* Since the First World War, capitalism has been a decadent social system. It has twice plunged humanity into a barbaric cycle of crisis, world war, reconstruction and new crisis. In the 1980s, it entered into the final phase of this decadence, the phase of decomposition. There is only one alternative offered by this irreversible historical decline: socialism or barbarism, world communist revolution or the destruction of humanity.

The 17th Congress of the section of the ICC in France took place at the same moment as the movement of the young generation of workers in response to growing uncertainty in employment. The movement of the students against the CPE expressed the highest point reached up to now by the international resurgence of workers’ struggles, which has also just been reconfirmed in Vigo, Spain (see WR no. 295). The class struggle is now entering a new period. Faced with this situation, our organisation, as a matter of priority, had to focus the work of this Congress on the demands posed by such an important situation.

Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilisation? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means.

1. The structure adopted by an organisation of revolutionaries corresponds to the function it takes up within the working class. Since a revolutionary organisation has tasks which apply to all stages of the workers' movement and also has tasks which are more particular to this or that juncture in the movement, there are constant characteristics of the organisation of revolutionaries and characteristics which are more circumstantial, more determined by the historic conditions in which it emerges and develops.

Some of these constant characteristics are:

One step ahead in the strengthening of the revolutionary organization in the Americas

On November 30 and December 1 2002 an event of great importance took place for the working class, and particularly for its bastions in North, Central, and South America, as well as in the Caribbean area. The ICC held its first Pan-American Conference, which brought together the sections in the USA (Internationalism), Mexico (Revolucion Mundial), and Venezuela (Internacionalismo). This assessment is not an expression of arrogance. Instead, its importance is a historical fact.

The ICC decided, earlier this year, to change the 15th Congress of its French section into an Extraordinary International Conference.

The fundamental task of this conference was to face up to an organisational crisis � the most serious in the history of the ICC � that emerged suddenly right after its 14th International Congress in April 2001.

The ICC held its 13th Congress at the beginning of April, at a time marked by the acceleration of history, as dying capitalism confronts one of the most difficult and dangerous periods of modern history, comparable in gravity to the two world wars, the upsurge of the proletarian revolution in 1917-19, or the Great Depression of 1929. The seriousness of the situationiousness of the situation is determined by sharpening contradictions at every level:

The acceleration of the world crisis of capitalism is more and more reducing the margin of manoeuvre open to the bourgeoisie, which, in the logic of capitalist exploitation, has no choice but to attack the living standards of the entire working class head-on and with increasing violence.

14th Congress of the ICC

The alternative facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st century is the same as the one which faced it at the beginning of the 20th: the descent into barbarism or the renewal of society through the communist revolution. The revolutionary marxists who insisted on this inescapable dilemma in the turbulent period 1914-23 could hardly have imagined that their political descendants would still be obliged to insist on it again at the start of the new millennium. Indeed, even the 'post-68' generation of revolutionaries, who emerged from the revival of proletarian struggles after the long counter-revolution that set in during the 1920s, did not really expect that a declining capitalism could be quite so adept at living with its own contradictions as it has proved to be since the 1960s.

At the beginning of this year, the ICC decided to transform the 15th Congress of its section in France into an Extraordinary International Conference. The decision was motivated by the open outbreak of an organisational crisis immediately following its 14th International Congress in April 2001. This crisis has led to the departure from our organisation of several militants, who have recently regrouped in what they call the "Internal Fraction of the ICC". As we shall see, the Conference took note of the fact that these militants had deliberately set themselves outside the organisation, even if today they proclaim to whoever is prepared to listen that they have been "excluded".

1. With the massive US offensive against Iraq, we enter a new stage in capitalism’s descent into military barbarism, which is set to aggravate all the other areas of open hostilities or simmering tensions around the globe. Even apart from the awful devastation which is being heaped on the hapless population of Iraq, the war can only have the effect of stoking up imperialist tensions and military chaos everywhere else. The preparations for the war have already given rise to the first open split between America, on the one hand, and the only other power which could pose as the candidate to lead a new anti-American bloc – Germany. The divisions between the great powers over Iraq have sounded the death knell of NATO, while at the same time revealing that Europe, far from being such a bloc already, is riven with profound divergences on the key issues of international relations. It has prompted another pole of the ‘axis of evil’, North Korea, to play its own hand in the crisis, with the danger that this will in the medium term extend the theatre of war to the far east. Meanwhile the third pole of the axis – Iran – is also playing the nuclear card. In Africa, France’s pretensions to being a ‘pacifist’ power are exposed by the increasing involvement of its troops in the bloody war in the Ivory Coast. The aftermath of war in Iraq, far from creating a new Middle Eastern ‘West Germany’ as some of the more facile bourgeois commentators have predicted, can only serve to create a huge zone of instability which will have immediate consequence of aggravating the Israel/ Palestine conflict and generating new terrorist attacks around the globe. The war against terrorism is spreading terror all over the planet - not only through the massacres it perpetrates on its immediate victims in the front lines of imperialist rivalry, but more widely in the shape of growing popular anxiety about what the future holds in store for the whole of mankind.

Resolution on the international situation

The international situation in the year 2000 confirms the tendency, already analysed by the ICC at the beginning of the last decade, for a gap to open up between a growing open crisis of the decadent capitalist economy, and an abrupt acceleration of imperialist antagonisms on the one hand and a retreat in class struggle and class consciousness on the other.

1. Except for a few particularly short-sighted revolutionaries, no-one today would dream of denying the reality of the world crisis of capi­talism. Despite the differences in form with the 1929 crisis -- which are seized upon by those who try to minimize the gravity of today’s crisis -- the real depth of the crisis can be seen: