Whatever one may think at first glance, from a static and non-historical point of view, the existence and development of what we call the International Proletarian Camp, is a material element of any historical situation. The groups claiming the Communist Left that are its main component, are both the product of this situation and an active factor in its development since they are the highest expressions of proletarian class consciousness.
This is obvious during the few rare revolutionary periods when the revolutionary party, or even the revolutionary parties, influence and lead the proletarian struggle. But this is also true during periods when the proletariat is not massively in struggle, even in periods of full counter-revolution, and the revolutionaries are scattered, divided, reduced to very small groups or circles without direct and immediate influence in the revolutionary class. This is just as true today as capitalism, caught up in the crisis and its own contradictions, imposes increasing misery and sacrifices and seeks to drag humanity into the imperialist war and the proletarians, in their great mass, do not do not know how to oppose it and even too often hesitate to do so.
The reality, the action, the strengths and weaknesses of the communist groups, of the party in the making, are essential data to understand the state of the capitalist world and the course of the class struggle. This is why it is important to recognize, welcome and support the ongoing emergence of new political groups claiming the Communist Left, particularly in the United States and Spain. The contribution of new energies, new blood, is to be welcomed in two measures. Firstly, with the crisis of 2008 and the rise of the class struggle in Greece and Spain, for example, one could have thought of a concomitant development of groups of the Communist Left; development, it must be specified, in terms of intervention and influence, not in numerical terms. But it is rather the opposite that occurred: deliquescence of the International Communist Current, a defeatist ideology that the Communist Left had gone bankrupt with the wind in its sails (of which the journal Controverses remains the most accomplished expression), etc. In a second step, the generation of militants of the years 1960-70, generation that formed the base of most historic groups [1] of the Communist Left, is decimated by the fact that many militants have died, the rest being struck by political demoralization. In short, the setting up of new groups around the journal Intransigence (https://intransigence.org/) [2] and the creation of groups around Nuevo Curso (https://nuevocurso.org/) as the Liga Emancipación (http://emancipacion.info/) is to be saluted fraternally. This dynamic is part of the constant work of the communist militants for the regrouping of the revolutionaries in the class party.

Re-appropriating the Experience of the International Communist Left

The most difficult task for the new communist groups is the re-appropriation of the communist program. We must face reality. Between the current period and the October Revolution, there was a political break marked by the darkest counter-revolution. Only a few small communist nuclei have been able to maintain themselves thus ensuring a certain political and programmatic continuity until today. The younger generations must therefore build on this heritage in order to avoid falling into the pitfall of modernism, that is to say the nihilist ideology that claims that everything has failed, including Marxism, except its own new ’theory’. If it is too early to state profoundly on the group Emancipación (Spain) which has yet expressed itself little, the journal Intransigence # 2 (USA) gives good place to the historical texts of the Communist Left. In fact, there is a text by Grandizo Munis [3] and another by the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy. And that’s very good.
Moreover, the basic positions of the journal Intransigence are typical positions of the Communist Left. Although they are too summary, for example there is no mention of the principle of the Dictatorship of the proletariat and the destruction of the bourgeois state, they somehow express what we call ’class frontiers’. That is the resulting positions of the highest political experience of the revolutionary movement. However, these positions must be discriminating criteria, otherwise they are only wishful thinking. For example, the article by the Kontra Klasa group from Croatia on the period of transition is completely opposed to the basic positions displayed by the journal. Indeed, this one sympathizes with the theory of communisation [4] and, in the purest councilist spirit, the entire article speaks of the transition between capitalism and communism only from the economic point of view without speaking of the central question of political power! Now, this opportunist theory, communisation, is to be fought relentlessly.
Which brings us to the question of regroupment. Yes, we must regroup, but according to which method? The regroupment will never be the harmonious addition of the different currents or tendencies of the revolutionary milieu. This is a democratic conception of the regroupment. On the contrary, it will be done through a process, which incidentally unfolds before our eyes in an embryonic way, of political confrontation. By political confrontation, we mean the political struggle that is waged in the revolutionary milieu between the Marxist left and the opportunist right. This demarcation, which is always dynamic and changing, transcends the formal organizations. There are no other ways to the party constitution.
This is probably the main weakness of the journal Intransigence # 2: there is no position, debate or political confrontation, on the various texts published. Yet four different groups participate. One can logically think that they do not all have the same positions on all aspects of the class struggle. Why not use the journal as a tool to debate and discuss and thus begin a process of homogenization around one current or another of the Left? The regroupment is not like a shopping centre where everyone opens his small shop to sell his small merchandise.

The Communist Groups: Expressions of the Local Proletariat or rather Expressions of the International Proletariat?

As well, the revolutionaries’ regroupment must be done directly on the international ground according to the centralist principle of internationalism. We thus find reductive that Intransigence sets itself only on the North American area. The journal has ’spontaneously’ an international character in that a Croatian group participates, thus contradicting the claim of the grouping only on American soil. This question seems to be one of the main difficulties facing new groups. Should communist groups, including those of today, and the party have to consider and address situations and problems, general and particular, from the local or from the international level?
Whether they are a group with an international physical material existence, in several countries and continents, or only in one isolated city, does not change the political problematic and the approach with which the Communists must approach the problem. To answer this question which concerns the space dimension, we must adopt the same method as for the time dimension: a communist group, all the more the party, must consider the situations and the problems which arise not from the immediate point of view but from the historical, that is, from the revolutionary and communist future of the international proletariat. It must also approach and consider its activity and its intervention as well as the situations from the international point of view. References and calls to internationalism, certainly indispensable, are not enough and remain only pious wishes, abstractions, if they are not fueled by the vision and a permanent international approach and by the historical perspective of the proletarian insurrection and the Dictatorship of the proletariat. These considerations have concrete political implications of all kinds, including in the intervention in the immediate and local struggles of the working class.
As well, the communist groups and the party always address themselves to the international proletariat even when they intervene in a specific and local struggle with particular orientations and slogans. Because armed with the communist program, and therefore constantly having in mind the historical and international character of the proletarian struggle, they are the most capable, and often the only ones, to precisely be able to put forwards the most effective orientations and slogans, according to the moments and the limits of each working class struggle, ’from the smallest to the largest’. Thus, any communist group must immediately consider itself as an expression of the international proletariat regardless of the places, the scenes, where its members arise and where it can intervene directly and physically – with obviously a special responsibility in these places. Any new group must ’tend to’ – it is not an ’absolute’ that can be decreed but a process of homogeneity and political unity around the communist program for which it is necessary to fight – to form and act as a centralized international group. Once again, these are not pure abstractions, nor even ’preferences’ in themselves of any ethical order or still dogmas that would be limited to the sole terrain of the organizational form to be adopted, but the choice of the general political approach and method of analysis and intervention to utilize and develop in each moment and ... place, or even field or subject of struggle, where we can intervene. Including, therefore, in the fight for the party and its construction.