Prague “Action Week”: response to the CWO’s balance-sheet

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As we wrote in our second article on the “Prague Action Week”[1], various groups have tried to draw a balance sheet of what happened at the Prague event, an attempt to bring together opponents of imperialist war from many different countries. In this article we will examine the contribution of the Communist Workers Organisation[2] (in a subsequent article we will deal with the perspectives after the Prague Action Week).

The CWO article presents their view that the crisis is forcing capitalism towards a new World War aimed at the devaluation of capital. We will not develop here our disagreements with this approach to the current world situation and the current dynamic of imperialist wars. But we do want to respond to the way that the CWO deal with a key experience of the historic workers’ movement – the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915, which was the first major attempt of internationalists from across the warring camps to come together and issue an appeal against the imperialist war. The CWO seem to downplay the significance of this event by insisting it was part of a general failure of the revolutionary left in the Second International to break in time from Social Democracy: “even the example of the Zimmerwald Left who came together well after the war had started”, they say, is not an example to be emulated. Yes, it’s true that the international left waited too long to begin organised fractional work against the growing opportunism of the Second International in the period leading up to the war, and this delay made it difficult to make an international response to the outbreak of the war and the betrayal of the whole opportunist wing of Social Democracy after 1914. But this does not mean that we cannot learn from the experience of the Zimmerwald Left. On the contrary, the attitude of the Bolsheviks and others at Zimmerwald – both of recognising the importance of participating at the Conference and of intransigently opposing the centrist and pacifist errors of the majority of its participants – provide us with a clear example of how to respond to events like the Prague Acton Week. In other words, the necessity to be present at such an event, on the one hand and, on the other, to intervene with a clear critique of all its confusions and inadequacies. This is especially true when we consider that some of the key forces behind the Action Week, in particular the Tridni Valka group, simply reject the whole Zimmerwald experience as nothing but a pacifist carnival[3]. And at the same time, the lesson the CWO draws from Zimmerwald – the need to regroup as soon and as broadly as possible, before the war is upon us - is leading them towards a wholly uncritical approach to the elements it is trying to regroup with. We will come back to this.

A partial explanation for the chaos in Prague

Along with most of the other accounts, the CWO article begins by pointing out that “From an organisational point of view, it was a disaster (our emphasis).  Participants may disagree about who’s to blame but the fact is some events didn’t take place at all, others were poorly attended, people were promised accommodation and weren’t provided any, and ultimately on Friday the congress venue pulled out. In the absence of any communication from the organisers, around 50 participants met up and self-organised their own congress. The discussions carried on for many hours, and though eventually the original organisers found some other venue, the self-organised congress had already made plans for the next day. So on Saturday two separate events took place: the official congress and the self-organised congress (though some participants visited both throughout the day).”[4]

We can only agree that it was a disaster at the organisational level, but the CWO account doesn’t go any deeper into the reasons for the disaster. It’s not a question of blame here, but of investigating the political reasons for the failure. As we aimed to show in our first article on Prague[5], such an investigation cannot avoid a critique of the activist, anti-organisational approach of the majority of the participants - a problem rooted in anarchist conceptions and exacerbated by the various efforts to exclude the communist left from the proceedings. 

The organisational question is a political question in its own right, but the CWO account seems to restrict the “political point of view” to the more general conceptions held by the various participants. Nevertheless, they are quite right when they point out that, at this level, “the real divide that emerged was between the activists who were looking for immediate solutions on how to stop the war, and those with a class struggle orientation who had a more long-term perspective and understood wars, as a product of the capitalist system, can only be ended by the mass struggle of workers”.

This is precisely what we have said in our own articles on Prague. However, again there is something missing in the CWO account. As we pointed out in our first article, in putting forward this general approach “it was noticeable that there was a convergence between the interventions of the ICC and the ICT, who met more than once to compare notes on the evolution of the discussion”.

The CWO article asserts that one positive thing about the Prague event were the many informal contacts and discussions that took place on the margins of the main meetings, and we agree with this. But what they avoid saying is that, within the “self-organised” assembly itself, their delegation was able, for the first time in many years, to work constructively with the ICC, and that this was in no small measure due to the fact that, despite many disagreements, we share the tradition of marxism and the communist left, which enabled both organisations to offer a real alternative to the sterile activism which dominate the majority of this milieu. Thus, in the interventions of both organisations in Prague there was an emphasis on the primacy of serious debate about the world situation over an immediatist fixation on “what can we do today”; an insistence on the central role of the workers’ struggle in the development any real opposition to imperialist war; and an affirmation that only the overthrow of capitalism by the working class can put an end to the deadly spiral of war and destruction built into decadent capitalism.

A long history of opportunism and sectarianism

We don’t think that the CWO is suffering from a simple lapse in memory here. Rather, it is consistent with a practice that has been embraced by the CWO/ICT and its forerunners for a long time: a policy of “anyone but the ICC”. This attitude could already be seen in the approach of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in 1943-5 – the organisation to which the ICT traces its roots. As we have shown in a number of articles, the PCInt was, from its inception, opportunist in its intervention towards the partisan groups in Italy and towards a number of elements who it let into the Party without demanding any account of their past deviations and even betrayals: such was the case with Vercesi, a former militant of the Italian Fraction who had engaged in anti-fascist frontism during the war, or the elements who had split from the Fraction to fight in the POUM militias in Spain. And this opportunism was accompanied by a sectarian approach to those who criticised the PCInt from the left – namely, the Gauche Communiste de France, with whom it refused all discussion. We saw the same approach by Battaglia Comunista (the ICT’s Italian affiliate) and the CWO in the sabotage of the conferences of the communist left at the end of the 1970s – in the sad aftermath of which Battaglia and the CWO, having effectively got rid of the ICC, held  a “new” conference along with a group of Iranian Stalinists[6]. A clear example of opportunism towards the right, even towards the left wing of capitalism, and sectarianism towards the left of the proletarian camp, the ICC.

Today, this policy is continued in the systematic refusal of joint work between the main groups of the communist left in favour of seeking alliances with all kinds of elements – from anarchists with ambiguous positions on internationalism to what, in our view, are fake left communists who can only play a destructive role towards the authentic proletarian milieu. The most obvious example of the latter is the “International Group of the Communist Left”, a group which is not only a parasitic formation, whose very reason for existence is to slander the ICC, but which has actively engaged in snitching about the ICC’s internal life[7]; and yet this is the group with which the ICT formed its No War But the Class War group in France. The ICT’s choice of rejecting the proposals of the ICC for a joint appeal of the communist left against the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and instead going for a kind of “broad front” via the No War But the Class War groups, is only the latest iteration of this approach[8].

Prior to the Prague meeting, the CWO wrote to the organisers suggesting that the eight criteria proposed by the organisers for participation in the conference and for common internationalist work in the future could easily be merged with the five basic points that define the No War But the Class War committees[9]. It would be useful if the CWO, in their balance sheet of the conference, could have made an assessment of what has become of this proposal.

For our part, we think that what happened in Prague provided a practical refutation of the whole method behind the NWBCW initiative. First, it didn’t persuade the organisers to overcome their refusal to invite the communist left to the “official” conference, as initially argued in a radio interview with the organising committee[10] and fully confirmed in the account of the event written by the Tridni Valka group (which certainly had a key influence on the official organising committee, even if they claim that they themselves were not part of it)[11]. As TV’s  article shows, the hostility towards the communist left in certain parts of the anarchist movement runs very deep. This is not something that can be overcome by forming amorphous fronts with the anarchists. On the contrary, that is a guaranteed means of avoiding a real, searching debate, which will necessarily take the form of a patient and unrelenting political struggle that aims to go to the roots of the divergence between marxism and anarchism. There is no sign that the ICT is engaging in such a confrontation with the groups it has paired up with in the NWBCW committees.

Second, the unfolding of the events in Prague was a real demonstration, on the one hand, that it cannot be the task of the communist left to “organise” the fragmented, politically heterogenous and often chaotic anarchist movement. Yes, we must be present at its gatherings to argue for both political and organisational coherence, but the attempt to encompass such a milieu in permanent groups or committees can only end up sabotaging  the work of the communist left. On the other hand, 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.

Amos

 

 

 

 

 

Affiliate in Britain of the ICT (Internationalist Communist Tendency)

[3] Ibid, note 1

[11]  https://libcom.org/article/aw2024-report-prague. We responded to this  in our second article on the Prague Action Week (footnote 1)

 

Rubric: 

Proletarian political milieu