In July of this year, we discovered that the Internationalist Perspectives group and the Forum for the Communist Left, “Controverses”[1] had instigated a "Conference" that had taken place at the end of May, bringing together some twenty participants, both individuals and representatives of political groups who, according to the organisers, belong to the "Internationalist Left" or to "Left Communism". The meeting was held almost secretly, on the basis of exclusive invitations with the participants selected by the organisers, bizarrely, for "strictly financial reasons". Here is what looks like a meeting of conspirators, but a conspiracy against whom and to what end?

Since its foundation and in line with the policy of the Communist Left, the ICC has always been a staunch advocate of discussion between revolutionary groups with a view to confronting and clarifying positions or adopting common positions faced with the development of the class struggle: “With its still modest means, the International Communist Current has committed itself to the long and difficult task of regrouping revolutionaries internationally around a clear and coherent programme. Turning its back on the monolithism of the sects, it calls upon the communists of all countries to become aware of the immense responsibilities which they have, to abandon the false quarrels which separate them, to surmount the deceptive divisions which the old world has imposed on them. (…)  The most conscious fraction of the class, must show it the way forward by taking as their slogan: ‘Revolutionaries of all countries, unite!’[2]”.

Particularly following a proposal by the Internationalism group (in the United States) in 1972 to set up an international correspondence, the very constitution of the ICC was the product of a long process of open political confrontation between various groups on questions central to the development of proletarian struggle. Subsequently, the leading role played by the ICC in the organisation and holding of conferences of groups of the Communist Left convened by the Battaglia Comunista group in the years 1978-1980, and more recently in the publication of a "Joint Declaration by Groups of the International Communist Left on the War in Ukraine" in 2022, bear witness to the importance the ICC attaches to discussion between revolutionaries.

However, for the ICC, it has always been fundamental that these discussions are held in public, on a clear political basis of class positions shared between the invited organisations, and with well-established stated objectives that will help to contribute to the development of class consciousness: "The life of revolutionary groups, their discussions and disagreements are part of the process whereby consciousness develops in the working class; this is why we are radically opposed to any policy of ‘hidden discussions’ or ‘secret agreements’." [3]

Not only was this Brussels meeting organised "in secret", it also lacked any militant ambition whatsoever. If there was a "convergence of objectives" (as the organisers put it) between the participants, it was certainly not that of taking a stand as revolutionary militants on the crucial challenges now facing the working class: there was no joint declaration by these so-called "internationalists" taking a stand on a major historical event such as the war in Ukraine, the destruction and crisis of the climate or growing economic destabilisation. The bourgeoisie was clearer and more explicit at the Davos summit in early 2023 than these people! Nor is any position taken on the recent wave of struggles and its perspectives. How can elements who proclaim themselves to be "communists" remain silent on the issues of the day? For the ICC, militant concerns are an inescapable component for a conference of communists, insofar as it always aims to achieve a greater understanding of the world situation, of the crisis into which world capitalism has sunk, and the working class political perspective, as well as the tasks that this entails for revolutionary groups.

And what about the dynamics of the discussions? We are told that the participants met "to talk and listen to each other" and that they "were exposed to different ideas". However, no joint text was published before the conference to announce and prepare its objectives, or afterwards to present the fruits of its labours. Yet, for revolutionaries, the deepening of positions is a living process which implies a frank discussion of positions and the political confrontation of disagreements, insofar as this dynamic is part of the process of pushing forward the consciousness developing within the working class. The mere juxtaposition of showy analyses at the Brussels meeting, as well as the conscious avoidance of any confrontation of positions, reveal that it was no more than a trading of positions, a talking shop, each with their own hobby horse, one of those academic symposia of learned boffins, waxing in "theory". In short, it was the opposite of the tradition of political confrontation advocated by the Communist Left with the aim of clarifying political positions and the questions at stake in the class struggle.

In reality, a fruitful political confrontation is only possible if the political bases of the meeting are coherent and clear. For the ICC, while there is indeed "the fundamental necessity of working towards regroupment, it also warns against rushing into anything. We must resist any regroupment on the basis of sentiment and insist on the need to base regroupment on the indispensable coherence of programmatic positions as a first condition for regroupment"[4]. That "Resistance, a constant critical questioning of the Capitalist Mode of Production" was the basic theme of the meeting could only give rise to considerable confusion and disagreement over the framework for understanding the current situation of capitalism (whether it is in decline and, if so, since when?) This is a key to defending the orientations for the class struggle, as well as for understanding the general situation and the capabilities of the working class, including its means of organisation. With regard to this last question - dealing with the importance of revolutionaries, their role and their organisation - this meeting ignored it completely.

Moreover, on closer examination, there is clear common ground between most of the participants, which no doubt they would prefer to keep under wraps: it is the conviction that marxism and the acquisitions of the Communist Left over the last hundred years are obsolete and must be "supplemented" or even "surpassed" by recourse to various anarcho-councilist, modernist or radical ecologist theories. That's why they call themselves "pro-revolutionaries", seeing themselves as a kind of "a friendly association for the spreading the idea of revolution" and no longer as militants and organisations produced by the historic struggle of the working class. As a result, their unstated but real aim is to throw away the lessons of the last 55 years of workers' struggles and the results of a hundred years of fighting by the internationalist Communist Left, and to call into question its organisational achievements: the militant conception of the communist political organisation as the product of the historical struggle of the proletariat and as the political vanguard in the struggle, in favour of a vision of a circle of intellectuals reflecting on the future of humanity and dreaming of having a revolutionary impact on it.

In short, this meeting was indeed a "conspiracy" aimed at discrediting and devaluing the positions and struggles of the internationalist Communist Left, by replacing its "obsolete" political and organisational acquisitions with theoretical smoke and mirrors and organisational self-interest of a so-called "pro-revolutionary" pole. In the perspective of such destructive "revisionism", it was by no means an oversight or a "lack of space" or "funding", as they suggest, that the promoters chose not to invite the ICC to this conference. On the contrary, they did so deliberately and consciously: the aim being to avoid the political confrontation that the ICC would inevitably have sought with the denunciation of this clear deception, since the main objective of this "Potemkin" conference, the one on which most of the participants will fully agree, is not to clarify and deepen the positions, but rather to put forward a phoney left communism, to deploy an enticing decoy serving above all to mislead those seeking a revolutionary perspective. In this way, the conference has helped to build a "cordon sanitaire" to prevent them from engaging with the positions of the Communist Left and the ICC in particular. This deception is the opposite of an instrument for the class struggle; it is a barrier aimed at obstructing the development and the strengthening of the revolutionary vanguard.

 

The ICC, 15 September 2023

The 2nd Bulletin of discussion between groups of the communist left in response to the war in Ukraine.

At the end of July, refugees looking like skeletons, men, women and children dying of thirst, were picked up at the Libyan border by coastguards. A little further on, in the Saharan desert, several corpses were found, including a mother and her little girl. Unbearable images! The father, who was already waiting for them on the spot, devastated by the news of their deaths, expressed his sorrow that he wanted "a future for his daughter". A terrible event among thousands of others, in a capitalist world with no prospects.

Accelerating decomposition leads to an explosion in the number of migrants

A few weeks earlier, on 14 July, the nth makeshift boat from Libya with 750 people on board sank after a failed pushback by the Greek coastguard [1]. In the face of these horrors, the media coverage was scant. In contrast, just eight days later, the disappearance of 5 VIP tourists on a trip to visit the wreck of the Titanic attracted intense media coverage. This contrast says a lot about the policies of governments, which take advantage of a dramatic news item to make people forget the corpses of drowned migrants in the Mediterranean.

The worsening global situation is leading to increasingly long, complex and dangerous migrations. Today, there are a record 110 million refugees in the world, as well as an increasing number of victims, particularly in the Mediterranean, where the situation is one of the worst in the world, with more than 2,000 victims since the beginning of 2023. And the more migrants there are, the less access they have to Western countries. This is an inhuman policy that is getting much tougher, effectively banning any right to exile.

In the face of increasing barbarity, instability and chaos around the world, governments are no longer content simply to present themselves as impregnable fortresses, surrounded by miles of barbed wire and high walls. They have equipped themselves with surveillance technologies and spying tools designed to block access to borders. The worst victims are probably migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Horn of Africa. Already victims of capitalist logic with its wars, armed criminal gangs, insecurity, climate change producing drought and famine, these populations are forced to flee as a last resort.  

The criminal policies of the great democratic powers

While bankrupt capitalism tends to drag humanity down into rubble and absolute poverty, the destructive effects of the crisis, which have had a greater impact on peripheral countries for decades, are now having a greater impact on Western countries, which are drastically refusing the slightest "useless mouth". Only refugees from the Ukraine, for the purposes of war propaganda, or the richest and most highly educated, who are likely to bolster a few sectors "under pressure", working under arduous conditions and for pitiful wages, can hope, after ubiquitous administrative hassles, for a hypothetical asylum in exchange for relentless exploitation. But for the majority of the "starving", the EU has become an inaccessible and even deadly destination.

At the same time, the democratic countries have stepped up their legal arsenal, with unprecedented brutality, to act as a deterrent [2], further criminalising migrants and the NGOs that come to the aid of the shipwrecked. [3]

And to delegate the dirty work and avoid getting their hands too dirty, the EU member states have, above all, added to their arsenal by extending their own borders, giving ‘third party’ countries on the shores of the Mediterranean a mandate to detain migrants, delegating the maintenance of law and order to remote camps outside European territory and away from the cameras. In return for a fee, the camps are managed "offshore", where abuse, human trafficking and torture are legion, and where living conditions are often akin to the most squalid prison environment. This is a policy that has been fully endorsed by the EU, in particular through the funding of the Frontex Agency, enabling the coastguards of these third party countries to carry out "pushbacks", even though these practices are "illegal" under Western law.

True to the EU's unacknowledged instructions, the Tunisian authorities, for example, as the tragedies in the Sahara have shown, have not hesitated to deliberately abandon refugees in the desert without food or water so that they can die. A monstrous policy which, in addition to the blackmail practised by third party countries for the occasion, uses migrants as a mere bargaining chip. The EU's de facto complicity with these states and their heavy-handed methods is aimed at preventing asylum applications: either by keeping would-be exiles out of the loop by blocking the borders or condemning them to death in the Mediterranean (or the desert) if they resign themselves to leaving in the end. And that's exactly what's happening!

The bourgeois states, under their democratic cloak, are veritable murderers! Even the most basic right to asylum is flouted, even for children who have been persecuted or are in distress, even for people who have been mistreated or mutilated. It's enough to make you sick. Especially when, following EU orders, migrants are parked in camps against their will by guards from the Turkish, Libyan or Egyptian states, and so on.

The roundabout, cynical way in which the shipwrecked are left to die, and the increasing number of shipwrecks and corpses, testify not only to the hypocrisy and cynicism of the EU, but also and above all to its criminal practices and its desire to liquidate "undesirables" in cold blood.

Xenophobia and division: two weapons of the bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie's despicable, horrific and repulsive practices are not confined to driving away or eliminating those it does not accept on its soil. It cultivates fears, exploiting the worst xenophobic reflexes within the population, pitting workers against each other, pitting local populations against migrants, presented as dangerous competitors who have come to "take their place" and "worsen their living conditions". This is already beginning in the countries used as outsourcing resources: "By designating sub-Saharan migration as ‘a criminal plan to change the composition of the demographic landscape in Tunisia’, the Tunisian Head of State has made every sub-Saharan migrant a presumed accomplice in this alleged plot" [4]. Such policies encourage aggression, persecution and other forms of violence against migrants, as has happened on numerous occasions in the Tunisian port city of Sfax, which has rapidly become a veritable Calvary for exiles.

And for those migrants who miraculously arrive in Western countries, the suffering continues in the form of exclusion, racist prejudice conveyed by extreme right-wing theories, exploited by the state in a despicable manner on the one hand, but also and above all by leftist "anti-racist" propaganda of the "defence of rights", slyly opposing workers and immigrants, seeking to rot people's consciences to the detriment of a genuine common workers' struggle. The working class must absolutely reject all democratic prejudices, just as it must firmly reject "the traps set by the bourgeoisie around single-issue struggles (to save the environment, against racial oppression, feminism, etc) which divert it from its own class terrain" [5].

The only real support that workers can give to persecuted migrants is to fight against the degradation of their living conditions and the growing barbarity of this system, in the longer term affirming the only viable historical project: overthrowing and destroying capitalism to replace it with a society without exploitation.

WH (1 September, 2023)

[1] See the article : Shipwreck of migrants in the Mediterranean: capitalism kills to defend its borders [4] ICConline 27 July, 2023.

[2] In the UK, for example, which is no longer a member of Frontex, the Illegal Immigration Bill prohibits illegal immigrants from applying for asylum or any other protection under their fundamental rights, regardless of the seriousness of the situation in which they find themselves. In addition, this law provides for their deportation to another country (such as Rwanda), with no guarantee that they will be able to obtain the protection they need (UNHCR sources).

[3] Italy, Greece and Malta have launched administrative and criminal investigations against NGOs that save lives. Italy has already detained and imposed financial penalties

[4]  See the article on the website “le Monde.fr” of 29 June : ‘Tunisie : dans la ville portuaire de Sfax, l’espoir blessé des migrants subsahariens’

[5] Resolution on the International Situation, 25th ICC Congress [5], International Review 170.

With the new outbreak of barbarism in Israel/Palestine, we are obliged to change the focus of this public meeting, which had intended to concentrate on the ecological crisis. Coming in the wake of the war in Ukraine, this new conflict confirms once again that war plays a central role in what we have called the “whirlwind effect” – the accelerating interaction of all the different expressions of capitalist decomposition, posing a growing threat to the very survival of humanity. It is vital for revolutionaries to put forward a clear internationalist position against all the imperialist confrontations spreading across the globe. 

This does not imply any underestimation of the fact that the capitalist destruction of nature is an integral part of this threat. Indeed, the intensification of war and militarism can only worsen the ecological crisis, just as the deepening of the latter can only fuel the increasingly chaotic military rivalries.

Neither does it mean that all hope for the future is lost. The return of the class struggle that began in Britain over a year ago, and which is now making its mark in the USA, shows that the working class is not defeated and that its resistance against exploitation contains the seeds of the revolutionary overthrow of the present world order.

All these questions are up for discussion at the forthcoming meeting.

DATE: Saturday 21st October, 2pm to 5pm UK time

VENUE: The Calthorpe Arms, 252 Grays Inn Rd, London WC1X 8JR

It will also be possible to participate in this meeting online. Please write to [email protected] [6] for details.