Having read on the website of the Internationalist Communist Tendency the communiqué of 12 April 2015 entitled A proposito di alcune infami calunnie (‘Response to a vile slander’), the ICC expresses its total solidarity with the ICT and with those of its militants who have been particularly targeted in these attacks by former members of the ICT’s section in Italy, the Partito Comunista Internazionalista.

We have become used to the politicians, economists and media using the most extraordinary theories to hide the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system and to justify the

The debate on the period of transition has always been the object of fierce polemics between revolutionary groups.

The course of history: The 80s are not the 30s

In the previous issue of the International Review (n°118), we recalled at length, and with the support of passages from their major writings, how Marx and Engels defined the notions of the ascendance and decadence of a mode of production. We saw that the notion of decadence lies at the very heart of historical materialism in the analysis of the succession of different modes of production. In a forthcoming article, we will also demonstrate that this concept was central to the political programmes of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, and of the marxist left that emerged from them, in which the groups of the Communist Left today have their origins.

The previous articles in this series concentrate on the experience of the Italian Fraction and its immediate successors, on which the ICC has based its own view of organisation. Here, we return to see how the question was posed in the days first of Marx, then of Lenin.

The Italian Fraction, founded in the Paris suburb of Pantin in 1928 by a group of militants in exile, saw itself explicitly as taking on the task of educating militants in preparation for the time when the rebirth of class struggle after the defeat of the 1917 Russian Revolution would reach a point when the creation of a new Party - a new International - would be both possible and necessary.

The Third Conference of left communist groups ended up dislocated. Two of the principal groups to have animated previous conferences (the Inter­nationalist Communist Party (Italy) and the Communist Workers' Organization (Great Britain)) made their participation in future Conferences dependent on the closing of the debate on the role of the revolutionary party[1]. The ICC rejected this condition.

For almost four years a number of revolutionary groups have tried to create a framework to facili­tate the regroupment of political organizations of the proletariat. Given the present situation, this effort can be summed up in two phrases:

• there will certainly be no more conferences like the three which have already taken place;
• in order to be viable, the new conferences must: 1. shake off the remains of sectarianism which still weigh heavily on certain groups; 2. be politically responsible.

At the end of 1978 an International Conference of groups of the communist left was held. This Conference, which had been called for by the Milan Conference of May 1977 organized by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) and attended by the International Communist Current, had the following agenda: 1. the crisis and perspectives; 2. the question of national liberation struggles; 3. the question of the party. Two pamphlets are being prepared, containing the correspondence between the groups, the preparatory texts for the Conference, and the proceedings of the debates. The most important step forward taken by this Conference was the fact that it had a broader participation. As well as the ICP (BC) and the ICC, the other groups involved were the Communist Workers’ Organization (Britain), Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista (Italy), the Marxist Work Group (For Kommunismen, Sweden). Two other groups agreed to participate but were unable to attend for various reasons -- Organisation Communiste Revolutionnaire Inter­nationaliste d’Algerie (Travailleurs Immigres en Lutte) and Il Leninista (Italy). The latter group wrote a contribution which will appear in the pamphlet. The Ferment Ouvriere Revolution­naire (France and Spain) left the Conference at the beginning and thus didn’t take part in the debates. Other groups invited refused to partici­pate (cf the article on this in International Review, no.12).