In IC15 we wrote on “The Political Roots of the ICC’s Organisational Malaise”. The article was our attempt to explain why the International Communist Current (ICC) had suffered a severe crisis (particularly in its most important section in France) and why this had led them to lash out at other communist organisations, in particular the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO), the British affiliate of the International Bureau. The CWO replied on its own account in Revolutionary Perspectives (Series 3 No.5) in an article entitled “Sects, Lies and the Lost Perspectives of the ICC”. We are not going to repeat the statements we made there. What our two articles have in common is that they point out to the ICC that the real cause of its crisis was political, not organisational. Their problems stemmed from wrong political perspectives about the imminence of a proletarian upsurge. An organisation can only go on shouting that revolution is just around the corner for so long. After thirty years it is not surprising that some ICC militants became more than a little demoralised.

The ICC have largely ignored our analysis. Instead they have taken up the few remarks we made about the origins of the ICC and the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt - Battaglia Comunista) in Internationalist Communist 15. We stated there that we considered the PCInt the “the most successful creation of the revolutionary working class since the Russian Revolution”. Nothing apparently raises ICC hackles more than any questioning of their right to that title. The ICC’s reply came in two issues of their International Review (Numbers 90 and 91). These were devoted to “demonstrating” that the Gauche Communiste de France (the precursor of the ICC) was a lot better than the Internationalist Communist Party (the official name of our comrades of Battaglia Comunista) which was founded in 1943. However, not content with calumnies against our comrades in the past, the ICC have also recently criticised our work with the Proletarian Struggle Groups (Gruppi di Lotta Proletaria - GLP) in Italy. The ICC considered this so worthy of comment that their criticism appeared in all its various language publications in an obvious attempt to discredit the IBRP, particularly BC.

In response to this we are publishing the article from Battaglia Comunista defending their work with the GLP. The full text follows but in their introduction our comrades wrote:

This attempt is well polished, and tries to give credence to the illusion that the Bureau and the ICC are drawing closer together. Beyond recognition of a shared presence on this side of the class barricades, no politico-organisational convergence is possible between those of us who work on the terrain of dialectical materialism for the construction of the class party and head-in-the-clouds idealists, anarchists, councilists “Current-ists”, or whoever they may be.

Battaglia Comunista 11, 1998

It is rejection of this idealism which forms the main theme of the present article. For us the question at issue is the method by which the ICC reaches its conclusions. We think the ICC doesn’t have a materialist analysis. We will try to illustrate what we mean by that by looking concretely at some of their positions. Obviously this will not deal with all our divergences but those who have written to us asking for a summary of our differences with the ICC will find some of these outlined in the letter to Russian comrades also published in this issue.

The Question of Methodology

The most important issue arising from the three articles published by the ICC in their International Review (Nos. 90, 91 and 95) is the question of methodology. All three concern the origins of the Internationalist Communist Party, the most important affiliate of the Bureau. The texts in themselves say nothing that is not already known (and recorded in the ICC’s pamphlet The Italian Communist Left 1926-45) but the current interpretation the ICC is putting upon them reveals precisely why there is still a gulf between us.

In the first place we regard the ICC’s repetition of this history as nothing less than a noisy diversion to avoid confronting the questions we posed them when we analysed their splits in International Communist 15. In that article we wrote,

It is tragic enough if communist groups (even ones we are fundamentally in disagreement with) are losing members. 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 “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 it is becoming a sect.

Stung by this it seems that the ICC has shifted from denigrating the CWO to denigrating our Italian comrades. Whilst the ICC publicly apologised for slandering the IBRP when it insisted that we had watered down the conditions for attendance at the Fourth International Conference in 1984 (See International Review 91) we have plenty of evidence from the current polemics in the ICC press to show that this brand of sectarianism has not yet died out.

As an example of this sectarianism let’s take the issue of the partisans in Italy from 1943-5. Despite the ICC’s protestations that they do not go out of their way to denigrate other organisations they originally wrote in a polemic on the “partisan” question (in International Review 32) that the PCInt “flirted with the partisans” when they know full well that comrades of the PCInt entered partisan groups in order to win individuals from them on the basis of clearly stated internationalist positions (and two, Atti and Acquaviva, paid with their lives for this). This is clearly documented in the ICC’s own pamphlet where it states

The PCInt was very clear on the partisan war; no support , no participation, calling for fraternisation between the workers in uniform in both camps; agitation for a revival of class struggle on its specific terrain, the factories.

The Italian Communist Left 1926-45. p.160

This “flirting” jibe reveals not only the sectarian malice of the ICC but also their abstentionist attitude to the social reality around them. This is not a revolutionary position but, as we keep saying, an idealist one. We have to understand the basis of the independence of the working class from all factions of the capitalist class (including the state capitalist formations who pretend to be proletarian). However it is one thing to hold this analysis. It is another to win over workers to our perspectives. Communism is a “practical movement” as Marx tells us in The German Ideology. Communists cannot simply preach the failings of the class from the sidelines but must find ways of influencing working class action wherever the counter-revolution tries to impose its agenda. This is far easier to say than to do and every attempt to combat the capitalists must inevitably start from a terrain which is not of our own choosing. But start we must.

Both in the past and in the present the framework of the ICC is simply paralysing. According to them communists cannot fight for the communist programme from inside reactionary organs but must only issue propaganda from outside. Of course such work is dangerous and does test the proletarian credentials of any revolutionary organisation but that is where the strength of our platform comes in. It is not a set of stone tablets only to be chanted by priests but part of the working class struggle itself. If the platform contains the lesson of all workers’ struggles up to now it is the task of the revolutionary organisation to return them to the working class in practice.

And this means going wherever we find the working class. It does not always (and not everywhere) mean communist militants joining unions and using their meetings as forums but it is an arena we have to look at seriously. We don’t, of course, intend to win positions in the unions like the left wing of capital (in order to impose their new social democratic framework upon them). Our aim has to be to demonstrate in every struggle the futility of fighting on the union terrain since that starts from the preservation of the wage labour system.

From the French December to the July Day

The absolute gulf in method between the ICC and the IBRP was illustrated in the French strikes of December 1995. For the ICC these strikes were manoeuvres of the Left of capital (we will leave aside the plot theory which had leftist unions and a Gaullist government consciously working together to get the workers on strike!) and therefore they denounced them. They told the workers that the bourgeoisie‘s aim was to exhaust them so that the real movement (which was naturally imminent) would be defeated.

This was an extraordinary analysis to make. The movement covered wide sections of the working class (therefore it could have got out of control of the unions) and it was the first sign for some time that the working class was still capable of resisting. We do not disagree that the unions were manoeuvring against working class interests. Nor do we dispute the fact that the Government was trying to provoke the class. Such facts are features of every situation where wide sections of the working class start to struggle. But in these circumstances the communist response is not to say “Don’t fight”. Our response is to point to the aims of the class enemy and then say “Go beyond what they are ready for”. In fact the ICC in the past have made this call but their increasing vision of a world made up of bourgeois plots rendered them class pacifists in December 1995.

The ICC’s subsequent attempts to justify their error in December 1995 then led to the school of historical falsification. Poor revolutionaries too often run to the history books to re-examine old events in the light of present reality. Lacking a really Marxist historical framework, they find in history only what they want to see. The ICC may be poor at economic theory but they are even worse when it comes to historical analysis. To justify their class pacifism in December 1995 the ICC looked for a historical analogy to back up their case. They thought they had found it in July 1917!

In the July Days of 1917 certain sections of the Russian working class wanted to make the slogans of the Bolsheviks immediate reality. They were premature. Some of these were sailors from Kronstadt who were influenced as much by the anarchists as by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks at the local level had not argued decisively enough for the Kronstadters to wait until the movement (which was already flowing in the direction of proletarian revolution) was more developed. At the same time, the Provisional Government was trying to get as many armed workers out of Petrograd where they were a threat to the rule of the bourgeoisie. This is why they ordered more troops to the Front. For the ICC this is the most important part of the story. This is the provocation of the bourgeoisie. There is no doubt that it was a provocation - but this was also what the bourgeoisie had to achieve to retain control of the state. In July 1917 they still had enough loyal troops to be able to pretend to be ruling. The problem for the Bolsheviks was that a part of the class was impatient to finish off the bourgeoisie before the rest of the workers were ready. In this they were caught on the horns of a dilemma. They could not oppose a movement of their own creation and they could not condone an armed demonstration. They had to remain with the class. This is why Lenin, much against his will, was forced to greet the demonstrators and try to persuade them to keep the demonstration peaceful and return to Kronstadt. Whilst the bourgeoisie then did not find it difficult to provoke a blood bath (since the demonstrators had arrived armed in the centre of Petrograd) the important issue here is that, whatever the bourgeoisie intended to do, the Party remained with the class.

The Bolsheviks could not issue leaflets saying that this was a provocation and wriggle out of the consequences of their own slogans. They had to live with this and try to ensure that they held on to support at the grassroots. Although it cost the lives of many Bolsheviks this was precisely what they did. Thus, while some sections of the working class deserted them for a few weeks, within a month Bolshevik influence was restored. Would this have happened had the Bolsheviks dissociated themselves from the July demonstration? We think not. The programme of “All Power to the Workers’ Councils” had already been laid down and the Bolsheviks were the only party who defended it. To have yielded to the manoeuvres of the capitalists and their social democratic allies would have been to totally disorient the working class. This was the exact opposite of what the ICC did in France in 1995 and to justify it they rewrite the history of the July Days. In World Revolution 196 they write,

... the Bolsheviks were able to expose and denounce the provocation which enabled the workers to fight another day.

This is absolutely untrue. At no time did the Bolsheviks denounce the July Days. On the contrary Lenin wrote that,

Mistakes are inevitable when the masses are fighting but communists REMAIN WITH THE MASSES, see these mistakes, explain them to the masses, try to get them rectified and strive perseveringly for the victory of class consciousness over spontaneity.

Collected Works Vol. 29 p.396

However historical falsification is not the worst sin of the ICC here. The December 1995 events and the July Days of 1917 have absolutely no basis for comparison. What was significant about December 1995 was that it showed that the class was still capable of responding collectively to the attacks of a system in crisis. After years of very little resistance it was to be welcomed, not denounced (whatever the limitations of the movement). The July Days of 1917 occurred at a time of rising class struggle when a premature action of the most militant workers did endanger the whole revolutionary movement. The fact that the ICC refuse to see this difference is again symptomatic of a formalistic idealist framework. Their view that there was a bigger class movement waiting round the corner in December 1995 belongs only to their long-time perspectives. No-one else could see it. This is idealism in practice.

Just to further underline the point, the IBRP and ICC have both taken an internationalist position on the NATO bombings in Kosovo. The ICC though have inserted a paragraph which again harks back to their perspectives of thirty years ago. In their leaflet “Capitalism is War, War on Capitalism” they wrote,

Because the world working class, ever since the massive strikes of May 68 in France has developed its struggle and refused to submit to the logic of capitalism, its has been able to prevent a Third World War from being unleashed.

In the first place, the current series of wars from the Falklands on reveal, if they reveal anything, the current impotence of the working class. The absence of a strong working class movement is allowing capital to get away with these wars on workers. Of course, the ICC will take refuge in the phrase “Third World War” but there are a number of issues to be made here. One is that class movements sometimes - as in the case of the First World War - provoke the ruling class to unleash war in order to increase nationalist identification. The other factor is that Third World War is not on the agenda today because we are still in the pre-war period of realignment. The ICC does not believe this is happening, despite all the evidence for it (even in the chaos of Kosovo) ergo they can still go on believing that there is a “subterranean” class movement out there even if we cannot yet see it. Communism as cargo cult is a long way from the materialism needed to understand where we are today.

Italian Left or French Fraction?

In our first attempt to analyse the crisis in the ICC we located this idealist method in the Communist Left of France (GCF). The GCF was founded by Marc who also founded the ICC. This was in direct opposition to the Internationalist Communist Party. Marc sought to fuse elements of the politics of the Italian Left in exile with ideas borrowed from the German Left. We argued that the ICC retains the same

abstract reasoning [as the GCF] which is one of the methodological hallmarks of the ICC today.

What seems to have stung the ICC is not any discussion of our differences on method but the fact that we used the word “tiny” to describe the GCF. We compounded this “sin” by stating that the Internationalist Communist Party founded in 1943 was the “most successful creation of the revolutionary working class since the Russian Revolution”.

We are not going to respond at great length on this issue (especially since there is an outline of our history elsewhere in this issue). What did we mean by “successful”? We meant that the PCInt was the best fusion of both political clarity and a real movement of the working class in the period after 1943. As to political clarity, lets take the evidence presented by the ICC themselves. They tell us that Mussolini’s secret police almost got it right when it characterised Prometeo, the new (clandestine) publication of the PCInt as,

The only independent paper. Ideologically the most interesting and the most prepared. Against any compromise, defends a pure communism, undoubtedly Trotskyist, and thus anti-Stalinist. Declares itself without hesitation an adversary of Stalin’s Russia, whilst proclaiming a faithful combatant for Lenin’s Russia...

Fights against the war in all its aspects: democratic, fascist or Stalinist. Even struggles openly against the partisans, the Committee of National Liberation and the Italian Communist Party.

As the ICC themselves state, the Fascist police got it wrong about the Trotskyism.

Prometeo was on the contrary in direct ideological continuity with Bordiga’ s Communist Party and the Italian Fraction in France and Belgium.

The Italian Communist Left 1926-45. All the above information is taken from pp. 160-1 of the English version of this ICC pamphlet.

This organisation was the one that the ICC’s ancestors refused to join. Over the next few years it was to become the only “mass” party that the Communist Left created after its expulsion from the Third International. ⁽¹⁾

It is true that other elements later entered the party who were not as clear as the original Damen group but, and this is the important issue, as long as there was a class movement then this did not have serious consequences. And this is fundamentally where we part company with the ICC. For the ICC none of the sins of the past of the various elements who rallied to the Party should be forgotten (in fact many of them were not even known at the time by some of the various participants). In this the ICC are like the description of the Bourbons given by Napoleon “they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing” from their experience. In the class struggle there will be elements who waver from one side to the other and who will join us when the class is moving forward. Equally they will desert once again if we suffer setbacks. That is the reality of the class struggle. They will say they now accept formally the principles we defend and we will have to accept them even if we are not entirely sure. That is the difference between a real movement and a discussion circle.

This was what happened in Italy at first but once the class movement died down the divisions (albeit new ones) reappeared. These were even more complicated by the presence of Bordiga whose prestige, despite his virtual twenty year silence, gained him an audience when he began to intervene in the debates inside the PCInt. The Damen faction attempted to accommodate this for some time until it became clear that the entirety of the political gains of the internationalist camp were under threat and a split was inevitable. A majority sided with the Damen faction and this is why they continue to publish Battaglia Comunista and Prometeo to this day.

The ICC makes great play with the political factions in the PCInt in the 1946-52 period but their appearance only reflects the reality of the class struggle. Here though the GCF/ICC theorised not only the end of this post-war movement (which had been largely confined to Italy) but also that imperialist war was “inevitable” and subsequently they disappeared.

We are making two points here. The first is that the PCInt (1943-6) was the highest point the Italian Left had reached since the old Communist Party of Italy was bolshevised in the 1920s. This was because it was not simply a paper movement but actually appealed to, and knew how to work towards, a wide layer of workers. The second and more important point (from the viewpoint of the present) was to demonstrate that the ICC have inherited a schematic view of history. The GCF in the post-war period did not realise that history was not about to repeat itself. Imperialist war would be less of a threat than the welfare state to the revolutionary reconstitution of the working class in the capitalist heartlands. Battaglia Comunista2 did not theorise about the imminence or not of the imperialist war but recognised that the class retreat was on the way. They argued, however, that the period of fractions was over and that a new platform had been established to meet whatever the historical circumstances were in the 1950s.

This leaves a number of questions for the ICC. They have a schizophrenic attitude towards the Italian Left. Sometimes they claim to be in the Italian Left but then they will claim only to be from the French Fraction which was actually a split from the Italian Left. Whilst they berate the Bordigists for ignoring the experience of Bilan in the 1930s they themselves only refer to this period of the Italian Left. And yet, as their own pamphlet makes clear, the PCInt of 1943 was far clearer on many issues than Bilan had ever been. Why then did the GCF not add its support to the Damen group in the PCInt? The answer lies in the GCF’s growing affinity with the remnants of the German Left - a tendency which had organisationally disappeared precisely because of its dogmatism and schematism. It is the confused methodological inheritance which the ICC still carries with it and it is the greatest barrier to its own material understanding of reality.

(1) The ICC pedant who replied to the original text we wrote made much play with the description of the PCInt as the “most successful creation of the revolutionary working class since the Russian Revolution” as if we would talk about our predecessors role in the formation of the Communist Party of Italy and the Third International as detached from the whole revolutionary experience of 1917-26.

(2) Another little ICC hobby horse is to keep saying that Battaglia Comunista considers itself the party because it still formally uses the title Internationalist Communist Party. Again formalism (and a bit of polemical illwill) are behind this statement. The title Internationalist Communist Party is retained for the obvious reason that the historical links with that experience cannot be abandoned to, for example, the dozens of Bordigists who would love to formally acquire that title. However in both Bureau publications and in propaganda aimed at the class the PCInt prefers to state that it is not the party (and neither is the Bureau) but generally uses the appellation “the internationalists of Battaglia Comunista” on leaflets etc.