The ICC will be holding online public meetings in English to discuss the acceleration of capitalist barbarism, demonstrated by the war in Ukraine as well as by the deepening world economic crisis and the worsening effects of climate change. In considering the response of the international working class, we will pay particular attention to the important workers’ struggles now taking place in Britain.

Come and discuss with us!

The meetings will be at 11am (UK time) on Saturday 10 September, and at 5pm (UK time) on Sunday 11 September. If you want to take part, please write to us at [email protected] [1], indicating which day suits you best.

From Slovenia to the Czech Republic, Turkey, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the Canary Islands, hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests and houses are now reduced to ashes with all the ecological and human consequences that one can imagine. Even the United Kingdom has seen extensive fires in the London area. Most recently, California has gone up in flames. Yosemite Park and its legendary redwoods are threatened by a giant fire that has burned more than 7,000 hectares. In the Maghreb, in Chad, fires are also multiplying... In short, the world is on fire! If 350 million hectares go up in smoke every year in the world, if the Amazon forest, a large part of Australia and Siberia have already been ravaged by flames, we are reaching new records today!

Clearly, these fires are a direct consequence of climate change around the world: increasingly frequent and intense heat waves, such as the historic heat waves in Europe this summer. In India and Pakistan, temperatures have approached 50°C in recent weeks! A level of heat that is unbearable for the very survival of millions of human beings and which, according to a large part of the scientific world, is becoming the norm. At the same time, deadly floods are hitting Iran. The long-predicted downward spiral is thus becoming a reality.

If the bourgeoisie seeks to conceal the responsibility of the capitalist mode of production in the face of climate change by focusing attention on arsonists, on the deplorable behaviour of this or that billionaire with his or her private jets, on tourists, or on such and such a company, these stories are also a means of concealing its negligence and its total inability to curb the phenomenon, since it is so caught up in the headlong rush towards destruction. In this respect, the so-called "historic agreements" of the many climate conferences are  pure hypocrisy, fine words that only produce “small measures” that do not measure up to the global challenges facing the planet.

The incapacity and growing shortcomings of all governments and international structures to deal with and prevent disasters are obvious: the emergency services and predictive technology, under the weight of decades of budget cuts, are increasingly deficient and powerless. Technological capacities, satellite detection of potential outbreaks and weather forecasts, remain unused due to a lack of budgets and financial means. The fleets of water-bombing aircraft (only a few dozen planes and helicopters in France, for example), which are capable of reacting as quickly as possible and effectively countering these devastating fires, are only being strengthened piecemeal due to a lack of resources. They are obviously far from equalling the military air fleets of all the armies, which are acquiring more and more fighters and bombers every day, capable of raining fire on the potential “enemy”: your imperialist competitor.

In the face of fires, firefighters are presented today as the heroes of this “war on fire”, the fighters ready to “sacrifice their lives”, just as health care workers were previously applauded as “heroes of the nation” in fighting the pandemic. However, all of them are paying the price of attacks and the deterioration of their working and living conditions all over the world: “more and more missions, with less and less means”. Many have already lost their lives.

But the defence of nature, of the human species, of life, does not carry much weight in the face of the demands of the law of profit and of capitalist competition between states. For this is the real concern of the bourgeoisie: the defence of its own interests, not those of humanity and its relationship with the "natural world".

These fires of today are not exceptional epiphenomena. They have become a daily occurrence in the capitalist world where devastation is reaching new heights. With the spread of intensive monocultures, massive deforestation, and increasingly anarchic land-use planning guided by immediate profitability, the world’s ecosystems, animal species and biodiversity are being destroyed day after day. The acceleration of climate disruption and the environmental disasters that accompany it are the products of the logic of a capitalist system that has been reduced to implementing a literal “scorched earth” policy that openly threatens the survival of humanity.

The world is today on fire and this is not a mere image. In July 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War, Jean Jaurès declared: “Capitalism carries war like a cloud carries a storm”. This is still the case today: the ravages of the war in Ukraine bear witness to this, but they are compounded by global warming and climate disruption, demonstrating that capitalism carries within it generalised destruction, secreting it from every pore of its skin. In fact, we can see a clear link between war and the deepening ecological crisis. Most recently, in the name of developing independence from Russian gas supplies, coal-driven power stations in the west, well known for adding to global pollution levels, are having their lives extended. Capitalism sacrifices the planet for the sake of war.  

This putrefaction is becoming more and more violent and uncontrollable, and it is clear that capitalism is no longer a source of progress for humanity, but is synonymous with death and destruction. The capitalist world is becoming more and more hostile to life. Only the proletariat can put an end to it by developing its revolutionary struggle, its class consciousness in defence of its living conditions and the establishment of a society without exploitation. The fate of humanity is in its hands.

Stopio, 24 July 2022

 

 

 

Introduction by the ICC

Published below is an exchange of letters mainly between groups of the Communist Left, from the initial proposal to the drawing up, finalising and publication of the Joint Statement.

The correspondence within the marxist movement has always been an important aspect of its development and its intervention in the working class. The Communist Left has continued this tradition. The correspondence below is particularly significant because it makes known the process of contact and discussion between the constituent groups of the Communist Left about the principles and procedure for the achievement of a common action such as the Joint Statement on the war in Ukraine.

The fact that much of the correspondence is between the ICC and Internationalist Communist Tendency about the refusal of the latter to participate in and sign the Joint Statement will help readers to understand the conflicting arguments concerning the motivation for the statement, the criteria for the inclusion of the groups in it, the question of how to address the differing analyses of the imperialist situation in the statement, and other questions. Although the ICT brought this aspect of the correspondence to an end, the vital questions involved remain to be clarified and debated.[1]

We also include here at the end correspondence with two groups who do not come from the Communist Left tradition: the KRAS, a Russian anarcho-syndicalist group, and Internationalist Communist Perspective from Korea. We asked them to support the Joint Statement because of their internationalist rejection of the war in Ukraine.

Otherwise the correspondence is presented in chronological order.

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ICC to groups of the Proletarian Political Milieu  25/02/2022

The ICC to

- the ICT

- Parti Communiste International (Programma Comunista)

- Parti Communiste International (Il Comunista)

- Istituto Onorato Damen

- Internationalist Voice

- Fil Rouge

Comrades,

The imperialist war has once again struck Europe on a massive scale. Once again the war in Ukraine is a dramatic reminder of the true nature of capitalism, a system whose contradictions inevitably lead to military confrontations and massacres of the populations, especially the exploited. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the political organisations of the proletariat have, beyond their differences, united their forces to denounce the imperialist war and to call on the proletariat of all countries to engage in the struggle for the overthrow of the system which generates it, capitalism. The congresses of Stuttgart in 1907, Basel in 1912, the conferences of Zimmerwald in 1915, Kienthal in 1916 opened the way that would lead to the communist revolution of October 1917 in Russia and to the end of the imperialist slaughter.

During the 1930s and during the second imperialist slaughter, it is the honour of the Communist Left to have firmly brandished the banner of proletarian internationalism in the face of all those who called on proletarians to fight each other in the name of "anti-fascism", the "defence of democracy" or the "defence of the socialist fatherland". Today, it is the responsibility of the groups which claim to be part of this communist Left to firmly defend proletarian internationalism, and in particular :

•  to denounce the lies of all the national sectors of the ruling class in order to involve the proletarians in the imperialist war or to associate them in their imperialist policies by calling them to side with this or that imperialist camp:
•  to call on the proletarians of the whole world to refuse all the sacrifices that the ruling class and its states want to impose on them, to lead the class struggle against this system which exploits them ferociously and aims at making them cannon fodder;
•  to recall the importance and the topicality of the old slogans of the workers' movement: "Proletarians have no country", "Proletarians of all countries, unite!

We are convinced that your organisation, like ours, will not fail to assume its internationalist responsibility in the face of the current war. However, the ICC believes that the affirmation of internationalism would have a much greater impact if the positions taken by each of our organisations were backed up by a common position of our organisations based on the fundamental positions we all share. We therefore call on you to vote on our proposal and, if you are in favour, to contact our organisation as soon as possible in order to prepare this common position.

Receive, comrades, our communist and internationalist greetings

———-

Il Programma to the ICC 2022/03/01

Dear friends,

Now is not the time for talk, but for putting into practice the unchanged and unchanging directives of revolutionary preparation: work to prepare for revolutionary defeatism, detach the proletarian class from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois hegemony and, in perspective, transform imperialist war into class war.
Sincerely,

Communist Programme

——————————

ICT to the ICC 02/03/2022

Comrades

We have discussed your proposal.  No-one can disagree with the need for the organisations of the Communist Left to respond to the new and even more dangerous course that this imperialist world has now taken and we have responded in various ways already ourselves.

Nor do we disagree with your outline of the basic proletarian positions.

"- to denounce the lies of all the national sectors of the ruling class

aimed at involving the proletarians in the imperialist war or at

associating them in their imperialist policies by calling them to side

with this or that imperialist camp:

- to call on the proletarians of the whole world to refuse all the

sacrifices that the ruling class and its states want to impose on them,

to lead the class struggle against this system which exploits them

ferociously and aims at turning them into cannon fodder;

- to recall the importance and relevance of the old slogans of the

workers' movement: "Workers have no fatherland", "Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

However, we need to go beyond these important propagandist points. We have in the past always found that our entirely different perspectives make any deeper joint statement impossible and this has become more pronounced rather than less over time. So though we are not in principle opposed to some form of joint statement we may find the same old problems arise. The question is where do you stand now on these perspectives?  Would they allow us to produce a meaningful document which could be a guide for action?

Our second question concerns who else you are proposing this joint initiative with?  We know that all the Bordigist parties will not only refuse but take pleasure in telling us that they are THE party. And it may be that it is also necessary to look beyond the "Communist Left" (which despite our recent growth remains sadly small) but to those who share our class perspective if not our precise politics. The slogan of "No War But the Class War" not only poses that question for other political groups but draws them further towards the perspective of the Communist Left. More importantly it is a call to fight for the wider working class, linking as it does the fight against the daily attacks of capitalism with the horrendous future capitalism is preparing for us.  A future which seems to be closer than ever.

We have circulated the meeting announcement to all our comrades.

Internationalist greetings

The International Bureau of the ICT

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Reply of Internationalist Voice 3 March 2022

Dear comrades!

We welcome your initiative to make a joint statement on the war and agree with you that a joint statement would have a much greater impact. However, an essential point for us is who has received this letter, and we can trust you that only revolutionaries have received it.

A statement has already been published; see attached, and the English version will be available soon.

Internationalist greetings

Internationalist Voice

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Letter of Istituto Onorato Damen 03/03/2022

Comrades,

We welcome your proposal.

We think, like you, that internationalist communists of all the world have the responsibility to clarify the causes of the imperialist war and to take a position on the war.

Our organisation believes that the communist political perspective, based on proletarian internationalism, revolutionary defeatism and rejection of all imperialist camps, increasingly represents the only possible response of the working class to imperialist slaughter and capitalist barbarism. It is the only possibility of a future for humanity, in a society that is finally humane: a communist society.

We welcome the idea that revolutionaries, beyond the differences between organisations, must be united in denouncing the imperialist war and supporting among the world proletariat the perspective of international communist revolution.

Our organisation therefore agrees to the preparation of a common statement, supported by different internationalist revolutionary communist groups, in addition to the statements and analyses that each organisation will publish independently.

It would represent a stronger internationalist voice; we also think that it could represent a step forward along the road of a fraternal and frank confrontation between communists, in the perspective of building the future World Communist Party, on the basis of programmatic clarity.

Regarding how to prepare this common statement, we suggest that the ICC prepare a draft on which to work together.

With our fraternal communist greetings

IOD

——————————

ICC to the Proletarian Political Milieu concerning the appeal 13th March 2022

ICC to :

Internationalist Communist Tendency

PCI (Programma Comunista)

PCI (Il Comunista)

PCI (Il Partito Comunista)

Istituto Onorato Damen

Internationalist Voice

PCI (Le Prolétaire)

Dear comrades,

We write following our letter of 25 February 2022 proposing a common public statement of fundamental internationalist principles against the war in Ukraine shared by the tradition of the Communist Left as a whole.

We have received positive support for this proposal from Institute Onorato Damen and Internationalist Voice. The International Communist Tendency has also replied positively to the main principles that we proposed for the statement but had some questions regarding the analysis of the situation, the invitees and the possibility of other common initiatives. PCI (Programma) made a short reply rejecting the proposal saying it was ‘time for action, not talk’. The other invitees have not replied yet.

The main task for the Communist Left today is to speak with a united voice on the fundamental internationalist principles of our tradition concerning the imperialist nature of the war, the denunciation of pacifist illusions and the alternative perspective of the working class struggle leading to the overthrow of capitalism. We must affirm the only political tradition which has upheld these principles in tests of fire in the past.

In our view the function of the statement is therefore not to go into any depth into the analysis of the situation on which there are no doubt differences of appreciation between the organisations claiming the Communist Left; nor is the statement the place we think to go into questions of other common initiatives. A common statement by the groups of the Communist Left would, in any case, not be an obstacle to discussing differences and alternative approaches in other contexts.

The comrades of the IOD suggested that the ICC draft the common statement. In order to speed up the process we have accepted this suggestion and the draft appeal is attached with this letter. We have attempted to present the internationalist principles in a way in which all the signatories can accept. However, comrades are welcome to propose any alternative formulations to the existing ones in order to fulfil the common objective of the statement. But we hope that comrades, appreciating that time is pressing, will limit themselves to changes which they consider essential to fulfil the joint project, so that a final version can be quickly produced.

We are confident that the common statement of the Communist Left will make these principles and this tradition more widely known amongst the working class today.

Looking forward to your rapid reply.

Communist greetings

ICC.

——————————

ICT to the ICC 21 March 2022 21 March 2022

On the proposed joint statement on the war in Ukraine

Comrades

Thanks for sending the draft appeal and informing us as to who you intended to sign it. Regrettably, we have to say that we cannot agree to either.

The proposed statement contains several flaws (as well as errors of fact which we will leave aside for now) and is inadequate as a political guide for the working class as to how we can fight against the war. In the first place it does not address itself to the actual significance of this war at this point in time. It also lacks a coherent analysis of what is actually going on. As such it provides no guide. It is a purely paper declaration and we need to offer more than this. As Lenin long ago stated “Without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary practice”.  

One example of this weakness is the draft statement makes reference to the fact that “the world’s working class cannot avoid developing its struggle against deteriorating wages and living standards” but does not say why, after decades of the reverse being the case, the class struggle should revive now. What links the current war and the continuing attacks on workers’ livelihoods is the capitalist economic crisis which after almost 50 years remains unresolved. This war is a new and clear indication that the strictly economic options are running out for capitalism, and the world is much further down the inter-imperialist road to its ultimate “solution”. There is no sense in the draft that this is a new and dangerous departure in capitalist history. (Confirmed, for example, by the absence of any reference to China and the fact that the war in Ukraine has already helped to define a clearer imperialist line up on a global scale.)

This abstract timelessness in the face of an emerging reality is reinforced by long passages about the history of the Communist left. Inarguable though the details may be, we don’t live in the same world as our predecessors and this document exudes the sense that it was written just for “the milieu” as you call it. The Communist Left may have a principled history of opposition to war which we can be proud of, but as the statement ultimately admits, we have little influence in the class today. From our current position of political obscurity, do you think announcing that

“Today, in the face of the acceleration of imperialist conflict in Europe only the organisations of the Communist Left have the right to hold up the banner of consistent proletarian internationalism, and provide a reference point for those searching for working class principles”.

is going to extend our influence? We are not living in the time of the Second or Third International when there was a mass following which ended with workers betrayed and led into imperialist war. Our task is not to react to historical betrayals by supposedly workers’ Internationals but to continue to lay the basis of a new International.  We have a much more difficult task of rebuilding from the ground up.

Which brings us to your list of potential signatories.  It is very narrow, and even narrower than it appears, given that we all know that every Bordigist “party” considers itself to be the only international party possible. You don’t elaborate on why this is such a narrow selection from amongst the groups of the Communist Left but on your website we find this.

“Controverses, IGCL, Internationalist Perspective, Matériaux Critiques and some others belong to the parasitic milieu and have nothing to do with proletarian internationalism, even if they write about it and even if they put forward exactly the same position. Their activity is characterised by the sabotage of the communist activities and stands in the way of the possibility of united action by the authentic Communist Left.

The groups that belong to the Communist Left are: Il Partito Comunista, Il Programma Comunista, Instituto Onorato Damen, Program Communiste, Internationalist Communist Tendency, and Internationalist Voice."

So what you are asking us to sign up to is your own particular definition of who is, or is not, in the Communist Left and, moreover, your long time rationale that any organisation formed by those who left the ICC must be guilty of “parasitism”.  We have long criticised you for this destructive labelling. We have also criticised these groupings on occasion, but always in political terms with the aim of clarification, not a label aimed at annihilation of their right to exist. 

In any case, your proposal is also too narrow. Even if we agreed on who was part of the Communist Left we do not have a monopoly of the truth on this issue. The influence of internationalist ideas (often as a result of all our past efforts in promoting internationalism) has penetrated political organisations coming from different traditions.  In this situation we should attempt to draw them into a wider movement against the war. 

In some ways the debate is a reprise of the one that the ICC held in the UK with the CWO over the promotion of No War But the Class War as an organised body of class resistance to the war. Indeed back then we were just as critical of your narrow approach as we are now. Then the CWO wrote that we recognised:

“the absolute weakness of communist forces world-wide and certainly in Britain. Unlike the ICC, we do not puff ourselves up with self-descriptions as an international movement which has survived longer than any of the three internationals in the history of the workers’ movement.

We recognise our central duty of safeguarding and developing communist theory and practice but this is an impossible task if we remain isolated and introverted.

Communists can only defend and enrich their programme and organisation by interacting with social reality. We need to recognise the actuality of developing forces and develop theory and practice to relate to those developments. This applies both to underlying developments in the world economy and to those elements who are caught up in all kinds of social movements and are receptive to the communist programme”. [See https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2002-12-01/communism-against-the-war... [3]

Today the ICT sees the promotion of this form of organisation on an international scale as the best way to contribute to a real class movement against the wars that this system inevitably produces.  And as we said before, it is not enough to make paper declarations (even if they are a necessary start) we need to find ways to take the issue to the wider working class, and certainly to engage with its most concerned elements.  There is not a lot of time left and, given the four decades retreat of the class, there are enormous challenges to meet. A new generation is coming to the communist left as the crisis mounts and we need to give them something they can work in to build a real movement.  It means we need something clearer and more concrete than the proposal you are putting forward now.

Internationalist greetings

The International Bureau of the Internationalist Communist Tendency

——————————

To the ICT from the ICC 22.04.2022

Dear comrades

The ICC agrees with the fundamental internationalist principles contained in the ICT ‘No War but the Class War’ Appeal on the war in Ukraine. Since those in broad agreement are asked to respond to the appeal, we will underline our support for the Communist Left principles it contains:

-          the war in Ukraine is entirely imperialist in nature and in no way a war of national defence. The working class cannot support any side in the carnage in which it is the principal victim;

-          the present period of imperialist wars of capitalism, that the war in the Ukraine exemplifies, is bringing the extinction of humanity closer;

-          only the overthrow of capitalism can end imperialist wars. Pacifist illusions in a peaceful capitalism buries the revolutionary perspective of the working class that is the sole solution to imperialism;

-          the road to the proletarian revolution can only be based on the struggle of the working class to defend its living conditions (and against the unions as you point out) and engagement in the process that leads to the formation of the international political party of the working class. This process necessarily excludes the Social Democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist counter-revolutionary traditions.

Having affirmed our fundamental agreement on these questions there is a problem related to the ICT appeal which is important to clarify:

Given this close agreement on questions of internationalist principle expressed in the ICT appeal it was perfectly possible for the ICT to sign the Joint Statement of groups of the Communist Left (published on the sites of the signatories) that was based on these very principles and left points of secondary disagreement between the groups to one side. The Joint Statement, from the point of view of internationalist principle, could have been signed by the ICT even if your organisation felt it was insufficient in itself for the struggle against imperialist war (we will come back in detail to the reasons you sent us in your letter of refusal to sign the Joint Statement).

Perhaps you feel that it is not appropriate to refer in such an appeal to the experience and tradition of the workers' movement since the Zimmerwald Conference and in particular to the tradition of the Communist Left. If this is the case, can you tell us why? If, on the contrary, you consider valid this preoccupation to inscribe the position of the internationalists on the war in Ukraine in continuity with those of our predecessors, we do not see, on the basis of the clear internationalist positions that we share, why you could not support the Joint Statement of groups of the Communist Left.

Perhaps the original proposal for a joint statement we sent you was insufficiently clear that it was not intended to be an exclusive initiative against the imperialist war. The signatories could have other activities - like the NWCW committees that you propose in your appeal for example - that the other signatories didn’t agree with or whose objectives and modalities were not yet clear to them.

The signatories could also disagree on their analysis of the world situation providing they nevertheless agreed that capitalism had no alternative than descent into barbarism.

But an important need in the situation is make a joint statement and therefore stronger affirmation of internationalism by the Communist Left. Of course, these common principles could have been reformulated or strengthened from the proposed draft (as they were in discussions with the IOD) and the criteria for groups signing the statement could have been discussed.

We therefore ask you to reconsider your refusal to sign the Joint Statement.

At the moment the ICT Appeal, as far as the ‘public’ is concerned, appears to be in competition with the Joint Statement, so that those coming to internationalist class positions of the Communist Left will be presented with two separate and rival ‘unities’.

Surely we can agree that this ambiguous situation is a weakness for the whole internationalist camp?

Looking forward to your suggestions for a way to resolve this problem.

Communist Greetings, the ICC

——————————

To the ICC from the ICT  24 April 2022

Comrades

If you are really serious about trying to persuade us to sign your statement you are going the wrong way about it. 

In the first place you don’t address the central point of our decision to decline to sign it which is that we do not accept your narrow definition of who is, and who is not, in the “milieu”. We have never agreed with your idea of “parasitism” and we do not wish to even implicitly approve it.

We also note that you accept the principles of the NWBCW appeal, but the aim of NWBCW is not to simply address the Communist Left but to bring together anyone or any organisation which is genuinely internationalist and against imperialist war in a practical way. We are approaching a critical point in world history where the capitalist system has taken a decisive turn towards new and wider conflicts. Taking a stance based on internationalist positions is a necessary starting point but the aim is to go beyond assertion of principles. We need to generate a movement amongst the wider working class which can prepare the way for a political response to the horrors the system is already visiting on some and will eventually bring to all workers. 

We note that the version of the statement which you asked us to sign is not the version currently on your website.  ou put up that version with the signatures of the other organisations on 6 April. Today the version on your site has been edited. Gone is the sentence we criticised in our previous reply which stated that: "only the organisations of the communist left have the right to hold up the banner of consistent proletarian internationalism".

Also deleted is the sentence which states that the: "persistent, conscious fight of the working class against the worsening austerity that imperialist war brings is therefore the only serious obstacle to the acceleration of militarism”.

There has been no public acknowledgement of this, and we don’t know if all the groups who signed the statement on 6 April were consulted about the changes. It is difficult to have a serious dialogue if the terms of the debate keep shifting.

In any case, our position on signing the ‘joint statement’ remains the same.

Internationalist greetings

The ICT

——————————

The ICC to the ICT  29 April 2022

Dear comrades

Thank you for your reply of 24th April. We regret that you are still refusing to sign the Joint Statement of the Communist Left on the war in Ukraine.

You note that the final version of the Communist Left joint statement is not entirely the same as the draft we sent for your and other group’s approval on the 13th March. In this latter communication we asked the groups of the Communist Left for comments and alternative formulations to the draft, so it was quite normal and logical to then discuss changes to the draft with the willing co-signatories in order to agree on a final version of the joint statement. Obviously, the co-signatories were then consulted and the final version was changed as a result of a common discussion. You could of course have participated in this joint amendment process but you decided against the idea of a joint statement in your letter to us of 21st March.

(Incidentally we note that the first No War but the Class War appeal on the ICT website of 6th April had twelve points for agreement, while the second of 23rd April has only five. What happened to the other seven?)

Obviously, there was no need to publish the draft joint statement of the Communist Left; the whole point of a joint statement is for the co-signatories to agree on a final version before it is published, as an expression of their common action. So there was no ‘shifting’ of the terms of the debate as you allege. The terms remained the same from the first letter of the proposal for a joint statement to its final realisation. 

In any case you admit that you would not have signed the joint statement anyway, so these changes from the draft to the final version were not the reason for your refusal to sign the common statement.

But what are the reasons for your refusal to sign the joint statement? Your letter is still obscure on this fundamental point.

Your letter brings up the ICT motivation behind the No War but the Class War appeal. Whatever the merits of this appeal - we agree with its underlying internationalist principles - or weaknesses, it was, and is, perfectly possible for the ICT to also sign the joint statement which contains the same internationalist principles. The Korean group, Internationalist Communist Perspective, has proved this option in practice. But your letter doesn’t respond to this possibility posed in our previous letter. Nor do you reply on the problem posed by the existence of two internationalist appeals that could be seen as in competition with each other.

The fundamental need for the revolutionary camp is for the Communist Left groups to not just produce internationalist statements separately but to combine their forces in the spirit of Zimmerwald and proletarian unity in action. Why do you resolutely reject this fundamental principle?

The conception of the Communist Left milieu behind the joint statement is too narrow for you. Was it really for the sake of leaving out fake Communist Left groups and bloggers who attack this milieu rather than the imperialist bourgeoisie, that you refused to sign the joint statement? While not agreeing with the description of the false communist left as ‘parasitic’ you have nevertheless recognised its negative role in recent correspondence with the ICC. So the rejection of the term ‘parasitic’ is hardly a reason to avoid the important responsibility of helping unify the genuine communist left against imperialist war.

Finally, you say that we are going the ‘wrong way’ about persuading you to sign the joint statement. Please tell us what would be the ‘right way’ to persuade you.

Communist greetings

ICC

——————————

The ICT to the ICC 30 April 2022

Comrades

We clearly stated in our previous correspondence that though we support all internationalist declarations against the war, your Appeal was defined by the narrowness of its aim. Not only do you exclude all groups you consider “parasites” but the initial document actually said that “only the organisations of the communist left have the right to hold up the banner of consistent proletarian internationalism” and this was the version you published on 6 April. Now you claim that your Appeal is of “the Communist Left” which puts you on the same level as the Bordigists. 

We do not think you really share our concern about the gravity of the current situation. We note that there is an article on your site which states that there will be no general imperialist war as “the blocs have not been formed” [see https://en.internationalism.org/content/17151/ruling-class-demands-sacrifices-altar-war [4].] The world has taken a decisive turn towards the imperialist war the Communist Left knew would be the outcome of this long crisis of the cycle of capital accumulation. Even if they patch up a peace over Ukraine (daily looking less and less likely) it will only be a truce. The mounting contradictions of the system are now dictating the course that imperialist capitalism is taking us on. It has taken longer than we all thought but it is not the only issue of importance. As we said in our Call to Action, the working class has been in retreat for decades, and as we predicted there is no mass movement as yet which would lead to theoretical confluence of views that would produce a viable new International. Our idea around NWBCW is to try to bring internationalists of all tendencies together in a practical way to resist both imperialist war and all the fake responses from the capitalist left (including pacifism), as well as extend to the widest working class the internationalist critique of capitalism as the begetter of imperialist wars.  In short whilst your Appeal looks inward, we are trying to look outward.

We certainly do not wish to be associated in anyway with your long-held view that certain other groups are “parasites” and it is dishonest of you to even imply that we share your view on this. We have made criticisms of other groups in the proletarian camp, but over specific issues (like the working class is holding back war, for example) but we don’t deny their right to political existence or believe, as you say in this letter, that they are “fake”. Similarly, we don’t judge other groups like you do. The Korean ICP can make their own decisions about what they need to do and we accepted the explanation that they sent us for signing your Appeal. The important fact is that they also can see the real value of trying to develop opposition to the war and capitalism in the widest way possible. In this regard we do not expect everyone to agree with all our twelve points in the “Call for Action” as this included the rationale of the ICT for calling for NWBCW committees. However, as in 2002 with the CWO’s NWBCW groups against the Iraq War, we always had a working set of internationalist criteria which would allow others to join them. Indeed, if we insisted on everyone agreeing to exactly how the ICT sees the world, we would be repeating your error.

This is our final word on this matter. So long as you are only prepared to regard only a chosen few as worthy of recognition there is nothing more for us to say. By contrast we have put out a Call to Action which gives every internationalist an opportunity to respond. In that way we might actually take a small step towards a real international class movement against capital before time runs out for humanity.

Internationalist greetings

The ICT

——————————

The ICC to the ICT 16 May 2022

Comrades,

Unfortunately, your most recent letter (30 April) again fails to adequately explain why the ICT consistently refuses to sign the Joint Statement of groups of the Communist Left about the war in Ukraine, even though your organisation, as part of the Communist Left, fully agrees with the proletarian internationalist principles of the statement.

We understand that the ICT wants a ‘Call to Action’ over the imperialist war, but don’t understand why, in terms of a common position of the Communist Left camp, the ICT remains inactive.

Your organisation wants a ‘wide’ appeal as opposed to the ‘restricted’ one of the Joint Statement. But in refusing to sign the Joint Statement you have restricted the wider impact of a common stance of the Communist Left.

Worse, because the ICT refuses to sign the Joint Statement, the No War but the Class War appeal of the ICT appears to set up a competition within the Communist Left. We asked for your response to this problem in previous letters, but so far, no answer to it has come from you.

The ‘Call to Action’ of the ICT, judging by your last letter, seems to be increasing in flexibility: those in agreement with it don’t have to agree to all its 12 points, providing the ICT holds a ‘working set of internationalist criteria’. But towards groups of the Communist Left, the ICT is implacably rigid in its refusal for a common statement.

You again pretend that you were misled about the content of the Joint Statement. The reality is that you refused the process of revising the draft statement that was offered when it was sent to you for alternative suggestions. The real problem for you was not this or that formulation but the willingness to have a common declaration, the very principle of a united effort, which you declined.

Again, the ICT’s differences of analysis of the world situation is brought up as a justification for refusal. But the differences over the interpretation of recent events is not an obstacle to making a common statement which the Communist Left shares concerning the bankruptcy of world capitalism and the inevitability of the spread and intensification of imperialist war. The Joint Statement which defends the fundamental common axis of the analysis of world imperialism by the Communist Left does not preclude subsequent debate on differences of interpretation of this axis. On the contrary the Joint Statement is the basis for such a debate, a vital precondition.

According to you the definition of the Communist Left in the project of the Joint Statement was too restricted and therefore impossible to sign up to because it excluded the parasitic bloggers and pretend political groups that falsely claim this tradition. But the ICT questioned the inclusion of the Bordigist Parties in the original proposal of the Joint Statement who are an important strand of the real Communist Left tradition with which you share a common origin. The exclusion of the Bordigist groups from the invitation to the appeal would have created a much narrower and indeed an inadequate basis for participation. Of course, the criteria for who is to be included in a joint statement of the Communist Left is an important discussion. However, this question of criteria can’t in itself be used as a justification for abandoning the attempt to forge a common statement of the Communist Left. Agreeing on these criteria is part of the process of discussion that leads to a joint position. What is essential is the will to achieve it, which has been consistently absent in the ICT’s attitude to the Joint Statement.

In an analogous situation the ICC, in responding positively to the appeal of Battaglia Comunista in 1976 to joint discussion conferences of groups of the Communist Left, expressed its willingness for the effort but regretted that Battaglia’s initiative contained no criteria for deciding which groups should participate in the conferences. This regret did not stop the ICC from pursuing the joint work and attending the first Conference. As we wrote to Battaglia at the time:

“In this respect we can only regret that you did not consider it useful to communicate the names of the groups invited to this meeting, nor on the basis of which criteria the choice of these groups was made. However, this lack of information does not prevent us from participating in this meeting with our best revolutionary will. Furthermore, we would have liked, as we have already expressed, that a bulletin containing the letters of response and other texts from the various groups invited, be prepared and distributed to the participants before the meeting.” 1 March 1977

Fortunately for the 2nd Conference of the Communist Left, a set of criteria proposed by the ICC was agreed and the Bordigist parties were invited. The lessons of this episode for the effort for joint work of this nature is that all its conditions are not necessarily completed in advance and that the disagreements that arise should not be used as an excuse for withdrawing from the project. What is vital, and one of the main lessons for the ultimate failure of the International Conferences in the seventies, was that the conviction in the principle of a joint effort and the will to maintain a forum for the discussion of differences in the Communist Left, was missing. Indeed the 3rd Conference of the Communist Left failed to make a joint internationalist statement, proposed by the ICC, against the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the time.

In your letter of 24 April 2022 you said that the ICC was asking you to reconsider your refusal to sign the Joint Statement in the ‘wrong way’. We therefore asked you in our reply what the ‘right way’ would be. Your last letter doesn’t reply to this question. In the recent public meeting of the ICC in London on Saturday 7 April the same question came up for the ICT: what should the ICC do to convince you to sign the Joint Statement of the Communist Left against the imperialist war? The ICT comrade at the meeting admitted he had no reply to this question either.

Is the lack of answer to this question why you also make the peremptory declaration that your last letter was your ‘final word’ on the subject?

For our part, the ICC remains open to discussion with you of our differences on the ICT’s refusal to sign the Joint Statement of groups of the Communist Left against the war in Ukraine.

Communist greetings

ICC

——————————

The ICC to the International Communist Party (Il Partito)

Dear comrades,

We have read on your site the announcement of the Public Conference that you have organised in Genoa for Friday 22 April on the subject of the war in Ukraine. We have also read the five themes you suggest for the discussion, which we completely agree with in their basic approach. As you rightly say, war is a constant of capitalism, all the more so in this phase of historical decline. We therefore consider the choice of your organisation to hold a Public Conference on this issue an important and responsible choice to confront the bourgeois campaign that tends to push us to support one of the two sides in the struggle, in this specific case Ukraine, as a country under attack and therefore to be helped by sending ... arms. The bourgeois propaganda, through a guilty pacifism, is trying to entangle us all in the horror of the current war. All this must be denounced forcefully and we are sure that you will do so at your conference. Unfortunately, we learned late of the holding of this meeting and regret that we are unable to attend physically, nor do we see that remote participation via the internet is possible. However, allow us to send you the text of the Joint Declaration of the groups of the International Communist Left on the war in Ukraine, a declaration which we have also proposed to other components of the Communist Left and which we think is important to show to the proletariat today as an expression of what unites the revolutionary organisations in the face of the various bourgeois mystifications. As we wrote to you in a previous letter, we ask you to sign this declaration, not to make up a number, but to open, starting from the mutual recognition of belonging to the same revolutionary camp, a process of confrontation and public discussion capable of producing over time a decantation of positions and a political clarification in front of the class. We would also like to take this opportunity to announce the holding of our next public meetings on a similar theme, which will be held via the internet, therefore easily accessible, for the time being in Italian, on the 4th of May, and in English, on the 8th of May. The announcement of these meetings will appear as soon as possible - as early as tomorrow the one in Italian - on our website. We hereby officially invite you to these meetings, which could offer a precious opportunity for a confrontation between genuinely revolutionary organisations.

We look forward to receiving your reply and send you our fraternal greetings.

International Communist Current

——————————

From the International Communist Current to KRAS

Dear comrades

    We are sending you links to the joint statement on the imperialist war in Ukraine (in English and Russian), signed by three groups of the communist left and another group which is close to this tradition.

    Joint statement of groups of the international communist left about the war in Ukraine | International Communist Current (internationalism.org [1]);

    Совместное заявление групп

    Интернациональной коммунистической

    левой о

    войне на Украине | Интернациональное

    коммунистическое течение

    (internationalism.org [1])

    We understand that you come from a different political tradition, but we have always recognised that you consistently and courageously - especially in the present conditions in Russia - defend internationalist positions against the wars of capitalism, and we have thus recently published your statement on the war in Ukraine on our website in several languages (cf “An internationalist statement from inside Russia”, International Communist Current (internationalism.org [1]))

    We are thus asking for your support for our statement, whether by signing it directly or by announcing that you are in broad agreement with it in spite of any differences, and by publishing it on your own website and other means of communication open to you.

    We would also welcome any comments or criticisms you may have about

 the statement

    In solidarity

    The ICC

——————————

Response of the Kras  14 Avril 2022

Hi, comrades,

Thank you for spreading our statement on the war. We cannot join the statement that you issued jointly with other left-communist Marxist organizations - certainly not because we do not agree with its internationalist orientation, but because of theoretical disagreements, for example, the positive mention of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - a concept with which we do not agree.

Nevertheless, we have translated and placed on our website (with a preface and a mention of disagreements) your text,"Аgainst the imperialist war - class struggle" with the assessments and internationalist approach of which we fundamentally agree: https://aitrus.info/node/5949 [5]

In solidarity

KRAS-IWA

—————————————

The ICC to the ICP (Korea)

Dear comrades,

    We send you the introduction to the joint statement:

“The organisations of the communist left must mount a united defence of their common heritage of adherence to the principles of proletarian internationalism, especially at a time of great danger for the world's working class. The return of imperialist carnage to Europe in the war in Ukraine is such a time. That's why we publish below, with other signatories from the communist left tradition (and a group with a different trajectory fully supporting the statement), a common statement on the fundamental perspectives for the working class in the face of imperialist war”.

    We will publish this as mentioned earlier on Wednesday, 06.04,

    2) We propose to have as "signatories" the following groups:

    International Communist Current

    Istituto Onorato Damen

    Internationalist Voice

     Internationalist Communist Perspective (Korea) fully supports the joint statement.

    Is this ok for you?

 

Introduction: We continue to publish contributions to an internal debate relating to the understanding of our concept of decomposition, to inter-imperialist tensions and the threat of war, and to the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This debate was first made public by the ICC in August 2020 when it published a text by comrade Steinklopfer in which he expressed and explained his disagreements with the resolution on the international situation of the 23rd ICC Congress. This text was accompanied by a response from the ICC and both can be accessed here [6]. The second contribution by the comrade (here [7]) develops his divergencies with the resolution of the 24th Congress and the text below is a further response expressing the position of the ICC. Finally, there is a contribution by comrade Ferdinand (here [8]) also expressing his differences with the resolution of the 24th Congress. A reply to this text will be published in due course. 

***

The ICC is more or less alone in considering that the collapse of the eastern imperialist bloc in 1989 marked the beginning of a new phase in the decadence of capitalism – the phase of decomposition, resulting from a historic stalemate between the two major classes in society, neither able to advance its own perspective faced with the historic crisis of the system: world war for the bourgeoisie, world revolution for the working class. This would be the final stage in the long decline of the capitalist mode of production, bringing with it the threat of a descent into barbarism and destruction that could engulf the working class and humanity even without a fully worldwide war between two imperialist blocs[1].

The groups of the proletarian milieu have rarely, if ever, responded to the Theses on Decomposition which laid out the theoretical bases for the concept of decomposition. Some, like the Bordigists, with their idea of the invariance of marxist theory since 1848, have tended to reject the very concept of capitalist decadence. Others, like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, consider our view of decomposition as a phase of mounting chaos and irrational destructiveness to be idealist, even if they don’t disagree that such phenomena exist and are even on the increase. But for these comrades our conception is not directly based on an economic analysis, so cannot be considered to be materialist.

At the same time, despite locating their origins in the Italian communist left, these groups have never accepted our notion of the historic course: the idea that capitalism’s capacity to mobilise society for world war depends on whether it has inflicted a decisive defeat on the world working class, in particular its central battalions. This was certainly the approach of the Left Fraction which published Bilan in the 30s, which insisted that with the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, the road to a Second World war was open; and it was a method taken up again by the ICC from its inception. In the 1970s and 80s, we argued that, despite a deepening economic crisis and the existence of stable imperialist blocs, capitalism was unable to take decisive steps towards World War Three because it faced an undefeated generation of proletarians who were not willing to make the sacrifices demanded by a march towards war. None of these arguments made sense to the majority of the groups of the milieu who did not factor in the balance of class forces in order to understand the direction that society was taking[2].

The concept of the historic course was a key element in the formulation of the theory of decomposition. In the 1970s, a period characterised by international waves of workers’ struggles in response to the open economic crisis, we still considered that society was heading towards massive class confrontations whose outcome would determine whether the road was open to world war or world revolution. However, towards the end of the 1980s, despite the bourgeoisie’s inability to marshal society for a new world war, it became apparent that the working class was finding it increasingly difficult to affirm its own revolutionary perspective. Paradoxically, the concept of a historic course, of a definite movement towards either world war or massive class struggle, was no longer applicable in the new phase opened up by the historic stalemate, as we clarified at our 23rd International Congress[3]

With some exceptions, the majority of groups of the milieu have also rejected one of the principal conclusions we have drawn from the analysis of decomposition at the level of imperialist conflicts – an analysis further developed in our 1990 orientation text “Militarism and Decomposition” and its update in May 2022 –  that the growing tendency of every man for himself among states, the tide of fragmentation and disorder that characterised this new phase, had become a central element in the difficulty for the bourgeoisie to reconstitute stable imperialist blocs[4]. Most of the groups see the formation of new blocs as being on the agenda today, and indeed have argued that it is quite advanced.  

Although in our view the principal predictions in the Theses on Decomposition and the Orientation Text on militarism have stood the test of time (cf report from 22nd Congress[5]), the war in Ukraine has brought to the fore the divergence with groups who see the rapid movement towards blocs and the imminent threat of a third world war.

Similar ideas have arisen in our own ranks as can be seen in the texts by comrades Steinklopfer and Ferdinand[6]. These comrades however still insist that they agree with the concept of decomposition, although in our view some of their arguments call it into question.

In this article we will explain why we think this is the case in the contribution by comrade Steinklopfer. Although the positions of Steinklopfer and Ferdinand are very similar, they were put forward as individual contributions so we will reply separately.

We will divide our response into three parts: on disagreements about the basic concept of decomposition; on imperialist polarisation; and on the balance of class forces. In responding to the criticisms of comrade Steinklopfer, we will have to spend a considerable amount of time correcting various misrepresentations of the position of the organisation, which in our view derive from a loss of acquisitions on the comrade’s part – a forgetting of some basic elements of our analytical framework. What’s more, some of these misrepresentations have already been answered in previous responses to the comrade’s texts, but are not acknowledged or responded to in later contributions by the comrade. This is the sign of a real difficulty in taking the debate forward.

On the basic concept of decomposition: where is the revisionism?

According to comrade Steniklopfer, however, it is the ICC which is “revising” its understanding of decomposition.

“there is a red thread linking together many of these disagreements, revolving around the question of decomposition. Although the whole organisation shares our analysis of decomposition as the terminal phase of capitalism, when it comes to applying this framework to the present situation, differences of interpretation come to light. What we all agree on is that this terminal phase was not only inaugurated by, but has its deepest roots in, the inability of either of the two major classes of society to open a perspective for humanity as a whole, to unite large parts of society either behind the struggle for world revolution (the proletariat) or behind the mobilisation for generalised warfare (the bourgeoisie). But, for the organisation, there would appear to be a second essential driving force of this terminal phase, this being the tendency of each against all: between states, within the ruling class of each nation state, within bourgeois society at large. On this basis the ICC, as far as imperialist tensions are concerned, tends to underestimate the tendency towards bi-polarity between two leading robber states, the tendency towards the formation of military alliances between states, just as it underestimates the growing danger of direct military confrontations between the big powers, containing a potential dynamic towards some kind of third world war which could possibly wipe out humanity”.

We will come to the question of underestimating the threat of World War Three later on. What we want to make clear at this juncture is that we do not see the tendency towards “every man for himself” as a “second driving force of this terminal phase” in the sense of being an underlying cause of decomposition, which is implied by the comrade’s phrase a “a second essential driving force” and made explicit when he goes on to say that “while agreeing that the bourgeois each against all is a very important characteristic of decomposition, one which played a very important role in the inauguration of the phase of decomposition with the disintegration of the post-World War II imperialist world order in 1989, I do not agree that it is one of its main causes”. While we all agree the tendency for each state to defend its own interests is inherent throughout the history of capitalism, even during the period of stable blocs – or as Steinklopfer puts it, “the bourgeois each for oneself is a permanent and fundamental tendency of capitalism throughout its existence” - this tendency is “released” and exacerbated on a qualitative level during the phase of decomposition. This exacerbation remains a product of decomposition but it has become an increasingly active factor in the world situation, a major impediment to the formation of new blocs.

This brings us to a second key disagreement about the concept of decomposition – the understanding that decomposition, while bringing to fruition all the existing contradictions of decadent capitalism, takes on the character of a qualitative change. According to Steinklopfer, “As I understand it, the organisation is moving towards the position that, with decomposition, there is a new quality in relation to prior phases of decadent capitalism, represented by a kind of absolute domination of the fragmentation tendency. For me, as opposed to this, there is no major tendency in the phase of decomposition which did not already exist beforehand, and in particular in the period of the decadence of capitalism beginning with World War I”.

This seems to be a clear case of the “loss of acquisitions”, the forgetting of what we ourselves have said in our basic texts, in this case, the Theses on Decomposition themselves. Certainly, the Theses agree that “To the extent that contradictions and expressions of decadent capitalism that mark its successive phases do not disappear with time, but continue and deepen, the phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production” (Thesis 3). But the same thesis goes on to point out that these characteristics “reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion” in the phase of decomposition: in sum, such a synthesis marks the point where quantity turns into quality. Otherwise, what would be the sense in describing decomposition as a new phase within decadence?

On imperialist polarisation

If we go back to the OT on Militarism and Decomposition, it becomes clear that we have never argued that the tendency towards the formation of new blocs disappears in the phase of decomposition. “History (especially of the post-war period) has shown that the disappearance of one imperialist bloc (eg the Axis) implies the dislocation of the other (the ‘Allies’), but also the reconstitution of a new pair of opposing blocs (East and West). This is why the present situation implies, under the pressure of the crisis and military tensions, a tendency towards the re-formation of two new imperialist blocs”.

However, the OT had already pointed out that

“The constitution of imperialist blocs is not the origin of militarism and imperialism. The opposite is true: the formation of these blocs is only the extreme consequence (which at certain moments can aggravate the causes), an expression (and not the only one), of decadent capitalism's plunge into militarism and war.

In a sense, the formation of blocs is to imperialism as Stalinism is to state capitalism. Just as the end of Stalinism does not mean the end of the historical tendency towards state capitalism, of which it was one manifestation, so the present disappearance of imperialist blocs does not imply the slightest calling into question of imperialism's grip on social life”. And it goes on to say that in the absence of blocs, imperialist antagonisms will take on a new, chaotic, but no less bloody character: “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”.

This scenario has been amply demonstrated by the subsequent wars in the Balkans, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the war in Syria, numerous conflicts in Africa, and so on; in particular, the attempts of the US policeman to maintain a minimum of order would become a major factor in the exacerbation of chaos, as we have seen in the Middle East in particular.  

Of course, there is a major limitation in the analysis put forward in the Orientation Text on militarism, published at the beginning of the 1990s. While it correctly demonstrates the inability of new contenders such as Germany and Japan to form a new bloc opposed to the US, it does not predict the rise of China and its capacity to mount a major challenge to US domination. But does this invalidate the OT’s conclusion that the tendency towards the formation of new blocs will not be on the agenda for an indefinite period?

To answer this question, it is necessary to be clear about what the ICC is really saying about the Chinese challenge to the US. According to comrade Steinklopfer,

“In the present analysis of the organisation, however, China is and can never become a serious global challenger of the US, and this because its economic and technological development as seen as a ‘product of decomposition’. According to this interpretation, China cannot be or become any more than a semi-developed country unable to keep pace with the old centres of capitalism in North America, Europe or Japan. Does this interpretation not imply that the idea, if not of a stop to the development of the productive forces – which we rightly always ruled out as a characteristic of decadent capitalism – then at least something falling not far short of this is now being postulated by the organisation for the final phase of decadence? As the attentive reader will notice, the 24th Congress condemns not only the idea of a global Chinese imperialist challenge as amounting to a putting in question of the theoretical analysis of decomposition – the very idea that China has enforced its competitiveness at the expense of its rivals is dismissed as an expressed of my alleged illusions in the good health of Chinese capitalism”.

It’s not at all the case that the organisation’s position is that China “can never become a serious global challenger of the US”. Despite being late in recognising the significance of the rise of China, for some years now the ICC has been insisting that US imperialist strategy – certainly since the Obama years, through the Trump presidency and continuing under Biden– is based on the understanding that its main rival is China, both on the economic and the military level. The report on imperialist tensions published in the wake of the Ukraine war[7] develops the argument that, behind the trap the US has laid for Russia in Ukraine, behind the attempt to bleed Russia dry, the real target of US imperialism is China; and it goes on to talk at some length about the growing “polarisation” between the US and China as a central factor in global imperialist rivalries. But it is an error – and one which we think comrade Steinklopfer falls into - to confuse this process of polarisation, in which US-Chinese rivalries are increasingly taking centre stage in world events, with the actual formation of military blocs, which would imply the development of stable alliances in which one power is able to exert discipline over its “allies”. As we have said, there have been claims within the proletarian milieu that the Ukraine war has marked a significant step in the march towards new military blocs, but in reality we have seen new evidence of the instability of existing alliances:

• While the US has enjoyed a certain success in reinvigorating NATO under its leadership, it has not ended the urge of countries like Germany and France towards taking an independent line with regard to Russia, as can be seen by attempts at separate negotiations, reluctance to impose bans on the import of Russian energy, and above all a revival both of the EU military force and a huge increase in Germany’s defence budget – a double-edged sword that could go against US interests in the longer term; meanwhile, NATO member Turkey has very clearly been playing its own game in the situation, as witness the deal it brokered between Ukraine and Russia to allow grain supplies to be shipped from Ukrainian ports.
• China’s “support” for Russia has been extremely low-key despite Russia’s pleas for economic and military aid. No doubt the Chinese ruling class are aware that Russia has fallen into America’s trap and know that a weakened Russia would constitute a huge burden rather than a useful “partner”.
• A number of countries have maintained an independent stance towards the call to isolate Russia, notably India and a series of countries in South America and Africa.

We should also point out, in response to the charge that the ICC “underestimates the growing danger of direct military confrontations between the big powers”, the report also firmly denies that the non-existence of military blocs makes the world a safer place, on the contrary:

“The absence of blocs paradoxically makes the situation more dangerous insofar as conflicts are characterised by greater unpredictability: ‘By announcing that he was placing his deterrent force on alert, Russian President Vladimir Putin forced all the staffs to update their doctrines, most often inherited from the Cold War. The certainty of mutual annihilation - whose acronym in English MAD means ‘mad’ - is no longer enough to exclude the hypothesis of tactical nuclear strikes, supposedly limited. At the risk of an uncontrolled escalation’ (Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2022, p.1). Indeed, paradoxically, it can be argued that grouping in blocks limited the possibilities of slippage

 - because of the bloc discipline;

 - because of the need to inflict a decisive defeat on the world proletariat in the centres of capitalism beforehand (see the analysis of the historical course in the 1980s).

Thus, even if there is currently no prospect of the constitution of blocs or of a third world war, at the same time the situation is characterised by a greater danger, linked to the intensification of the every man for himself and to growing irrationality: the unpredictability of the development of confrontations, the possibilities of their getting out of hand, which is stronger than in the 1950s to 1980s, mark the phase of decomposition and constitute one of the particularly worrying dimensions of this qualitative acceleration of militarism”.

The danger sketched here is not one in which the bourgeoisie is able to consciously march humanity towards a third world war between blocs, aiming at the conquest of the markets and resources of rival powers. This would imply that one of the key premises of decomposition – the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to offer a perspective to humanity, however barbaric – had been taken out of the equation. Rather it would be the ultimate expression of the spread of irrationality and chaos which are so central to the phase of decomposition. And in a sense Steinklopfer himself acknowledges this, when he says, later on in the text, that an irreversible spiral of destruction could take place even without the formation of blocs: “It is of the highest political importance to overcome any schematic, one-sided approach of making the existence of imperialist blocs a precondition for military clashes between the great powers in the present situation”, and he goes on to argue that the very attempt to prevent the formation of new blocs could make a third world war more likely. America’s provocation of Russia is certainly part of an effort to prevent the formation of a new bloc between Russia and China and it could indeed escalate in unforeseeable ways if a desperate Russia decided to take the suicidal path of using its nuclear armoury. But that would be the clearest expression of the warning contained in the Theses that the development of decomposition can compromise humanity’s future even without a general mobilisation of society for world war.

No doubt comrade Steinklopfer will point to a prescient passage in his text (written before the war in Ukraine) where he says that

“The new quality of the phase of decomposition consists, at this level, in the fact that all of the already existing contradictions of a declining mode of production are exacerbated to the hilt. This goes for the tendency of each against all which, most certainly, is exacerbated with decomposition. But the tendency towards wars between the major powers, and thus towards world war, is also exacerbated, as are all the tensions generated by the moves towards the formation of new imperialist blocs and by the moves to foil them. The failure to understand this leads us today to gravely underestimate the danger of war, in particular emerging from the attempts of the United States to use its still existing military superiority against China in order to halt the rise of the latter, just as we are seriously underestimating the danger of military clashes between NATO and Russia (this latter conflict, in the short term at least, being potentially even more dangerous than the Sino-American one since it contains a greater risk of leading to thermo-nuclear warfare)”.

It's certainly true that the ICC initially underestimated the imminence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just as we were late in identifying the Machiavellian manoeuvres of the US which were designed to lure Russia into this trap. But in our view, this was not a refutation of our underlying theoretical framework, but rather the result of a failure to apply it consistently. After all, we had already seen the Covid-19 pandemic as evidence for a new and very serious acceleration of capitalist decomposition, and the Ukraine war has fully confirmed this judgment, showing that the process of decomposition is not simply a slow and gradual descent into the abyss, but will be punctuated by moments of severe intensification and acceleration, such as we are living through today.

Finally, we should make it clear that our view that the rise of China was only possible as a result of decomposition, and of the dissolution of the blocs in particular, does not imply that there has been a “stop to the development of the productive forces” preventing China becoming a serious rival to the US. Rather, China’s development is a shining example of what, following Marx, we have described as “growth as decay”[8], a process where the very amassing of productive forces brings with it new threats to humanity’s future: through ecological devastation, the “production” of pandemics and the sharpening of military antagonisms. Not only is Chinese growth a result of decomposition, it has become a powerful factor in its acceleration. Arguing, as comrade Steinklopfer does, that it has taken place “despite decomposition” removes an understanding of China’s rise from our general framework of analysis.

On the class struggle

When we come to the assessment of the current state of the class struggle, we again have to spend some time in our response insisting that comrade Steinklopfer’s portrayal of our position is not at all accurate.

• The comrade repeats the argument that we no longer consider the proletariat’s lack of perspective as a factor in the retreat of the class struggle: “It was already striking in the resolution of the 23rd Congress that the problem of the weakness, soon becoming an absence of a proletarian revolutionary perspective, is not put forward as central in explaining the problems of the workers’ struggles during the 1980s”. We already answered this in our previous published reply to Steinklopfer’s article on the 23rd Congress: “comrade Steinklopfer suggests that the resolution on the balance of forces from the 23rd Congress is no longer concerned with the problem of revolutionary perspective, and that this factor has disappeared from our understanding of the causes (and consequences) of decomposition. In fact, the question of the politicisation of the class struggle and the bourgeoisie’s efforts to prevent its development is at the heart of the resolution”[9]. It could hardly be otherwise because the whole basis of the Theses on Decomposition is the argument that if the capitalist world is in a state of agony and disintegration, it is above all because neither of the two major classes in society is able to offer a perspective for the future of humanity.
• Steinklopfer is similarly wrong when he argues that the ICC is now pinning its hopes on a simple increase in combativity, a kind of automatic leap to revolutionary consciousness pushed by the crisis, a councilist or economist view which neglects the role of revolutionary theory (and thus the revolutionary organisation). But we have never denied the necessity for struggles to politicise and the key role of the political organisations in this development, nor the negative weight of the organic break and the separation of the political organisations from the class. It’s certainly true that no revolutionary organisation is immune from making concessions to councilist, economist, or immediatist errors, but we consider that when such errors do occur, they are at variance with our fundamental analytical framework, which is what gives us the capacity to criticise and overcome them[10].

On the other hand, we considered that Steinklopfer’s seeming dismissal of the central importance of the defensive struggle of the working class against the impact of the economic crisis – explicitly affirmed in the concluding section of the Theses on Decomposition as a vital antidote to being engulfed in the process of social putrefaction – was opening the door to modernist ideas. Not in the explicit sense of those who call on workers to abandon their defensive struggles or who demand the immediate self-negation of the proletariat in the revolutionary process. The comrade in his recent text clearly asserts that he considers the defensive struggles to be indispensable to the future recovery of class identity and a revolutionary perspective. The problem lies in the tendency to separate the economic dimension of the struggle from its political dimension and thus not to recognise the implicitly political element in even the "smallest” expression of class resistance. In his previous text, there seemed to be a clear expression of this separation between the political/theoretical dimension in the apparent view that the theoretical contribution of the revolutionary organisation could of itself compensate for the missing political dimension in the day-to-day defensive struggle, a view which we criticised as verging on substitutionism[11]. In the new contribution Steinklopfer has clarified that the development of the theoretical dimension can’t be the work of a minority alone but ultimately has to be the work of millions of proletarians. Well and good, but then the comrade claims that it is the majority of the ICC which has forgotten this. “The organisation however, has perhaps forgotten that the proletarian masses are capable of participating in this work of theoretical reflection”. We have indeed not forgotten this. One of the reasons we accorded so much importance to the Indignados movement of 2011, for example, was that it was characterised by a very lively culture debate in the assemblies, where questions about the origins of the capitalist crisis and the future of society were raised and discussed as being just as relevant to the movement as decisions about immediate forms of action[12].

However, there is a very important component in the capacity of the working class “en masse” to reappropriate the theoretical dimension of its combat, and that is the process of “subterranean maturation”, by which we mean that, even in periods where the class as a whole is in retreat, a process of politicisation can still take place among a minority of the class, some of whom will of course gravitate towards the political organisations of the communist left. It is this often “hidden” aspect of politicisation in the class that will come to fruit in more widespread and massive class movements.

In the report on class struggle to the 24th ICC Congress[13], we pointed out that comrade Steinklopfer is either abandoning or undermining the concept of subterranean maturation by asserting that we are in fact seeing a process of “subterranean regression” in the working class. We argued that this ignores the reality of searching elements responding to the desperate state of capitalist society, despite the evident extreme difficulties in the class becoming aware of itself at a more general level the revolutionary organisation has the task of assisting these elements take their reflections further and understand all their implications on the theoretical and organisational levels. On the other hand, the concept of subterranean regression can only result in an underestimation of the importance of this work towards the searching minorities.

In the new text, the position of the comrade towards the notion of subterranean regression remains very unclear. On the one hand, it is neither defended nor repudiated. On the other hand, just before charging the ICC with forgetting that the proletarian masses are capable of reflection, he seems to edge back towards the notion of a dynamic of subterranean maturation: “Theoretical work is the task, not of revolutionaries alone, but of the working class as a whole. Since the process of the development of the proletariat is an uneven one, it is in particular the task of the more politicised layers of the proletariat to assume this task; minorities therefore, yes, but still potentially comprising millions of workers, and who, instead of substituting themselves for the whole, press forward to impulse and stimulate the rest. Revolutionaries, for their part, have the specific task of orienting and enriching this reflection to be accomplished by millions. This responsibility of revolutionaries is at the very least as important as that of intervening towards strike movements, for example”. What remains unclear in the comrade’s assessment is whether or not this potential for political maturation is something for the future or one which is already taking place, even on a very small scale.

On the question of defeats

What comrade Steinklopfer does continue to insist on in the new text is the importance of the set-backs, the political defeats, which the working class has been through since the initial resurgence of the class struggle in the late 60s, which ended the previous period of counter-revolution. In his view, the ICC’s majority is underestimating the depth of these defeats and this – along with our amnesia about the capacity of the masses for theoretical reflection - expresses a loss of confidence in the proletariat on our part: 

“This loss of confidence expresses itself in the rejection of any idea that the proletariat has suffered important political defeats in the decades which followed 1968. Lacking this confidence, we end up downplaying the importance of these very serious political setbacks, consoling ourselves with the daily defensive struggles as the main crucible of a way forward – in my eyes a significant concession to an ‘economistic’ approach to the class struggle such as was criticised by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of the 20th century. The understanding of an ‘undefeated proletariat’, which was a correct and very important insight in the 1970s and still in the 1980s, has become an article of faith, an empty dogma, preventing a serious, scientific analysis of the balance of forces”

Enumerating these defeats, the comrade in a proposed amendment to the resolution on the international situation from the 24th Congress refers to (a) the inability of the first international wave to develop the political aspect of the struggle, a potential announced in particular by the events of May-June 1968 in France (b) the impact of the collapse of the eastern bloc and the ensuing campaigns against communism and (c) the failure of the class to respond to the economic crisis of 2008 , a failure which paved the way for the rise of populism.

It is hardly sustainable that the ICC has rejected “any idea that the proletariat has suffered important political defeats in the decades which followed 1968”. Comrade Steinklopfer himself recognises that the very concept of decomposition is based on our recognition that the proletariat was not able to realise the revolutionary political potential contained in the workers’ struggles of the 70s and 80s; moreover, the understanding that the collapse of the eastern bloc initiated a profound retreat in class combativity and consciousness has been central to our analyses for the past thirty years; and we can certainly point to any number of important class movements which have been roundly defeated by the ruling class, from the mass strike in Poland in 1980 to the British miners in 1985, the Indignados in 2011, and so on (as Rosa Luxemburg famously insisted, the proletarian class struggle is the only form of war in which final victory can only be prepared by a series of defeats).

What the ICC rejects is not the reality or importance of particular defeats, failures or set-backs, but the idea that the ones that have occurred since the 1980s amount to a historic defeat comparable to what happened in the 20s and 30s, in which the working class in the main centres of capitalism has been reduced to the condition where it is ready to accept being marched off to war to “solve” the problems of the system. We don’t think this is an empty dogma but continues to have operational value, most importantly with regard to the current war in Ukraine, where the bourgeoisie of the US and western Europe has been at extreme pains to avoid using “boots on the ground”, let alone any direct mobilisation of the proletarian masses in the conflict between NATO and Russia.

Certainly, in the period of decomposition, we cannot see such a historic defeat in the same way as we did in the 1968-89 period, where it would have been predicated on the bourgeoisie emerging victorious from a decisive and direct confrontation between the classes. In the period of decomposition, there is a very real danger that the proletariat will be progressively undermined by the disintegration of society without even mounting a major challenge to the bourgeoisie. And revolutionaries have to constantly assess whether this “point of no return” has been reached. In our view, the continuing signs of class resistance to the onslaught on living standards (eg in 2019 and again today, notably in Britain at the time of writing) is one sign that we are not there yet; another is the emergence of searching minorities around the world.

In contrast, comrade Steinklopfer seems to be regressing to the approach that was valid in the previous period when the concept of the historic course was fully applicable, but which no longer hold true in the phase of decomposition. Without specifying what has changed and what remains the same in the new phase, the comrade seems to be drifting towards the view that the working class has been through a defeat on such a significant historical level that the course towards world war has been reopened. He does not say what consequences this might have, particularly for the activity of the revolutionary organisation, and he puts forward many caveats and qualifications: “Not only is the proletariat not wanting to be marched off to such a war, the bourgeoisie itself does not intend to march anyone off into a third world war”.

Ambiguities of this kind, as we have noted, proliferate throughout the text and this is why we don’t think that that the comrade’s current analysis offers a way forward for the organisation.

Amos