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Home ›The Political Roots of the ICC's Organisational Malaise
Regular readers of the English language press of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party will be aware that we have recently had to deal with the consequences of an organisational crisis in the International Communist Current. This crisis stems from the expulsion of a former leading member of the French section of the ICC (Revolution Internationale) followed by the resignations of about a dozen others including one of the most internationally respected founding members of the ICC. It is tragic enough if communists (even ones we are fundamentally in disagreement with) are lost to the class struggle. What compounds this particular issue is the reaction of the ICC itself. Not content with warning other revolutionary organisations about the activities of their ex-member (and filling their publications with historical articles about state infiltration of revolutionary groups) they have declared that the significance of the crisis is one of "life and death for the organisation".
In their frantic defence of their organisation the ICC has not only denigrated the IBRP (see our response in Revolutionary Perspectives 5) but has also pronounced all its ex-members (and other groups it had previously considered part of the "proletarian milieu") as "parasites". Even worse it has publicised the activities of the crypto-anarchist, autonomist, situationist groups as a "threat to the milieu" when in fact these groups (the publications of which are usually only the outpourings of one individual) count for nothing and represent no-one. All this is evidence that the ICC is turning in on itself, and ignoring the real and widespread problems of the working class as a whole. In a real sense they are becoming a sect.
The question is, "Why has the ICC become so apparently absurd and paranoid?" The key to the ICC's decline lies in its failure to come to grips with the real world. It is not a new failing. We have polemicised about it for years. We have described the ICC as idealist in the past for several reasons, but all of which are methodologically connected. (See, for example, Workers Voice 62.) For thirty years the ICC and, its forerunners, have been arguing that "the capitalist crisis is here" and that the proletariat is on course towards revolutionary confrontations. They insisted that the 1980s would be the "years of truth" in this respect.
But the years of truth have come and gone and with them have gone the ICC's whole raison d'etre. Although the current malaise apparently has no direct political cause - being rather a response by the ICC leadership to a crisis of morale, there is a deeper underlying problem which the organisation is doing its utmost to avoid recognising. This more fundamental weakness is a weakness of political method and is manifested by the failure of key aspects of the organisation's perspectives which it continues to cling to, often in the face of overwhelming reality. The solution, therefore, cannot be found in blaming others but in looking at the political assumptions of the ICC and the theory which lies behind them.
As we have recently explained in Revolutionary Perspectives 5, the ICC's problems stem from the failure of central aspects of their political perspectives. In part their flawed analysis is due to an erroneous conception of capitalism's economic crisis. This, however, is compounded by a messianic view of the role of their own organisation and a basically idealist method, especially on the question of class consciousness and the role of the Party. Part and parcel of this messianic idealism is their assumption that there is only one road open for the course of history (the road to revolution). This assumption, along with many others over the years, has been erected into a fixed dogma which only prevents a reappraisal of the perspectives of the organisation. The result is an organisation which is increasingly thrashing about in the dark politically, and which has to focus on supposed internal and external threats to avoid the even bigger danger of confronting its political and theoretical inadequacies. In a single article we can do no more than outline these weaknesses in order to be able to explain why the ICC is in crisis at the present time.
The Scars of the ICC's Origins
The ICC was formed in 1975 but its history goes back to the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) a tiny group formed during the Second World War by the same individual ("Marc") who would found the ICC in the Seventies. The GCF was fundamentally based on the rejection of the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy by the IBRP's ancestors in the period after 1942.
The GCF argued that the Internationalist Communist Party was not an advance on the old Fraction of the Communist Left which had gone into exile in France during the Mussolini dictatorship. The GCF called on the members of the Fraction not to join the new Party that was being formed by revolutionaries like Onorato Damen, released from jail with the collapse of Mussolini's regime. It argued that the counter-revolution which had faced the workers since their defeats in the1920s still continued and that therefore there was no possibility of creating a revolutionary party in the 1940s. After Italian fascism collapsed in1943 and the Italian state became a battle ground between the two imperialist fronts the vast majority of the exiled Italian fraction rallied to join the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) with the expectation that workers' unrest would not only be limited to northern Italy as the war drew to a close. The GCF's opposition was of no significance at the time but it was the first example of the consequences of the abstract reasoning which is one of the methodological hallmarks of the ICC today. Today the ICC will say that no revolution came out of World War Two, ergo the GCF were right. But this ignores the fact that the PCInt was the most successful creation of the revolutionary working class since the Russian Revolution and that, despite half a century of further capitalist domination, it continues to exist and is growing today. The GCF, on the other hand, took their "logical" abstractions a stage further. They argued that since the counter-revolution was still dominant then proletarian revolution was not on the agenda. If this was the case then a further imperialist war must be coming! The result was that the leadership took itself off to South America and the GCF collapsed during the Korean War. The ICC have always been somewhat embarrassed by this revelation of their ancestors' powers of understanding "the course of history". However their response has always been to brazen it out. Instead of admitting that the PCInt got both their perspectives and their conception of organisation right all along, when the ex-GCF returned to a remarkably unscathed Europe in the mid-1960s, they sought to denigrate the PCInt as "sclerotic", "opportunist" and told the world that they were "Bordigist" (a charge which they could sustain only on the basis of the ignorance of the new young generation of revolutionaries. It was a charge they subsequently were forced to publicly retract). However even after this admission was forced out of them they had not finished with their policy of denigrating possible "rivals" (to quote the ICC themselves) and now they tried to maintain that the PCInt had "worked in the partisans" (i.e. supported the bourgeois forces seeking to establish a democratic Italian state). This was a disgusting and cowardly slander. In fact PCInt militants had been murdered directly on the orders of Palmiro Togliatti (General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party) for attempting to undermine that Stalinist control of the working class by winning support away from the partisans. (For more on this see Workers Voice 73, 74 and 77)
The Question of Perspectives
All this demonstrates that the ICC, more than any other organisation, carries around an enormous baggage from the past. The GCF collapsed, like the Italian Left in exile before it, over a wrong appreciation of the possibilities and problems opened up by the development of capitalism. Whilst the Italian Left in exile crumbled because it failed to see that war was coming in 1939, the GCF went to the other extreme of seeing the Korean War as the beginning of World War Three.
Twelve years later the leading militant of the GCF ("Marc") founded the group Internacionalismo in Venezuela which
saw itself as being in continuity with the positions of the Communist Left, particularly the GCF...
IR 80 Twenty Years of the ICC p.21
However if war had been on the agenda in 1952 when the GCF collapsed what had changed to prompt the formation of Internacionalismo in 1964? The ICC's documents give no answer, leaping straight to May 1968 in France to justify the revival of the GCF. They have maintained ever since that May '68
..marked the historic resurgence of the world proletariat after more than 40 years of counter-revolution.
ibid.
Superficially this seems quite persuasive. After all there were a series of working class struggles over the next six years in various parts of the world (Italy 1969, Poland 1970, Spain, Argentina , Britain 1972-4 etc.). Eventually these did give rise to a whole series of new groups who tried to understand the significance of the new wave of struggle. By 1975 this had led to the formation of the ICC (largely based on the absorption of various councilist groups in Europe) and in Britain, the CWO (which was itself also enormously influenced at that time by the German Left, even if it did consider that it rejected its councilist offshoots). However all along there was an alternative interpretation maintained by the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista).
For Battaglia the mass strikes which accompanied the end of capitalism's post-war boom and the slide into economic crisis were a welcome reminder that the proletariat was still capable of acting as a class but there were no exuberant schemas about "the end of the counter-revolution". They held that for marxists the only meaningful indicator of the end of the counter-revolution is the existence of an international revolutionary party, itself a product of a general increase in class consciousness and a whose aims are widely recognised and approved by a substantial part of the working class. Whilst the ICC were euphoric about the prospect of growing 'waves of struggle' leading inexorably to revolution Battaglia realised that capital's ideological hold over the working class was far from broken.
This was a lesson that the CWO had to learn, as experience demonstrated that consciousness was not rising automatically with the development of the economic crisis.
Contrary to another ICC myth the opening of the crisis initially led not so much to the growth of revolutionary groups (although that was also a small part of the result) but to the massive growth of social democratic forces in various guises. Some countries saw the revival of a massive and openly reformist Labour or Socialist Party which offered to spend their way out of the crisis. At the same time a parallel growth of the pseudo-revolutionary Trotskyist movement which worked alongside (and even inside) social democracy to support the Left of the capitalist system also developed. This was hardly the stuff of a decisive end to "40 years of counter-revolution" as the ICC has maintained. The ICC has also to ask itself why so many potentially communist groups have disappeared or suffered such severe reverses since 1968 if this was a period in which the resurgence of workers struggles was favourable to the development of class confrontations.
Shaky Economic Foundations
In the late sixties and early seventies Marxists understood that the post-war boom had come to an end (the final signal being the devaluation of the US dollar - the basic bulwark of the Bretton Woods system set up in 1945). This meant we had entered a period of developing crisis but it did not mean that the capitalist system was finished. Under the modern conditions of state capitalism and the monopoly control of international banking agencies the system still had several cards to play.
These cards (manipulation of interest rates, deficit financing, more loans to the technically bankrupt) could not alter the fundamental crisis but, as we argued in an article in 1977 (Money, Credit and Crisis) they could allow the capitalists to "manage" the crisis and draw it out in ways which would have been unthinkable in the pre-First World War epoch. However the ICC, although it now sees that capitalism's structural crisis is deepening, cannot understand how this is happening since it does not even accept the basic Marxist premise that decadent capitalism continues to go through cycles of accumulation. This failure is another legacy from the GCF. Basically the ICC reject Marx's understanding that the operation of the law of value is central to the explanation of the capitalist crisis. Originally the ICC used to maintain a fairly uncritical neo-Luxemburgist position.
Despite their assertions to the contrary, Rosa Luxemburg's theory is based on an open rejection of how the law of value operates. Whilst Marx argued that the periodic crises of capitalism were due to a shift in value relations within the capitalist mode of production - the law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, "the most important law from an economic standpoint" (Marx) - Rosa Luxemburg rejected this idea. She thought that Marx had made a mistake in Volume II of Capital where he simply aimed to demonstrate how commodities circulated. She stated that capital accumulation could not take place in a closed system (a central assumption of Marx throughout the 3 volumes of Capital). She insisted that the real cause of capitalist crises lay outside the system. For her the idea that capitalism could continue to accumulate when there were no non-capitalist markets to use was untenable. Thus she concluded the capitalist system needed to constantly find "third buyers" who were neither workers nor capitalists (i.e. who were outside the capital-wage labour relationship) in order for accumulation to continue smoothly. Once capitalism had used up all the third buyers (by absorbing all the non-capitalist modes of production) then the crisis ensued.
This is a nonsense in several ways. In the first place capitalism had exhausted all non-capitalist buyers by 1914 according to Luxemburg and yet it continues to grow (albeit it at enormous cost to humanity). Furthermore how can Luxemburgists explain the cycles of accumulation that have occurred since 1914 using this third-buyers schema? The ICC quite simply ignore the problem and quite specifically reject the idea that twentieth century capitalism has been subject to cyclical accumulation. Capitalist production has manifestly grown but according to the Luxemburgist idea this should not have been possible. Clearly a dialectical approach using the methods of Marx is more fruitful. Marx saw the crisis as a product of the growing organic composition which at a certain point becomes so great that there is insufficient profit to recapitalise the process of production. At this point the crisis ensues. This crisis presents itself (even if its fundamental causes lie elsewhere) as a crisis of overproduction. This is because the insufficiency of profit of one capitalist means the collapse of the market of another capitalist. Thus the crisis of profitability can be expressed as a crisis of overproduction but one within the capital-wage labour relationship
"On the other hand, too many means of labour and necessities of life are produced at times to permit of their serving as means for the exploitation of labourers at a certain rate of profit." (Capital Vol III. p.258 (IBRP emphasis
However this expression of overproduction is completely in terms of the capitalist mode of production itself. It does not require inventions like third buyers to explain why the crisis occurs. The ICC have evolved a number of debating tricks to wriggle out of the idea that the Luxemburgist analysis is at odds with Marx in several ways. The first is to quote the Communist Manifesto, written twenty years before Marx completed his scientific analysis of the capitalist system in Capital.
But the Communist Manifesto gives no clue as to the actual cause of the crisis of overproduction which Marx identifies as the unique feature of capitalist crises compared with earlier epochs.
This is because the Communist Manifesto was not intended to provide that analysis. Marx did not spend the next twenty years writing Capital for nothing. The second ICC trick is to quote the passage from Vol. III of Capital, quoted above as if this confirmed Luxemburg. It does not. The two crises of overproduction have two totally separate causes.
A further way the ICC has found to evade some of the consequences of Luxemburgism is to denounce them itself. The ICC clearly sees that arms production cannot be a “province of accumulation” and criticise Luxemburg for insisting in her last chapter that it was. Luxemburg's gaffe here is an enormous error and shows that she dos not understand how the law of value operates. The ICC however try to tell us that it was not an error which was central to Luxemburg's analysis and even have the nerve to accuse the IBRP of "sectarianism" in International Review 82 (p.21) for insisting that it indicates that Luxemburg's understanding of the law of value cannot have been very secure.
This is not an academic quibble about the understanding of Marxist economics. For the ICC the idea that "the saturation of markets" (a phrase not actually used by Luxemburg) causes the crisis means that when the crisis occurs then that is it. The analysis of how the growing tendency towards globalisation and the massive restructuring of capital have affected the working class is of no interest to the ICC. They put down the current class quiet to bourgeoise mystifications rather than to the difficult material conditions the class has faced to regroup itself in the face of the crisis. Thus the organisation has never gone beyond the original analysis of their ancestors. They simply announced to the world in 1967 (in Revolution Internationale) that "The Crisis is Here" and from then on we have had only the most lamentable empiricism in economics which has continued to insist that the final collapse is only just around the corner. The poverty of this analysis is compounded by the continuous insistence that if we can only expose the mystifications of the bourgeoisie then the working class will take the road to revolution. Idealism personified. (1)
The Course of History
As for the course of history, Battaglia, in line with its long Marxist tradition, rejected the idea of basing communist politics on predictions about the immediate future development of the capitalist system. Whilst it was necessary to understand the "general line of march" of the system this is not the same as acting as though we were the Nostradamus of the proletariat. There are too many variables to predict precisely what the future holds. Marxists understand that we are living in the imperialist epoch of capitalism (the era of decay and parasitism of the system). Under such conditions the end of a cycle of accumulation in any narrow historical phase has two, separate but interdependent, outcomes - war or revolution. Which of these it will be depends on the relative strengths of the two great contending classes of modern society. The duty of revolutionaries is everywhere and at all times to try to build the nuclei of the future party, however difficult the immediate situation for the working class. The reason is obvious. When the working class does take the revolutionary road, as one day it will again, it has to have in place the basis for its systematic struggle against all the machinations of the capitalists. This is the role of the Party. However we will return to this issue below.
The second point of difference which we have with the ICC over the course of history is methodological. For the ICC there can only be one exclusive outcome - the course is towards revolution. But this is a gross oversimplification. In reality the crisis created by the stagnation in capitalism's inability to profitably reproduce itself on the scale of the period of the post-war boom creates a situation in which the class struggle intensifies. The bourgeoisie try to make the working class take more and more of the burden of the crisis (in the form of speed-ups, unemployment, and inflation - not to mention good old-fashioned semi-starvation). These measures in themselves cannot solve the crisis and so the bourgeoisie are also forced into greater and greater rivalry - manoeuvring towards war. In this drive to greater exploitation and war the working class is not passive. However it resists, the more the bourgeoisie is pushed towards war. This was the case before the First World War where the British and Russian ruling classes consciously took their states into war in order to swamp the growing revolutionary movement of the proletariat in a tide of nationalist fervour. In other words the tendencies to war and revolution, inherent in the capitalist system, are both the product of the same forces.
The ICC have acquired a temporary respite from the collapse of their perspectives on this issue in that the fall of the Eastern imperialist bloc has postponed the day of reckoning for the capitalist system as whole. The likelihood of war has been further postponed whilst the bourgeoisie is stepping up its attacks on the working class. There is no question that currently the bourgeoisie has the upper hand. The international revolutionary organisations of the working class are weak and divided. The proletariat's resistance is generally sectional and ineffectual. This is the one sure indicator of the current state of class consciousness.
The ICC, in their usual messianic, way reject all this. For them the events of May 68 ended the counter-revolution. Ever since the workers have shown their growing capacity to resist in a series of waves of struggles. The 1980s, the ICC solemnly declared were to be "the years of truth". After all by 1988 we would be twenty years from 1968 and the promised revolutionary assault would not have taken place! By the end of the 1980s the ICC's chiliastic perspectives were beginning to look a bit tattered. However, faced with the "the wind from the East", by which the ICC meant the fall of the Stalinist bloc, the ICC's perspectives were thrown a lifeline. The ICC now declared that the collapse of the USSR had brought about a new situation in which capitalism had reached a new stage - this they called "decomposition". According to this last piece of wind from Paris the course of history had ended (at least for the time being) in a draw. Neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie had succeeded in imposing its will upon each other. The proletariat still held the bourgeoisie back from war (although events in the Gulf, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Rwanda etc. seemed to belie this idea) and the working class had not succeeded in overthrowing the bourgeoisie (a more accurate answer might have noted the increased exploitation, ever lower wages, mounting unemployment and increasing poverty of this semi-victorious proletariat).
What was really decomposing was the ICC's perspectives. Ideas like "chaos" (a term also much used by our post-modernist bourgeois intelligentsia) and "decomposition" now provided the ICC with an escape route from the more embarrassing consequences of its unmarxist predictions. Nearly thirty years, more than a whole generation, have gone since May 68 and yet the ICC still clings to it as an icon of old. In fact we can now see that the beginning of the crisis was not the beginning of the fight back of the working class. All revolutionaries now understand that we will need an increase in the wider struggles of the working class, against the immediate disasters that the system brings on them, before we can talk about a new resurgence of the working class. But this, as we explained in RP5, is where the current political crisis of the ICC really stems from. You can only keep on exhorting your members that "revolution is just around the corner" for so long. When the truth dawns as savagely as it has in the last few years that Jerusalem has been postponed then there is no hiding place. The net result is a demoralisation and haemorrhaging of the membership. This is precisely what happened to the ICC. But instead of seeing this as a consequence of the collapse of its perspectives the ICC have created a series of organisational bogeymen. "clans", "parasites" and freemasons are now conjured up as the real cause of the ICC's malaise. In fact they are symptoms of the political decline of the ICC itself.
The ICC has to recognise that it cannot proceed without reviewing its perspectives if it is to survive.
The work of building a revolutionary party is a long one (something that recent ICC publications half accept only to be undermined by a continued stubborn insistence that the proletariat is still holding back war (see WR 202. However this brings us to another problem for the ICC - the question of party and class consciousness.
Class Consciousness and the Party
The ICC has fought its current campaign under the slogan of "defend the Organisation". In itself this is no bad thing but the first question we would pose is "what for?" since the most fundamental difference between our two organisations is over the question of the Party. This difference is not quite the one the ICC would like to maintain. As ever brilliant at caricaturing the positions of other revolutionary organisations (a fundamental necessity of an organisation which considers itself to be the "elect"), the ICC focuses the question around the issue of consciousness. They maintain that the IBRP
... continues to defend a slightly watered down version of the Kautskyite theory of class consciousness.
IR 69 p.29
Now this is quite a crafty assertion on two accounts. In the first place it seems to imply that we are simply undialectical in assuming that class consciousness arise from anywhere other than the struggle of the working class and second it actually obscures the real locus of the debate.
Kautsky maintained that it was not the proletariat but the educated bourgeoisie who brought revolutionary science to the proletariat. This was a common view in Social Democracy at the turn of the century. It was also held in various forms by Plekhanov and, for a time, Lenin. All of them considered that they were following in the footsteps of Marx. In the Communist Manifesto Marx had maintained that the theoretical world view of the proletariat was articulated for the class by the bourgeois intelligentsia,
Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a section of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
In the last century when working hours were often over 70 a week and labour for both men and women was both more gruelling than today the chances of workers who were largely denied any educational opportunities elaborating the theory of communism was very small. And the problem was, as Lenin so trenchantly stated for the working class,
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary practice.
The Communist mode of production cannot live inside the capitalist system as capitalism lived under feudalism until it was socially and politically strong enough to overthrow the feudal state and inaugurate the rule of the bourgeoisie. Communism can only stem from an initial political act - the overthrow of the global domination of the bourgeoisie. This cannot come about without the conscious and programmatic effort of millions of workers. Now for Marx this posed a seemingly insoluble problem because
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.
The German Ideology
If this is the case how can the workers ever break free of capitalist ideology? Marx had two parts to his answer. In the first place the very experience of capitalist exploitation, and the resistance to it by the workers, will cause a minority to reflect on what the lessons of the class struggle are. These, whether workers or intellectuals, will formulate the programme of working class emancipation. Such a programme can never be static but develops as the working class comes to understand the strengths and limitations of its own movement. And this is where the ICC polemic over Kautskyism misses the point. Today the issue is not one of which class of persons elaborates communist theory. The issue is of how that theory is elaborated. And here the ICC have nothing to say. Under conditions of bourgeois domination it will be a minority of the class who initially develop and defend the communist programme. It cannot happen any other way. But in their Quixotic tilting at Kautskyite windmills they avoid this basic issue.
The Party emerges as the most conscious and revolutionary part of the class. This was seen by Marx as a logical process . For the working class to transform itself from a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, from a mere social category into the revolutionary antithesis of capitalism
The organisation of the proletariat into a class and therefore into a political party
Marx
was necessary. This does not mean that the Party is either separate from the class (as councilists argue) or that it is the class (as the Bordigists maintain) but it does mean that it is the leadership of the class and seeks to organise itself as part of the "practical movement" of the revolution. A communist society cannot be realised without the active participation of the mass of the class but this comes about as a result of the period of insurrection. During the period of insurrection a practical leadership directly opposed to the organised dictatorship of the bourgeois is necessary. Such a leadership can only be provided by the most class conscious workers and not by any other part of the working class. The ICC formula, both on the back of all its publications and in its Platform that
The role of the revolutionary organisation is not to “organize the working class” nor to take power “on behalf of the class” but to participate actively in the generalisation of proletarian struggles and revolutionary consciousness within the proletariat.
is just a meaningless abstraction forever looking over its shoulder at the counter-revolution. It offers the Party no concrete role in the revolutionary process at all. The precise way in which the capitalist state is overthrown will be a matter decided at the time but it will be led and organised by a party of the class and not by anyone else.
On the other hand, the more difficult question of achieving communism is of a different order. As Marx himself states, what transforms the consciousness of the working class as a whole is not communist propaganda, but the great practical movement of the revolution itself. And as communism "cannot be instituted by decree" (Lenin) then mass activity of the working class is absolutely essential if the proletarian dictatorship is to develop into communist society.
This is why we say that the proletariat cannot abdicate this role to even the best revolutionary party.
Communism is not a mode of production which depends on the passivity of its "citizens" but is "a movement of the immense majority". But it is only such after the initial proletarian insurrection.
By reducing the activity of the Party to that of intellectual cheerleader the ICC demonstrate that they do not understand the real material process of revolution and that they have only partially broken with the spontaneism of councilism which has dogged so much of the Communist Left since the 1920s. They need to look again at what the real process of revolution is and precisely what the forces arrayed against the proletariat are. Revolutionaries should not apologise for declaring that we want to create an instrument to organise, guide and lead the proletarian insurrection. To prepare for this we need to begin the construction of a revolutionary organisation inside the class now and not simply an intellectual vanguard which proclaims itself as the conscience of the proletariat. Only once we have a network of workers groups of the party built on the real experience of the working class can we talk of a real organisation which is capable of being internationally centralised in any meaningful sense.
Contrast this with the ICC's view that the working class is already spontaneously and fundamentally revolutionary. For the ICC the workers already carry communist consciousness around with them. All that prevents the working class from taking the road to insurrection is the "mystifications' of the bourgeoisie. If revolutionaries can demystify the workers about nationalism, the trades unions' role in preserving capitalism or whatever other issue the ICC focuses on, then the road to revolution is open. But this is not only an idealist conception of how consciousness will develop in the working class but reduces the role of the revolutionary vanguard to a mere group of publicists. Successful revolution will never happen with such conceptions.
And the ICC's gross exaggeration of the level of class consciousness within the proletariat has also got dangerous consequences. We saw this in the strikes in France in 1995. Paradoxically, for the ICC the strikes were nothing but a manoeuvre carefully prepared by the bourgeoisie to force the workers into fighting when they were not ready. Since the strikes remained locked in the union framework and the working class did not display its inherent tendency to unite against capital, they simply "denounced" them as they have proudly told us repeatedly (see Internationalist Communist 14 and Revolutionary Perspectives 5 for our earlier comments on this episode).
But if the struggle for communism starts from the real movement going on in front of our eyes, the class struggle (whatever the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie) is the most significant aspect of this movement. The most important fact about the French strikes was that they occurred at a time when the bourgeoisie was trumpeting the death of the working class. The recognition that the unions manoeuvred to control them was not something new as the ICC try to maintain. In any case such manoeuvres should not lead us to denounce the strikes (even if we criticise their weaknesses) but to try to push them beyond the limits that the state is prepared to accept. In the late 70s and the early 80s the ICC at least knew this much (even if their conception of organisation was largely councilist). Today it is another symptom of their decline that they are not able to relate to the "real movement" of the class struggle however weak it is.
This is not accidental position that the ICC has taken. Their publications are full of self-obsessed responses to individuals and publications produced by individuals (like the so-called London Psychogeographical Association) who count for precisely nothing in the working class. Further they are rewriting working class history to fit their current obsessions. One example of this is the German Revolution where we find that one of the lessons is that
The work of constructing the organisation must not be obstructed by intervention in the class.
International Review 86 p.12
This is a bizarre statement in a number of ways. In the first place it implies a separation of the Party from the class (something the ICC have previously rejected). We are part of the class and do not "intervene" from outside. But it also implies that the Party is built independently of class action. This is a dangerous (and once again, an idealist) doctrine. What the Party (or even its nuclei) cannot afford to do is to withdraw into themselves (or they simply deny their own existence as the GCF did in 1952).
Participating in all the struggles of the class is a fundamental task of revolutionaries today (assuming that they have the basic organisational strength). Only once workers break out of the bounds of the game between unions and governments will we see the struggle move from a bourgeois to proletarian terrain. But the future Party (and its present nuclei) give a lead in that process by preparing for such a future today. At present, contrary to ICC mythology, the consciousness of the class is not very high as the very limited numbers in revolutionary organisations materially testify. When we have an international revolutionary vanguard worth the name then we will know that revolutionary consciousness is growing within the working class. Each reciprocally condition one another. And only then will we be in a position to do more than dream about revolution.
The ICC is now entering what we might call its "years of truth". In the past we have made it quite clear that we cannot see them as part of the future world party of the proletariat because their idealist methods have little to do with the realities faced by the working class. (2) The recent crisis has made matters worse rather than better as the ICC have become more concerned with their own organisational problems. However if the ICC membership can recognise that their organisational malaise stems from the ICC's political framework then they may yet draw back from the abyss which they are sliding into. The current weak forces of the internationalist communists have to develop perspectives and methods of working which do not lead to ridiculous splits and short-term perspectives. These are precisely the features which have dogged the ICC in recent years. As we have tried to show in this brief statement these perspectives and methods are a legacy of the ICC's past. We call on the ICC to abandon their current preoccupations and turn instead, to recognise what the real role of the Party is, and to re-examine their perspectives to give them the basic capacity to work day to day as part of the working class. If they fail in this task then the "warning" (ironically appearing under the name of the comrade they have just expelled) they issued to other proletarian groups will become more appropriate to themselves;
The development of the historic course imposes on the milieu an irresistible process of decantation. The clarification that this process implies, in the present situation of degradation in the relations between proletarian groups, is not happening through the clear and and determined confrontation of positions. It will happen nonetheless, but in these conditions it will take the form of an ever greater crisis of those groups which have faced the acceleration of history in confusion, and so put in question their own political survival. The clarification that is unable to emerge through debate will instead impose itself through desertions. This is what is at stake in today's discussions between the revolutionary political organisations.
International Review 62 p.27
This was aimed at us but we can now see that it represents a more accurate analysis of the the state of the ICC. The basic issue between revolutionaries is the organisation question but not in the way posed by the ICC. In their current campaign to "defend the organisation" the one question the ICC have not asked is "what is the organisation for?" As a result it appears that they are saying no more than "the movement is everything". This is the sterile agenda of a sect. The real issues are about what the international revolutionary party is, how it wins support in the wider working class and what its role in the future revolutionary struggles is.
CWO(1) Recently the ICC has been attempting to gain the moral high ground (having plumbed the intellectual depths in a woeful pair of slanderous articles by their latest "expert" who accuses us of Kautskyism and centrism because we reject the ICC's religious perception that the next imperialist war necessarily means "the end of humanity") by publishing texts (see International Review 82 and 83) which claim that they support the view that the cause of the capitalist crisis is due to both the falling rate of profit and the saturation of markets. This eclecticism is not Marxism but a contribution to the development of economic ignorance (see Internationalist Communist 13 for our views).
(2) We only respond to the ICC's polemics when they touch a serious issue for the working class. The ICC however has always interpreted this as a desire to avoid "political confrontation". The problem is that the ICC's concerns about "parasites" etc are confections which only interest the ICC.
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