Gaizka’s deafening silence

Following the publication of our article “Who is who in Nuevo Curso”[1], which denounces the collaboration of the individual known as Gaizka with the high functionaries and institutions of the bourgeois state, this person has up till now maintained absolute silence. No comment. Silence is his response. And we can hardly believe that he hasn’t understood what we are saying, because his friends have immediately leapt to his defence[2]. But none of them have refuted any of the facts that we have brought to light: nothing, zero, nada.

This silence is a crying confirmation that Gaizka’s career is that of an arriviste and an adventurer. He says nothing because he has nothing to say.

This silence is a well-known kind of response which can only corroborate the fact that our accusations are well-founded, and in this respect Paul Frölich[3] relates in his autobiography an edifying anecdote about the behaviour of one of the editors of the press: “He had an instinct for tactical behaviour. Once I was very surprised that he did not respond to repeated attacks from another party newspaper. ‘Very simply’, he said, ‘I was wrong about an important point. Now I let them bark until they are hoarse and the story is forgotten. Until then I'm deaf”.[4]

However, every time that revolutionaries were accused of being agents provocateurs or of collaborating with the bourgeoisie, or simply suspected of unworthy behaviour, they dedicated all their energies to denying it. Marx spent a whole year writing a book in response to the accusations of Herr Vogt[5], according to whom Marx was a police agent. Similarly, a bit later on and along with Engels, as we can see in their correspondence[6], they took part in all the battles against attempts to discredit the International Workingmen’s Association and themselves. Bebel was accused of stealing money from the treasury of the ADAV (General Association of German Workers) and he didn’t cease fighting until he had proved the falsity of these accusations. Trotsky, though completely isolated and harassed by Stalin, was able to bring together sufficient forces to convoke the Dewey Commission[7] in his defence, and so on. But true adventurers and provocateurs have always done everything they could to go to ground, to slip between the cracks of the truth.

A deafening silence

Bakunin, for example, in response to the IWA’s internal circular on the “Veritable Split in the Internationale”, behind a scandalised tone, recognised that he could only reply with…a prolonged silence.

“For two and a half years, we suffered these filthy attacks in silence; our slanderers first began with vague accusations, mixed up with loose references and poisonous insinuations, which were at the same time so stupid that, for lack of any other reason to remain silent, the bad taste they left in my mouth during the period of my withdrawal would have been enough to explain and legitimise my silence" .[8]

In vain can the whole letter be scrutinised for some argument, which is conspicuous by its absence. However, Bakunin announced that he would convene a Jury of Honour, and that he would write an article before the next congress (the Hague Congress of 1872):"On the other hand, I have always reserved the right to call all my slanderers before a jury of honour, which the next congress would no doubt not refuse me... It’s necessary to re-establish the truth, contributing as far as I can to the demolition of the system of lies built by Marx and his acolytes, that will be the aim of a paper which I intend to publish before the holding of the congress”.

Needless to say, he never convened such a jury of honour, nor did he write any articles. Instead, upon learning of the publication of the IWA’s report on the Alliance of Socialist Democracy[9], what he wrote in a letter of September 25, 1873 to the Geneva Journal (in addition to insults against Marx, for being a "communist, a German and a Jew") was a capitulation:

"I confess that all this has deeply upset me with public life. I am sick of it all. After spending my whole life fighting, I am tired. I am over sixty years old and a heart condition that worsens with age makes my life more and more difficult. Let other young people get to work. As for me, I no longer feel the strength, or perhaps the confidence, to push the Sisyphus stone against the triumphant reaction everywhere. Therefore, I withdraw from the fight, and ask my dear contemporaries for only one thing: oblivion." [10]

Bakunin also deploys here another of the classic strategies of adventurers, which is to present himself as a suffering victim when his personal behaviour is unmasked.

Similarly, when Schweitzer [11] was accused of stealing money from sick workers who could not go to work, to spend it on champagne and delicacies, he, unlike Bebel, was never able to defend himself:

"Schweitzer was publicly accused more than once of this shameful action, but he never dared to defend himself." [12]

What’s more, when Bebel and Liebknecht denounced him as a government agent at the congress in Barmen-Elberfeld (Wuppertal), Schweitzer, who was sitting on the same stage right behind them, did not utter a single word, leaving his acolytes to respond with insults and threats:

"Our speeches contained a summary of all the accusations we had made against Schweitzer. There were several violent interruptions, especially when we accused him of being a government agent; but I refused to withdraw anything... Schweitzer, who was sitting behind us when we spoke, did not utter a word in response. We left at once protected by some delegates against the assaults of Schweitzer's fanatical defenders, in the midst of a storm of imprecations and insults like ‘rogues!’, ‘traitors!’, ‘scoundrels!’ and so on. At the door we met our friends who escorted us under their protection until we arrived safely at the hotel”. [13]

And we can also cite the historical example of Parvus, accused by Gorky of swindling money for the rights to his work in Germany, denounced as an adventurer and social patriot by Trotsky [14] , who had been his friend, rejected by Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Leo Jogiches, for trying to sell himself to German imperialism, and prevented by Lenin from returning to Petrograd after the revolution, because he had "dirty hands". Parvus never took up his defence against all these accusations, leaving others (Radek in particular) to defend him in the exile milieu in Switzerland during the war.

And we could go on, Lassalle, Azev..., etc., etc. all tried to make the accusations against them be forgotten behind a wall of silence, to disappear, or, like Parvus, to carry on as if nothing had happened.

But there is no need to go back so far; in 2005 we could see how "citizen B", who proclaimed himself "unanimously" (since it was only himself) as the "Circle of Internationalist Communists" of Argentina, put himself at the service the IFICC[15] (now the International Group of the Communist Left -IGCL) to denigrate the ICC, and then fled the scene as soon as we denounced his imposture. [16]

There are also examples of such deafening silences when the ICC has denounced adventurers in its own ranks. Such was the case of the discovery and sanctioning of the militant known as Simon [17] , to which he responded with a stubborn silence that even provoked a "Resolution on the silence of comrade Simon", which said:

"Since Comrade Simon withdrew from the life of the ICC at the end of August 1994, he has never acceded to the organisation's request that he make known in writing the disagreements he had with its analyses and statements of position, which, according to him, partly motivated his withdrawal... This silence on the part of Simon is even more inadmissible since he had fundamental disagreements with the two resolutions adopted by the extended meeting of the International Secretariat on 3 December 1994".

But this stubborn silence of adventurers and shady elements when they are caught red-handed is not only a confirmation of the accusations made against them or a way of trying to be forgotten, it is also a strategy aimed at allowing others to come to their defence.

Gaizka's friends and companions

If Gaizka has not opened his mouth since we published our accusations, his friends have wasted no time coming to his defence. And so only 4 days later the IGCL published a statement: "New ICC attack against the international proletarian camp”.

We are not surprised that a parasitic group with a gangster behaviour comes to the defence of an adventurer. It had already done the same thing in 2005 by taking up the cause of citizen B of Argentina. And perhaps we should begin to think that the IGCL has the power to see the future since it published and distributed a communiqué from the "Circle" of Argentina before Citizen B had published it on his own website.

The unfortunate thing is that the IGCL (then IFICC) duped the IBRP[18], now the ICT, which, although discreetly, without taking the floor directly, published the IFICC/citizen B communiqués denigrating the ICC , thus encouraging the unworthy behaviour of both of these rogues.

Of course, the IGCL does not provide in its communiqué any denial of what we denounce in our article, except for the statement that they "have not noticed anything": "we must point out that to date we have not noticed any provocation, manoeuvre, denigration, slander or rumour, launched by the members of Nuevo Curso, even in an individual capacity, nor any policy of destruction against other groups or revolutionary militants". We won’t waste any time on this declaration.

In reality, the purpose of the communiqué is to attack the ICC, since it is we "who have developed these practices under the guise of its theory of decomposition and parasitism and which it is now returning to". And at the same time the ICC has fallen "into the rotten domain of the personalisation of political issues".

The website Pantopolis run by  Doctor Bourrinet[19] immediately reproduced the IGCL article preceded by an introduction that competes with and even outdoes the IGCL in its hate-filled invective against the ICC.

Another group that has condemned our Gaizka exhibition is the Gulf Coast Communist Fraction in the US, which has said in a communication to the ICC[20] : "we have nothing but condemnation for this egregious and immoral hit-piece of personalized gossips completely removed from a political terrain”.

In short, two recriminations: 1) that it is not Gaizka, but the ICC that is behaving in a manner unworthy of the proletariat, resorting to denigration and provocation; 2) that in our denunciation political questions are replaced by personal ones.

It is not the first time that in the face of rigour in the defence of the proletarian milieu and the denunciation of unworthy behaviour, revolutionary organisations have been attacked with slanders about their "authoritarianism" and their "manoeuvres", as if they were employing the same means as the adventurers and provocateurs who have been unmasked. This was also the case in the IWA: "The bourgeoisie, which understood, from its point of view, the historical danger for its class interests represented by the lessons drawn by the First International, responded to the revelations of the Hague Congress, doing everything possible to discredit that effort. And so the press and the politicians of the bourgeoisie pointed out that the struggle against Bakuninism was not a struggle of principle, but a sordid dispute for power within the International, accusing Marx of having eliminated his rival, Bakunin, through a campaign of falsification. What, in other words, the bourgeoisie was trying to instil in the workers is that the workers' organisations used the same methods, and were therefore no better, than the organisations of their exploiters. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the International supported Marx was attributed to the ‘triumph of authoritarianism’ in its ranks, and to the supposed tendency of its members to see enemies of the Association lurking everywhere. Bakuninists and Lassalleans went so far as to spread rumours that Marx himself was an agent of Bismarck”. [21]

Bakunin himself did not hesitate to present the struggle of the International for the defence of its statutes and functioning against the sectarian spirit and its intrigues as a "fight between sects”. Thus, in his "Letter to the brothers in Spain", Bakunin claims that the 1872 London Conference resolution against secret societies, aimed in particular against the Alliance, has only been adopted by the International "in order to clear the way for their own conspiracy, for the secret society, which under the leadership of Marx has existed since 1848, founded by Marx, Engels and the deceased Wolff, and which is none other than the almost exclusively Germanic society of authoritarian communists (...)

One has to recognise that the struggle which has broken out in the midst of the International is none other than between two secret societies"[22]..

In the world view of elements like Bakunin, the IGCL, or Gaizka, there is no room for honesty, organisational principles or proletarian morality; they only project onto others their own way of behaving. As popular wisdom says, "the thief believes that everyone acts like he does”

However, “Much more serious and dangerous is when such denigrations find a certain echo within the revolutionary camp itself. This was the case with Franz Mehring's biography of Marx. In this book Mehring, who belonged to the determined left wing of the Second International, declared that the pamphlet of the Hague Congress on the Alliance was ‘inexcusable’ and ‘unworthy of the International’. In his book, Mehring defended not only Bakunin, but also Lassalle and Schweitzer against the accusations made by Marx and the Marxists.

Mehring's discrediting of the Marxist struggle against Bakuninism and Lassalleanism had devastating effects on the workers’ movement in the following decades, for it not only led to a certain rehabilitation of political adventurers like Bakunin and Lassalle, but above all allowed the opportunist wing of social democracy before 1914 to erase the lessons of the great struggles for the defence of the revolutionary organisation. It was a decisive factor in the opportunist strategy to isolate the Bolsheviks in the Second International, when in fact their struggle against Menshevism belongs to the best tradition of the working class. The Third International also suffered from Mehring's legacy: in 1921, an article by Stoecker (‘On Bakuninism’), likewise based on Mehring's criticisms of Marx, justified the most dangerous and adventurist aspects of the so-called March Action of 1921 by the KPD (German Communist Party) in Germany”. [23]

The fact that the IBRP allowed itself to be pulled behind the IFICC and “citizen B” in 2005 also gave a boost to parasitism, hampering the struggle against it in the proletarian milieu.

But let’s move on to the second charge, that of personalising political issues and, more precisely, evoking "gossip or private affairs". To begin with, our accusation was not based on airing intimate matters, but on exposing public political behaviour, which is widely documented. What we exposed about Gaizka are facts that belong to the sphere of the public activity of bourgeois politicians, and therefore they should be carefully considered by communist militants. What was an individual who had repeatedly frequented the high-level political circles of the bourgeois state doing in the area of the Communist Left?

Now, in the second place, there are "private" facts (intrigues, manoeuvres, secret contacts, obscure relations etc.) which need to be made known in order to understand and be able to denounce destructive actions against the proletariat or against revolutionary organisations. Denouncing them has nothing to do with gossip.

Here, rather than ourselves answering, let Engels do it. In one of the many articles Marx and himself had to write in defence of the IWA, attacked by the whole bourgeois press, and by the provocateurs and the followers of Bakunin, and questioned by the undecided militants themselves, Engels answers an article in Vperyod by Peter Lavrov[24] , which questions the report of the Hague Congress Commission on "The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the IWA ([25]) because it is a “caustic polemic on personal and private matters with information that can only come from gossip". This is how Engels replies:

"The main charge (against the report on the Alliance, editors), however, is that the report is full of private matters... of gossip. His statement is in any case extremely frivolous. The facts in question are proven by authentic evidence and those involved have been careful not to answer them.

But Friend Peter [26] is of the opinion that private matters, like private letters, are sacred and should not be published in political debates. To accept the validity of this argument in whatever terms is to make it impossible to write about history... So, if one is describing the history of a gang like the Alliance, in which one finds such a number of tricksters, adventurers, scoundrels, police spies, swindlers and cowards, along with those who have been deceived, should one falsify that history by knowingly concealing the individual villainies of those gentlemen as ‘private affairs’?

When the editor of Vperyod nevertheless describes the report as a clumsy concoction of essentially private facts, he is committing an act that is difficult to characterise ... No one can read ‘A Plot Against the International’ without being convinced that the private affairs interspersed in it are the most insignificant part, are illustrations to provide a more detailed picture of the characters involved, and could be suppressed without calling into question the main point of the report. The organisation of a secret society with the sole intention of subjecting the workers' movement in Europe to the hidden dictatorship of a few adventurers, the infamies committed in pursuit of that purpose, particularly by Nechayev in Russia - that is the central theme of the report, and to maintain that everything revolves only around private matters is, to say the least, irresponsible”. [27]

Conclusion

Can we tolerate in the proletarian political milieu an element that has maintained contacts and collaborated with high officials of the bourgeois state? Can we accept that someone like that now presents himself as a representative of the Communist Left? Can we build organisations of the proletariat and prepare the future party of the revolution with individuals like this? Gaizka's silence is a confirmation of his collaboration with the bourgeois state. His service record mainly to the PSOE [28] and at some point to the liberals, and then his contacts with the Communist Left and his disappearance when questioned about problematic aspects of his behaviour, constitute the trajectory of an adventurer. [29]

The aspiration of a group formed around this element to be considered part of the Communist Left would mean the introduction of a Trojan Horse whose purpose could only be to distort and undermine the heritage of the proletarian tradition and the programmatic and organisational principles represented by the organisations of the Communist Left. And this regardless of the honesty of the members of the Gaizka group, who may well have been deceived by him.

In that sense, and keeping all proportions in mind, just as Bakunin, as Engels says, wanted to impose his dictatorship on the International, which grouped together the workers' movement in Europe, Gaizka wants to play a similar undercover role behind a group – Nuevo Curso - where there are possibly elements who have been duped; he wants to appear as a reference point of the Communist Left, especially for young people in search of proletarian political positions. But his link with the Communist Left can only confuse the positions of the latter by passing off leftist or Stalinist notions and the methods of adventurism as positions of the Communist Left.

In this criminal endeavour, Gaizka has the organised support of the parasitic and gangster group of the IGCL, which presents him precisely as a champion of regroupement; but he also draws benefit from the silence towards his initiatives from other groups in the proletarian milieu.

ICC 11.4.2020

 

---

[1] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16802/who-who-nuevo-curso

[2] We refer here to the International Group of the Communist Left (IGCL) and the Pantopolis website of Monsieur Bourrinet.

[3] A militant of the Bremen left during the revolutionary period in Germany; IKD delegate to the founding Congress of the German Communist Party

4 Paul Frölich "Im radikalen Lager", Politische Autobiografie 1890-1921, Berlín 2013, page 51. He is referring to Paul Lensch (1873-1926), a talented editor who worked with Frölich on the Social Democratic paper Leipziger Volkszeitung. Lensch  was an element with a shady history in the workers' movement. Frölich described him as "a broad-backed, strong-footed bulldog, a pitiless guard-dog (...) who believed that he had much of Mehring's elegance, but whose brutal character always ended up coming out clearly. A boaster and a manipulator (...) with nothing to bind him to the working class”. He was also capable of adopting the “correct political position" if it helped his career; in 1910 he was part of the left wing of Social Democracy but played a dubious role in the Radek affair; then he was present on the night of August 4, 1914 in Rosa Luxemburg's apartment (with those who were against the imperialist war); shortly afterwards, in 1915, he was a supporter of the extreme right of Social Democracy and defender together with Cunow and Haenisch of "war socialism", supporting the war with a "marxist" argument in the magazine Die Glocke run by Parvus and others. Lensch was not simply a social democrat who allowed himself to be dragged to the right and ultimately to the betrayal of the proletariat; as an element without any militant ties or trust in the working class, he was above all a dishonest careerist who hid behind marxism and was able to keep silent when necessary.

[5] In this book, which took him a year to complete, Marx not only defended himself against the disgusting accusations of Vogt, but also defended the Communist League, despite the fact that it had already disappeared. Defending the tradition it represented, the Communist Manifesto, the principles of organisation, the continuity of the workers' movement, was of vital importance, contrary to all those who consider that Marx had wasted his time on minutiae, or had even lost his political judgement and disinterested dedication to the struggle of the proletariat

[6] Marx/Engels Collected Works, 2010 Lawrence &Wishart Electric Book, Vol 24

[7] Since Stalin had crushed every vestige of what the workers' movement had been in the revolutionary period, the Commission had to be composed mainly of members of the intellectual and cultural milieu who were reputed for their independence of opinion and their honesty. Dewey was one of them. The sessions of the commission took place in Mexico.

[8] In Jacques Freymond, The First International, Ed. ZERO 1973, p. 355 (translated from Spanish)

[9] The report was produced by a commission of inquiry by the Hague Congress of the IWA (1872). After the Congress heard and discussed the report, it made the decision to exclude Bakunin and some of his followers from the International.

[10] Virtual Library Sit Inn - www.sitinn.hpg.com.br, Bakunin by Bakunin – Letters: “Letter to the Geneva Journal”. In Portuguese in the original. Translated by us.

[11] See on our website: https://en.internationalism.org/content/16745/lassalle-and-schweitzer-struggle-against-political-adventurers-workers-movement

[12]   Bebel, My Life, The University of Chicago press, The Baker & Taylor co., New York, page 152

[13]Ibid, p 156

[14] See Nashe Slovo No. 2: "Epitaph for a living friend"

[15] The "Internal Fraction of the ICC" was a parasitic group whose members were excluded from the ICC after refusing to defend their positions and actions before the investigation commission appointed by the 15th ICC Congress of 2001. One of its prominent members, known to Jonas, had been expelled earlier for behaviour unworthy of a revolutionary militant. https://en.internationalism.org/ir/110_conference.html; “IFICC: an attempt to swindle the communist left”, IR 112.

[16] https://en.internationalism.org/content/9742/communique-our-readers-icc-under-attack-new-agency-bourgeois-state

[17] Simon was excluded from 11th ICC Congress for behaviour incompatible with communist militancy

[18] International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party which comes from the Damen tendency in the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy. It’s now the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT)

[19] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201502/12079/doctor-bourrinet-fraud-and-self-proclaimed-historian The French version refers to a different article about Bourrinet

[20] We want to make it clear that we do not in any way equate the GIGC/Bourrinet with the GCCF. The IGCL is a parasitic group that only exists to attack the ICC; even if we had published an article denouncing Mata Hari they would say that they "have not noticed anything”, and then straight ahead go on to the attack. The same can be said of Bourrinet. The GCCF is a young group without experience and in search of clarification, susceptible to the flattery of Gaizka and the IGCL /Bourrinet

[21] “Questions of organisation: The struggle of Marxism against political adventurism”, IR 88, https://en.internationalism.org/content/3753/communist-organisation-struggle-marxism-against-political-adventurism

[22] Cited in the above article

[23] ibid

[24] Vperyod (Forward) a Russian language newspaper published in Great Britain, with Narodnik or “populist” tendencies. Lavrov Pyotr (1823-1900) Russian philosopher, sociologist and journalist, Narodnik supporter; he was a member of the 1st International and participated in the Paris Commune

[25] In Germany, the report was given the title “A plot against the International” and this is how it’s known in English versions. Engels uses this title for the report of the Investigation Commission of the Hague Congress instead of “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Workers’ Association”, but it is the same report

[26]Engels  refers here to Pyotr Lavrov, as he explains at the beginning of the article, in order to respect the anonymity that he scrupulously requires of him and which Engels mocks, since the real name of Vperyod's editor is well known both in Britain and in Russia; that is why he proposes to refer to the author as “Friend Peter”, a very popular name in Russia.  

[27].Engels, Refugee Literature III, Marx/Engels' Complete Works, 2010 Lawrence &Wishart Electric Book, Vol 24 p 21-22

[28] Partido Socialista Obrero Español - Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, currently in power

[29] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16802/who-who-nuevo-curso