Statement of solidarity with the ICT

Having read on the website of the Internationalist Communist Tendency the communiqué of 12 April 2015 entitled A proposito di alcune infami calunnie (‘Response to a vile slander’), the ICC expresses its total solidarity with the ICT and with those of its militants who have been particularly targeted in these attacks by former members of the ICT’s section in Italy, the Partito Comunista Internazionalista.

All those who see themselves as part of the communist left, or who are interested in this current, know the disagreements between the ICC and the ICT, on questions of general analysis (like the course of history), on how we interpret historical experience (like the work of the Italian Fraction between 1928 and 1945 or the foundation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in 1943-45) or – and for us this is the most important – on the relations that should exist today between the groups that consider themselves part of the communist left. We have never hidden these disagreements or renounced our vigorous criticisms of those political positions of the ICT (and of the IBRP in the past) which we judge to be negative for the struggle of the communist left. But in our eyes this cannot affect the expression of our total solidarity with the ICT or the firmness with which we condemn the slanders being aimed today at the organisation and certain of its militants. This is an attitude which belongs to the tradition of the workers’ movement.

The ICC does not know the identity of the elements who are today attacking the PCInt-ICT, nor the exact terms of their allegations. However, the ICC has complete confidence in the communiqué published by the ICT and considers that the information it contains is valid. This confidence is based on the following facts:

• We cannot imagine that an organisation which has laid claim to the positions of the communist left and which has defended these positions for 70 years could invent the facts reported in the communiqué;

• The experience of the workers’ movement (as well as the experience of the ICC itself) attests that former militants can fall into the basest ignominy when they develop resentments against their former organisation, when they abandon the fight for the communist perspective in order to engage in a fight for their petty personal concerns. Disappointment, frustration, wounded pride, rancour then become the motive force for their behaviour, and no longer the revolt against this shameful society of exploitation. As the PCInt communiqué puts it, the “hateful attacks” against their former organisation “has become their main focus of their politics, if not their lives”, rather than the combat against capitalism, whose allies they thus become, whether they want to or not;

• One of the most insidious, but unfortunately, “classic” features of the destructive approach of these elements towards their former organisation is to make the most sordid accusations against its most prominent militants, in particular the accusation that they are “state agents”.

 

This kind of accusation has to be fought and denounced in the firmest possible manner, especially because it introduces suspicion within the organisation but also within the whole proletarian milieu. This is why the ICC declares its readiness to offer whatever help it can to the ICT, and which the ICT judges would be most useful to it, in order to unmask the slanders aimed at certain of its militants and to re-establish their honour.

 

The ICC calls on all elements and groups who fight sincerely for the communist revolution, and particularly those who see themselves as part of the communist left (especially those who refer to the current animated by Bordiga after 1952) to offer unfailing solidarity to the ICT against these sordid attacks. It is the honour of the communist left to have fought against these kinds of methods, in which Stalinism was the great specialist, in the darkest moments of the counter-revolution. Participating in the combat of the communist left does not only mean defending its political positions. It also means denouncing political behaviour such as rumours, lies, slander and blackmail, all of which are diametrically opposed to the proletariat’s struggle for its emancipation.

 

The ICC, 17.4.15.