Birth of the Revolutionary Internationalist Group

Everyday we receive the confirmation of what we wrote in issue 22 of Bilan et Perspectives: the renewal of workers’ struggles.⁽¹⁾ In the past few years, the long retreat of over five decades, seems to be approaching its end. This is evident from:

• mass movements all over the world which in certain countries appear almost insurrectional. Previously, certain “communizers” have come to defend the idea that the working class has disappeared. Not only was this a false conception, it was also a Eurocentric vision. There are now more wage workers in the rest of the world than in the old capitalist cores. Today, it is all the more obvious that these kinds of Eurocentric claims, just as that of the end of history, do not correspond to reality.
• the appearance of new revolutionary energies and the growth of revolutionary organizations. In the ICT, we are seeing an increase in the number of affiliated groups around the world. For us, 2021 saw the arrival of new comrades and 2022 the coming together of new sympathizers.

Bilan et Perspectives was founded in 2000 by three comrades around André Claisse, known as “Goupil”, a former member of Internationalisme and of the Renault Strike Committee after the Second World War.⁽²⁾ The crossing of the militant desert began in the 1980s with the publication of La Revue Communiste (6 issues) by a single comrade from the ICT (IBRP at the time). The comrades continued along that desert with the publication of 19 issues of Bilan et Perspectives.

With the new period marked by the march towards generalized war and the slow and chaotic resumption of the class struggle, the situation is complex because it is accompanied by several crises (economic, social, health, environmental). It is made all the more difficult by the weakness of the working class.

But at the same time, this period makes it possible to unlock new revolutionary forces. Bilan et Perspectives now brings together several comrades and has several close supporters. Readers will no doubt have noticed that the journal has become more regular and more militant.

To translate this progress into reality, Bilan et Perspectives has decided to go a step further and formally affiliate with the ICT. Bilan et Perspectives will take the name of the Groupe révolutionnaire internationaliste (Revolutionary Internationalist Group). This name change expresses the desire of its members to articulate more clearly the reason for belonging to this group: to intervene more effectively in the class struggle and to play a role in guiding it politically. The name change does not reflect any ignorance of the real difficulties that the working class faces to defend its interests and to raise the level of its struggles to meet the challenges. Nor does it express any triumphalism, because we are all too aware of the marginal and dispersed status of revolutionary militants.

We also call on you to support the publication of this bulletin, to participate in its distribution, to send us your critiques, comments and points of view on the workers' struggle and the political questions on the agenda, to send us your proposals to improve the bulletin both on the political content and in its form, to correspond and act with us. In short, to strengthen the regroupment and organization of communists, on a resolutely internationalist basis. The historic change that we are experiencing demands more from revolutionary organizations, which now more than ever must be capable of intervening within the class to orient and guide its struggles towards the revolutionary overthrow of a rotting capitalism.

Notes:

(1) Bilan et Perspectives 22

(2) Our Last Salute to Comrade Goupil