1) The fight against opportunism, a vital challenge for the revolution
2) The Communist Left and the Current Wars:
Two years on from the Joint Statement of the Communist Left on the war in Ukraine [1]
Joint statement of groups of the international communist left about the war in Ukraine [2]
Israel/Gaza: Call from the communist left: down with the massacres, no support to any imperialist camp! No to pacifist illusions! For proletarian internationalism! [3]
3) The struggle against imperialist war can only be waged with the positions of the Communist Left [4]
4) The weaknesses of the ICT:
The ICT and the No War But the Class War initiative: an opportunist bluff which weakens the Communist Left [5]
How the ICT denies the lessons of Marxism on the fight against political parasitism [6]
Gaizka: Should an adventurer be publicly exposed? [7]
On the historical origins of the ICT’s opportunism
International Review 172 - Spring 2024pdf
Wars are proliferating and plunging more and more regions of the world into the most appalling barbarity: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Ukraine, Gaza... behind this growing list of countries at war, millions of people are falling, going hungry or trying to flee. Tomorrow, it could be the turn of Kosovo or Taiwan.
Gangsterism also strikes and ravages. In northern Mexico, Venezuela and Haiti, the drugs and prostitution trade is flourishing, leaving a sinister trail of mass murder and rape in its wake.
Poverty is growing everywhere. In a country like the UK, a large proportion of the population no longer has access to dental care. A terrible expression has appeared in the press to describe these people, who number in their millions: "the toothless".
To put it in a nutshell: capitalism threatens the survival of humanity. If the working class does not succeed in overthrowing capitalism, this decadent system will descend into barbarism and death. The only alternative is world proletarian revolution. To achieve this, our class must develop its struggles, its organisation and its consciousness on an international scale.
Since the summer of 2022, under the blows of the economic crisis, the working class has begun to react. The strikes that broke out in the United Kingdom heralded the return of the proletariat to the terrain of struggle. In two years, strikes described by the media as "historic" have taken place in France, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Iceland, Bangladesh... But this is only the beginning, the first step. The proletariat faces a very long road to revolution. It will have to learn through struggle how to unite and organise, how to spot the traps set by the bourgeoisie, how to identify its "false friends": the trade unions and the organisations of the left of capital, which will do everything they can to sabotage the revolutionary process from the "inside". The bourgeoisie is a Machiavellian class; it is even the most intelligent ruling class in history. To preserve its privileges, it will be prepared to commit any crime, any manipulation, any lie. The working class will have to raise its level of consciousness and organisation to match this adversary. What's more, it will have to raise its level of consciousness and organisation to the level of the new society to be established, a world society which, in time, will be classless and borderless, without exploitation or competition, without a state. The proletarian revolution is undoubtedly the highest step humanity has ever taken.
"The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves" (Karl Marx, Statutes of the International Workingmen's Association, 1864).
"In its struggle against the united power of the possessing classes, the proletariat can only act as a class by constituting itself into a political party [...]. This constitution of the proletariat as a political party is indispensable to ensure the triumph of the Social Revolution and its supreme end: the abolition of classes". (Idem).
Since then, this formulation has been made more precise through the historic experience of the proletariat which has shown that the political party will take the form of a minority, the party of the vanguard of the class.
The fundamental difficulty of the socialist revolution lies in this complex and contradictory situation: on the one hand, the revolution can only be realised as the conscious action of the great majority of the working class; on the other hand, this realisation comes up against the conditions imposed on the workers in capitalist society, conditions which constantly prevent and destroy the workers' realisation of their historic revolutionary mission. Left to their own internal development, workers' struggles against the conditions of capitalist exploitation can lead at most to explosions of revolt, reactions which are absolutely insufficient for social transformation. To go beyond the experiences of particular struggles, to accumulate the historical experience of the proletariat, to defend and propagate awareness of the aims of the movement, is the crucial political role of the revolutionary party. The party draws its theoretical substance, not from the contingencies and particularism of the economic position of the workers, but from the movement of historical possibilities and necessities. Only the intervention of this factor enables the class to move from revolt to revolution. The party is the indispensable weapon of the proletariat for the final victory, for the success of its revolution.
For the moment, this party cannot exist: the working class is too far from a revolutionary process, its consciousness and its capacity to organise are too weak. The most determined and clearest fraction of the proletariat, that which is conscious of its general and historical aims, can only be grouped together in the form of small revolutionary organisations.
These small revolutionary organisations nevertheless have an immense and crucial role to play in the future. They must organise themselves on the basis of the historical interests of the proletariat in order to give a clear political orientation to the movement and actively promote the development of class consciousness. They must also work now to prepare the foundation of the future party. To do this, they must constantly check the truth of their analyses in the face of changing events, debate and develop their positions, draw essential lessons from the history of the workers' movement, fight against the penetration of the dominant ideology, and defend the forces and positions around which the future party will be built.
History has shown how difficult it is to build a party that lives up to its responsibilities, a task that requires many and varied efforts. Above all, it requires the greatest possible clarity on programmatic issues and on the principles of organisational functioning, a clarity that is necessarily based on all the past experience of the workers' movement and its political organisations.
At every stage in the history of the workers' movement, the Left has distinguished itself as the best representative of this clarity, making a decisive contribution to the future of the struggle. "It was the Left that ensured continuity between the First and Second Internationals through the Marxist current, in opposition to the Proudhonian, Bakuninist, Blanquist and other corporatist currents. Between the Second and Third Internationals, it was again the Left, which led the fight first against reformist tendencies and then against the 'social-patriots', which ensured continuity during the First World War by forming the Communist International. From the Third International, it was still the Left, and in particular the Italian and German Lefts, which took up and developed the revolutionary gains trampled underfoot by the social-democratic and Stalinist counter-revolution". ("The continuity of the political organisations of the proletariat: the class nature of social democracy", International Review No. 50).
The world communist party, which will be in the vanguard of tomorrow's proletarian revolution, will have to draw on the experience and thinking of all these left currents, of all this historical parentage. It is precisely by being rooted in this tradition, by always striving to respect the essential principles of these currents that, faced with the litmus test of the Second World War, the Communist Left was the only one to remain faithful to internationalism.
Groups of the Communist Left sprang up as early as 1920 in various countries (Russia, Germany, Italy, Holland, Great Britain, Belgium, etc.). They did not all reach the same level of clarity and coherence, and the majority of them were unable to resist the terrible capitalist counter-revolution. They disappeared as victims of the combined action of Stalinist and fascist repression, demoralisation and confusion. In the 1930s, only the most coherent groups managed to survive, and among them the Italian Communist Left was the clearest and most consistent. The Internationalisme group (publication of the Gauche Communiste de France, 1945-52), which grew out of the latter, achieved a critical and coherent synthesis of the widely dispersed work of the various groups of the Communist Left:
These positions of the Communist Left are the necessary starting point for the whole revolutionary process to come. As an expression of the historic struggle of the proletariat, its reappropriation by the working masses is the indispensable condition for its struggle to bring about a revolutionary solution to the hopeless crisis of world capitalism. The future world party, if it wants to make a real contribution to the communist revolution, will have to base its programme and its methods of action on the experience and heritage of the Communist Left.
We thus take up the words of our predecessors: "The historical continuity between the old and the new class party can only be achieved through the channel of the Fraction, whose historical function consists of taking political stock of experience, sifting through Marxist criticism the errors and inadequacies of yesterday's programme, extracting from experience the political principles which complete the old programme and are the condition for a progressive position of the new programme, an indispensable condition for the formation of the new party. At the same time as the Fraction is a place of ideological fermentation, the laboratory of the revolutionary programme in the period of retreat, it is also the camp where the cadres are forged, where the human material is formed, the militants of the future party". (L'Etincelle, paper of the GCF, n° 10, January 1946).
That's why, in response to the war in Ukraine, the ICC, together with Internationalist Voice and the Istituto Onorato Damen, launched a joint appeal to all the organisations of the Communist Left. Drawing on the legacy of the Zimmerwald conference, the ICC's aim with this appeal was not only to raise the internationalist banner but also, more generally, to defend the historical lineage, principles and functioning of the Communist Left. This Appeal was intended to be, and is, a milestone on the road to revolution and the Party. A milestone to prepare for the future.
This Common Appeal was rejected by the rest of the Communist Left. The various "International Communist Parties" (Programma Comunista, Il Partito Comunsita, Le Prolétaire/Il Comunista) ignored it out of claimed sectarianism. As for the second most important organisation of the Communist Left, the Internationalist Communist Tendency, it preferred the adventure of the No war but the class war committees to this call because, in its view, it was "necessary to look beyond the 'Communist Left'".
The refusal to work together with other groups of the Communist Left defending the historic principles of this current in favour of collaboration with the forces of the "marsh" (the confused zone between proletarian positions and those of the left of the bourgeoisie) has a name: opportunism. This policy is particularly dangerous because it entails the liquidation of all the organisational lessons of which the Communist Left claims to be the fruit. It turns its back on the main responsibility that falls to us, that of preparing the construction of a future party armed with the best of the tradition of the workers' movement, of the struggle of all its successive lefts.
This opportunist dynamic of the ICT leads it today to sweep aside the vital lessons of the struggle of the marxist current within the First international, against the deadly poison of political parasitism represented by the Bakunin tendency, in order to justify its opening up to the current parasitical groups. Worse still, it no longer hesitates to openly collude with an organisation that pursues a systematic policy of snitching, such as the International Group of the Communist Left (IGCL, ex-FICCI).
Opportunism, which has historically constituted the most serious danger for proletarian organisations, is an expression of the penetration of foreign, bourgeois and above all petty-bourgeois ideologies. It is distinguished by the fact that it tends to sacrifice the general and historical interests of the proletariat for the benefit of illusory immediate and circumstantial "successes". One of the driving forces of opportunism is impatience, which expresses the vision of a stratum of society condemned to impotence within itself and which has no future on the scale of history. "Opportunism wants to take account of social conditions that have not yet reached maturity. It wants 'immediate success'. Opportunism does not know how to wait, and that is why great events always seem unexpected to it", wrote Trotsky in 1905.
Opportunism is a deadly poison that constantly tries to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionary organisations. To resist it, therefore, we have to fight an equally permanent and determined battle, constantly sharpening the weapon of theory:
By shamelessly wallowing in opportunism today, by turning its back on the successive struggles of the revolutionary left wing since Marx and Engels, the ICT is following in a long tradition, one that has always led to disaster. It has pursued this calamitous policy because, until now, it has refused to criticise its original errors, thereby condemning itself to repeating the same opportunist approach over and over again, only worse. When it was founded in 1943, its ancestor, the Internationalist Communist Party (ICP), uncritically accepted into its ranks:
To prepare for the construction of the future party, an indispensable weapon for the success of the revolution, the fight against opportunism by the left wing must continue. This is what the publication of this set of articles introduced by the ICC proposes to do. This is an uncompromising political struggle taking place within the revolutionary camp. We therefore call on all our readers to connect with the historical roots of this struggle, to make this tradition and this defence of proletarian organisational principles their own, and to participate in this preparation for the future. We also call on the ICT to make its own this proletarian principle so well expounded by Rosa Luxemburg: "Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history” Luxemburg The Accumulation of Capital, an Anti-Critique, 1915.
Let's recall how, in 1903, Lenin humorously pointed out the ridiculous wounded pride of the future Mensheviks: "The circle spirit and the striking lack of political maturity, which cannot bear the fresh wind of a public debate, appears here in all clarity [...]. Imagine for a moment that such absurdity, that a quarrel such as the complaint of a ‘false accusation of opportunism’ could have arisen in the German party! The organisation and discipline of the proletariat have long since made it possible to forget this vexatious intellectualism [...]. Only the spirit of the most routine circle, with its logic: a punch in the jaw, or a hand to kiss, if you please, could have raised this crisis of hysteria, this vain quarrel and this split in the Party around a 'false accusation of opportunism'. (One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Chapter "Innocent victims of a False Accusation of Opportunism").
International Communist Current, March 2024
The indignation and concern felt by the working class faced with the proliferation of increasingly destructive imperialist wars is being expressed in small minorities seeking an internationalist response.
But what is internationalism? In the name of internationalism, the leftist groups - mainly the Trotskyists - ask us to choose a camp among the imperialist gangsters. For them, to choose Palestine in the name of the "national liberation of the peoples" would be the most internationalist answer! So, they sell us an “internationalism” which is its opposite, because internationalism means fighting against all imperialist camps, for the international class struggle, for the perspective of world revolution which alone can end war.
There are other views of internationalism: anarchists tend to reduce it to a rejection: rejection of armies, rejection of military service, rejection of wars in general. These visions do not go to the root of the problem, which is the decadence of capitalism and its dynamic of destruction of the planet and of all humanity.
It is therefore necessary, first, to clarify what internationalism is, drawing on the historical experience of the proletariat.
The struggle against war cannot be left to men of goodwill or peace-loving, wise politicians... the struggle against war is a class question. Only the working class bears with it the communist perspective, the force and the interests that allow it to put an end to war.
That is why we say in our Third International Manifesto "Of all the classes in society, the most affected and hardest hit by war is the proletariat. ‘Modern’ war is waged by a gigantic industrial machine which demands a great intensification of the exploitation of the proletariat. The proletariat is an international class that HAS NO HOMELAND, but war is the killing of workers for the homeland that exploits and oppresses them. The proletariat is the class of consciousness; war is irrational confrontation, the renunciation of all conscious thought and reflection. The proletariat has an interest in seeking the clearest truth; in wars the first casualty is truth, chained, gagged, suffocated by the lies of imperialist propaganda. The proletariat is the class of unity across barriers of language, religion, race or nationality; the deadly confrontation of war compels the tearing apart, the division, the confrontation between nations and populations".
Internationalism is the most consistent expression of the consciousness and historical interest of the proletariat.
We can find the foundation stone of internationalism in the Principles of Communism of 1847, where in point XIX, Friedrich Engels asks, “Is a revolution possible in one only country?” and his answer is clear: “No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilised peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has coordinated the social development of the civilised countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilised countries – that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany. It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.”
The Communist Manifesto reaffirms and deepens this principle, proclaiming “the proletariat has no fatherland, proletarians of the world unite!”
In the sixties of the 19th century, Marx and Engels combatted the pan-Slavism that opposed the international unity of the working class and argued that the support for certain national wars could accelerate the conditions for world revolution, but not in the name of a so-called “national right”. This was the case with the Civil War in US and the German / French war of 1870. As Lenin said in his pamphlet Socialism and War, written just before the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915: “The war of 1870 was a ‘progressive war’ like those of the French revolution, which while they undoubtedly brought with them all the elements of pillage and conquest, had the historic function of destroying or shaking feudalism and absolutism throughout the old Europe still founded on serfdom"[1].
The Second International faced a clear change in wars that increasingly took on an imperialist character. So, in 1900, in the Paris Congress, it adopted the position that: "the socialist deputies to Parliament in all countries are required to vote against all military and naval expenditure, and against colonial expeditions".
But the increasing gravity of imperialist tensions, expressing the starting point of the decadence of capitalism and the necessity for proletarian world revolution, raised the need to make internationalism not only a defensive position of rejection of war – a position in which the majority of the Second International tended to remain - but to make the fight against war the fight for the destruction of capitalism. That’s why in the Stuttgart Congress (1907), faced with a proposed resolution on war by August Bebel, formally correct but too timid and limited, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Martov proposed an amendment, which in the end was adopted, that insisted on the need “to profit in every way from the economic and political crisis to raise the people and so to precipitate the fall of capitalist rule"
By the same token the Extraordinary Congress of Basel (1912) denounced a possible European war as "criminal" and "reactionary" and declared that it could only "hasten the fall of capitalism by unfailingly provoking the proletarian revolution".
However, the majority of parties of the 2nd International “denounced war above all for its horrors and atrocities, because the proletariat provided the cannon fodder for the ruling class. The Ilnd International's anti-militarism was purely negative (…) In particular, the ban on voting war credits did not resolve the problem of the ‘defense of the country’ against the attack of an ‘aggressor nation’. This is the breach through which the pack of social-chauvinists and opportunists poured”[2]
Faced with the limitations of the majority position in the parties of the Second International, their confusions on the national question and even the colonialism of Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation in Britain, only the Left of the Second International, especially the Bolsheviks and Rosa Luxembourg, defended internationalism against imperialist war and were for world proletarian revolution. They made it clear that internationalism is the frontier that separates communists from all parties and organisations that defend capitalist war.
The response to the First World War made a clear demarcation between the internationalism of a small minority in the Social Democratic Parties against the majority chauvinism that destroyed the Second International. The internationalists regrouped in the Zimmerwald conferences that started in Septembe1915.
But Zimmerwald was only a point of departure because it also expressed huge confusion. The Zimmerwald movement was the emanation of the parties of the moribund 2nd International that had collapsed in 1914 and therefore brought together a completely heterogeneous range of forces, united only by a general rejection of the war, but lacking a real internationalist programme.
There were the advocates of an impossible return to a pre-World War I capitalism, who called for "peace" and wanted to confine the struggle to parliament, by abstaining or refusing to vote on war credits (Ledebour of the SPD). There were those who were simply pacifists; there was a wavering centrist wing (Trotsky, Spartacists) and, finally, the clear and determinate minority around Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Zimmerwald Left.
As our article in International Review 155 says: “in the context of Zimmerwald, the right was represented not by the ‘social chauvinists’, to use Lenin’s term, but by Kautsky and his consorts – all those who later formed the right wing of the USPD - whereas the left was made up of the Bolsheviks and the center by Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacus group. The process which led towards the revolution in Russia and Germany was marked precisely by the fact that a large part of the ‘centre’ was won over to the positions of the Bolsheviks”[3].
From the beginning, only the Bolsheviks put forward a genuine and consistent internationalist response defending three key points:
They led a stubborn and steadfast fight around these three points. They were aware of the confusion that reigned in the "Zimmerwald movement" and that this swampy terrain of eclecticism, of the coexistence of "fire and water", led to the disarmament of the anti-war struggle and the weakening of the maturing revolutionary perspective, with the workers in Russia at its head.
It’s true that Bolsheviks signed the compromise Zimmerwald Manifesto in 1915, but this did not mean the acceptance of this confusion, particularly the pacifist tone of the Manifesto, but a recognition that it could, by denouncing the social patriots to the whole working class, be a first step in the adoption of an intransigently internationalist line, leading towards a new International. By retaining their critiques of Zimmerwald centrism the Bolsheviks could continue the necessary process of decantation. Given the results of the Zimmerwald conference, the Bolsheviks adopted the following decisions:
- presenting a much clearer draft of the Manifesto than the adopted draft.
- creating their own press organ which regrouped the Left of Zimmerwald.
- waging an intransigent polemic against the different exponents of the right and centrist wing: Plekhanov, Martov and specially Kautsky’s centrism that was even more dangerous than open social-chauvinism.
Today the Internationalist Communist Tendency and certain parasitic groups pretend to be the followers of Zimmerwald. They put a lot of “likes” to Zimmerwald. However, its meaning has been deliberately obscured or even reversed by the ICT and parasitic elements disguised as internationalists. For the ICT the goal of Zimmerwald was supposedly aimed at regrouping as many as possible of those who were against the war as a practical means of organising the masses. “This is not the time for picking and choosing among those who oppose the war on the basis of a revolutionary programme. In the first place, just as before Zimmerwald, all revolutionary and internationalist energies are worth the effort of regroupment. But more than this, the example of France was significant with the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations (Comité pour la Reprise des Relations Internationales - CRRI), which led the most activity and was the heart of the workers’ opposition to the war. From its inception it regrouped revolutionary syndicalists, as well as militants of the Socialist Party, the section of the International which had failed. Indeed, the raison d'être of the CRRI was its opposition to the war and to the Sacred Union, to bring together different opponents of them, having come from syndicalism, socialism and anarchism”[4] .Clearly this distortion and contempt for the facts is aimed at justifying the opportunism of the No War But the Class War (NWBCW) enterprise[5]. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who despite being in a small minority insisted on the rejection of pacifism, the rejection of the attempt to resuscitate the Second International, and on the struggle for the world party. The guiding principle of the Bolsheviks was to develop a “line of work” for the working class in the epoch of imperialist wars, against the morass of centrist confusion, even if it meant, at the time, numerical isolation.
Zimmerwald was not a collection of “anti-war” elements, as the ICT and parasites claim, even if at the beginning it was still conceived as a grouping within the Social Democratic parties at a time when the latter were still the political reference point of the whole proletariat. The orientation taken by the Bolsheviks was the struggle to overcome this confusion and move towards the formation of the Third International. Zimmerwald was understood to be on a class terrain. But a process of decantation was nevertheless taking place which led the centrists into the counter-revolution, and therefore supporting their own national bourgeoisie, while the intransigent Left remained as the only internationalist proletarian current.
The combat of the Zimmerwald Left was validated in practice by the October proletarian Revolution in 1917 which made the internationalist slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war” into a reality. The immediate withdrawal by the new Soviet regime from the Entente imperialist alliance in the midst of the First World War, and the publication of the secret treaties on who would gain what in the event of their victory, sent shock waves through the world bourgeoisie, while the revolutionary upsurge of the European working class was given a tremendous impetus, reflected in the near success of the German revolution and the formation of the Communist International in 1919.
If the path of internationalism in the First World War was through the struggle of the Left against the opportunism of the social-chauvinists and centrists, the continuity with that path in the 20s and 30s was through the struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of the Communist International in the 20s and subsequently against that of the Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the 30s. The Comintern, because of the isolation and degeneration of the revolution in Russia, more and more capitulated to the social chauvinists of the disinterred Social Democracy, expressed in the policy of United Fronts and Workers’ Governments. The policy of the 3rd International became increasingly the extension of the interests of the Russian state in place of the needs of the international revolution, which contributed to the defeats of the latter in Germany, Britain, China. A policy that was consolidated in the Comintern’s adoption of the nationalist slogan of Socialism in One Country in 1928, and the complete capitulation of the Russian state to the game of world imperialism with the entry of Russia into the League of Nations in 1934.
The Communist Left was the first to oppose this tendency, particularly the tradition of the Italian Communist Left, that was eventually excluded from the Communist Party of Italy and the Communist International. It formed a Fraction in exile and subsequently an international Fraction of the Communist Left.
The defeat of the international revolutionary wave by 1928 opened a course toward another imperialist world war, and it was only the Communist Left which remained true to the internationalist struggle of the revolutionary proletariat, both in the lead-up the Second World War and during and after the war itself.
Bilan drew a clear line of demarcation against the Left Opposition around Trotsky on the key question of the defense of USSR, a position that helped drag the Trotskyist current into supporting the imperialist war:
"We consider that in the event of war the proletariat of all countries, including Russia, would have the duty of concentrating its forces with a view to transforming the imperialist war into a civil war. The participation of the USSR in a war of robbery would not alter its essential character and the proletarian state could only sink under the blows of the social contradictions which such participation would entail. The Bolshevik-Leninists leave the terrain of Marxism when they urge the proletariat to sacrifice its struggle for world revolution in exchange for a defence of the USSR" (Bilan nº 10, August 1934)
Nevertheless, the internationalist litmus test for the revolutionary groups and fractions who had been expelled from the degenerating Comintern was the war in Spain from 1936, where the conflict between the republican and fascist wings of the Spanish bourgeoisie became the terrain for a proxy battle between the contending imperialist powers Britain and France, Russia, Germany and Italy. Yet the Trotskyists who had been excluded from the Communist Parties notably for their attempts to defend internationalism, now, in the name of anti-fascism, defended ‘critically’ the republican side and thus betrayed the proletariat, which they encouraged to choose sides in this inter-bourgeois and inter-imperialist dress rehearsal for the Second World War.
Bilan had to combat this tendency to capitulation that was dragging down the proletarian groups. Its uncompromising loyalty to internationalism led it to a dramatic isolation: only small groups in Belgium or Mexico joined its fight.
However, the Communist Left itself wasn’t immune from the dangers of opportunism. A minority of the Italian Fraction broke with the latter and its internationalist principles and joined the anti-fascist war in Spain.
And the Second World War found the Italian Fraction in disarray, with its most notable representative, Vercesi, claiming that the proletariat had disappeared and the political struggle for internationalism was no longer viable. It was only with extreme difficulty - caught between the Gestapo and the resistance - that a part of the Italian Fraction managed to regroup in the South of France and proclaim the internationalist positions of the Communist Left, that is against both imperialist camps, whether “fascist” or “anti-fascist” in ideology.
Separately, in 1943, the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt) was formed in Northern Italy, after the overthrow of Mussolini, and continued the internationalist policy of the Communist Left. However, neglecting the critique of the opportunism of the Comintern by the Italian Fraction in exile, and ignoring the aim of learning the lessons of a period of defeat for the proletariat, including internationalist intransigence in front of the war in Spain, the PCInt returned to the policy of “going to the masses” and imagined that it could turn the Partisans in Italy, that is those anti-fascist forces working on behalf of allied imperialism, into genuine internationalists[6].
While the PCInt prematurely abandoned the necessary international fraction work against this opportunist drift, the Communist Left of France (Gauche Communiste de France, which published Internationalisme) resolutely continued the work of the Fraction, elaborated the positions that Bilan had begun to develop. The GCF clearly denounced the false opposition Fascism v Democracy which had been the banner of mobilisation for imperialist slaughter, while after the Second World War and in the face of the new imperialist configuration (the struggle between the USA and the USSR) it denounced the additional means of enlistment for war: the "national liberation" of the "oppressed peoples" (Vietnam, Palestine etc).
We can conclude that only the Communist Left has remained loyal to the proletariat by defending internationalism against the innumerable military massacres that have bloodied the planet since 1914.That is why in our Third International Manifesto we say “In serious historical situations such as far-reaching wars like the one in Ukraine, the proletariat can see who its friends are and who are its enemies. These enemies are not only the major figures such as Putin, Zelensky or Biden, but also the parties of the extreme right, right, left and extreme left, who, with a wide range of arguments, including pacifism, support and justify the war and the defense of one imperialist camp against another.
“The only political current that has survived the defeat of this revolutionary wave and maintained the militant defense of internationalist principle has been the Communist Left. In the thirties, it preserved this fundamental working class line during the Spanish war and the Sino-Japanese war while other political currents like the Stalinists, Trotskyists or Anarchists chose their imperialist camp that instigated these conflicts. The Communist Left maintained its internationalism during the Second World War while these other currents participated in the imperialist carnage that was dressed up as a fight between ‘fascism and anti-fascism’ and/or defence of the ‘Soviet’ Union” (Appeal to the Communist Left).
The critical historical continuity of the communist positions defended and developed during the last century by the Communist Left is the only one capable of providing a body of analysis (nature of capitalism, decadence, imperialism, war economy, capitalist decomposition etc.), a continuity in the debates and in the intervention in the class, a coherence that provides the weapons of struggle for the world communist revolution against all manifestations of capitalist barbarism and above all, imperialist war.
Against the infamous carnage in Ukraine the ICC proposed a Common Declaration of the Communist Left which was signed by 3 other groups. In the face of the new imperialist barbarism in Gaza we have made an Appeal to make a common declaration against all imperialist powers, against the calls for national defense behind the exploiters, against the hypocritical pleas for “peace”, and for the proletarian class struggle that leads to the communist revolution.
All the forces of the bourgeoisie (parties, trade unions, institutions such as churches, the UN etc.) call on the proletarians to choose a camp among the imperialist bandits, to accept the terrible sacrifices that the war dynamic of capitalism imposes, in short, to become themselves caught in the machinery of war and destruction that leads to the annihilation of the planet and the whole of humanity. Only the voice of the Communist Left clearly rises up against this concert of the dead.
The Joint Statement and Appeal of the ICC to the sectarian and opportunist proletarian political milieu today is in continuity of the attitude of the Bolsheviks at Zimmerwald towards the centrists. The Communist Left groups are the only minimum solid class terrain for an internationalist perspective today. Yet the Communist Left groups descending from the PCInt refused to sign the common proposals. But if these groups had signed the common statements this would have acted as a political beacon for emerging revolutionary forces and could have opened a more intense process of political decantation. The Joint Statement and Appeal[7] was intended to be an initial step towards the necessary political decantation that the formation of the future party will demand.
The bourgeoisie needs to silence the internationalist voice of the Communist Left. To this end, it conducts a covert, sly war. In this war it does not openly uses the repressive bodies of the state or the big media. Given the small size, the reduced influence, the division, and dispersion of the groups of the Communist Left, the bourgeoisie uses the services of the parasites.
The parasites claim to be internationalist, rejecting the different sides by grandiloquent declarations, but all their efforts are focused on denigrating, slandering, and denouncing genuinely internationalist groups like the ICC. We are talking about snitches and gangsters like the “International Group of the Communist Left” who use "internationalist" verbiage as their passport to attack communist organisations. Their methods are slander, denunciation, provocation, accusations of "Stalinism" against the ICC. They proclaim that our organisation is "outside the Communist Left" and to "fill the vacuum" they shamelessly flatter the ICT by offering it the throne of the "vanguard of the Communist Left". It is thus a question of creating division within the Communist Left and shamelessly using the sectarianism and opportunism of the ICT to turn it even more strongly against the clearest and most consistent organisation of the Communist Left, the ICC.
The parasitic coterie, a chaotic jumble of groups, and personalities, uses an indigestible rehash of the positions of the Communist Left in order to attack the actual Communist Left, to falsify and denigrate it. This attack comes in different flavours.
On the one hand, there is the blog first called New Course and then disguised as Comunia which tries to pull the wool over our eyes: it uses the confused positions, due to an incomplete break with Trotskyism, of a genuine revolutionary, Munís[8], to present us with a fake Communist Left, completely adulterated and falsified. This enterprise of impersonation promoted by the adventurer Gaizka[9] was for some time unreservedly supported by the parasitic IGCL
Another front in the war against the Communist Left comes from a farce of a conference held in Brussels, where several parasitic personalities and groupuscules have as a “common ground, 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’. Their message is that the working class must ‘start again’ and under the din of wars, the waves of inflation and misery, the orgy of destruction, wait patiently for these ‘pro-revolutionary’ denizens of the salon to use their incredible brains to come up with some idea on ‘how to fight capitalism’"[10].
The war of the bourgeoisie against internationalism finds a point of support in the sectarian and opportunist position of the ICT.
The ICT denounce imperialist war, reject all sides in the conflicts, and defend the proletarian revolution as the only way out. But this internationalism runs the risk of remaining pure words, because, on the one hand, they refuse to fight against the war in union with the other groups of the Communist Left (for example, by refusing to participate in the Common Declaration proposed by the ICC from the beginning of the war in Ukraine or by also rejecting the Appeal we have made in the face of the war in Gaza). In the same way, giving internationalism an elasticity that ends up breaking or diluting it, it advocates fronts (for example, the NWBCW) which can fit leftist groups that are "internationalist" in the face of one military conflict but chauvinist in response to another, or confused groups that have a false conception of internationalism.
This sectarian and opportunist position is not new - it has almost 80 years of history as we have seen above in relation to the origins of the PCInt. With the historical recovery of the proletariat since 1968, both the Bordigist groups coming from the PCInt and the Damenist branch, predecessor of the present ICT, display on the one hand the sectarianism of refusing any declaration or common action against the imperialist war proposed by the ICC, and on the other hand collaboration with confused groups or groups clearly situated in the terrain of the bourgeoisie.
So, the ICT, with the sectarianism and opportunism that are in its genes, has rejected all the joint action of the Communist Left proposed by the ICC against imperialist war - since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 - up to an including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza!
At the same it has created fronts like the No War But the Class War with the argument that that the field of the Communist Left is too narrow and that it barely reaches the working class.
The alleged “narrowness” of the Communist Left leads the ICT to “widen the field of internationalism” by calling for anarchist, semi-Trotskyist, parasitic groups from a more or less leftist-infested swamp to join NWBCW. Thus, the programmatic identity, the historical tradition, the fierce struggle of more than a century, carried out by the Communist Left is denied by an “enlargement" which, in reality, means dilution and confusion.
But, at the same time, real internationalism is trampled underfoot because these "internationalists" are not always internationalists, they are internationalists against some wars, while against others they keep silent or support them more or less openly. Their arguments against war contain numerous illusions in pacifism, humanism, inter-classism. This can be seen in the ICT's attitude towards the Anarchist Communist Group in Britain (ACG). It welcomes this group's stance on the war in Ukraine, but at the same time "regrets" its contrary position on the war in Gaza.
The ICT in its opportunist eagerness to "unite" all those who say "something against the war" blurs the demarcation that must exist between the Communist Left that effectively fights against the war and all the other fauna:
The ICT want to maintain confusion because it argues “What we do not think internationalists should be doing is attacking each other. We have always held the view that old polemics would be resolved or made irrelevant by the appearance of a new class movement”[11].
No! Such an approach is radically antagonistic to that of the Bolsheviks in Zimmerwald. Lenin regarded this meeting of "internationalists in general" as a "puddle" and led an uncompromising struggle to separate the truly internationalist position from this puddle of confusion which blocked the consistent struggle against the war.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed that the "Zimmerwald majority" practiced a "façade internationalism"; their opposition to the war was more empty posturing than real combat. By the same token, we must warn against the present internationalism of the ICT. It is true that the ICT has not betrayed internationalism, but its internationalism is becoming more and more formal and abstract, tending to become an empty shell by which the ICT covers up its sabotage of the struggle for the party, its complicity with parasitism, its collaboration with snitches, its growing connivance with leftism.
Como & C.Mir 22-12-23
[1] However, it is necessary to point out that after the Paris Commune and the collaboration of the French and Prussian bourgeoisies in its suppression, Marx came to the conclusion that this marked the end of progressive national wars in the central countries of capitalism.
[2] Bilan nº 21 August 1936
[3] Zimmerwald and the centrist currents in the political organisations of the proletariat [9], International Review nº 155.
[5] The ICT and the No War But the Class War initiative: an opportunist bluff which weakens the Communist Left [5], World Revolution nº 398, Autumn 2023, and ICConline
[6] See The ambiguities of the Internationalist Communist Party over the ‘partisans’ in Italy in 1943 [11], International Review nº 8
[7] Joint statement of groups of the international communist left about the war in Ukraine [2] Call from the communist left: down with the massacres, no support to any imperialist camp! No to pacifist illusions! For proletarian internationalism! [3], International Review nº 171, 2024
[8] Nuevo Curso and the “Spanish Communist Left”: What are the origins of the Communist Left? [12], International Review nº 163, 2019
[9] Who is who in “Nuevo Curso” [13]? [13] ICConline, January 2020
[10] See A "conference of left communism" in Brussels? A decoy for those who want to take part in the revolutionary struggle! [14], ICC online, September 2023
[11] The tasks of revolutionaries in the face of Capitalism’s drive to war [15], on leftcom.org, October 2023.
A first balance sheet of our appeals to the Communist Left to make a joint statement on the current imperialist conflicts.
In late February 2022 the ICC proposed a Joint internationalist statement against the imperialist war in Ukraine to the other groups of the Communist Left. These groups are the political descendants of the only proletarian political current that fought against both fascist and democratic imperialist camps in the 2nd World War and thus the only one that can still claim today a continuity in both words and deeds with proletarian internationalism.
In the two years following this statement the ICC also proposed a similar ‘Appeal' to the same groups concerning the war in Gaza that erupted at the end of 2023. (For the sake of brevity we will refer to both of them as joint statements). In this case, the only group to adhere to our Appeal was Internationalist Voice.
What lessons can we draw from this initiative that can guide us in a period in which imperialist carnage will inevitably increase and spread?
Of the six groups addressed, two agreed with the proposed joint statement, with one group, Internationalist Communist Perspective (Korea), whose origins are not in the Communist Left, supporting it.
At first sight then these internationalist initiatives of the ICC don't seem to have been a success since they didn’t lead to a united response of the entire or even majority of the Communist Left currents, a response that would have provided a beacon of genuinely communist internationalism to all those workers looking for their class alternative to the imperialist slaughter.
The lack of short-term success of the ICC initiatives will no doubt confirm the illusions of those who, deriding the initiative as ‘speaking to the converted’, thought that it was possible today to create a wider ‘anti-war movement’ that could put an end to imperialism by ‘doing something now’ and bringing together as many people as possible of whatever political persuasion or probity in a period of working class disorientation on this question of war. The failure of such activist illusions and projects have either led or will inevitably lead to passivity, confusion and ‘burn out’, or worse, to ending up choosing one of other of the imperialist camps - critically of course.
In reality the experience of the ICC initiatives has important longer-term lessons in advancing a political line of work that must lead to the future party of the working class and the overthrow of world capitalism, which is the only way that imperialist war can be brought to an end. In other words success or failure is in the last analysis measured with a historical yardstick, not a short-term impression.
Let’s compare these two ICC initiatives of the last two years to similar internationalist appeals to the Communist Left for common work stretching back to 1979 at the time of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. On all previous occasions between then and now, the ICC’s proposals for a joint internationalist statement had never got off the ground and gone beyond the concept stage, because the principle itself of such a public declaration of unity was summarily rejected or ignored by the other groups.
For the first time, the proposal for a joint statement on Ukraine elicited positive responses from two other groups. After one of these groups, the Istituto Onorato Damen, proposed that the ICC draft such a joint statement; the latter subsequently agreed and the text was printed and distributed by the press of the three groups as a leaflet or articles, and served as the basis for joint public meetings and other interventions[1].
This step forward, miniscule as it may appear, prompted certain other advances which shouldn’t go unnoticed:
Correspondence between the ICC and ICT
This can be read on our website[3]. So it is only necessary to summarise the main arguments. First, the ICT insisted that the differences on the analysis of imperialist war (that is on the marxist explanation for imperialist war and its prospects today) between the groups was too great to allow them to sign the Joint Statement, which they otherwise agreed with. Secondly, they questioned the invitation of the Bordigist groups which go under the name of the International Communist Party and can best be distinguished by the names of their main publications (Programma Comunista, Il Comunista/Le Proletaire, and Il Partito Comunista) to the Joint Statement, and on the other hand regretted the absence of some groups from the list of invitees. Thirdly they wanted a wider movement against the war than the Joint Statement that was restricted to the Communist Left.
The ICC answered that regarding differences of analysis, which are certainly significant, they are still secondary to the fundamental agreement on a common internationalist programme of action between the Communist Left groups. To make secondary differences an obstacle to such joint work is therefore to elevate the interests of one’s own group to the detriment of the needs of the movement as a whole – therefore it is classically sectarian. The final version of the Joint Statement in fact was able to accommodate a difference in the analysis of imperialism between the IOD and the ICC in order to underline the essential class position. A difference quite similar to the one the ICT felt was a key reason for not signing the declaration.
On the second point it was ironic that the sectarian ICT complained that each of the Bordigist groups invited all saw themselves as the one and only internationalist communist party in the world. This was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In fact the ICT, despite describing itself as a ‘tendency,’ considers that its main component, Battaglia Comunista, is also the Internationalist Communist Party and is therefore hostile to all the other pretenders to this throne.
Regarding those parasitic grouplets claiming adherence to the Communist Left in words who were not invited to sign the joint statement it was quite logical to exclude them, since in practice these various cabals do everything to vilify the Communist Left. But the ICT, in wanting them invited, were therefore opportunistically open to joining with parasitic slanderers and even snitches who have nothing to do with internationalism in deeds. The ICT’s sectarianism toward the rest of the Communist Left - their Bordigist siblings[4], and the ICC - therefore found its natural complement in an opportunism toward those outside of the Communist Left and even hostile to the latter.
The desire of the ICT for a ‘wider movement beyond the Communist Left’ thus limited itself immediately by excluding the majority of the genuinely internationalist milieu in existence today. Subsequently their front No War But the Class War was launched with a more elastic criteria for participation than the Joint Statement and so made itself more amenable to a heterogenous milieu of various anarchists, parasites and even leftists. Its public meetings didn’t extend beyond the confines of this milieu. In fact on one occasion the size of the delegations of the ICC to intervene in these public meetings was its largest component. The NWBCW has proved to be an opportunist bluff whose real purpose was to act as a conveyor belt into the ICT rather than creating a wider audience for authentic internationalism[5].
Discussion Bulletins of the Communist Left
The Joint Statement provided a principled framework of internationalist unity in action, marxist parameters for discussing and clarifying theoretical and analytic differences between the groups. The Bulletins are not therefore a conglomeration of random positions and ideas but essentially a forum for the confrontation of arguments within the Communist Left, that is, a proletarian polemic.
The two bulletins have so far included: relevant correspondence between them concerning the Joint Statement; statements of analysis of the current situation of the imperialist wars in Ukraine and Gaza according to the respective organisations; and most importantly an ongoing polemic on how the contradictions of capitalism translate into imperialist conflict, whether the latter is directly the result of economic ambitions - such as preservation of the hegemony of the dollar, or the control of oil production and distribution - or refracted through a self-destructive dynamic produced by the impasse of capitalism in its historical epoch of decadence. This polemic is of great interest and importance for understanding the prospects and conditions of militarism today. It should be continued.
The relevance of Zimmerwald
The Communist Left, drawing its inspiration from the history of the revolutionary movement of the working class, naturally looks to the nature and meaning of the Zimmerwald movement in World War 1.
Was Zimmerwald intended to create a wide as possible anti-war movement as the ICT pretend, a kind of anticipation of the NWBCW initiative? Zimmerwald was indeed the first indication that the working class was losing its illusions in the imperialist war and confirmed its hopes that there was an alternative way out. But the real, long-lasting significance of Zimmerwald was in the development of an intransigent internationalist line amongst a small minority called the Zimmerwald Left. The latter recognised that WW1 was only the beginning of an entire historic period that would be dominated by imperialist war and require a maximum programme for the working class: civil war, the overthrow of the bourgeois regimes, proletarian dictatorship with a new Communist International to replace the bankrupt, chauvinist 2nd International.
The majority of Zimmerwald was ambivalent or opposed to this programme. Instead, seeing WW1 as a temporary aberration, and hoping for a reconciliation or reconstitution of the 2nd International that had collapsed in 1914, they wanted to exclude or neutralise the ‘trouble makers’ and ‘splitters’ of the left. Eventually the class lines that were implicit in these differences were drawn in 1917 by the October Revolution.
The intervention of internationalists into the anti-war movement today
Only the big bourgeoisie and the nation states that protects their privileges is fully committed to the drive to imperialist war made unavoidable by capitalist development. In terms of society as a whole though, imperialist war has a convulsive effect on other classes. The biggest sufferer of imperialism is the working class, since the military juggernaut threatens to divide and drag it into fratricidal slaughter and turn its poverty into destitution. At the same time an intermediate layer - the petty bourgeoisie, caught between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - foresees the loss of its relatively more secure status as a result of the imperialist maelstrom. In reaction to the latter this layer hopes for a return to normality and peace but sees in the struggle of the working class another threat to its disappearing status, another source of disruption and conflict.
In this situation anti-war sentiments grow both in the proletariat and this intermediate layer, but within this apparently common reaction to imperialism different, antagonistic class interests are concealed. To defend its interests the working class must struggle to detach itself from all the pacifist solutions (however radical they may seem, such as anti-militarism) that are rife amongst the intermediate strata and stand instead on the terrain of its own class struggle that leads the workers towards civil war against the bourgeoisie and capitalism as a whole. The petty bourgeoisie on the other hand, which fundamentally has no historical future, can at best react impotently to imperialist war in various ways and remains trapped in ambiguity. This mixture of a class struggling for consciousness of its internationalist interests and a middle layer that reacts with horror to imperialist barbarism is the social basis for the growth of a political marsh between the Communist Left and the left wing of capital today, that seems to be neither one thing nor the other and is marked by constant contradiction and turmoil.
The intervention of internationalist communists towards this milieu is therefore vital in the acceleration of the development of working class consciousness. The internationalist organisations do not by definition arise spontaneously from this marsh, that as a whole essentially represents political confusion, an obstacle to the development of class consciousness. Authentic internationalist organisations are the product of a historical experience of the revolutionary movement, stretching back to the First World War and before. The existence and intervention of the Communist Left, its political presence, is therefore vital in not only combating the influence of the bourgeoisie within the political marsh, also in exposing the difference of class interests between the proletariat and those of intermediate strata, who, despite their radical opposition to the big bourgeoisie, are essentially backward-looking.
This is the wider importance of the Joint Statement, which in defining the common position of the Communist Left, begun to demarcate, in the midst of a milieu of political confusion, an internationalist reference point.
Conclusion
The last two years and the reaction to the Joint Statements have shown that the historical Communist Left is still fragmented and many of its groups have been unable so far to take united internationalist action against the increase in imperialist war. However, small steps in this direction have been made as we outline above. And only the unification of the communist vanguard, not through compromises or amorphous fronts, but through the real clarification of differences, can arm the proletariat in its fight against capitalism and imperialist war.
[1] Joint statement of groups of the international communist left about the war in Ukraine, ICConline [2], Ukraine Dossier, May 2022
[2] Correspondence on the Joint Statement of groups of the Communist Left on the war in Ukraine [16], ICConline, August 2022
[3] A balance sheet of the public meetings about the Joint Statement by groups of the Communist Left on the war in Ukraine (Ibid). [17]
[4] Both the Bordigist parties and the Damenist ICT have common origins in the founding of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in 1943
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.
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Workers have no country!
Down with all the imperialist powers!
In place of capitalist barbarism: socialism!
The war in Ukraine is being fought according to the conflicting interests of all the different imperialist powers, large and small – not in the interests of the working class, which is a class of international unity. It’s a war over strategic territories, for military and economic domination fought overtly and covertly by the warmongers in charge of the US, Russia, the Western European state machines, with the Ukrainian ruling class acting as a by no means innocent pawn on the world imperialist chess board.
The working class, not the Ukrainian state, is the real victim of this war, whether as slaughtered defenceless women and children, starving refugees or conscripted cannon fodder in either army, or in the increasing destitution the effects of the war will bring to workers in all countries.
The capitalist class and their bourgeois mode of production cannot overcome its competitive national divisions that lead to imperialist war. The capitalist system cannot avoid sinking into greater barbarism.
For its part the world’s working class cannot avoid developing its struggle against deteriorating wages and living standards. The latest war, the biggest in Europe since 1945, warns of capitalism’s future for the world if the working class struggle doesn’t lead to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and its replacement by the political power of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The war aims and lies of the different imperialist powers
Russian imperialism wants to reverse the enormous setback it received in 1989 and become a world power again. The US wants to preserve its super power status and world leadership. The European powers fear Russian expansion but also the crushing domination of the US. Ukraine is looking to ally itself to the most powerful imperialist strong man.
Let’s face it, the US and the Western powers have the most convincing lies, and the biggest media lie machine, to justify their real aims in this war - they are supposedly reacting to Russian aggression against small sovereign states, defending democracy against the Kremlin autocracy, upholding human rights in the face of the brutality of Putin.
The stronger imperialist gangsters usually have the better war propaganda, the bigger lie, because they can provoke and manoeuvre their enemies into firing first. But remember the oh-so peaceful performance of these powers recently in the Middle East, in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, how US air power recently flattened the city of Mosul, how the Coalition forces put the Iraqi population to the sword with the false excuse that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Remember further back the countless crimes of these democracies against civilians over the past century whether it be during the 1960s in Vietnam, during the 1950s in Korea, during the Second World War in Hiroshima, Dresden or Hamburg. The Russian outrages against the Ukrainian population are essentially drawn from the same imperialist playbook.
Capitalism has catapulted humanity into the era of permanent imperialist war. It is an illusion to ask it to ‘stop’ war. ‘Peace’ can only be an interlude in warlike capitalism.
The more it sinks into irresolvable crisis the greater the military destruction capitalism will bring, alongside its growing catastrophes of pollution and plagues. Capitalism is rotten ripe for revolutionary change.
The working class is a sleeping giant
The capitalist system, more and more a system of war and all its horrors, does not currently find any significant class opposition to its rule, so much so that the proletariat suffers the worsening exploitation of its labour power, and the ultimate sacrifices imperialism calls on it to make on the battlefield.
The development of the defence of its class interests, as well as its class consciousness stimulated by the indispensable role of the revolutionary vanguard, conceals an even bigger potential of the working class, the ability to unite as a class to overthrow the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie entirely as it did in Russia in 1917 and threatened to do in Germany and elsewhere at the time. That is, overthrow the system that leads to war. Indeed, the October Revolution, and the insurrections it gave rise to in the other imperialist powers, are a shining example not only of opposition to the war but also of an attack on the power of the bourgeoisie.
Today we are still far from such a revolutionary period. Similarly, the conditions of the proletariat’s struggle are different from those that existed at the time of the first imperialist slaughter. On the other hand, what remains the same, in the face of imperialist war, are the fundamental principles of proletarian internationalism and the duty of revolutionary organisations to defend these principles tooth and nail, against the stream when necessary, within the proletariat.
The political tradition that has fought for, and continues to fight for, internationalism against imperialist war
The villages of Zimmerwald and Kienthal in Switzerland became famous as the meeting places of the socialists from both sides in the First World War to begin an international struggle to bring the butchery to an end and denounce the patriotic leaders of the Social Democratic Parties. It was at these meetings that the Bolsheviks, supported by the Bremen Left and the Dutch Left, brought forward the essential principles of internationalism against imperialist war that are still valid today:
No support of either imperialist camp; the rejection of all pacifist illusions; and the recognition that only the working class and its revolutionary struggle could put an end to the system that is based on the exploitation of labour power and permanently generates imperialist war.
In the 1930s and 1940s it was only the political current now called the Communist Left which held fast to the internationalist principles developed by the Bolsheviks in the First World War. The Italian Left and the Dutch Left actively opposed both sides in the second imperialist world war, rejecting both the fascist and anti-fascist justifications for the slaughter - unlike the other currents which claimed the proletarian revolution, including Trotskyism. In so doing these Communist Lefts refused any support to the imperialism of Stalinist Russia in the conflict.
Today, in the face of the acceleration of imperialist conflict in Europe, the political organisations based on the heritage of the Communist Left continue to hold up the banner of consistent proletarian internationalism, and provide a reference point for those defending working class principles.
That’s why organisations and groups of the Communist Left today, small in number and not well known, have decided to issue this common statement, and broadcast as widely as possible the internationalist principles that were forged against the barbarism of two world wars.
No support for any side in the imperialist carnage in Ukraine.
No illusions in pacifism: capitalism can only live through endless wars.
Only the working class can put an end to imperialist war through its class struggle against exploitation leading to the overthrow of the capitalist system.
Workers of the World, Unite!
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International Communist Current (www.en.internationalism.org [18])
Istituto Onorato Damen http://www.istitutoonoratodamen.it [19]
Internationalist Voice (en.internationalistvoice.org) [20]
Internationalist Communist Perspective (Korea) fully supports the joint statement (국제코뮤니스트전망 - International Communist Perspective (jinbo.net) [21]
Bakunin set up a secret organisation within the International Workingmen’s Association aimed either at taking it under his control or, if that was not possible, at destroying it. The IWA responded to this colossal piece of intrigue by devoting the Hague Congress (1872) to the defence of the organisation against this parasitic attempt to destroy it.
We must remember that this congress took place one year after the Paris Commune, the first time in history that the proletariat had tried to take power; but the crucial importance of defending the revolutionary organisation against the attempts to destroy it was consciously addressed by the IWA by giving it absolute priority and making its work public.
The lessons of this combat are vital. However, they have been totally buried for various reasons. The first is that they were quickly forgotten in the later workers' movement with the sole exception of the Bolsheviks. Franz Mehring - Rosa Luxemburg's sparring partner in the left of Social Democracy - in his biography of Marx presents his fight against Bakunin's conspiracy as a "personal confrontation".
Of course, the numerous authors (historians, Marxologists, political scientists) who have spoken of the Hague Congress have repeated ad nauseam the same refrain: it all came down to a "clash of personalities" or a "struggle between authoritarians and libertarians".
No scientific rigour can be expected from them. However, what is outrageous is that a group like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, which claims to be part of the Communist Left, which claims to fight for the World Party of the proletariat, has published an article on the Hague Congress[1] which repeats the same falsifying clichés that for 150 years have been propagated about that Congress.
Who was Bakunin? According to the ICT article a true revolutionary who championed misguided ideas such as pan-Slavism, but "When the 1863 uprising in partitioned Poland broke out, Bakunin volunteered his services, only to be rebuffed. He then tried to make his own way to join the uprising, but the expedition failed, as did the uprising itself - the Polish insurgents were isolated and crushed. These events delivered a blow to Bakunin's pan-Slavist hopes and finally made him reconsider his political ideas". According to the article, this reconsideration led Bakunin to "formulate a new doctrine, characterised by political abstentionism, anti-statism and federalism, which variously went under the names of revolutionary socialism, collectivism and anarchism. He initially looked for supporters among the radicalised followers of Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Freemasons, eventually founding a secret society, the International Revolutionary Association. The ‘catechisms’ of that secret society sum up the ideas around which Bakunin attempted to reorganise revolutionaries in an international network".
The General Council of the IWA did not share this assessment: "The denunciations in the bourgeois press, like the lamentations of the international police, found a sympathetic echo even in our Association. Some intrigues, directed ostensibly against the General Council but in reality against the Association, were hatched in its midst. At the bottom of these intrigues was the inevitable International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, fathered by the Russian Michael Bakunin. On his return from Siberia, the latter began to write in Herzen's Kolokol, preaching the idea of Pan-Slavism and racial war, conceived out of his long experience. Later, during his stay in Switzerland, he was nominated to head the steering committee of the League of Peace and Freedom, founded in opposition to the International. When this bourgeois society's affairs went from bad to worse, its president, Mr. G. Vogt, acting on Bakunin's advice, proposed to the International's Congress which met at Brussels in September 1868, that it make an alliance with the League. The Congress unanimously proposed two alternatives: either the League should follow the same goal as the International, in which case it would have no reason for existing; or else its goal should be different, in which case an alliance would be impossible. At the League's congress, held in Bern a few days later, Bakunin made an about-face. He proposed a makeshift programme whose scientific value may be judged by this single phrase: ‘economic and social equalisation of classes’. Backed by an insignificant minority, he broke with the League in order to join the International, determined to replace the International's General Rules by the makeshift programme, which had been rejected by the League, and to replace the General Council by his personal dictatorship. To this end, he created a special instrument, the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, intended to become an International within the International."[3] .
Thus, contrary to what the ICT says, Bakunin was not a revolutionary who "evolved his ideas". His changes of position were not based on considerations of lived experience. Much of his career was spent with clearly bourgeois and even reactionary positions (Pan-Slavism, the League for Peace and Freedom), but, sniffing out that the International could fall into his hands, he quickly changed his hat, threw the League for Peace and Freedom into the dustbin and rushed to join the International, inventing for the occasion a "back-up programme" following the criteria of "Groucho Marxism" (Groucho Marx joked "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others"). He was not a sincere revolutionary who “evolved”; he was a political adventurer[4]. Such figures are very destructive for the workers' movement because what drives them is not the struggle for the interests of the class, but their personal ambition to be a "political player" who uses workers' organisations for their spurious ends. Lassalle wanted to make the German labour movement a pawn in his game with Bismark, with whom he even made a secret pact[5]. Bakunin wanted to put the IWA at his own service.
Moreover, it is false that Bakunin adopted an "abstentionist, federalist and anti-statist" programme; his "principles" varied according to circumstances. As we shall see later, he was ultra-centralist when he thought he had the conquest of the IWA within his grasp, but, when he failed, he abandoned this self-interested centralism to wrap himself in the banner of federalism as this proved to be the best instrument to harass an IWA General Council which refused to surrender at his feet.
We are faced with two antagonistic visions. That of the ICT article which paints Bakunin as "a romantic revolutionary with wrong ideas" and that of the IWA General Council which saw him as a scheming and unscrupulous political adventurer. We resolutely choose the second view as it provides a political weapon to defend and build the organisation. The revolutionary organisation is a vital instrument of the proletariat which must not only intervene in its struggles, but also build itself consciously and defend its existence against bourgeois repression and all the instruments at its disposal, such as adventurers, political parasitism, etc.
Bakunin finally succeeded in joining the IWA. The article completely ignores the danger that this membership entailed and ignores the fact that Bakunin pretended to adhere to the IWA while smuggling his International Alliance of Socialist Democracy in under his cloak. The General Council rejected this trap: "Whereas: that the existence of a second international body functioning inside and outside the International Workingmen's Association would be the most infallible means of disorganising it; that any other group of individuals resident in any locality would have the right to imitate the Geneva Initiating Group and to introduce, under more or less ostensible pretexts, within the International Workingmen's Association, other international Associations with other special missions; that, in this way, the International Workingmen's Association would very soon become the plaything of intriguers of any nationality and of any party".
Faced with this refusal, Bakunin began to manoeuvre. He pretended to accept the principles of the International and pretended to dissolve the Alliance. He resorted to another deception: he gave the impression to the central organ of the IWA that he had been endorsed by the Swiss Romance Federal Council (which turned out to be false). Armed with these credentials Bakunin set out to conquer the International and went to the Basle congress (1869) with the aim of imposing his programme of the day, based on "the abolition of the right of inheritance", and above all on obtaining the transfer of the General Council to Geneva.
To this end Bakunin showed himself to be the most ultra-centralist. This manoeuvre is not grasped by the ICT article which is "surprised" by it: "more surprisingly, Bakunin also supported a motion to extend the powers of the General Council so that it could suspend any section which acted against the principles of the International".
Nor does the ICT see the instrumentalising manoeuvre behind Bakunin's "programme": "For Bakunin, the abolition of the right of inheritance formed a key point of his programme for the Alliance, a prerequisite for social equality in the society of the future. For Marx, the whole question of the right of inheritance was a juridical distraction which would be resolved with the abolition of private property in the means of production (already approved by the International)".
According to the article there was a "debate" between Marx's position and Bakunin's. This assessment is erroneous: what there was in reality was a rabbit that Bakunin had pulled out of the hat, which the IWA denounced: "the programme of the Alliance, in the tow of a ‘Mohammed without the Koran’, is nothing but a heap of pompously worded ideas long since dead and capable only of frightening bourgeois idiots or serving as evidence to be used by the Bonapartist or other prosecutors against members of the International".
Bakunin did not seek "debate"; his star proposal for the "abolition of the right of inheritance" was a means, combined with ultra-centralism, to take control of the IWA.
Similarly, for the ICT, there was nothing untoward in the attempt to move the General Council to Geneva where it could be "welcomed" by Bakunin. On the contrary, their version is: "the attacks on his person did not stop, as Moses Hess then published a hit piece in October 1869, claiming Bakunin intended to undermine the International and transfer the General Council from London to Geneva. Bakunin responded with an – unpublished – anti-Semitic tirade against ‘German Jews’ who allegedly conspired against him (which even Herzen and Ogarev found excessive). Both out of respect and tactical consideration Bakunin spared Marx, though he incorrectly assumed him to be the mastermind behind all these attacks ".
Here we see that the ICT article clearly takes Bakunin's side and even praises his "personal magnanimity" in "forgiving" Marx. The ICT does not see - or does not want to see - what was at stake, which was Bakunin's manoeuvre to take over the central organ of the IWA by proposing to move the General Council to Geneva. What is a central organ in a proletarian organisation - an instrument for an individual or group to control the organisation? Or an expression of the organisation as a whole which must be defended against the intrigues and ambitions of individuals or groups? The IWA clearly had the latter position, which is the one we revolutionaries must defend, contrary to that of the ICT which only sees "conflicts between individuals".
The Basel Congress rejected Bakunin's "proposals", which made him change his strategy: since he could not take over the IWA, he now conspired to destroy it.
In the service of this strategy, the extreme centralist from Basel was fast becoming the most ultra-federalist and his new Groucho Marx-style programme was "abstention in politics", but all this was "the sign of the open and unceasing war that the Alliance is waging; not only against the General Council, but again against all the sections of the International, which refuse to adopt the programme of this sectarian and above all the doctrine of absolute abstention in political matters.”[6]
Let us look at the nightmare that Bakunin and his Alliance brought about in the life of the International after 1869. We will highlight some of the most salient episodes.
"Just before the Basle Congress, when Nechayev came to Geneva, Bakunin got in touch with him and founded a secret society among the students in Russia. (...) The great means of propagandising this society consisted in compromising innocent people vis-à-vis the Russian police, by sending them communications from Geneva, under blue envelopes, covered outside, in Russian, with the stamp of the ‘Secret Revolutionary Committee’"[7].
Bakunin had no scruples about joining up with a shady informer who was handing over to the Tsarist torturers people interested in the International. This "bad company" is seen by the ICT as a "mistake" on Bakunin's part, ignoring the fact that as the International's document shows it was he who was using Nechayev. According to the ICT, “Bakunin's fondness for conspiracies blinded him to the scale of the deception and when he finally distanced himself from Nechayev, it was already too late. The likes of Borkheim and Utin now had further ammunition to feed Marx's suspicions”.
In other words, Bakunin was "fond of conspiracies" (sic) and this "blinded" him to Nechayev’s (sic) manoeuvres and by the time he realised it was "too late", which ended up giving "ammunition" to Marx, ill-advised by Berkheim and Utin.
The ICT trivialises the fact that within a communist organisation there are "conspiracy buffs"; this means that for this organisation, which claims to be part of the Communist Left, being a "conspiracy buff" would be an "innocent pastime", a "small defect" of a "great revolutionary" like Bakunin...
This position of the ICT is simply monstrous. That within a bourgeois organisation there are "conspiracy buffs" is standard practice, but that within a communist organisation there are "conspiracy buffs" is something radically incompatible with its principles of functioning and militancy and immediately endangers it.
“Poor Bakunin" did not see the extent of Nechayev’s deceptions according to the ICT. No! The lesson to be learned is that Bakunin had used and encouraged Nechayev, was aware of his disgusting actions, and when the whole affair began to be discovered, it was too late to cover it up. In a communist organisation such "alliances" with shady elements are intolerable, and those who practise them are equally incompatible with communist organisations. This does not appear in the ICT's field of vision and that is why it has no qualms about collaborating with informers and thieves, such as the IGCL riff-raff, to set up the NWBCW committees[8] .
Let us see what version the ICT gives us of this affair which took place in 1870: “The next controversy revolved around the Romance Federation, the Geneva section of the First International, where L’Egalité, edited by followers of Bakunin such as Paul Robin and Charles Perron, had made a number of complaints regarding the work of the General Council. In March 1870 the General Council circulated a response by Marx, which addressed the criticisms. However, Marx seemed to be under the incorrect impression that Bakunin was personally behind this, that having failed to influence the Basel Congress, he was now trying to discredit the General Council. Nikolai Utin, another Russian émigré with a vendetta against Bakunin, now sensed his chance and made a move to take over L’Egalité in the name of Marx. The section split, those in Geneva declaring themselves followers of Marx, those in Jura followers of Bakunin, and both claiming the Romance Federation name”.
According to this explanation, Bakunin's followers, without his knowledge, had attacked the General Council. In his reply, on behalf of the latter, Marx had been "misinformed" and, in addition, a follower of Marx, Utin, wanting a vendetta against Bakunin, provoked a split in the Romance Federation.
The IWA has another, radically different version: "The Alliance commenced at this time a public polemic directed against the General Council, first in the Locle Progres, then in the Geneva Egalité, the official newspaper of the Romance Federation, where several members of the Alliance had followed Bakunin. The General Council, which had scorned the attacks published in Progres, Bakunin's personal organ, could not ignore those from Egalité, which it was bound to believe were approved by the Romance Federal Committee "[9]. In the controversy, the organ L'Egalité accused the General Council of not fulfilling its functions. The latter in a circular clarified that criticism of the functioning of the IWA should not be made in the organisation's public press but should be channelled through the statutory bodies. Otherwise, these "criticisms" would give ammunition to the incessant attacks of the bourgeois press against the International: "When the Romance Federal Committee addresses requests of reprimands to us through the only legitmiate channel, that is to say through its secretary, the General Council will always be ready to reply. But the Romance Federal Committee has no right either to abdicate its functions in favour of l’Egalité and Progres, or to let these newspapers usurp its functions. Generally speaking, the General Council's administrative correspondence with national and local committees cannot be published without greatly prejudicing the Association's general interests. Consequently, if the other organs of the International were to follow the example of Progres and the l’Egalité, the General Council would be faced with the alternative of either discrediting itself publicly by its silence or violating its obligations by replying publicly. l’Egalité joins Progres in inviting Travail (Paris paper) to denounce, on its part, the General Council. That is almost a League of Public Welfare"[10].
To begin with, Bakunin had used his lackeys to launch a public attack on the General Council by fraudulently using L'Egalité, the press organ of the Romance Federation.
The General Council's response, insisting on respect for organisational principles, was that criticism of the General Council should be made through the central body of the Romance Federation and not by publicly airing this criticism behind the organisation's back.
This attack on the General Council had spread to another body in Paris. As the General Council pointed out, a "league" of public attack against it was being forged. The aim was clear: to discredit the central body elected by the Basel Congress, thus destroying the centralisation of the IWA.
Thus the issue at stake was not Utin's personal vendettas against Bakunin, nor an "ill-informed" Marx, but the defence of a method of centralised debate where criticism is not used to discredit the central organs, but to strengthen the whole organisation and the central organ. Where the IWA sees vicious attacks on its central body, the ICT sees "personal vendettas" against Bakunin.
The ICT article is very striking: at every step we see that their main concern is the defence of "poor Bakunin" and that everything concerning the defence of revolutionary organisation, of its centralisation, of the method of criticism and debate, has completely disappeared from their radar.
Another episode in Bakunin's conspiracy against the International was the attempt at the congress of La Chaux-des-Fonds to take over the Romance Federation in April 1870.
Let us look at the manoeuvres and intrigues that Bakunin and his altar boys employed: "Although, on their own calculation, the Alliance supporters represented no more than a fifth of the Federation members, they succeeded, thanks to repetition of the Basel manoeuvres, in procuring a fictitious majority of one or two votes, a majority which, in the words of their own organ (see Solidarité of May 7, 1870), represented no more than 15 sections, while in Geneva alone there were 30! On this vote, the French-Switzerland Congress split into two groups which continued their meetings independently. The Alliance supporters, considering themselves the legal representatives of the whole of the Federation, transferred the Federal Committee's seat to Chaux-de-Fonds and founded at Neuchatel their official organ, Solidarité, edited by Citizen Guillaume. This young writer had the special job of decrying the Geneva ‘factory workers’, those odious ‘bourgeois’, of waging war on L'Egalité, the Federation newspaper, and of preaching total abstention from politics. The authors of the most important articles on this theme were Bastelica in Marseilles and Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc in Lyon, the two big pillars of the Alliance"[11].
So we have here :
This episode and the clear lessons it provides are ignored by the ICT article which says in passing, referring to the London Conference (1871): "During the conference, Marx delivered a speech in which he criticised the Alliance for not actually having dissolved back in 1869 when it was asked to, and alleged that it existed as a secret society within the First International. He also argued that the Jura section should not use the name of the Romance Federation (though it could go under the name Jura Federation instead), and he singled out Guillaume for having published an appeal in violation of the International’s statutes ".
The Alliance did not make "mistakes" as the ICT claims, but engaged in repugnant attacks against the organisation. The ICT article ignores the precise reason for Marx's denunciation: "On August 10, the Alliance, hardly eager to see its activities looked into by a Conference, declared itself dissolved as from August 6. But, on September 15, it reappeared and requested admission to the Council under the name of the Atheist Socialist Section. According to Administrative Resolution No. V. of the Basel Congress, the Council could not admit it without consulting the Geneva Federal Committee, which was exhausted after its two years of struggle against the sectarian sections. Moreover, the Council had already told the Young Men’s Christian Association that the International did not recognize theological sections"[12].
In other words, the Alliance had pretended to dissolve and then appeared under the guise of the "Section of Atheist Socialists" (!).
Bakunin's conspiracy continued and had taken as its axis the Romance Federation where he had (along with Spain and Italy) a string of followers. From its base of operations at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Bakunin's Alliance was ceaselessly mounting one scandal after another to disorganise the International and paralyse its General Council with constant demands. One of these was that an Alliance delegate, Robin, relentlessly insisted that the General Council convene a private Conference to finally give the "Federation of the Jura" (Bakunin's stronghold around La Chaux-de-Fonds) the upper hand against the Romance Federation.
As the Basel Congress had marked the impossibility of taking over the IWA "from above", Bakunin now undertook politics "from below" by using his followers as promoters of all kinds of "sections" with an "autonomous" functioning and advocating the most fanciful alternatives as a remedy for the evils of the world. The General Council saw two fundamental political dangers in all this turmoil:
The IWA was being dislocated by a chaotic proliferation of groupings, each flying a different banner. Moreover, these groupings, in the hands of Bakunin and the Alliance, devoted themselves from the beginning to the harassment of the General Council by resorting to the most absurd "arguments". For example, the alleged "pan-Germanism" of the General Council. Thus, a press organ was created in a hurry by Bakunin's friends in Switzerland, The Social Revolution, “thought the moment opportune to fan the flames of national hatred, even within the International. It called the General Council a German Committee led by a Bismarckian brain”.
The anti-German agitation continued with a disgraceful action. An "émigré section of the Commune" set up in London with police provocateurs like Pyat, engaged in the denigration of German workers' militants who had opposed the Franco-Prussian war: "The London Conference approved the conduct of the German workers during the [Franco-Prussian] war… Nonetheless, eight days later, on November 23, 1871, 15 members of the ‘French Section of 1871’ inserted in Qui Vive! a ‘protest’ full of abuse against the German workers and denouncing the Conference resolution as irrefutable proof of the General Council’s ‘pan-Germanic idea’. On the other hand, the entire feudal, liberal, and police press of Germany seized avidly upon this incident to demonstrate to the German workers how their international dreams had come to naught "[13].
It is important to note that all the calumnies and intrigue circulated by the followers of the Alliance were immediately echoed in the bourgeois press organs: "Let us note in passing that the Times, that Leviathan of the capitalist press, Progres (of Lyon), a publication of the liberal bourgeoisie, and the Journal de Geneve, an ultra-reactionary paper, have brought the same charges against the Conference and used virtually the same terms as Citizens Malon and Lefrancais"[14].
2. The resurrection of sects
All the Bakuninist agitation for the creation of sectarian sections within the IWA took the workers' movement back to the epoch of its first steps (1800-1848), dominated by sects. "The first phase of the proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie is marked by a sectarian movement. That is logical at a time when the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to act as a class. Certain thinkers criticise social antagonisms and suggest fantastic solutions thereof, which the mass of workers is left to accept, preach, and put into practice. The sects formed by these initiators are abstentionist by their very nature — i.e., alien to all real action, politics, strikes, coalitions, or, in a word, to any united movement. The mass of the proletariat always remains indifferent or even hostile to their propaganda. The Paris and Lyon workers did not want the St. Simonists, the Fourierists, the Icarians, any more than the Chartists and the English trade unionists wanted the Owenites. These sects act as levers of the movement in the beginning, but become an obstruction as soon as the movement outgrows them; after which they became reactionary. Witness the sects in France and England, and lately the Lassalleans in Germany, who after having hindered the proletariat’s organisation for several years ended up becoming simple instruments of the police. To sum up, we have here the infancy of the proletarian movement, just as astrology and alchemy are the infancy of science. If the International were to be founded, it was necessary that the proletariat go through this phase.”
Against this setback, encouraged by Bakunin and his multiplication of sectarian sections, the IWA is "the genuine and militant organization of the proletarian class of all countries, united in their common struggle against the capitalists and the landowners, against their class power organized in the state. The International’s Rules, therefore, speak of only simple ‘workers’ societies’, all aiming for the same goal and accepting the same programme, which presents a general outline of the proletarian movement, while having its theoretical elaboration to be guided by the needs of the practical struggle and the exchange of ideas in the sections, unrestrictedly admitting all shades of socialist convictions in their organs and Congresses "[15].
We have recalled who Bakunin was, his trajectory and the sabotage and disorganisation he had carried out within the IWA. This work of destruction undermined the International from within. The International had to organise its defence and this defence was to:
This was the work of the Hague Congress in September 1872: the whole IWA united against three years of incessant intrigue which prevented it from achieving its aims and led it to paralysis and destruction. The ICT article sees things in a very different, opposite way:
We have already shown that this "debate" was a manoeuvre to destroy the International. That within the International there were different views on centralisation, on the function of the organisation, on the measures to achieve communism; that was obvious. But for this the International had statutes which encouraged debate, as Engels said, "Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’ s minds the insufficiency of their various favourite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their president [W. Bevan] could say in their name: ‘Continental socialism has lost its terror for us’. In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries".[16]
The intrigues, the sudden and unexplained changes of position, the slander, the secret organisations, the entire practice since 1868 of Bakunin and his followers, did nothing but prevent debate, for they exploited these differences for their own unsavoury ends, mixed them with personal tensions and spurious interests, festered them and made it impossible to clarify them. It was not debate they sought, but disorganisation, division and confrontation within the IWA.
2. The ICT implies that Marx and "his supporters" used underhand methods and alliances in their struggle against Bakunin: “For a number of reasons, it was an ugly finale to the proceedings. At least one of those on the committee investigating the Alliance later turned out to be a Bonapartist spy. And to strengthen the case against Bakunin, the special committee also accused him of theft and intimidation. This was in regard to Bakunin having received the advance to translate Capital but neither completing the project nor returning the money. It was however Nechayev, likely without Bakunin’s knowledge, who then threatened the publisher with violence”
Thus, the "supporters of Marx" did "ugly" things and were carried away by antipathy towards Bakunin and levelled unjust accusations against him. This is not so; it was the whole congress that adopted as the main item on the agenda the investigation into the activities of the Alliance. This decision was actively supported by Proudhonians and other anarchist-oriented tendencies. The Hague Congress was not a struggle between "Marxist authoritarians" and "Bakuninist libertarians", but a fight for the defence of the organisation. As our article on the Hague Congress puts it: "The Congress - with the exception of the Bakuninist minority - resoundingly supported the conclusions of the Commission. In fact, the Commission called for only three expulsions: those of Bakunin, Guillaume and Schwitzguebel, and only the first two were accepted by the Congress, thus disproving the fallacy that the International intended to eliminate, by disciplinary means, an uncomfortable minority. The revolutionary organisations, contrary to the accusations levelled by anarchists and councilists, have no need of such measures, and do not fear, but, on the contrary, have the greatest interest in the most complete clarification through debate. In fact, they only resort to expulsions in very exceptional cases of serious indiscipline and disloyalty. As Johannard pointed out in The Hague: ‘expulsion from the IWA is the most serious and dishonourable condemnation that can befall a man; those expelled can never again belong to an honourable association’" (p. 171) [17].
The target was not the person of Bakunin, but his politics and above all the denunciation of the secret organisation he had set up, "an International within the International"; it was his methods that were to be denounced and eradicated. What was at stake at the Hague congress was not to see whether the supporters of Marx or the supporters of Bakunin would win, but to affirm the organisational principles of the International. A communist organisation cannot function without clear principles of organisation and militancy. This is the crux of the matter which the ICT article scandalously ignores.
With the crushing of the Paris Commune, the IWA found itself in a very dangerous situation: "Jules Favre was demanding from all governments, even the British, the extradition of refugees as common criminals; when Dufaure was proposing to the Rural Assembly a law banning the International, a hypocritical counterfeit of which was later presented by Malou to the Belgians; when in Switzerland a Commune refugee was put under preventive arrest while awaiting the federal government's decision on the extradition order; when hunting down members of the International was the ostensible basis for an alliance between Beust and Bismarck, whose anti-International clause Victor Emmanuel was quite eager to adopt; when the Spanish Government, putting itself entirely at the disposal of the butchers of Versailles, was forcing the Madrid Federal Council to seek refuge in Portugal; at a time, lastly, when the International's prime duty was to strengthen its organisation and to accept the gauntlet thrown down by the governments"[18].
The generalised attack by the European governments was supported within the IWA by the Bakuninist fifth column, "the support which European reaction finds in the scandals provoked by that society at a time when the International is undergoing the most serious trial since its foundation obliges it to present a historical review of all these intrigues "[19]. The Alliance and its machinations were an absolute threat to the IWA; one of the members of the Alliance, Bakunin's lieutenant, Guillaume, went so far as to say with impudence that: "Any member of the International has every right to join any secret society, even Freemasonry. Any investigation of a secret society would simply amount to a denunciation to the police"[20].
From the dawn of the workers' movement the bourgeoisie has waged a war to the death against its communist organisations, both when they are large and influential, and when they are tiny and have little or no influence in the class. The Communist League, once dissolved, was not forgotten by the bourgeoisie who mounted against its militants the monstrous Cologne Trial (1852) Similarly, Marx himself was the object of a campaign of slander orchestrated by Herr Vogt, which forced him to spend a year of work to refute it [21].
The experience of the IWA and that of the last 40 years of the Communist Left sheds light on another means of the bourgeoisie's war against revolutionary organisations: using forces which are not directly created by it, but which by their blind hatred of the communist organisations and what they represent, act admirably in favour of the bourgeoisie. This is the case of the parasites: "The Hague Congress showed that the Bakuninist Alliance was not acting on its own, but as a real coordinating centre of the whole parasitic opposition, which, supported by the bourgeoisie, was acting against the workers' movement.”[22]
In the United States, the Alliance received the support of a sinister, spiritualist-oriented group, that of Victoria Woodhull who, according to an intervention by Marx at the Hague Congress: "West's mandate is signed by Victoria Woodhull who, for years, has been scheming for the presidency of the United States, is the president of the spiritualists, preaches free love, has a banking business, etc. (...) She published the famous appeal to the English-speaking citizens of the United States, in which the IWA was accused of a host of atrocities, and which led to the creation in that country of several sections on a similar basis. It (the appeal) speaks, among many other things, of personal freedom, social freedom (free love), fashion in dress, women's suffrage, universal language, etc. (...) It considers that the women's question should take precedence over the workers' question, and refuses to recognise the IWA as a workers' organisation" [23].
German parasitism, i.e. the Lassalleans who had been expelled from the Association for the Education of German Workers in London, joined this international network of parasitism, through the above-mentioned Universal Federalist Council in London, in which they participated together with other enemies of the workers' movement such as the French radical Freemasons, and the Mazzinists of Italy (...) In Italy, for example, the bourgeoisie set up the Societa universalei razionalisti, which, under the leadership of Stefanoni, devoted itself to attacking the International in that country. Its press published the slanders of Vogt and the German Lassalleans against Marx, and ardently defended Bakunin's Alliance.
"The aim of this whole network of fake revolutionaries was none other than to slander the members of the International, as does the bourgeois press, which they themselves inspire. And, to their shame, they do it by appealing to the unity of the workers"[24] (Duval's Intervention, p. 99).
The lessons of the Hague Congress are compelling:
These lessons are thrown into the dustbin by the ICT article which concludes: "After a tumultuous session, Bakunin was expelled by a majority vote and from then on, the red and black tendencies of the workers’ movement went their separate ways".
There was no split between the "red tendency" and the "black tendency"! There was no quarrel between Marx and Bakunin, nor were differences of political or organisational conception the cause of the split in the IWA. The real problem was Bakunin's parasitic conspiracy against the International and what the momentous Congress of The Hague in 1872 did was to defend the organisation against this destructive plot.
So we see that the ICT has not written the article on the Hague Congress in order to recover and nourish the historical memory of the proletariat. If that had been its aim, it should have based itself on the documents of the Congress itself, which it does not quote at any point. According to the article itself the aim is: "At this crucial historical juncture, when every day that capitalism continues to survive is a threat to the very existence of humanity, we call on all who see themselves as anarchists devoted to the class struggle to reconsider how things have changed on that long road towards the self-emancipation of the working class since 150 years ago".
There is a trap here; anarchism is a swamp where many political tendencies coexist. The majority are clearly bourgeois, support the war in Ukraine and hold positions such as the national liberation of the Kurdish people of Rojava. Only a minority defends positions situated in the camp of the proletariat. The article does not address this minority, but with obvious opportunism it addresses "anarchists in general" and to keep them happy it whitewashes Bakunin, hides his anti-organisational conspiracy, denigrates Marx and hides the lessons the IWA drew.
There are two blatant manifestations of opportunism in this behaviour. The first is that of advocating a "discussion" with anarchism while concealing the fact that the majority of this milieu is clearly made up of bourgeois organisations. The second, even more serious, is the whitewashing of characters like Bakunin and his methods which, as the IWA made clear, are incompatible with communist organisations.
Of course, it should be up to the ICT itself to explain the motives behind its article, but another motive is not hidden from us, namely its ongoing collaboration through the NWBCW committees with the parasites, and worse, the police-like snitches of the IGCL. It is evident that, in addition to the blatant flirtation with anarchism, the article on Bakunin also serves to whitewash the IGCL’s behaviour, to give it a "legitimacy", and this is simply scandalous.
C.Mir 24-08-23
[2] It is very striking how the article considers the roots of the IWA: “Meanwhile in London, the Polish uprising and the American Civil War served as the impetus for the founding of the First International in 1864”. It is incredible that a so-called Communist Left organisation sees the origins of the IWA in this way, not as an expression of the workers' movement, but as a result of the Polish uprising or the American Civil War! This differs radically from Marx and Engels' assessment of the origin of the IWA.
[3] From the text of the IWA Fictitious Splits in the International; unless otherwise stated, quotations are from this document.
[4] For an analysis of this notion see Communist Organisation: The Struggle of Marxism against Political Adventurism, [23]International Review 88
[5] On Lassalle see Lassalle and Schweitzer: The Struggle against Political Adventurers in the Labour Movement | [24]ICC Online, September 2019
[6] Fictitious Splits in the International
[7] ibid
[8] See Attacking the ICC: the raison d'être of the IGGC [25]ICC Online, January 2023 and A committee that leads the participants to a dead end [26]World Revolution no 395, Winter 2023
[9] Fictitious Splits in the International
[10] ibid
[11] ibid
[12] ibid
[13] ibid
[14] ibid
[15] ibid
[16] Foreword to the German edition of the Communist Manifesto of 1890
[17] Questions of Organisation, Part 3: The Hague Congress of 1872: The Struggle against Political Parasitism [27], International Review 87
[18] Fictitious Splits in the International
[19] ibid
[20] Nicolaievsky, La Vie de Karl Marx, p 409, Edition Gallimard, 1970
[21] See our articles in Spanish : El caso Vogt: el combate de los revolucionarios contra la calumnia (I) [28]; El caso Vogt: el combate de los revolucionarios contra la calumnia (II) [29]
[22] Questions of Organisation, Part 3: The Hague Congress of 1872: The Struggle against Political Parasitism [27], International Review 87
[23] ibid
[24] ibid
As clearly shown in the correspondence that follows - and in our previous articles on the question[1] - the individual Gaizka is demonstrably an adventurer. His websites: Communia, (also known as Emancipación and Nuevo Corso) are part of an attempt to create a bogus ‘communist left' to usurp those existing organisations which are authentic descendants of the Communist Left political lineage, including the International Communist Current and the Internationalist Communist Tendency[2].
We publish below a correspondence between the latter two organisations on the question of how to - or whether to - expose such an individual and those political parasites who defend them. Should the Communist Left as a whole - irrespectively of the political differences among them – publicly warn all revolutionaries, particularly the younger and less experienced ones, of the dangerous trap represented by the actions of such an adventurer? Or should it maintain a public silence about the latter?
The ICC’s intention in opening this exchange with the ICT was to share and verify the information we had already collected on this individual; warn of the danger he represented; and make a common front to defend the authentic Communist Left.
The differences that emerged between our two organisations was not about the fact of the danger of the adventurism of Gaizka - the ICT completely agrees with the ICC on his falsity and the fraudulence of his project - but on whether to publicise this fact and make common cause with the ICC.
The publication of this correspondence thus serves several purposes.
First, it confirms from another genuinely communist source the adventurist nature of Gaizka that we have already described on our site.
The correspondence also illuminates the political differences of approach to this question between our two organisations, which is of general interest for communists today. In the history of the marxist movement, political correspondence between groups has always been seen as a potential means of clarification in front of the working class. One only has to consult the correspondence of Marx and Engels to better understand their fight, which preceded that of Lenin and Luxemburg against the opportunist degeneration of the German Social Democratic Party during the latter part of the 19th Century.[3] It’s worth pointing out that it was the opportunists of the SPD who tried to keep secret the correspondence by Marx and Engels that was critical of them.
Finally, it allows us to continue the debate. The final letter of the ICT abruptly terminates the correspondence. But as far as the ICC is concerned the problem hasn’t disappeared and it will never be resolved without the conscious intervention of the communist vanguard. It would be completely illusory to think that the problem of adventurism would not interfere dangerously with the fight for the constitution of the future world political party of the proletariat. We therefor invite the ICT, and all those who are sincerely interested in the defence of the Communist Left, to continue the debate in the press.
Following the full publication of this correspondence, with the exception of personal details which ae not pertinent, internet links which don’t function and aspects linked to the international situation, we will add some concluding remarks.
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26.9.19 ICC > ICT
Dear Comrades,
We are writing to you to request your opinion on the information we shared with your CWO comrade concerning the individual Gaizka who animates the Emancipación/Nuevo Corso tendency.
We met with your comrade nearly six months ago on two occasions in London to present the facts that we had gleaned about Gaizka’s trajectory and to discover your opinion about the harm that this trajectory represents for the Communist Left as a whole. We understood from these meetings that your organisation would in due course give us a definite position from your central organ concerning the significance of the information on Gaizka that we supplied. So far, we haven’t received such a communication from you on this subject. Perhaps it was not clear from our last meeting that we expected a subsequent response from you. So please take this letter as a respectful reminder that we would indeed like to know your opinion on the facts about Gaizka that we gave you.
Having read your recent article concerning Emancipación on leftcom.org [30][4] we ourselves were reminded of the urgency of the need to determine the nature of Gaizka, noting several salient points from the article:
These points tend to confirm for us that the project of Emancipación is to create a false international communist left ‘movement’ that excludes the authentic tradition of the existing Communist Left camp and its political positions (without confronting them openly and fraternally) and therefore acts as a dangerous trap for the new elements, particularly in the US, who are coming to class positions.
The information on Gaizka that you have from us confirms, in our view, that this false and harmful objective is not the result of naivety, or a genuine political error, but is deliberately designed.
Consequently, we would appreciate receiving, in the near future, your own conclusions about the information on Gaizka that we presented to you.
Fraternally
PS. Your article on Emancipación is misinformed when it states that the ICC has “collapsed” or “disintegrated”. We would like to reassure the comrades of the ICT that, as Mark Twain said, “rumours of our death are greatly exaggerated.”
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01.10.19 ICT > ICC
The ICT IB is meeting next weekend and I will relay this message to them. My worry is that to turn a political critique into an attack on an individual (on whom we have even more evidence) may be counterproductive. We have seen those who argue that the “ICC is a cult” line but even the youngest of our sympathisers can see that with Emancipacion we are here dealing with a real cult with a guru who tolerates no contradiction and will not confront political positions honestly and directly. However, the young ones we hoped to save still remain true believers. We note also the totally opportunist line pursued by the IGCL[5] in this regard. Sometimes to chase these people only gives them a publicity they don’t deserve and undermines the entire CL.
This is my personal opinion but will argue for it in our deliberations,
Internationalist greetings
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11.10.19 ICC > ICT
Dear comrades
Thank you for J’s prompt reply to the ICC letter of 26.09.19 which gives his opinion concerning Gaizka and NC/Emancipación and mentions that the ICT central organ would soon be meeting where this question would be discussed. We look forward to hearing from the ICT after your central organ has reached its decision on the information we supplied to you about this individual.
We were interested to read in J’s reply that you have evidence about Gaizka that wasn’t in the information we supplied to you. We would be glad to know about this additional evidence as we would like to have a complete as possible picture of the activity of this individual. We would also like to know if your evidence complements or modifies our own information in any respect. This additional evidence could be passed onto us in London.
We look forward to hearing from you about both these questions at your earliest convenience.
Fraternally
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Received from the ICT [between 11-18 October 2019]
An official response is being prepared (summarising our discussions last week) but I have cut and pasted a message from someone re further information on Gaizka and his two female accomplices.
I read your recent text on Nuevo Curso in the web. And I would like to share with you some information that I discovered recently.
I knew some members of Nuevo Curso 2 years ago, when they were starting out. The founding group are members of the cooperative Las Indias. And the soul of the group is a man named Gaizka. He is not a complete unknown.
The group started two years ago by searching for "internationalists" in the social network Twitter, with bots, that is, fake accounts programmed to locate specific people. If we read the statements of its leader in 2014, we can assume that it is a case of recent conversion to communism. And with his creation of a "new Trotskyite-Munisist tradition", which I think is a direct offspring of Gaizka, we can assume that he is a political adventurer. But it is true that he is an adventurer who can do a lot of harm to our cause, because he can attract a lot of young people, thanks to his good use of internet and social networks.
I don't think it adds substantially to what you know (except more colours to the chameleon) - he is a punk, anarchist, communiser etc etc.
IG
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18.10.19 ICT > ICC
Comrades
As promised we discussed your letter in our IB and are entirely in agreement with the substantive passage
“Having read your recent article concerning Emancipación on leftcom.org [30]. we ourselves were reminded of the urgency of the need to determine the nature of Gaizka, noting several salient points from the article:
- that Emancipación pretends to be a new pole of regroupment of the Communist Left for the future world party based on internationalist principles while it has failed to produce a political platform that defends these principles.
- that Emancipación bases its perspective not on the positions and tradition of the Communist Left but on the Transitional Programme of Trotsky that Munis attempted to revitalise in a revolutionary sense in the post-war period without success.
- that the approach of Emancipación is not the clarification of political differences with the existing currents of the Communist Left but instead follows the ‘path of ambiguity’.”
These points tend to confirm for us that the project of Emancipación is now to create a false international communist left ‘movement’ that excludes the authentic tradition of the existing Communist Left camp and its political positions (without confronting them openly and fraternally) and therefore acts as a dangerous trap for the new elements, particularly in the US, who are coming to class positions.”
We can confirm that in the course of our early discussions with them they denied they were aiming to create a separate political organization, but were rather aiming to more broadly educate youngsters in working class history so that they could best decide for themselves what course to take. When some of their young supporters became more inclined towards political organisation, they did ask us not to engage in discussion of serious political issues, instead offering practical cooperation on a “no-questions asked” basis. This was rejected by us and after that they began a series of manoeuvres both to frame their “new tendency” and to break up the discussion between our sympathisers and members in the USA and the groups of Workers’ Offensive and the Gulf Coast Communist Fraction. When we openly stated what their manoeuvres were they abruptly cut off all communication with us. In fact Gaizka (as we shall continue to call him) cannot tolerate any kind of contradiction and automatically freezes out even the most innocent of interlocutors who question any of his assumptions.
However, the question is how to deal with this threat and we think our attack on this dangerous individual has to come through a critique of the organisation he has given birth to both in its political framework and its modus operandi. In this regard we intend to prepare more critiques of the Emancipación project as such, avoiding argumentum ad hominem in the most direct sense but revealing clearly the weak organisational basis on which it operates. We, as always, will go about this in our own way and expect you will do the same. It is probably the best way to deal with the situation since powerful and separate critiques are more likely to reach a wider audience, and of course, we do have a different approach to dealing with those sectarian elements which from time to time appear on the fringes of the Communist Left.
Internationalist greetings
The International Bureau of the ICT
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26.3.2020 ICC > ICT
Dear comrades,
We hope none of your comrades have succumbed to the corona virus and are taking all necessary measures of precaution against it. The few militants of the Communist Left in the world are precious for the future of the working class.
It is now two months since we published the article on Gaizka[6] which gave sufficient facts to indicate the suspicious nature of this element and his danger to the authentic Communist Left and the new elements coming toward it.
As you remember we already presented these facts about him to you and we both reached agreement on the serious nature of his threat to the Communist Left, as outlined by you in an email of 18th October 2019.
NC/Gaizka’s response to the article has been a deafening silence; a cowardly approach which is actually symptomatic of his doubtful nature. It would be difficult to believe that he has not noticed the article: if our website metrics are right nearly two thousand people read this article in the first weeks of its appearance.
In fact there has only been one public response to the article – that of the IGCL (also reproduced on Philipe Bourrinet’s Pantopolis Blog). In this response entitled ‘New ICC Attack against the International Proletarian Camp’ the IGCL staunchly defends Nuevo Corso for having “played an active role in the emergence and international regrouping of new revolutionary and communist forces, particularly on the American continent”. Without contesting any of the facts presented in our article, the IGCL alleges that the article is on the “rotten terrain of the personalisation of political issues” and is part of an ICC campaign of “provocation, manoeuvring, denigration, slander or rumour” against revolutionary groups or militants and that “it is aimed at rotting and undermining the international process of political emergence, development, regrouping and clarification that is currently underway”. It concludes that the ICC’s main purpose in the article is “weakening and if possible destroying any attempt, any process of regrouping and fighting for the party””.
We would be interested to know your opinion of these allegations by the IGCL and their support for the dubious Gaizka and Nuevo Corso.
In the email mentioned above you said that you were preparing more critiques of the Emancipación project. Will they be appearing in the near future?
Fraternally
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12.4.2020 ICT > ICC
Comrades
Thanks for your mail and we reciprocate your sentiments re safety of all comrades in this period.
The EC of the CWO met on Thursday and discussed your letter but we are confident we speak for the rest of the ICT (which meets next week).
The lack of response to your criticism is probably a good thing. As far as we know only the IGCL supported him. We had already sent them our criticisms of their refusal to recognise what Emancipación has become but they continue to ignore us. We in turn don’t intend to give either of them the oxygen of publicity. We think most people already know what the IGCL is. We have also had an enquiry from the Workers’ Group in the USA (which previously supported Gaizka) asking us if we can confirm the broad outlines of your critique of Gaizka and we have done so at some length. Again we have received no reply but in their enquiry they have become very suspicious of the fact that Gaizka makes no attempt to defend himself from any of the charges.
We are agreed that Gaizka is a political chameleon who operates on his own subjective level and he is in fact the guru of a cult (in this case a real one!). However, our position remains the same as the last time we wrote that we think we should stick to political critiques rather than get involved in argumentum ad hominem (which will always be interpreted as sectarian slander). At some point the organisational issue and the political one will make further comment both necessary and possible, but for now we remain with our political critique of the fantasy that is Emancipación. We already detect that some of his US followers have fallen away and those that remain are increasingly seen as incoherent.
For now we can see that a whole new generation is coming to communist politics but this is not the time to be diverted by something which could disappear as fast as it appeared. We have a more important task in building the Communist Left response in the face of far more serious diversions which affect many younger people who learn of us only via the distorted prism that is social media, and this is what we will be concentrating on until a new occasion arises which demands a telling political response.
Internationalist greetings
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4.5.2020 ICC > ICT
Dear comrades,
Thank you for your email from the EC of the CWO (12.04.20). We were pleased to hear that your comrades and family are unscathed from the virus…
The fact that you replied to a request from the Workers Group in the US confirming the facts about the suspect nature of Gaizka revealed in our article ‘Who’s who in Nuevo Corso’ is a positive step. A pity no reply from them has so far been received.
We know that your position, in distinction from ours, continues to be that making public this information would invite accusations of sectarianism, and that you therefore prefer to criticise the Emancipacíon project from a general political angle at some time in the future. Within this limited approach we think it would be logical to publicly set the record straight in relation to an article the ICT wrote in 2018 welcoming Emancipación as an authentic new group of the Communist Left[7], particularly as in your critical article of the group in 2019 you said that your break with the group “occurred in a way that was not sufficiently public and clear”.[8] In this context, since you have written to the IGCL putting your position on Emancipación, it would be appropriate to publish this letter of clarification.
However, the main reason for our previous letter was to ask for your position on the noxious response of the IGCL to the ICC article on Gaizka. Their denunciation of us goes completely beyond any accusation of sectarianism and alleges that the ICC is slandering Gaizka with gossip in order to destroy the other groups of the Communist Left. You say that “everyone knows what the IGCL is” - presumably that means it is a source of lies and thuggery - in your letter. But you don’t actually tell us what your view is of their support for Gaizka/NC and their denunciation of the ICC in their response. Given the public silence in relation to the IGCL’s denunciation we were hoping - and still are - for a message of solidarity with us against their attack even if only in an email to us.
We think the generally silent reaction to the publication of our article on Gaizka and to the denunciation of us by the IGCL is not a positive sign, even if it confirms, in the case of Gaizka himself, the truth of the facts we have presented on him. Silence allows him to play the hurt victim of a ‘personal attack’ and invite, if not sympathy then neutrality from other groups of the proletarian political milieu and elements coming toward it concerning the dangerous pretence that NC and Emancipación are part of the Communist Left. The IGCL has exploited this silent neutrality to completely invert the truth and present the ICC, instead of the bogus Emancipación project, as attacking the existing Communist Left.
Making public the nature of such fake communist groups is in our opinion vital for this reason, and silence and neutrality on this question harms the unity and integrity of the real Communist Left and helps the divisive goals of Gaizka, IGCL and co.
You see a danger in giving them the “oxygen of publicity” but the leftcom.org [30] ICT forum recently oxygenated a post of the IGCL on the pandemic without comment[9]. In our opinion the public identification of this political virus, represented by such groups, and making it better known and understood, is the precondition for its eradication. Though very small in size this political virus is designed to attach itself and destroy healthy political organisations. It thrives on the absence of a vaccine and on the passivity of the host toward it, and the illusion that it is only the annual flu to which there is supposedly ‘herd immunity’.
Looking forward to receiving a further response from you to the attack of the IGCL on us.
Fraternally
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17.5.2020 ICT > ICC
Comrades
Thanks for your letter of 4 May. We hope your comrades recover without after effects. Since we last wrote one comrade has also been hit by Covid-19 but is young and strong enough to see it off. Thanks for pointing out to us that the IGCL had once again spammed our forum. We had not noticed and it has now been removed as per our standard policy. As to Emancipación, and our previous welcome to it, we think our political response makes it clear already where we now stand. We have an extended correspondence with them which clearly shows their slippery evolution which we will publish if and when appropriate.
We will not agree on our approach to this issue of these small groups claiming to be part of the Communist Left. Annoying though they are, they are not worth our attention. They may be more annoying for you in that they began in or close to the ICC. For us there are far more serious political things which demand our attention. …
We are quite willing to discuss this issue with anyone including yourselves but we don’t want the CL to be noted for its internal squabbles which diminish us all and give ammunition to the capitalist left.
Internationalist greetings
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I.6.2020 ICC >ICT
Dear comrades
Thank you for your letter of 17 May. The Covid pandemic is indeed a catastrophic event for world capitalism accelerating at ‘warp speed’ the existing economic crisis and bringing with it mass unemployment, destitution and premature death to the working class on a scale not seen since the Second World War.
The Communist Left must provide an updated revolutionary perspective for the proletariat that takes the particularities of the present situation into account…
The historical significance of the present situation has to be fully explained to the working class. Only the Communist Left has the programmatic and organisational integrity to reveal, in the current conditions, the immensity of the historic mission of the communist revolution that lies behind the increasing pauperisation of the working class.
Clearly only the Communist Left can fulfil this task both today, to the extent of its limited capacities, and in the future when the world communist party must be created.
We are therefore continuing to devote many articles and leaflets on our website to the situation, in multiple languages. We are increasing the number of virtual meetings to bring the communist perspective to a wider audience for discussion and reflection. There are many aspects for the current situation that remain to be clarified and we are equally preoccupied with analysing them in detail.
Communists must be able to multi-task; a one-dimensional approach to intervention is not adequate.
Today and in the future, the protection of the integrity of the Communist Left must be incorporated into its intervention. If genuine organisations of the Communist Left can be discredited today by fake groups trying to usurp its traditions like Nuevo Corso, or defamed by thugs and slanderers like the IGCL without any collective public defence of its honour and authenticity, then the credibility of its present intervention and of the future party will be compromised. It’s true that the IGCL is openly defamatory toward the ICC while it is presently stalking the ICT with false flattery. So on the surface it appears that the whole Communist Left is not under attack by the IGCL. But whether filth is thrown in your face or you find it sticking to the bottom of your shoe the net result is ultimately the same: reputational damage. Taking down the posts of the IGCL from your site is welcome, but a more explicit distancing is required.
The task of the defence of the Communist Left is certainly not posed at the same level as the task of orienting the class as a whole with a global perspective. But that doesn’t mean that the latter renders the former unnecessary or unimportant. It is perfectly possible to combine both the necessary work of defending the integrity of the Communist Left camp and provide a class-wide revolutionary perspective, as our website testifies.
The history of the marxist movement shows that the importance of the defence of its own probity can even take precedence on certain occasions over questions of general policy and analysis. Even Engels became impatient when Marx took a year out of the preparation of Capital (1859/60) in order to comprehensively refute the slanders of Karl Vogt[10], but he was later obliged to recognise that the change of priorities was correct. Vogt’s slander that Marx was a blackmailer and in league with the secret police had to be openly and thoroughly condemned. It was necessary, in Marx’s words, to “fight fire with fire”.
The more famous example is the Hague Congress of the IWA which took place just over a year after the defeat of the Paris Commune but was not devoted to this major event in the life of the working class but to the exposure of the secret Alliance and the expulsion of its leader Bakunin. In a period of defeat it was vital to preserve the honour of the 1st International and prevent it from falling into the hands of a cabal led by an adventurer who had accused the legitimate General Council to be a clique of “German Jews”.
Our denunciation of the descendants of Vogt, Lassalle, Bakunin etc today is precisely not an internal battle within the Communist Left, but an external demarcation of the latter from usurpers and serial abusers. The class delineation from them is all the more necessary because the only purpose of their existence is to discredit the authentic Communist Left on behalf of the bourgeoisie.
Of course, for the capitalist left the Communist Left has always been sectarian because we denounce the bourgeoisie as a whole. We have no need to try and cater to their deliberate distortions by remaining neutral about the fake communist left. On the contrary we must make the distinction of the Communist Left all the more intransigent and thereby strike two enemies who use similar malign methods against the communist camp.
The obvious counter-part of the clear separation of the Communist Left camp from the capitalist left and the parasitic milieu is its own greater public solidarity and cohesion. The most effective way this camp can prevent its differences appearing as petty squabbles is by affirming its common class basis and by commonly organising discussion of their differences. We remain committed to the perspective behind the Conferences of the Communist Left of the late 1970s even though they were nipped in the bud. The absence of this project in the intervening decades have not improved the standing of the Communist Left camp as a whole; instead, hostile forces around it have been given more political room to operate.
We realise we diverge on this question and we will both continue to urge our different positions. But even though it is clear that you don’t accord the mutual solidarity of the Communist Left the same importance as we do, we still don’t understand why even a minimal statement of solidarity with the ICC against the recent revolting slanders of the IGCL is beyond you, since we can’t believe that such a declaration would break a principle for you.
Let’s hope our precious few militants of the Communist Left continue to remain (relatively) free of the virus.
fraternally
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June 2020 ICT >ICC
Dear Comrades
Thank you for your letter of 1 June which we discussed in the International Bureau of the ICT.
Your first paragraph is an expansion of what we briefly said to you in our previous letter but you will find that we are at least agreed on the current situation if you read Reflections on the Coronavirus and Economic Crises [31] and the opening paragraph of The Global Pandemic and Imperialist Competition [32]. However we have once again to emphasise that the current crisis began in the early 1970s (when the post-war boom came to an end) and not in 1989 when you suddenly woke up to the fact that the working class had been in retreat for over a decade (and which we told you repeatedly throughout the 1980s). The postmodernist “solution” that all is chaos and decomposition only has a material basis in the fact that the crisis is getting deeper and the palliatives the capitalists produce only kicks the day of reckoning further down the road and do not solve it.
We have no doubt the Communist Left has the analysis to understand this – our collective problem is that the wider working class does not and, as yet, is not universally responding to the slow creep towards disaster the system is carrying out. For us this remains the main focus. For us “multi-tasking” means developing the analytical framework of the evolving social reality in front of us, and searching for more and more ways to reach the wider class.
And here we can only repeat that it is counter-productive to engage in what are seen as personalised denunciations of cultish grouplets which have no significant bearing on, or life in, the working class. “Reputational damage” can be self-inflicted and to speak the absolute truth we think that the ICC’s continual defence of petty attacks on such groups has cost not only the ICC but also the entire Communist Left tradition as the mud sticks all around. We do not want to be associated with this method and we have constantly advised you not to go in for argumentum ad hominem. You have ignored our advice and now ask us to support a step we disagreed with before you took it.
These people will expose themselves politically. In fact they are already doing so. You are also obviously not paying attention. The IGCL ceased its “flattery” of the ICT some time ago. They have substituted it for blackmail about the ICT having to live up “to its responsibilities” (i.e. talk to the IGCL). It is a responsibility we have singularly failed to take on. Their utterly opportunist tie up with Nuevo Curso is political reason enough for exposing them as charlatans after all the criticism they have heaped on the various groups of the CL over time. If you had been paying attention you will have also noticed that the Workers’ Group of Detroit (without any contact with us since we wrote to confirm that the ICC’s attack on Gaizka was factually correct) have now broken with the IGCL/NC/WO/GCCF coterie but for political reasons (their non-proletarian denunciation of the demonstrations and riots in the US). But whilst we are at it these are not the only people indulging in slander. Apparently young sympathisers tell us there is a group of ICC sympathisers who slander the ICT on a regular basis on Instagram and other social media. As they often express opinions which the ICC would not share we do not know how close they are to you but we have not responded for the same reason as always. They can make their empty comments in a vacuum – our response would be to dignify their youthful games. There is more serious work to be done.
Internationalist greetings
ICT
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10.07.20 ICC > ICT
Dear comrades,
Thank you for your email of 17th June. We would like to reply to some of your points in a further letter.
Here we would just like to express our concern when we read in your email that a group of ICC sympathisers has been slandering the ICT on a regular basis on Instagram and other social media. We cannot find anything about this and would like to have more information from you about it, as we intend to put a stop to any such behaviour.
We were saddened to hear of the tragic death of an ex-sympathiser of the ICT.
Fraternally,
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July 2020 ICT > ICC
Comrades
We have discussed the question of your sympathisers but think that this is an issue for you and will leave you to make your own enquiries with people who are known to you. We have also written to the IGCL to state that whilst we disagree with your decision to ignore our advice over the murky past of comrade Gaizka we also consider their decision to come to his defence as an indication of their failure to defend the CL and have closed all correspondence with them. We also wish to make it quite clear to you that this is our final communication on the IGCL and Emancipación (but we should say we regard both these organisations, and their acolytes, as the product of your methodology). We have nothing to gain from anything other than making a political defence of the CL as and when appropriate. Any future correspondence from you on this issue will be ignored.
Internationalist greetings
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12.08.20 ICC > ICT
Dear comrades,
Here are some responses to your email of 23.07.20.
As we mentioned in our last letter our own investigations into the apparent slanders of the ICT by ICC sympathisers hadn’t turned up any evidence. If you do not want to specify your sources for this can you please help us by telling us the nature of the slanders in order that we can get to the heart of the problem?
Regarding your letter to the IGCL we of course agree with you that their defence of Nuevo Corso is an attack on the Communist Left. Your private letter to the IGCL about the falsity of NC however still leaves the public to take the latter as an authentic communist left group. A public exposure of this pretence is essential.
Furthermore while you are cutting off relations with the IGCL in private, this still leaves the public to consider the IGCL as a real revolutionary group.
We also note from your description of your letter to the IGCL that, while you criticised the ICC to them for making the nature of these groups publicly known, you do not seem to have expressed your solidarity with the ICC against the slanders of the IGCL - a declaration we have been asking from you throughout our recent correspondence, to no avail.
We are puzzled by your idea that the ICC shares the same “methodology” as n and the IGCL. Our methodology is diametrically opposed on class lines to that of these two bogus groups. Our goal and method is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the international working class; theirs is to overthrow the existing revolutionary organisations on behalf of the bourgeoisie. We fail to see any convergence between these two basic methods.
You say you will ignore any further correspondence from us on this topic. However, ignoring the problem of these groups won’t make it go away. They will continue on their destructive course, and the genuine Communist Left will continue to be confronted with the need to publicly close ranks against them in order to defend the integrity of the Communist Left camp.
Fraternally
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By trying to justify their refusal to denounce the pernicious role of adventurers, the ICT justifies the unjustifiable!
The argument of the ICT presented in its letters is, in essence, that the ICC exposure of adventurers like Gaizka, and the unmasking of their clearly anti-proletarian project, is creating more damage to the Communist Left than the adventurer himself. The exposure of the crime is supposedly worse than the crime itself. This is clearly absurd, implying:
Such an approach by the ICT, which is already an aberration, leads to other aberrations:
The ICT is to a large extent aware of the threat posed by adventurers and parasites, as clearly shown by their own letters. But the ICT prefers to do this ‘privately’ while preserving a discreet public silence on the existence of this dangerous phenomenon due to the illusion of achieving a “significant influence” in the life of the working class, and to preserve its fishing permit in the murky pools of adventurism and parasitism.
Furthermore, the ICT harbours a misunderstanding of the specific function of Gaizka: to undermine the ground for the constitution of the future party. The target of Gaizka’s group and its parasitic defenders is not the working class as a whole - it has no political programme for example – but to prevent the germination of the future party and the evolution of new militants in particular. Thus, the Gaizka fraud has had a “significant impact” at the level of the political minorities of the working class, in the USA in particular.
This dual, contradictory approach, inevitably creates the illusion on the one hand that adventurers and parasites are genuine communists, while on the other hand a real organisation of the Communist Left, the ICC, by exposing the fraud, is only “throwing mud”. According to the twisted logic of the ICT, the real enemy is the ICC!
A false vison of the tasks of revolutionaries in the present period
To better understand why the ICT has ended up in this contradictory and harmful conclusion, look at their idea that Gaizka’s “cultish grouplet” has “no significant bearing on, or life in, the working class.” This is true, but the lack of widespread influence in the working class is unfortunately also true of the authentic Communist Left. This is because the general level of the class struggle is still a long way from making such a level of activity possible. In this context, imagining that it is possible to obtain “a significant influence on the life of the class” can only have pernicious consequences. In particular, it can lead to search for such influence by ‘adapting’ the organisation’s political positions and form of intervention to the level of consciousness in the working class at a given moment – in other words making concessions to the illusions and mystifications that weigh on the class, adopting an opportunist approach whose basic characteristic lies in the search for immediate ‘success’ at the expense of the future struggle of the proletariat. And this opportunism can also impact on organisational questions, as shown by the combat of the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party. In sum, withdrawing from the defence of political organisational principles by considering them to be “internal squabbles which diminish us all and give ammunition to the capitalist left”, is a disengagment from the public defence of the authentic communist organisations that really do exist.
Thus, by maintaining the illusion (for itself and a milieu around it) in the possibility of gaining a significant influence on the proletariat today, the ICT is creating an obstacle to the solid political and organisational preparation for the real future party which will indeed have a “significant influence” on the life of the working class. This illusion is accompanied by the pretension that it is currently in direct competition with the left of capital for winning an influence over the class[11]. This false idea tends to reinforce its opportunist battle to gain “influence”.
The questions and disagreements raised about the attitude needed towards parasitism and adventurism calls for a discussion about the systematic defence of revolutionary organisational principles in the preparation of the future communist party. For the ICC, without the common action of revolutionary organisations for such a principled approach, without a constant combat against opportunism, there is no basis for the successful formation of future generations of communist militants and of the future communist party.
[1] 1CC note: Who is who in “Nuevo Curso”? [13]; Gaizka’s deafening silence [33]; The adventurer Gaizka has the defenders he deserves: the gangsters of the IGCL [34]
[2] ICC note: Nuevo Curso and the “Spanish Communist Left”: What are the origins of the Communist Left? [12]
[3] ICC note: German Social Democracy 1872 – 1914: the fight against organisational opportunism, Part 1 [35]; German Social Democracy 1872 – 1914: the fight against organisational opportunism, Part 2 [36]
[4] Welcome to “Emancipación” (Spain) [37]
[5] ICC note: International Group of the Communist Left, a parasitic group.
[6] ICC note: Who is who in “Nuevo Curso”? [13]
[7] ICC note: Welcome to “Emancipación” (Spain) [37]
[8] ICC note: On the Establishment of the Group “Emancipación” [38]
[9] ICC note: Originally on http://www.leftcom.org/en/forum/2020-03-20/coronarivus-and-catastrophic-... [39]
10] ICC note: El caso Vogt: el combate de los revolucionarios contra la calumnia (I) [28]; El caso Vogt: el combate de los revolucionarios contra la calumnia (II) [29]
[11] “we don’t want the CL to be noted for its internal squabbles which diminish us all and give ammunition to the capitalist left”, ICT to the ICC, 17.5.2020
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17492/two-years-joint-statement-communist-left-war-ukraine
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17159/joint-statement-groups-international-communist-left-about-war-ukraine
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17416/call-communist-left-down-massacres-no-support-any-imperialist-camp-no-pacifist
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17491/struggle-against-imperialist-war-can-only-be-waged-positions-communist-left
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17396/ict-and-no-war-class-war-initiative-opportunist-bluff-which-weakens-communist-left
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17418/how-ict-denies-lessons-marxism-fight-against-political-parasitism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17403/gaizka-should-adventurer-be-publicly-exposed
[8] https://www.marxists.org/francais/bordiga/works/1926/02/bordiga_ic261.htm
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201508/13354/zimmerwald-and-centrist-currents-political-organisations-proletari
[10] https://leftcom.org/en/articles/2022-07-22/nwbcw-and-the-real-international-bureau-of-1915
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/197701/9333/ambiguities-internationalist-communist-party-over-partisans-italy-19
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16727/nuevo-curso-and-spanish-communist-left-what-are-origins-communist-left
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16802/who-who-nuevo-curso
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17400/conference-left-communism-brussels-decoy-those-who-want-take-part-revolutionary
[15] https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-10-23/the-tasks-of-revolutionaries-in-the-face-of-capitalism-s-drive-to-war
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17240/correspondence-joint-statement-groups-communist-left-war-ukraine
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17203/balance-sheet-public-meetings-about-joint-statement-groups-communist-left-war-ukraine
[18] http://www.en.internationalism.org
[19] http://www.istitutoonoratodamen.it/
[20] https://en.internationalistvoice.org/
[21] http://communistleft.jinbo.net/xe/
[22] https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2022-09-02/150-years-on-the-split-in-the-first-international
[23] https://es.internationalism.org/revista-internacional/199701/1234/cuestiones-de-organizacion-iv-la-lucha-del-marxismo-contra-el-aven
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16745/lassalle-and-schweitzer-struggle-against-political-adventurers-workers-movement
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17296/attacking-icc-raison-detre-igcl
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17297/committee-leads-its-participants-dead-end
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/content/3744/questions-organisation-part-3-hague-congress-1872-struggle-against-political-parasitism
[28] https://es.internationalism.org/content/4787/el-caso-vogt-el-combate-de-los-revolucionarios-contra-la-calumnia-i
[29] https://es.internationalism.org/content/4836/el-caso-vogt-el-combate-de-los-revolucionarios-contra-la-calumnia-ii
[30] http://leftcom.org/
[31] http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2020-05-06/reflections-on-the-coronavirus-and-economic-crises
[32] https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2020-06-14/the-global-pandemic-and-imperialist-competition
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16835/gaizkas-deafening-silence
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/content/16981/adventurer-gaizka-has-defenders-he-deserves-gangsters-igcl
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/node/17123
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/node/17206
[37] http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2018-07-10/welcome-to-%25E2%2580%259Cemancipaci%25C3%25B3n%25E2%2580%259D-spain
[38] http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2019-09-14/on-the-establishment-of-the-group-emancipacion
[39] http://www.leftcom.org/en/forum/2020-03-20/coronarivus-and-catastrophic-crisis-the-tragic-responsability-of-communists-igcl