of its practice and perspectives. More recently, this pattern has repeated itself with the Anarchist Communist Group, which in May 2023 barred us from their meeting in London - a meeting held in conjunction, with, among others, the CWO, who failed to express any solidarity with a fellow left communist group[3]. Subsequently ICC comrades have been allowed to take part in online ACG meetings; but at a recent one on the “Spanish Revolution”, an ICC sympathiser who was defending the position of the Italian Communist Left of the 1930s about these events - insisting that the armed conflict between the Republic (supported by the majority of anarchists) and Francoism was not a proletarian revolution but part of a wider imperialist conflict - found his first intervention denounced as “gibberish and deranged” and any possible response blocked by the hosts simply cutting him out of the meeting[4].

On the international level, the ICC – along with all the ‘established’ groups of the communist left, including the ICT - were formally banned by the organisers of the 2024 Prague “anti-war conference” because of our supposed “Leninist” politics and manipulative practices, with the ICC in particular being denounced as snitches by the Czech group involved in the conference, Tridni Valka/Class War.   However, both the ICC and the ICT were able to participate in the ‘fringe’ events around the conference, where some of the most important discussions took place. We will return to this[5].

.. in which the ICT and its predecessors have also taken played a role

Even though the CWO/ ICT has itself been targeted by some of these “anti-authoritarian” attempts to silence the criticisms levelled at anarchism by the communist left, the ICT and its political forebears have for a long time been drawn into very similar exclusionary policies. We could go all the way back to the 1940s and the way that the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, formed in Italy in 1943, sought to prevent its members from engaging in any discussion with our ancestors in the Gauche Communiste de France, which had exposed the deeply opportunist basis upon which the PCInt was cobbled together. In 1980, the ICC was effectively excluded from the international conferences of the communist left by a joint manoeuvre of the CWO and the PCInt, who later became the main components of the ICT; and we have already mentioned the CWO’s refusal to challenge the ACG for barring us from their 2023 London meeting.

However, the recent letter from the ICT, fully supporting our exclusion from the Varna conference as potentially disruptive elements, marks a new step in the ICT’s journey towards embracing an openly destructive policy towards the ICC. This is in effect the logical conclusion of its policy of forming No War But the Class War committees as a deliberate alternative to united action by the groups of the communist left. Turning their back on appeals by the ICC and others for a common intervention against imperialist wars, these committees have largely regrouped ICT members and supporters with anarchists, leftists, and fake groups of the Communist Left (such as the International Group of the Communist Left which has made no secret of its desire to destroy the ICC). The current stance of the ICT towards the ICC can only signify a complete capitulation to the position of Tridni Valka/ Class War which wants to ban all expressions of the communist left from any attempt to create a genuine forum of discussion among internationalists.

Defending revolutionary positions is not disruption

We have already replied to the ICT’s accusations that we behaved in a deliberately disruptive manner at their meetings at St Nazaire and Paris[6]. Our reply[7] systematically refutes these charges, showing that all our interventions were motived by a will to develop a political critique of the ambiguities and confusions of the ICT regarding the drive to war, the role of the trade unions, the ‘united’ front policy embodied in the NWBTCW committees, and their willingness to work with elements like the IGCL who have really behaved as snitches. The ICT may not like our style, but what is evident is that they object above all to the content of our criticisms. In this their reaction is no different from the anarchists who can only see our dismantling of the sacred idol of the “Spanish revolution” as deranged gibberish.

But we should not finish this article without pointing out that in the majority of cases where the ICC has attended ICT meetings[8], for example in London, the discussions, despite sharp disagreements, remained fraternal, and we said precisely the same thing about a more recent ICT public meeting in Paris, where we wrote, in explicit agreement with a similar assessment by the ICT, that “Public meetings, such as those organised by the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) on 7 March and by the ICC on 21 March, in Paris and other cities around the world, provide forums for proletarian debate where the analyses and arguments of different revolutionary groups can be compared” and remarked of the ICT’s Paris meeting that  “the debate was conducted in a fraternal spirit not only amongst proletarian groups, but also with the other participants, notably young people interested in the positions of the Communist Left, particularly on the central question of war and how revolutionaries and the working class must respond”. [9]

No less significant was the capacity of the ICC and CWO delegations in Prague to work together faced with the truly disruptive policies of Tridni Valka/Class War and the (dis)organisers of the conference. We noted this fact in our first article on the Prague event[10], and our third article concluded by saying that “the modest beginnings of joint work between the ICT and the ICC in Prague confirms the ICC’s view that the best starting point for the communist left to have an impact on a wider but still very confused search for internationalist positions is a united effort based on very clearly agreed principles”. [11]

However, the third article also noted that the CWO’s assessment made no mention at all of this “modest beginning”, as though the CWO didn’t want to talk about something it subsequently felt ashamed of. And since then, it has become clear that the ICT is moving in precisely the opposite direction: not towards the unity and solidarity of the communist left, but towards an ever more systematic exclusion of the most consistent currents within it.

ICC

 

.[1] Konflikt’s website. https://kon-flikt.org/en/who-are-we/. The call for registration was published on libcom Registration: Internationalist Meeting Against War- Varna ‘26/Варна ‘26

[2] On the history of the No War but the Class War groups, World Revolution 393. The article notes that these manoeuvres were also directed against a NWBTCW group in Sheffield, in which the CWO had a significant influence.

[5] For our balance sheet of these events, see: Prague "Action Week": Activism is a barrier to political clarification, International Review 172; Prague Action Week: Some lessons, and some replies to slander, World Revolution 401

 

[8] The ICT, by contrast, no longer attends the public meetings of the ICC, no doubt part of their policy of trying to demonstrate our political irrelevance.

Life of the ICC: 

Heritage of the Communist Left: 

Political currents and reference: 

Rubric: 

Proletarian political milieu