Congress Resolutions

Manifesto of the 1st Congress of the ICC, 1975

The spectre of communist revolution has returned to haunt the world. For more than fifty years the ruling class has believed that the demons which disturbed the proletariat last century and at the beginning of this century had been exorcised forever. In fact, the workers' movement has never known a defeat as terrible and as long lasting as that of the last fifty years.

Basic Positions

The International Communist Current defends the following political positions:

* 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.

17th Congress of RI: The organisation of revolutionaries tested by the class struggle

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.

The ICC's 16th International Congress

The ICC held its 16th Congress in the spring. As it says in our statutes, the International Congress is the sovereign organ of the ICC”. This is why, as we always do after such meetings, we have a responsibility to the working class to give an account of it and draw out its main orientations.

Resolution on the international situation (2005)

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.

16th Congress of the ICC: Resolution on the international situation

1. In 1916, in the opening chapter of the Junius pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg formulated the historical meaning of the first world war: "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 civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness..."

16th ICC Congress: Preparing for the class struggle and emergence of new communist forces

The ICC held its 16th Congress in the spring. As it says in our statutes, “the International Congress is the sovereign organ of the ICC”. This is why, as we always do after such meetings, we have a responsibility to the working class to give an account of it and draw out its main orientations.

Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation

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:

Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation

The acceleration of events and the gravity of the 'years of truth' compel revolutionaries to deepen their conceptions about the vanguard organisation of the proletariat, about its nature and function, its structure and mode of operation.

This report on the nature and function of the organisation was adopted by the International Conference of the ICC of January 1982. In the next IR we will publish the second report, on the structure and mode of operation of the organisation.

The First Pan-American Conference of the ICC

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.

15th Congress of the ICC: a struggle on two fronts

At the end of March, the ICC held its 15th Congress. This was a particularly important meeting for our organisation, for two main reasons.

First, since the last Congress held in spring 2001, we have witnessed a major aggravation of the international situation, at the level of the economic crisis and above all at the level of imperialist tensions. More precisely, the Congress took place while war was raging in Iraq, and our organisation had the responsibility to make its analyses more precise in order to make the most appropriate intervention.

The International Extraordinary Conference of the ICC

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.

Platform of the ICC

After the longest and deepest period of counter-revolution that it has ever known, the proletariat is once again discovering the path of class struggle. This struggle - a consequence both of the acute crisis of the system which has been developing since the beginning of the 1960s, and of the emergence of new generations of workers who feel the weight of past defeats much less than their predecessors - is already the most widespread that the class has ever engaged in. Since the 1968 events in France, the workers’ struggles from Italy to Argentina, from Britain to Poland, from Sweden to Egypt, from China to Portugal, from America to India, from Japan to Spain, have become a nightmare for the capitalist class.

ICC 13th International Congress

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:

XVIth RI Congress: Strengthening the unity and solidarity of the organisation

In April the ICC's section in France held its 16th Congress. This Congress was a very important one for our whole international organisation. Two years ago, the 15th Congress of RI was transformed into an Extraordinary Conference of the ICC owing to the fact that our organisation had gone through the most serious crisis in its history, with the constitution of a parasitic group in its own ranks. This group, which called itself the 'Internal Fraction of the ICC', was formed on the basis of secret meetings held behind the organisation's back and was devoted to destroying the ICC's unitary and centralised principles of functioning.

A turning point in the class struggle

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.

16th Congress of WR: British imperialism between a rock and a hard place

The ICC's section in Britain recently held its 16th Congress. One of the responsibilities of any territorial section is to discuss the national situation. It has to look at the economic crisis, the struggle between the classes, and the national capital in the framework of inter-imperialist antagonisms. The following article is based on part of a report presented to the Congress and concerns the current position of British imperialism. As a marxist analysis it looks at the situation with a historical perspective rather than taking a quick snapshot of the latest events. We will publish further material from the Congress in future issues.

ICC Congress resolution on the international situation

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.

Resolution on the international situation (2002)

The resolution on the international situation from the 14th congress, adopted in May 2001, focussed on the question of the historic course in the phase of capitalist decomposition. It correctly highlighted the acceleration both of the economic crisis and of the slide into war and barbarism across the planet, and examined both the problems and the potentialities of a proletarian response. The following resolution, proposed to the ICC's extraordinary conference of Easter 2002, is intended to supplement that report in the light of the events of 11th September and the ensuing "war against terrorism", which have largely confirmed the general analyses of the 2001 Congress.

ICC Extraordinary Conference

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".

ICC 15th Congress: Resolution on the International situation

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.

Theses on decomposition

The terrorist attacks which killed more than 6,000 people in the United States on 11th September, like the new war which has followed them, are a new and tragic illustration of the barbarism into which capitalism is plunging. As we explain in the article in this Review, “New York and the world over: capitalism spreads death”, this barbarity is an expression of the fact that capitalism, which entered its period of decadence with the outbreak of World War I, has for more than a decade suffered a further aggravation of this decadence whose main characteristic is the decomposition of society. Our organisation has highlighted this new phase of capitalism’s decadence since the end of the 1980s (see our first article on the question, “The decomposition of capitalism”, in International Review n°57, 2nd quarter 1989). In 1990, just after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, we made our analysis more systematic in the “Theses” published in International Review n°62. This is the document that we are reprinting here. We believe that it is more current than ever. In particular, it provides a framework for understanding the growing use of terrorism in inter-state conflicts around the world, and the rise of despair, nihilism, and religious obscurantism so strikingly illustrated by the attacks on the World Trade Center. It also deals with the fact that the different expressions of decomposition today are an important obstacle to the development of working class consciousness. We can see this today, in the way that the bourgeoisie, especially in the US but in other countries as well, is using the emotion and the fear provoked by the attacks in New York to muzzle the working class in the name of “national unity”.

Resolution on the International Situation (2000)

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.

7th Congress of the ICC: Resolution on the Proletarian Political Milieu

The proletarian political milieu, with all its strengths and weaknesses, springs from the life of the working class. Its dynamic and its characteristics tend to express the proletariat’s developing awareness of its own nature as a revolutionary class, and of its ability to give reality to the communist perspective. However, the political milieu does not merely reflect the class. It has an active role to play in the process of the class’ coming to consciousness, and in its struggle. The political milieu’s own dynamic is thus also determined by its own self-awareness, and by the active part played within it by its clearest fractions.

Resolution on the International Situation (1979)

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:

Resolution on the State in the Transition Period

During the period of transition the division of society into classes with antagonistic interests will give rise to a state. Such a state will have the task of guaranteeing the advances of this transitional society both against any exter­nal or internal attempt to restore the power of the old exploiting classes and maintaining the cohesion of society against any disintegration of the social fabric resulting from conflicts betw­een the non-exploiting classes which still subsist.

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