Our comrade Bernadette died on Wednesday 7 October, after a long and painful illness: lung cancer. Bernadette was born on 25 November 1949 in the south west of France. Her father was a skilled worker in an engineering factory and her mother didn’t have a paid job because she had to look after her 8 children. In other words, this was a family of modest means, an authentically working class family. Bernadette thus had a direct experience of the reality of the workers’ condition from a very early age. Also from a very early age she was animated by an ardent intellectual passion, a desire to understand the world and society. She was drawn to literature and loved reading in general. After graduating from the lycée, she entered the University of Toulouse and obtained a master’s degree in linguistics and literature. She then got a job as an office worker in the ministry of national education.

She was still a student when by chance she met a militant of the ICC, in the mid 70s. This comrade, seeing what concerned Bernadette, told her to read the Communist Manifesto. For her this was a kind of revelation: for the first time she found a clear and coherent response to the questions she was asking. “That’s it, that’s exactly it” is how, 40 years later, she described the way she felt when reading this text. Reading the texts of the ICC, which she then wanted to acquaint herself with, made a similar impression on her.

She decided very quickly that the ICC - unlike other groups who called themselves revolutionary and even communist, like the Maoists and Trotskyists whom she also encountered – was a true heir of the marxist tradition, and once she made the commitment to fight inside its ranks, she never deviated from her conviction that revolutionary militancy, dedicating oneself to the construction of the revolutionary organisation and of the ICC in particular, was an absolutely essential factor in the liberation of the working class. Bernadette was present as a member at our second international congress.

Bernadette contributed to the life of the ICC at many levels. She had a sharp perception of the international situation, the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, and the advances and retreats of the class struggle, and her ability to write about them, and her mastery of the French language, led her to work on the publications commission for the French section. She was also accomplished in explaining our ideas at the most basic level, “on the streets”, but also to people she met in various circumstances, such as the ambulance drivers who, each week, took her to hospital for her chemotherapy sessions, and who told us “Bernadette doesn’t have an easy character, but it’s extraordinarily interesting to discuss with her”. At demonstrations, she amazed comrades selling alongside her by the number of publications she managed to sell, since she always found the words and the tone needed to convince demonstrators that it was worthwhile reading our press.

But her greatest strength was undeniably her grasp of the organisational principles of the ICC, and in particular of the need to to defend our organisation from all the attacks and slanders aimed at it. Bernadette was always convinced that the revolutionary organisation is a foreign body within capitalism. This was why she was intransigent when it came to respecting the statutes of the organisation and in particular to the question of security.

Bernadette was one of the comrades of the old generation who was most open to the political heritage of comrade MC, our living link to the communist fractions of the past. Although perfectly capable of posing her questions and disagreements with MC, she had no interest in the petty bourgeois ideology of contesting the “older generation”, which was a particular weakness of the student movement that came out of May 68. What she took from him was an awareness of the central importance of the organisational question as a political question in its own right, and of the necessity for adherence to rigorous principles – to a proletarian morality in fact – in the relations that had to be built up between militants and the organisation and between the militants themselves.

Bernadette militated in several sections of the ICC: Toulouse, Paris, Marseille, London, as well as working closely for a while with the Swiss section. But she always saw herself first and foremost as a militant of the ICC, and comrades in Switzerland and London can testify to her ability to chase out the dust of localism by opening a window on the ICC as an international organisation.

Like all human beings and all militants, Bernadette of course had her faults which could exasperate some comrades, especially when her critical faculties seemed to get out of control and function like a machine gun firing in all directions, an expression of her fiery and passionate character. But her faults were also her qualities: her stubbornness, the iron determination which led one of the doctors caring for her to describe her as a “force of nature”, also made her extremely tenacious in her fight against the cancer which finally claimed her life. In the past two years, Bernadette amazed the medical staff by staying alive far longer than they had thought possible, and with all her awareness, her capacity for reflection and her will to understand. She was fighting her illness not only to continue her militant struggle but also to benefit from the greatest gift offered to her by her son: her little grand-daughter. The birth of her grand-daughter, the latter’s attachment to her grandmother and her joie de vivre was an enormous help to Bernadette in putting up with the pains of her illness.

Bernadette never saw her militancy as something narrowly political in the “common sense” use of the term. Instead, she brought to other areas of her life the same passion and commitment. She took on the name “Flora” as her nom de guerre in the ICC, reflecting her love for flowers and also because she was a great admirer of the books of Flora Tristan. She had an artist’s sensibility: she loved painting, literature, poetry. She was equally devoted to the art of cooking which she loved to share with the comrades of the ICC and her personal friends, who she always welcomed with warmth and generosity. She had a natural eye for beauty, which was reflected in the way she organised and embellished the space she lived in and in the gifts she chose for her family, friends and comrades.

Throughout her illness, Bernadette sustained her love of reading, and this in turn helped her to cope with the pain of cancer and the very taxing treatments she went through. Up to the end of her life, she continued to read the classics of the workers’ movement, Marx and Rosa Luxemburg in particular, and tried for as long as possible to assimilate the texts and contributions generated by the ICC’s internal debates, taking position on them, even if briefly, when her strength allowed.

Bernadette had a very deep sense of solidarity. Even though she suffered so much from the cancer and knew that there was no cure, she continued to be concerned for the health of all the comrades, offering them advice, urging them to be tested and not to neglect their health. So it was only fitting that comrades from all sections of the ICC should mobilise to express their solidarity throughout her illness, writing to her, visiting her, giving all the support she needed to leave life as serenely as possible.

Bernadette was not afraid of her own death, even if she loved life with a passion. She knew that every human being is a link in the long chain of humanity and that those who remain will continue the combat. She gave clear directives to the doctors caring for her: she wanted to die in physical, intellectual and moral dignity and refused any relentless therapy aimed at merely keeping her alive. She wanted to end her days peacefully, surrounded by her comrades in the struggle, and by the affection showed her by her son and grand-daughter. Her wishes were respected. Bernadette left us in full consciousness, Three weeks before her death, she forced herself to read the newspapers and follow the international situation. It’s because she felt in her bones all the sufferings of the proletariat that she said to the doctor looking after her at the end of her life: “it’s necessary to end my pain and it’s necessary to end the barbarism of capitalism”.

Until the end, Bernadette demonstrated an exemplary courage, militancy and lucidity. She really was a force of nature. And this force she drew from the depth of her militant conviction, her devotion to the cause of the proletariat and her unshakeable loyalty to the ICC. To her son and granddaughter, to her niece and all her family, the ICC sends all its sympathy and solidarity.

ICC 15.10.15

A deliberate attempt to kill as many as possible. A carnage. On Friday 13 November the streets of Paris and its suburbs were turned into a macabre theatre of bloody and barbaric acts carried out by a handful of terrorists, armed with Kalashnikovs and suicide vests. Their target? All those “prostituted” by the “western way of life”1, and young people in particular2.

On 11 January, by executing the cartoonists from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Daesh wanted the kill the ‘dads’3 of a libertarian tendency marked by the social movement of May 1968. This time, by attacking places of festivity and entertainment (Stade de France in Saint-Denis, the bistrots and restaurants of the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris, the Bataclan concert hall4, Daesh deliberately targeted young people who had committed the crime of liking to get together, to discuss, to have a drink, to dance and sing, in other words, who liked being alive (which the bourgeoisie, profiting from the emotional atmosphere and the media brainwashing, tries to identify with patriotism!). This is the same generation which had dreamed of reigniting the torch of May 68 during the social movement in France in 20065 and which in January had quite rightly expressed its solidarity with the murdered Charlie Hebdo artists by coming out in massive demonstrations6.

These new crimes, coldly planned, motivated by an obscurantist and morbid ideology worthy of Nazism, are not the fruit of a few “monsters” who simply need to be eradicated7. That is the way the bourgeoisie presents things. It’s an argument that serves only to justify war and engender even more hatred and crimes. At the root of these evils lies the whole capitalist system, a system with no future, no perspective, which is decomposing bit by bit and is dragging the whole of humanity into its murderous descent.

Islamic State, a product of imperialism

Daesh is a particularly revealing manifestation of the suicidal dynamic of capitalism. It is a pure product of decadence, a direct secretion of its final phase of decomposition.

In this framework, the aggravation and multiplication of imperialist conflicts, the accelerating break-up of social bonds, are rooted in a society which has no historical perspective. Neither of the two fundamentally antagonistic classes in society, bourgeoisie and proletariat, have been able to impose their historical project, world war on the one hand, communist revolution on the other. Since the mid-80s, the whole of society has been trapped in the immediate, looking increasingly devoid of any future and little by little rotting on its feet8. The collapse of the USSR in 1991, a product of the dynamic of this last stage in the decline of capitalism, exacerbated all of capitalism’s contradictions. The expressions of this phase are multiple: individualism and every man for himself, gangsterism, a retreat into different kinds of identity, obscurantism, nihilism, and above all the accentuation of the chaos of war. To the point where the weakest states have been destabilised and pushed to the edge of collapse, while military conflicts ravage whole regions of the planet. In this process the main imperialist powers bear a central responsibility, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. A glance at the history of the conflicts in these regions in recent decades illustrates this reality very well. Over this period, the USA has found it harder and harder to impose itself as the world’s cop. It may seem paradoxical, but the existence of the Russian enemy forced all its adversaries to seek protection behind the USA. The nations of the western bloc were obliged to accept Uncle Sam’s bloc discipline. As soon as the USSR fell, the western bloc also broke up and all its components started playing their own imperialist cards. The USA tried more and more to impose its leadership by force. This was the meaning of the huge military display of the 1990 Gulf war, a moment in which the American bourgeoisie managed to oblige all its allies to rally behind it. But the situation for the USA continued to deteriorate, and they were increasingly isolated when it came to the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and the result of these adventures was to completely destabilise both countries. We foresaw this dynamic in 1990:

“The war in the Gulf shows that, faced with the tendency towards generalized chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc's collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents, than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”9.

Thus, the American intervention in Iraq in 2003, quite apart from the 500,000 deaths it caused, brought down the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein10 without being capable of replacing it with a stable state. On the contrary, the exclusion from power of the Sunni faction and its replacement by a Shia faction has created a permanent state of chaos. It’s on the basis of these ruins, of this void left by the failure of the Iraqi state, that Daesh was born. It goes back to 2006, when al-Qaida, together with five other jihadi groups, formed a “consultative Council of the Muhajadeen in Iraq”. And on 13 October 2006, the Consultative Council proclaimed the “Islamic state of Iraq”, which considered itself to be a real state. Many ex-Saddam generals, militarily competent and haunted by the spirit of revenge against the west, joined the ranks of what was to become Daesh. The destabilisation of Syria then provided the opportunity for Islamic State to develop further. In 2012 it began to spread to Syria and on 9 April 2013 it became “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”.

Each new imperialist conflict, in which the great powers all played a crucial role, would provide Daesh with the occasion to widen its grip, growing on the fertile ground of hatred and revenge. Several jihadi groups have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, such as Boko Haram in the northwest of Nigeria, Ansar Shuras Shabab al-Islam in Libya, Jund al-Khalifa in Algeria and Anar Dawlat al-Islammiya in Yemen. Undeniably, Islamic State has been fed by imperialist war. This is a phenomenon which has grown and extended since the mid-80s: under the weight both of internal economic and political contradictions and of the effects of imperialist war, the weaker states are tending to collapse. In the east in the 1990s, particularly in the Balkans, this took the form of a splintering of nations and of bloody conflicts, such as the explosion of Yugoslavia. From Caucasia (Chechnya) to central Asia (Afghanistan) or Africa (ex-Zaire, the Horn of Africa etc), state instability gave way to the appearance of parallel and uncontrollable proto-states, directed by war lords. Daesh is a new expression of this gangrene, but on a much bigger geographical scale than before.

But let's get back to the responsibility of the great powers, who don’t stop at merely destabilising whole regions for their strategic and military interests. They are also directly involved in the creation of these murderous obscurantist cliques and have tried to make them their instruments. Islamic State is made up of the most 'radical' Sunni factions and their main enemy is thus the great country of Shia Islam: Iran. This is why all the enemies of Iran (Saudi Arabia, the USA11, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait...) have at some point all supported Daesh financially and sometimes militarily. Turkey has also supported Islamic State with the idea of using it against the Kurds. This circumstantial and heterogeneous alliance shows that religious differences are not the real ferment behind this conflict: it is indeed imperialist interests, national capitalist interests which above all determine the lines of scission and transform the wounds of the past into today's hatreds.

But in any case, all of them have had to think again. Saudi Arabia has now forbidden any financial aid to Daesh and jailed all those who continued to act as its advocates; the USA has officially initiated a certain rapprochement with Iran in order to fight against Daesh. Why this turnaround? The answer says a lot about the putrefaction of the capitalist system. The religious obscurantism and above all the destructiveness of Daesh are such that the group has escaped anyone’s control. Such states with no future and dominated by Sharia law have already existed, in central Africa for example, but they have always been limited to a particular region. The Daesh phenomenon is affecting a much wider area, and above all the highly geostrategic region of the Middle East12.

The incessant changes of alliances, this short term outlook, this increasingly destructive approach, like the existence of the Islamic proto-state itself, reveal the dead end that capitalism has reached, the absence of any lasting solution or perspective for all nations.

Here again the compass of marxism enabled us to understand, in 1990, that the whole social order had reached this impasse: quote.

“In the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of "every man for himself" will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force”13.

The latest turn around: France, through its rapprochement with Russia, is ready to support Bashir el-Assad (officially responsible for 200,000 deaths since the beginning of the civil war!) against Daesh even though since 2011 it has been putting all its diplomatic weight behind the “Syrian opposition”. Putin, with all his shameful crimes in Chechnya then in Ukraine, has become someone you can do business with again.

By waging all these wars, by sowing death and desolation, by imposing terror with their bombing raids and stirring up hatred in the name of 'self-defence”, by supporting this or that killer regime, by offering no other solution than more and more confrontations, and all this to defend their sordid imperialist interests, the great powers have the greatest responsibility for the accentuation of global barbarism, including the barbarism of Daesh. This so-called Islamic state, with its holy trinity of rape, robbery and repression, which destroys all culture (the same hatred of culture as the Nazi regime14), which sells women and children, sometimes for their organs – this is no more than a particularly blatant and 'honest' expression of the capitalist barbarity which all states, all nations, are capable of committing. “Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it in reality. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form”15.

A new step in the decomposition of capitalism

It is thus first and foremost the great powers who are unleashing their own barbarism on the planet and above all in the weakest capitalist nations. And now his barbarism is escaping their control and is hitting the heart of the system like a boomerang. This is the real significance of the November 13 attacks in Paris. They are not just one more terrorist act: they show that there is a new step in the exacerbation of imperialist tensions and in the decay of capitalist society. In effect, while such actions regularly decimate the populations of Africa and the Middle East16, the fact that they are reaching the heartlands of capitalism is particularly significant. At the time of the bombings that hit Paris in 1985 and 1986, we wrote:

“What the current wave of terrorist attacks shows is that this decomposition of capitalist society has reached such a level that the great powers are less and less shielded from its most barbaric manifestations, that they are finding it harder and harder to contain to the Third world these extreme forms of the convulsions of a dying system. Just as in an initial period the capitalist metropolitan centres were able to push the most catastrophic effects of a crisis whose origins lie at the very heart of the system, so they pushed to the peripheral countries the most barbaric forms of the convulsions this crisis engenders, above all armed conflicts. But today just as the crisis is hitting with renewed force the central countries of capitalism, so it also brings back with it some of the barbarism which has been unleashed in the Third World”17

With the November 13 attacks, this process which opened up in the mid-80s, and above all since the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, has got wider and wider. But it has just reached a qualitative new level even in comparison to the outrages in Madrid (2004), London (2005) or Boston (2013). At the time of writing, the number of dead stands at 130 and the number of wounded at 351, 98 of them very serious. This frightful hecatomb is one of the worst in the centre of Europe since the Second World War, even though it would have been much bigger if the attempt to bomb the Stade de France hadn’t failed18. But the real difference isn’t just at the quantitative level – the Madrid bombings also killed many people (200 dead, 14 wounded). But his time, it wasn’t a brief, isolated act: Islamic State succeeded in multiplying the number of places attacked and prolonged the slaughter for three hours in the middle of Paris. Thus, in western Europe, for a whole evening, people experienced the war atmosphere which the population of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria live through on a daily basis (and which so many of them are trying to flee from).The “meticulously”19 prepared scenario engendered a real wave of shock and panic. The direct transmission of the events, of these images of urban warfare, by all the world’s television services, the uncertainty about the number of victims, the number of attacks and of terrorists involved…all this created an unbearable climate of terror. Millions of powerless spectators remained glued to their screens and then were unable to sleep during the night.

Islamic State has managed to prove that a great economic and military power like France is incapable of preventing such actions; even though it had every reason to expect such attacks it couldn’t stop the killing.

Worse still, Daesh was able to use men and women born and living in France and Belgium, capable of committing the worst crimes in the name of a morbid, sickening ideology. In other words, it is above all the decomposition of society at the very heart of capitalism which has given rise to such an atrocity.

Many of those who saw the terrorists at close hand and lived to tell the tale, expressed their astonishment at the banal appearance of the killers: young people between 20 and 30 trembling with fear and sweating profusely20, justifying their murderous actions with the pretext of “avenging the crimes committed by the French army in Syria”. These monstrous acts were not carried out by monsters but by human beings who have been totally ground down and indoctrinated. The majority of these terrorists were born and grew up in “civilised” Europe. Many of the European jihadis now in Syria have come from the petty bourgeoisie which, in the absence of any perspective, jealous of the model up set by the big bourgeoisie, and above all foreign to any project of an alternative society, is deeply infected by nihilism. It’s this same layer of society which in the 1930s and 40s formed a large part of the shock troops of Nazism.

Another considerable part of the army of Daesh has come out of the poor suburbs, street kids with a chaotic history, humiliated by a system which has refused them entry to most forms of economic activity, as well as any social and cultural life. Here again, the wish for revenge on the one hand and nihilism on the other are probably the main driving forces behind their journey. Through these cowardly, shameful and absurd massacres, these elements finally have a sense of their own existence. It matters little to them whether they die as long as they have the idea that they are getting back at the system which has excluded hem. A final part, especially among the kamikaze elements, has been directly recruited from petty criminals. They are often people who have already carried out robberies or acts of aggression and who find themselves a few years later with a Kalashnikov in their hands, now killing with a pseudo-religious pretext.

In sum, in Europe and the Middle East, as in the rest of the world, the absence of any perspective for society, and its consequences – social putrefaction, gangsterism, the development of a lumpenised morality - supply the soil for this toxic growth. The encounter between these young people who have been born in Europe and the Syrian and Iraqi obscurantist gangs who have a real military savoir-faire is not at all an accident.

The great powers use the deaths caused by terrorism to justify war

To summarise: imperialism and decomposition are the two parents who, by getting together, have given birth to today’s terrorism. War, no-future, fear and hatred, moral collapse, terrorism… then war again. It’s an endless vicious circle. Capitalism will drag the whole of humanity towards ruin if it’s not destroyed and replaced with another society.

But what was the reaction of all the grand nations on the very night of the attacks of 13 November? The words of the Socialist prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, pronounced the day after on the biggest TV channel, gives us the tone of it: “there must be a will to annihilate Daesh”; this is a war which “could take months and maybe years”, and which will call for “exceptional measures”, adding “I will do this so that national unity will be preserved”, and finishing by a call to arms: “let’s be patriots in order to crush terrorism”. And all the national newspapers joined the chorus: “Now it’s war!”, “France is under attack!” This patriotic campaign has been relayed on an international scale, orchestrated around the Red, White and Blue and the Marseillaise. All over the world, on all the monuments, on all social networks, in sports stadiums,, the French flag has been displayed; the words of the Marseillaise were published in all the English newspapers so that the public could join in the singing at the England-France game at Wembley on 18 November. There is obviously no real solidarity from the other great powers towards France – all of them are engaged in pitiless competition, economically and sometimes militarily. No, each national bourgeoisie has simply used the 130 deaths in Paris, and the fear they have created, to put across the putrid idea that national unity is the highest and most beautiful possible unity, allowing us to “live together” and to protect ourselves from the “outside”. In reality, national flags are always flags of war! The national flag is the symbol of an ideology which pulls together the different classes of the nation against other nations. Fundamentally, it’s the same ideology as the ideology of Islamic State. And in France today it’s the Socialist party in power which is spearheading this warlike spirit. Result: French military HQ has already carried out reprisals against the outrages, dropping dozens of bombs in a few days and dispatching its aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle in order to treble the strike capacity of the French army in Syria. These attacks can be added to the 4111 targets hit by the Russian army in the last few weeks. Although every day the press relates the “collateral” victim of these massive bombings21, it is impossible to access the real figures. This is true of every war waged by the great democratic nations who intervene in the name of peace, humanitarian, safeguarding the people, etc. And each time, the human balance sheets published some years later are really terrifying. According to a very serious report: Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 years of the ‘War on Terror’22 the war launched by the US after the attacks of 9/11 2001 had in 12 years caused the deaths of at least 1.3 million people in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), with the report making it clear that this was a “low estimate” which didn’t take into account other conflicts (Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria). It’s Iraq that has paid the heaviest price for the war on terror, with around a million deaths, contrary to the 11,000 claimed by the US media and the 30,000 by ex-President George W Bush. The report speaks of a “crime against humanity close to genocide”. This is the real face of imperialist war. This is the real meaning of so-called “surgical” strikes!

The current air strikes in Syria will perhaps do damage to Daesh, which will make it even more desperate and suicidal, but above all they will sow fear and hatred throughout the region. The phenomena which gave rise to Daesh will in the end be strengthened. The “response” of the big powers to terrorism is part of the escalation of barbarism, part of the spiral of irrational violence.

Exacerbating hatred and reinforcing repression

Drawing the lessons from the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo on 7 January, when the bourgeoisie, surprised by the spontaneous demonstrations, was obliged to rapidly leap onto the train and take charge, the French state this time prevented the same spontaneous impetus towards solidarity, which might favour reflection and discussion and contains the possibility that people might see “the street” as a political force. On the contrary, everyone was urged to stay at home and identify with “la patrie”, to accept the logic of war. The idea of national service and a “national guard” is resurfacing. The Socialist party in France has taken advantage of the situation to step up its arsenal of surveillance and repression. The state of emergency was prolonged by three months for the first time since the war in Algeria (in 1958 and 1961) and it applies to the whole mainland and the overseas departments as well (Gaudeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, la Réunion and Mayotte). This state of emergency is a special situation, based on exceptional measures which restrain “freedoms”. It “confers on the civil authorities, in the zones it applies to, exceptional police powers”23, such as the possibility of carrying out raids without a warrant. It’s all about getting the population used to the drastic reinforcement of repression which, as the bourgeoisie knows perfectly well, it will have to use against the working class in the future. A whole array of new laws to tighten “national security” is under discussion, and the same campaign about security is being carried out across the world.

The state thus profits from terrorism, presenting itself as the guarantor of peace in order to wage war; as the protector of human rights to strengthen the control of the population; and as the guardian of social unity in order to exacerbate hatred. Hatred of foreigners, hatred of Muslims, and all the other divisions which allow the capitalist order to rule over the exploited, are being stoked up daily. Actions against immigrants are multiplying, as in Germany, where refugee camps have been set on fire. In France, the discourse of the Front National and right wing politicians like Nadine Morano play on the same reactions as Islamic State: fear, exclusion, the hatred of the other.

One perspective for humanity: class struggle against capitalism!

In such a social context, the few expressions of real solidarity appear heroic. Despite the risks and the danger, people immediately came to help the wounded. In the neighbourhoods under attack, residents didn’t hesitate to open their doors to give refuge to people panicking in the streets. Almost everywhere, a momentary tendency to come together in solidarity and indignation was quickly smothered. All this shows that the indifference and ignorance of the person next to you, which in normal times prevails in capitalist society, can be overcome when there is a conscious wish to express solidarity, to help people facing real danger. We’ve seen this in the last few months when a significant part of the working class welcomed the refugees, especially when they first arrived in Germany. But the present situation also shows that this fragile impetus, given the serious weaknesses of the working class today, can easily be derailed onto the false ground of patriotism and nationalism, behind which lies the murderous and in the end xenophobic logic of the most democratic states. The climate of fear and terror, along with the propaganda barrage after the Paris attacks, will weigh heavily on the consciousness of the working class: the call for national unity behind the nation and the state in danger can only reinforce the influence of deadly illusions about defending democracy and strengthening security, and this on an international scale. And this will make it even harder for a real perspective to emerge, further strengthening the suicidal tendencies of this rotting system.

Real working class solidarity can only be expressed in an independent manner, outside the influence of all forms of bourgeois ideology, and above all during workers’ struggles. The generation which was the prime target of the 13 November attacks was, in the social movement of 2006, able to generate a great wave of solidarity throughout the working class. And when young people from the poor suburbs came to rob people taking part in the demonstrations, this generation of students and precariously employed workers refused to fall into the trap of division. They sent delegations to these neighbourhoods to try to win people to the general struggle. If they had the understanding to do this, it was because the social movement had been able to organise itself through general assemblies which allowed for reflection, discussion and collective elaboration, in other words, the raising of political consciousness. This is the only way to go forward in the face of the worst effects of decomposition: solidarity in the struggle, open and frank debate, the development of class consciousness. In the end, only this logic, contained in massive struggles of the working class, can permit the emergence of a political class identity, the development of the historical perspective of a new society. This is the perspective of a world without classes, without wars and frontiers, a human community based on the satisfaction of human need and not the needs of profit.

“The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers….finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labour’s old and mighty battle cry: Proletarians of all lands, unite!”24

ICC, 21.11.15

In January 2015, the members of the ICC’s section in Turkey announced their resignation from our organisation: their explanation of their departure was published a couple of months later under the name of a new group calling itself "Pale Blue Jadal", with the heading "On our departure from the International Communist Current [8]". Our aim in the article that follows is to address what, in our view, are the main issues posed by the departure of these ex-comrades.

The editorial to the first issue of our International Review, published in 1975, lays out clearly the goal that the fledgling ICC set itself: “In this period of general crisis, pregnant with convulsions and social upheavals, one of the most urgent and arduous tasks facing revolutionaries is that of welding together the meagre revolutionary forces that are currently dispersed throughout the world. This task can only be undertaken by beginning straight away on an international level. This has always been a central preoccupation of our current”. For such an organisation, to lose one militant is a misfortune. To lose an entire section is a failure. We therefore owe it to ourselves, to all those who identify with the tradition of the Communist Left, and to the working class in general, to examine this failure in a ruthlessly critical spirit, and to lay our conclusions before our readers.

This necessity is all the more pressing given the nature of the text written by our ex-comrades from Turkey, who we must now call “Pale Blue Jadal”. There are points in this text with which we can agree, and yet overall it is such a welter of half-truths, distortions, recriminations, and general confusion that it is only barely recognisable to those of us who lived through the events it attempts to describe, and must certainly be completely unintelligible to anyone outside the ICC. This will not, of course, prevent PBJ’s text from having a certain effect: the faint-hearted will find further cause to doubt, and our enemies (some of whom bear us a hatred that lies more in the domain of psychopathology than politics) will read in it what they have been longing to hear.

To answer every one of PBJ’s accusations, we would have to undertake something like Lenin’s dissection of the 1903 RSDLP Congress in One step forward, two steps back, but over a period of almost ten years: we would have to quote in detail from a mass of conference and congress minutes, not to mention correspondence and the minutes of meetings and conferences. This would take too long, it would try our readers’ patience, and moreover it would lay the internal workings of our organisation open to the public gaze, something which no revolutionary in his right mind would do today. We will therefore limit ourselves to stating our case as clearly as possible, and to correcting, in passing, some of PBJ’s more egregious errors and insinuations.

Organisational opportunism

Let us begin with one point where we agree with PBJ: that our integration of the EKS group as the ICC’s Turkish section was a process infested with opportunism. We do not propose here to go into the reasons for this: suffice it to say that we tried to force the pace of history, and this is a classic recipe for opportunism.

“Forcing the pace”, of course, was at our own small level; principally, it meant the decision to “fast-track” the discussions with the EKS group which was to become our section in Turkey. In particular we decided:

1. To drastically reduce the time spent on organisational discussion with the members of EKS before their integration, on the grounds that the art of building an organisation is learnt essentially from experience.

2. To integrate EKS as a group, not as individuals. Although our statutes provide for this, it holds the danger that the new militants will see themselves, not first and foremost as individual militants of an international organisation but as members of their original group.

With hindsight, our cavalier approach to the organisational question was both unpardonable and incredible. What was EKS, after all? As PBJ says, it was “just a collection of politicised circles of friends”, and moreover circles drawn from the politicised petty-bourgeois student milieu. In other words, it was precisely the kind of circle that Lenin had described in 1903. Given all our past experience, not to mention our awareness of the way our own failings derived from much of the ICC’s origins in the student movement of the 1960s-70s, how could we fail to see that one of the biggest questions facing us with the integration of the EKS group would be precisely that of passing on our own organisational experience? How could we lose sight of our own critique of the futility of hasty, opportunist integrations [9] as they have been practiced in the past by the TCI? As it is, our experience with the section in Turkey only serves as further confirmation – if any were necessary – that this critique is fundamentally correct and applies to ourselves just as much as it does to others.

The forthcoming article on our 21st Congress gives a general answer to these questions: "The Congress emphasised that the ICC has always been affected by its ‘youthful error’ of immediatism which has repeatedly caused us to lose sight of the the historical and long-term framework which is the setting for the organisation’s function". Such failings are all the more difficult to overcome inasmuch as they were present in the organisation from the outset.1 Concretely, this laid us open to an illusion particularly prevalent among some members of EKS, that our difficulty in getting across our positions among the newly politicised younger generation (especially in the relatively new medium of the Internet forum) was essentially a matter of presentation,2 and that we could therefore increase our influence by watering down our insistence on organisational principle (this is what PBJ calls “recognising that our traumas posed problems”). As a result, we lost sight of the historical, materialist, foundations of our organisational practice as embodied in our Statutes which can only be understood historically, as political principles,3 and as the result of both the past workers’ movement (Internationals and Fractions) and our own experience. We treated the Statutes as mere "rules of behaviour", and the "discussion" on the subject was rushed through in a day (contrast this with the months of correspondence and discussion with EKS on the positions embodied in the Platform). There was no discussion on the "Commentaries on the statutes" (a text which places our Statutes in the context of the historical experience of the workers’ movement and of the ICC itself) nor on the basic organisational texts. Nor did we insist that these texts be translated into Turkish.4

For all this, let us repeat, the ICC – not the members of EKS – bears the entire responsibility.5

But the result was that the Turkish section’s attitude to the Statutes was not that of militant marxists who seek to understand and put into practice the principles behind them – or if necessary to argue that they should be changed, with all the international debate within the organisation that this would imply: it was more the attitude of the pettifogging taproom lawyer whose only interest is to seize on the surface of words to his own advantage.6

"We had to leave"

This, in the end, is PBJ’s justification for their departure: "we had to leave". But what exactly is meant by this? After all, the Turkish members were not expelled, either collectively or individually, nor were any sanctions applied against them. Their "minority positions" were not suppressed – on the contrary, they were constantly being pressed to express their positions in writing so that these could be published and brought to the knowledge of the organisation as a whole.

If we try to extract the main points from PBJ’s text, the overall picture that emerges is something like the following:

• The ICC suffers from “a culture of agreement” which makes debate difficult. With this at least we can agree, up to a point.7 We will come back to the "culture of agreement" within the Turkish section itself.

• The "old" militants tried to impose a "unilateral transmission" of experience on the young.

• “The section was dissolved”.

• In short, therefore, “We had to leave”.

PBJ, to summarise, is the “critical left” of the ICC, better than that they are the “youth” who refuse to accept the “unilateral transmission”, the “dictatorship” of the old whose “traumas” “pose problems”.

Indeed, barely months before their resignation, the section confronted the organisation with a grandiloquent statement of position in which they declared that they were "the left" within the organisation. Let us take them at their word and consider for a moment what that means: what does it mean to be "the left" in the context of the ICC?

The ICC very consciously claims to derive its origins from the Communist Left, but more explicitly, as far as organisational questions are concerned, from the tradition of the Italian Communist Left. What did it mean to be a "left fraction" in the days of the Italian Left, the days of the Communist International’s degeneration? "The Left Fraction is formed as the proletarian party is degenerating under the influence of opportunism, in other words its penetration by bourgeois ideology. It is the responsibility of the minority, which upholds the revolutionary programme, to conduct an organised struggle for its victory within the party (…) It is the responsibility of the Left Fraction to continue the fight within the party as long as there remains any hope of redressing it: this is why, during the late 1920s and early '30s, the left currents did not leave the parties of the IC, but were excluded, often by means of sordid manoeuvres".8

1. The left, in short, fights for its organisation to the limit:

2. to convince, to win over the organisation as much as possible;

3. to save as many militants as can be saved;

4. for clarity about the reasons of the organisation’s decline, for themselves, for other militants, and for the future.

Finally, the Left does not run away at the first sign of disagreement and opposition. It does everything possible to stay in the organisation and defend its ideas – and is excluded. It does not play the rabbit in wolf’s clothing by running away.

The Italian Left Fraction was formed as a reaction against the degeneration of the Communist International towards the integration of its constituent parties into the political apparatus of the ruling class. Whatever our defects, this is not the situation for the ICC, nor indeed did the members of the Turkish section make any such claim. There was not, therefore, any reason to suppose that the various disagreements voiced by or in the section could justify the formation of a "fraction" in the ICC; on the contrary, we could hope that open discussion within the organisation would make it possible to clarify these disagreements, perhaps leading to a clearer position for the organisation as a whole.

Nonetheless, the underlying point remains valid. It is the responsibility of any minority within a revolutionary organisation, to defend its positions for as long as it is able to do, to try to the utmost to convince the rest of the organisation of their correctness. Nobody will pretend that this is easy – but it is the only way to build an organisation.

Why did the Turkish comrades so signally fail in this respect? We can point to two main factors:

• The first, we already highlighted in 2007, in a text on "The culture of debate",9 which posed the absolutely vital necessity for debate within the organisation, for its own internal health: “The second major impulse for the ICC to return to the question of a culture of debate was our own internal crisis at the beginning of the new century, characterised by the most malignant behaviour we had ever witnessed within our ranks (…) One of the conclusions we came to was that a tendency towards monolithism had played a major role in all the split-offs that we suffered. As soon as divergences appeared, certain members began to assert that they could no longer work with the others, that the ICC was becoming a Stalinist organisation or was in the process of degenerating. These crises broke out in relation to divergences which, for the most part, could be perfectly contained within a non-monolithic organisation, and in all cases should be discussed and clarified before any separation takes place”. The Turkish comrades fell victim to this same "monolithism of the minority".

• The second, is that a precondition for accepting the demand that the Left should fight to the limit rather than quit the organisation in haste, is the conviction that the organisation itself is a vital necessity. This is precisely the problem in the political milieu today, which has no experience of Party life (as it existed, for example, in the Bolshevik Party in Lenin’s day), no experience of revolutionary agitation by a Party with real, determining influence in the class struggle, and moreover is infested not just by the old councilist opposition to the Party but by a much broader, profound suspicion of any form of organised political activity beyond that of the circle, as such. In fact, PBJ does not really take organisation seriously. This is why PBJ is so shocked by "positions which developed in the organization that if the ICC somehow ceased to exist the party couldn’t be founded, the proletariat couldn’t make a revolution and the world would face unavoidable ruin, [and] expressed that we hoped we wouldn’t be alone in continuing communist activity in case a situation like this took place". We should ask PBJ: do you believe (as you supposedly did when you joined the ICC) that the existence of an international, centralised, political revolutionary organisation is critical to the success of any future revolution? Unlike some, we have never pretended to be "the Party", nor to be the only group in the world to defend proletarian internationalism. There are two few revolutionaries in the world, in all probability this will be the case for a long time to come, and the proletariat needs to gather all the forces it can: the existence of a revolutionary organisation is not a matter of individuals but the product of the proletariat’s own historically revolutionary nature. As Bilan pointed during the war in Spain in the 1930s, if there is no Party – no political organisation recognised by the international working class as its own – then there is no revolution. And yet such an organisation will not come into being by some mystical process of self-generation. Building an organisation is immensely difficult, it takes years of painstaking effort, and yet it will always remain so fragile that it can be demolished in a matter of months or even weeks. If the ICC, which is today much the largest organisation of the Communist Left10, finally fails, what will be there to take its place? How and on what basis will the international organisation be built? To these questions, PBJ can only answer "we hope we won’t be alone". "Hope springs eternal", as the saying goes, and in the meantime superficiality reigns supreme.

We want to conclude this point by responding to the supposed "dissolution of the Turkish section". There is no doubt that mistakes were made on both sides in the process that led to the section’s departure; there is no doubt either that a certain mistrust built up, which we were unable to dispel.11 It is untrue, however, to suggest that the section was "dissolved". This claim is based on two points:

• First, that the section was asked by a resolution of the central organ, to replace its own meetings with the participation of all its members (via Internet) in the discussions of other ICC sections.

• Second, that the section was asked to translate all its articles into English and submit them to the IB before publication.

Let’s take these in order.

As PBJ’s own text says, the participation of its members in other section meetings was an attempt to break down the localism in which the section was entrenched – and which they cannot deny. What they fail to mention, is that the same measure was applied in other sections in the run-up to the ICC’s Congress. The purpose was to open up the local life of the sections to international discussion, to try to let in some air and allow all comrades to have an idea of the life of the organisation as a whole beyond their own immediate preoccupations before the delegations arrived at the Congress. The measure was not originally intended to last beyond the Congress itself. Not only that – what PBJ fails to tell its readers is that, once it became clear that the Turkish section did not agree with – because they did not understand – the proposed measure, it was withdrawn by the central organ: communist discipline is not something that can be imposed bureaucratically.

As far as the press is concerned, our Statutes state unequivocally that (even in Turkey) "The territorial publications are entrusted by the ICC to the territorial sections and more specifically to their central organs which can nominate editorial committees to this end. However, these publications are the emanation of the totality of the Current and not of particular territorial sections. Because of this, the IB has the responsibility for orientating and following the contents of these publications". Given that the IB as a whole does not speak Turkish, and that the section – as PBJ would hardly deny – was not in complete agreement with the rest of the ICC on a whole series of points (including for example, the analysis of the "social revolts" in Spain, Egypt, Turkey, and Brazil), it was surely not unreasonable for the IB to ask that articles be submitted to it before publication: at all events, the IB was entirely within its statutory rights to do so. Just how right the IB was, the reader can judge for themselves on the basis of the very article about the Soma mine disaster of whose non-publication PBJ makes so much. In this article we read, for example, that "the deaths of the workers in shipyards, construction sites and wars happen because the bourgeoisie consciously wants them to happen; the massacre in Soma which is called an accident has been consciously conducted", and it goes on to say that "In war or in the workplace, workers are valuable if they die for capitalism". Even for the most vulgar marxist (and the members of the Turkish section did, at the time, claim to be marxist, regaling us at length with ill-digested lessons on "the law of value"), this is arrant nonsense: workers are valuable for capital if they produce surplus value, something they can hardly do if they are dead.

Far from "dissolving" the section, the organisation had every interest in its participation in the international life of the ICC, including and especially its international Congress. One could expect that "the Left" would jump at the chance to express themselves at the Congress, all the more so inasmuch as our Statutes explicitly require the over-representation of minority positions. But not so PBJ: not only did they resign precipitately before the Congress, they rejected our organisation’s invitation to appear, and speak, as an outside group. They had too much "important work" to do – we leave our readers to judge for themselves the results of PBJ’s "important work" on their own web site. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" after all.

The transmission of experience

PBJ makes much of the so-called "conservative comrades",12 who "emphasized that the 68 generation needed to transmit its experience to the youth one-sidedly. This emphasis presupposed that the young comrades were bereft of any experience on the question of organization". That "the young comrades were bereft of any experience on the question of organization" is merely a statement of fact,13 but it is worth taking up this question in a little more depth than PBJ bother to do.

“Each generation forms a link in the chain of human history. Each one is confronted with three fundamental tasks: to receive the collective heritage from the previous generation; to enrich this heritage on the basis of its own experience; to pass it on so that the next generation can achieve more that it was able to.

These tasks, far from being easy, represent a particular challenge. This also goes for the workers movement. The older generation has its experience to offer. But it also bears the wounds and traumas of its struggles, has had to learn to face up to defeats, disappointments, and the realisation that the construction of lasting acquisitions of collective struggle often requires more than one lifetime. It needs the energy and élan of the following generation, but also its new questions and its capacity to see the world with new eyes.

But as much as the generations need each other, their capacity to forge the necessary unity is not automatically given. The more society distances itself from traditional natural economy, the more incessantly and rapidly capitalism "revolutionises" the productive forces and the whole of society, the more the experience of one generation differs from the next. Capitalism, the system of competition par excellence, also pits the generations against each other in the struggle of each against all”.14

Schematically, we can say that there are three possible reactions to this need for the transmission of experience inherent in every human society:

1. The Master’s authority is unquestionable, each new generation has merely to appropriate and repeat the lessons of the previous one. This is the attitude characteristic of old Asiatic societies, and which has infected the proletarian movement in the form of the Bordigists’ caricatural devotion to the untouchable works of the Master.

2. The contestation that dominated the 1960s youth movement, condemned – because it failed to learn from its predecessors – to repeat their errors in boring detail.15

3. Finally, we have the scientific – and marxist – critical appropriation of past experience. As a previous article16 pointed out, it is this ability to appropriate the work and the thinking of previous generations, and critically develop it, that characterised the emergence of scientific thought in Ancient Greece.

Examples of such critical appropriation by a new generation of militants are not lacking in the workers’ movement. We can cite that of Lenin with regard to Plekhanov, or more strikingly still, of Rosa Luxemburg with regard to Kautsky and the SPD in general, as well as to the theories of Marx which she both criticised and developed in The accumulation of capital. These examples show us that a precondition for criticism is, precisely, the appropriation of our predecessors’ ideas, in other words the ability to understand them – and an ability to understand is dependent on an ability to read (since half the section did not read any language other than Turkish, this was clearly a physical impossibility). Having understood the ideas, you can only criticise them, especially in the context of an organisation where the aim is to convince other comrades, by engaging with them, which the members of the Turkish section signally failed to do. PBJ claims this is untrue.17 Yet they would be hard put to point to a single text on organisational issues (other than the "infamous" position on parasitism) which engages with any of the ICC’s basic documents, either internal or external. If our readers need convincing of the vacuity of PBJ’s organisational understanding, we can only invite them to consult a text by Jamal [10] (a frequent contributor to the ICC’s forum) which PBJ have published on their web site without a word of critical comment: it reads like some kind of manager’s manual produced by the HR department of a new start-up.

What it means to join the ICC

At this point, we want to take a step back and return to the words we quoted at the beginning of this article. "One of the most urgent and arduous tasks facing revolutionaries is that of welding together the meagre revolutionary forces that are currently dispersed throughout the world". Confronted with the ICC’s failings (and none are more aware of them than we), it is all too easy to forget how difficult, how ambitious such a task is. To bring together militants from all across the world, from utterly different cultures and backgrounds, into a single international association capable of taking part in and stimulating the reflexion of a world proletariat billions strong, to unite them not in a lifeless homogeneity but in a whole where unity of action is founded on the diversity of debate within an accepted political framework – this is a gigantic undertaking. Certainly, we fall short of our ambitions – but we only need declare them to see how different they are from the circle mentality which dominated EKS, as its members recognise themselves.

In fact, the members of the Turkish section never understood the fundamental difference between being a circle and being militants of a revolutionary organisation, especially an international one. This is not entirely their fault, since we failed in transmitting our organisational conceptions to them – in part because we had, up to a point, lost sight of them ourselves.

We have already dealt extensively with the question of what Lenin called the "circle spirit".18 Here we will just recall some of the main points.

First, the circle is characterised by a membership based on a mixture of personal friendships and political agreement; as a result, personal conflicts and political disagreements are conflated – a sure recipe for the personalisation of political argument. It is hardly surprising that the life of the Turkish section was marked by a series of bitter personal animosities leading to splits and periods of "paralysis".

To maintain its cohesion, the circle closes like an oyster against the outside. This in turn is a recipe for personalised antagonism between the circle and the rest of the organisation: "Under the name of the ‘minority' heterogeneous elements are regrouped in the Party who are united by the desire, conscious or not, to maintain the relations of a circle, previous organisation forms to the party".19 The circle spirit in the organisation leads to an “us and them” attitude, the circle against the “central organs”; the circle completely loses sight of the organisation as a whole, to become obsessed with the "central organs". One example we can cite amongst many is a text written by one member of the section titled “Is there a crisis in the ICC?”; the critique voiced in this text was taken up and both answered and developed by another section, yet this response was completely ignored. Only "the central organs" are deemed worthy of consideration.

The circle maintains its cohesion by opposing the rest of the organisation en bloc, while at the same time avoiding any debate within the circle of its own divergences. This was clearly apparent in the debate on ethics and morality engaged within the ICC: where one comrade developed a critical argument which (cf the note above) was to some extent directly inspired by the organisation’s own texts, another put forward a position which owes more to Hobbes than to Marx – and yet never a word of critique did we hear from the Turkish comrades.20

A more striking case of this closure to the rest of the organisation came with the debate over the events around the massive Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul. According to PBJ, "It was claimed that the section failed to inform the organization of its disagreements during the Gezi process whereas within the heat of the events the section had a meeting with the comrades from the secretariat trying to explain its disagreements". It is certainly true that there was a lengthy discussion between members of the International Secretariat and members of the Turkish section over the editorial modification of their article concerning the events at Gezi. It is also true that the members of the IS had difficulty making head or tail of these "disagreements", and for good reason: at the section’s conference held shortly afterwards it became apparent that there were at least two, if not perhaps three, different positions within the section itself. The members of the section committed themselves to writing down their different positions to carry the discussion into organisation as a whole – our readers will be astonished to learn that these documents have still to see the light of day.

The ex-comrades from Turkey remain silent on yet another of their internal disagreements, on the "tone" of our "Communiqué to our readers: The ICC under attack from a new agency of the bourgeois state [11]".. According to PBJ, "Nevertheless, the members of our section in the central organ of the ICC didn’t fail to criticize the extremely angry tone of the communiqué written in response to this attack". Perfectly true. But the text fails to mention that two other members of the section found the communiqué perfectly appropriate, and said so unambiguously during a meeting held in July 2014 with members of the section in France.

We have already mentioned (cf note 6), the insistence of Leo and Devrim on carrying on their forum debates without any restrictions. This calls to mind, once again, Lenin’s words: "Certain eminent militants of the most influential old circles, not having the habit of organisational restrictions that the Party must impose, are inclined to mechanically confuse the general interests of the Party and their circle interests which can coincide in the period of circles". They "...naturally raise the standard of revolt against the indispensable restrictions of the organisation and they establish their spontaneous anarchism as a principle of struggle (...) making demands in favour of ‘tolerance' etc".21

Whither PBJ?

“An image is worth 1000 words” as the saying goes, and certainly this holds good for PBJ. Thanks to the technical wizardry of the Internet, we discover that the image that Pale Blue Jadal have chosen to represent their group comes straight from the world of sentimental hippiedom.22

Their "political principles" are devoid of any reference to the Communist Left, or indeed to any past heritage at all. PBJ thus declares itself a new group based solely on itself, on ignorance and an assemblage of resentments, discontents, and personal loyalties.23

There is no mention either of capitalism’s decadence, which for the ICC that they have just left is the materialist foundation-stone of its political positions. PBJ has no criticism to make of this theoretical foundation, nor have they any alternative to offer. PBJ may be unaware of it, but by jettisoning any reference to the past and any attempt at giving a materialist grounding to their positions, they are already compromising the process of "political discussion" to which they claim to be committed.24 In for the list of discussion topics proposed in PBJ’s "road map" (which should keep them occupied for the next 20 years at least), it is worth remarking the presence of "The National Question in the Middle East"... and the complete absence on PBJ’s site of the least comment on the concrete situation in Turkey, the renewal of Erdogan’s war on the Kurds, the resurgence of Kurdish nationalism and the Syrian refugee crisis, the bomb attack in Suruç, etc etc.

We have said above that the existence of an international revolutionary organisation is a precondition for the successful overthrow of capitalism. If the proletariat does, one day, prove itself capable of "assaulting the heavens" (to use Marx’s expression) then its decisive strength will be found in those countries with a strong working class and a certain historical experience. Turkey, at the gateway between Europe and Asia, is one of those countries and a rising proletarian movement will necessarily produce a political expression which can only be based on the heritage of the Communist Left. By turning their backs on this heritage, the members of PBJ disqualify themselves from participating in any such political expression, and this is their tragedy.

Let us end on an optimistic note however. All our past experience indicates that PBJ is condemned to go the way of previous circles – those who refuse to learn from history (and you cannot learn from history if you know nothing about it) are condemned to repeat it. But let us remain open to the possibility that we may be wrong, and that PBJ despite all appearances to the contrary may yet produce something worthwhile for the proletariat and the revolution. To do so, they will have to find their way back to the revolutionary theoretical and organisational heritage of the Communist Left.

ICC, November 2015