At the end of September, Bilan et Perspectives, the group in France that has since become the Groupe révolutionnaire internationaliste (GRI), affiliated to the Internationalist Communist Tendency, held its first public meeting on the theme Against Imperialist War, the Future Belongs to International Class Struggle! Around thirty comrades attended the meeting, including a strong ICC “delegation” of some fifteen members and sympathizers. We come back on this in the following.

The presentation on the international situation aimed at being complete. It was. In so doing, it was long and too politically dispersed in our opinion [1]. Nevertheless, the political position put forward was correct, and we supported it during the discussion. Our first intervention sought precisely to correct this dispersion, in order to focus the political discussion on what is essential today for the international proletariat and communist intervention: is there a dynamic, pushes, towards generalized imperialist war? Indeed, we share the ICT’s view that the war in Ukraine is a first step for capital and the bourgeoisie towards generalized imperialist war, towards a Third World War, and that the urgent need is to develop proletarian struggles to halt and oppose this march towards holocaust. [2] The first speakers were more or less explicitly in line with this perspective, clearly taking up the alternative of revolution or war, which is already presenting itself dramatically and concretely today. Among them, comrades presenting themselves as sympathizers of the Communist Left clearly argued that “crisis and war feed on each other” and that “the dynamic towards imperialist polarization is underway, even if it is not, and cannot be, linear.” This situation can only spur the working class to respond, “speak out” and act. Especially as the war in Ukraine is set to last.

Some of the speakers, who were not “ICCists”, asked the ICT about the situation and its assessment of the NWBCW committees, some of which had been dissolved or had disappeared. The ICT told them that other committees were being maintained and intervening, and that it was not a question of waiting for immediate and widespread success to judge the political validity of its call to form them. “It’s a question of preparing ourselves and providing tools for the whole period ahead.” One of them asked us and the ICT about the NWBCW initiative: was not it tantamount to excluding other initiatives like the one launched by the ICC? We replied that we would have been ready to sign the ICC’s internationalist appeal, even if it was “insufficient” since this organization rejects any possibility of generalized imperialist war and even denies any dynamics of imperialist polarization; and all the while knowing that the ICC’s declaration had among its objectives, that of excluding the so-called parasites – and therefore the IGCL – from its initiative. But the call for the formation of NWBCW committees seemed to us, and still seems to us, to respond more concretely to the current situation.

It was at this point that the ICC began its action to sabotage the meeting [3]. Far from defending its position on the absence of dynamics and the danger of generalized imperialist war [4], and thus allowing the two antagonistic positions on the historical situation to be debated, it engaged in one intervention after another to prevent this political confrontation on this question. After systematically and grossly misrepresenting the ICT’s positions, particularly on trade unions, it ended by denouncing the B&P member and the member of our group (Olivier and Juan) whom he had excluded in 2002 as “agents provocateurs, cops, gangsters, Nazis...”, and so on.

We denounce this policy, which can only disorientate and disgust new and young participants, who are often inexperienced and new to the Communist Left. Instead of finding an internationalist camp united and debating its differences of analysis and position, they find themselves in a sect-like atmosphere amidst an avalanche of ad hominem denunciations and false criticisms that can only disgust them and turn them away from the Communist Left. But is not that the real aim of today’s ICC?