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About the New Organizational Crisis of the ICC
We publish here after a political contribution of a sympathizer about the internal crisis of the ICC and our public ’Call’ to the Proletarian Camp at that matter. Besides the critical analysis of the present situation of the ICC whose great lines we share, the comrade opens the debate on ’should we have intervened publicly’ in front such an internal crisis or rather consider it as a ’private affair’ and keep silence on it ? The comrade supports the political choice and practice of the whole opposition to the rising Stalinism within the Communist Parties in the 1920’s : "We will be told too this: you make a counter-revolutionary job by displaying publicly the decline of your party. To this sophism, we respond the following : the counter-revolutionaries are those who have made the Party what it is, who set up a scandal that can only be eliminated if it is denounced" (Bulletin communiste #6, Nov. 1925, translated by us from French).
About the New Organizational Crisis of the ICC
In the case of the ICC, on the contrary it is a question of a slow process of internal degeneration, of an involution of a revolutionary and militant organization, which claims to defend the legacy of the Communist Left, towards an ’end of world’ stalinilized sect which now gets to its end. A watchful reader can find manifestations of this involution in the very publications of the Current. Let’s take, at random, a recent example : the article 100 years of capitalist decadence. The objective of this article would be to underline the historical alternative in front which is capitalism : proletarian revolution or new generalized imperialist war which is also summarized as ’socialism or barbary’. However, very quickly, the article becomes an apocalyptic prophecy, of a increasing social putrefaction, of a moral destruction and a generalized stupefying of humanity (sic) in a description of a world converted in Sodom and Gomorrah and in which the ICC remains the last cubbyhole (itself threatened too by the atomization and the lack of perspectives) of conservation of human morality as the last hope capable of touching the working class’s heart. It suffices to read some passages to verify that we don’t exaggerate :
’(…) Still less has this been the case since the emergence of class society and the first great civilizations, all of which have long disappeared: only a very few of them have been able to transform themselves into something new. History reveals to us many epochs of cultural regression, the loss of skills and knowledge, generally accompanied by moral stultification and a brutalization of human relationships. (…) In this situation, where neither of its two determining classes are capable of imposing a decisive response to an irreversible and ever deeper economic crisis, society is more and more rotting where it stands; a growing social decomposition makes it ever more difficult for the working class to achieve a clear awareness of its historical perspective – a historical perspective which a century ago was widely shared in the workers’ ranks (…). Even in the face of general stultification, a moral indignation arises in the heart of the working class, which gives us our bearings today. The working class suffers with the rest of humanity under the burden of decadence. Atomization and the absence of perspective for the future attack our very identity’ (ICC, 100 years of capitalist decadence, January 2014, we underline).
Nevertheless, this mixture between Marxism and the ’end of the world’ morality is just only an indication of the situation in which the ICC lives in internally. As any sect, what is published and known by the external world is not but the emerged part of the iceberg and, as in the other sects, ever more withdrawn into itself, it is through a leak that we can have a clear idea of the stunning degree of the organizational degeneration and sectarisation to which the ICC arrived today. It is what clearly shows the Appeal of the International Group of the Communist Left, A new (final?) Internal crisis in the ICC! [1], (April 28th 2014).
This communique has provoked the immediate and violent reaction of the ICC which accuses the IGCL members nothing less than working for the state service secret. Obviously such a response was predictable. Thus what was the objective of the IGCL by making public this new internal crisis of the ICC ? Why provoking the ICC ? Would not it have been better that this group, although having such informations, just shrugs its shoulders and lets quietly the ICC ’simmering in its own juice’ as the majority of the ex-members of the ICC presently does ? This attitude would even be justified since the IGCL, recently set up, doesn’t claim – as was doing one of its present components – to be ’fraction’ of the ICC.
On the contrary, we have to support the communique and the call of the IGCL. We must acknowledge the militant courage and decision of the IGCL comrades for having published – while knowing the risks – the communique about the internal crisis of the ICC and for having underlined its political importance. The fact that the internal crisis of the ICC overtakes the only ICC : it is a problem that – objectively – affects the whole militants and groups who claim themselves to be of the Communist Left camp, and even that it affects the future of the working class movement.
Because the ICC carries on claiming to be the heir of the historical positions of the Communist Left (CL). And not only that : every time with more insistence, the ICC claims to be – indeed, that’s another signal of its sectarian degeneration – the only organization of the Communist Left in all the world in front of which the rest of the militants and groups who claim this political camp would succumb to the ruling immorality and would be pure opportunists, parasites, traitors and policemen. This determines an objective confrontation – that is whether it is conscious or not – between two political and organizational conceptions of the function and the functioning of the working class’s organization political vanguard : party of political leadership or sect of moral renovation. At the moment, it is necessary to consider that the ICC is, amongst the groups which claim the Communist Left, the most extended organization at the international level and which carries on to absorb militant forces in its own ranks, militants who have no other possibilities to know an organization of the Communist Left but through the sectarian and deformed functioning of the ICC. That is this organization has converted itself, today, into a force of sterilization of revolutionary energies. That’s why the militants and the ’old’ groups of the Communist Left must defend the existence and the formation of these too few militants who approach the Communist Left orbit.
But besides, the militants and groups of the Communist Left have to learn of the historical experience : a revolutionary organization can collapse not only as a result of an open confrontation with the bourgeoisie, not only as a result of repression, but also from a process which develops within it. And even, a revolutionary organization can collapse not only from an unbearable historical social upheaval (as for the First World War for the Socialist Parties of the Second International, or from the world counter-revolution for those of the Communist International) but also by the incapacity of withstanding during a long period, various decades, the pressure of bourgeois ideology. This can’t express, at least not only, in the political mistakes or in the formal giving up of the programmatic positions, but above all in the dislocation of its internal functioning. So, already, during the 1980’s, the organization of the Communist Left which, at its time, was also the most extended at the international level, the ICP (of the so-called ’bordiguist’ current) exploded. Today, another international proletarian organization, with another political program, and another conception of functioning, the ICC is too collapsing in an irreversible way from its inside, degenerating into a sect which reproduces the methods of Stalinist functioning, methods which are antagonistic to the revolutionary organization and to the proletariat. Thus is not it important that the present camp of the Communist Left determines what process and what circumstances have led to this situation ? How to prevent and avoid for the future a similar fate for the revolutionary organization which is to guide the proletariat in the decisive confrontations ? It seems to us that this is in the sense that takes all its importance the call of the IGCL comrades to the whole proletarian camp and to which we modestly join :
’Like it or not, this ICC crisis and its consequences will still be a blow to the credibility of the Communist Left and a blow to all its organizations, participating in the weakening of the political convictions and communist commitments of militants and sympathizers. Like it or not, while we are on the same side of the class barricade, we have to learn to live with our differences, try to question and discuss, and where possible to overcome them; but again it is necessary that we see ourselves as as belonging to the same camp. In this the umpteenth ICC’s crisis that is certainly the one in which it will sclerose forever, two opposing historical forces that go far beyond the fate of this organization are beginning to face off: one to sabotage and annihilate the whole process of unity and consolidation of the communist political vanguard; while the other tries to fight the former and impose an inverse dynamic. Which trend will prevail over the other, what dynamics will prevail over the others in the communist left? Fundamentally, it’s a fight to the death, on the level of communist minorities, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This is what is at issue and it affects everyone!’ (A new (final?) Internal crisis in the ICC!, IGCL,).
