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The 19th ICC Congress or the Bankruptcy Declaration of the Policy led since 2001

The ICC held it 19th international Congress in Spring 2011. As we try to do it for every congress of this organisation which also remains ours, we want to take position on the balance-sheet it has published.

The balance-sheet article ¹ which presents this congress comes to confirm the continuation of the opportunist drift of the ICC and to point out the precise step where this process is now. About the congress, we can take back word by word the judgement we made a year ago for the 19th Congress of its territorial section in France :

"No innovation. No particular liquidation. No so-called theoretical deepening. Nor political. No real debate. No perspective put forwards. Nor for the working class – in particular in front of the question of imperialist war. Nor for the revolutionary minorities. Nothing. The ICC opportunist of the Liquidation has nothing else to say to the proletariat" we said at the time (Bulletin communiste international 3, this article is not translated in English).

Thus has the 19th ICC congress been a congress for nothing ? Not exactly. First because it officially ratified the policy of classes collaboration with anarchism which breaks with the ICC platform. Then because, as acknowledges the article, "the Congress, on the basis of different report, noted the biggest weaknesses of the organisation".

The biggest weaknesses ? At the organizational level ? It is not possible. Any regular reader of the ICC press can't believe it. At first sight, we could not believe it. Had not the organisation overcome its organizational difficulties of the past ? Did not it fly from progress to progress in its general activities, particularly at the level of its organizational functioning ? Was not it more united than ever before ? And we begun to worry. To question : of what kind were these difficulties ? "The Congress examined these difficulties at some length, in particular the often degraded state of the organisational tissue and of collective work, which can weigh heavily on some sections".

So, let's acknowledge we are being taken aback !

What did happened ? The "organizational tissue" is again degraded ? One more time ? But how such a situation of big weaknesses of the organisational tissue could happen while all the congresses since the 2001 crisis praised the state of mind which prevailed within the organization, the recovered confidence and the "human solidarity" developed between the militants, while they brandished well high the banner of Ethics and Morale and displayed the Culture of debate, in short while they vaunted the quality of the recovered "organizational tissue"... after the struggle against the so-called clan with nazi and stalinist methods, infiltrated by police, that we were and that they had to expel². Certainly, there is not – yet ? - "phenomena of a loss of conviction or disloyalty", are we reassured. But the worry comes back quickly because we are told that "the causes of the present difficulties are partly of the same order" as the crisis and the clans of the past ! The same order ?

But how ? How did it happen that had finally reappeared the same diseases against which the ICC had armed itself, had protected itself thanks to theoretical contributions of "first order" such as the texts about Confidence and Solidarity in the Proletarian Struggle (International Review 111-112) and Marxism and Ethics (Review 127-128) and had acquired its precious Culture of debate ? How could not this diseases be eradicated, at least contained, by the Permanent Inquiry Commission - they call it Special Commission - in charge of keeping "watching" the loyalty and the ideological purity of the militants and which had been set up since 2001 and had even justified a change of statutes in 2009³  ? Then, all these texts –" genuine theoretical innovations" whose invaluable "marxist" quality has been appreciated by everybody and that we have at their time "estimated" at their right value⁴ -, all these "new" organisational measures which had introduced new organizational rules would have been useless ? All these political sacrifices for so many militants have not succeeded to eliminate the disease ? So much personal humiliations and political capitulations for being back to the point of departure ? Would the balance-sheet of ten years of so-called fight for cleaning up the organizational tissue, for confidence and solidarity amongst militants, against the clanish spirit and the personal hatred be negative ? Even maybe a complete failure ?

Fortunately thanks to its theoretical vision of the Decomposition and of clanism (the roots of the organizational crisis within the workers movement according to this theory), the Liquidationnist faction which rules the ICC gives us a political analysis, oh so much "consistent", of its recurrent organisational difficulties. This analysis leads to an orientation as well "coherent" towards the militants and the organization :

"All the militants of the sections where these problems have arise (...) have known each other and militated together for more than 30 years. There are thus many solid links of friendship and confidence between them. But the minor faults, the small weaknesses, the character differences which everyone has to accept in others have often led to the development of tensions or a growing difficulty to work together over a period of many years in small sections which have not been refreshed by the “new blood” of new militants, precisely because of the retreat experienced by the working class. Today this “new blood” is beginning to arrive in certain sections of the ICC, but it is clear that the new members can only be properly integrated if the organisational tissue of the ICC improves" (19th ICC Congress : Preparing for class confrontations, International Review 146, we underline).

We invite our readers to pay attention to the "profundity" and the "coherence" of this kind of reflection that the Liquidators of our organization have become the specialists and that we have so often pointed out. Let's sum up : the organisational tissue is deteriorated because militants are "old" and that it has "not been refreshed by the new blood of new militants". But, in order to be able to properly integrate young militants and their new blood, beforehand you need to... improve the organisational tissue ! Any reader and serious sympathizer of the ICC will be astounded. Here is the kind of stupidity that the distinguished thinkers and theoreticians –  was not one of them presented by his close friends of the Liquidationist faction as the greatest marxist of the 20th Century⁵ ? - has become the specialists. A real trademark.

What concrete meaning has this brilliant thought ? Because, actually what can be – from the Liquidators' point of view - reproached to the old militants who are presented as responsible for the deteriorated organisational tissue ? Their supposed inability to accept the " the minor faults, the small weaknesses, the character differences" between them – only explanation given for the greatest difficulties - while they " know each other and have militated together for more than 30 years" ? Who can accept such a psychological inanity ? But it is true that the family nucleus of the Liquidators have succeeded to make swallow by the great majority of the ICC members that the organisational crisis of 2001 was due to the fact that, amongst 6 members of the former International Secretariat – the Central Organ -, 5 of them – a so-called clan, one more - were jealous of the particular affection Marc Chirik (dead ten years before) had towards the one who was going to be ordained as the "greatest marxist of the 20th Century". Then, why the present nonsense about the character of the ones and the others would not be accepted ? Bigger it is, more it is accepted as says the proverb.

No actually, for the Liquidationist faction, the genuine defect of the old militants would not be the fact they have been formed and integrated in the ICC on the basis of its original positions in the years 1970 and 1980 ? That they are still carrying these positions, at least partly and despite the political capitulations they had to accept these last years ? The political and organisational reflexes of these militants, or what remains of them, impede and limit on a daily basis, it seems, the destructive action of the ICC and of the Communist Left undertaken by the Liquidationist faction. Moreover, this latter has always provoked and fuelled the suspicion upon categories of militants⁶ in order to develop the internal paranoia – the ICC seen as a besieged fortress - for justifying the existence of the Special Commission "of investigation" and to establish its power by throwing anathemas against categories of militants : today it is the turn of the "old" members.

These "old" comrades have to watch their back ! They are under surveillance. Either they shut up, they accept the new opportunist positions without balking ; or they still let themselves express on occasions, by reflex, the genuine positions of the ICC on such or such question and then they'll be charged guilty for the "personal" tensions linked to any important political disagreement as a mark of "their character" and their "inability to work collectively". The discussion about the political difference will be then obscured and denied by the discussion about their psychological traits, their friendships and their hostilities. Their interest is – they already know it in their deepest beings - to be careful and to avoid any confidences, gossips, or other reports which the Permanent Special Commission of Surveillance could be submitted.

In regards to the young and new militants, integrated on the basis of the new positions and orientations, political as well as organisational, few remain in the organisation on the very admission of the Liquidators according to whom the new members are hardly integrated in a tissue deteriorated... by the "old" members.

So, given the circumstances, it does not matter to speak about the banalities and the contradictions that this congress has issued by way of analysis about the international situation when it dared to express a rather clear-cut opinion. It does not matter to come back on the extracts published in this balance-sheet of the Resolution on the International Situation about the crisis which underlines "an infernal spiral" of "the crisis of sovereign debts" ; an assessment of a pathetic banality that even the bourgeois press launches joyfully. Should we laugh or rather sadden for the self-satisfaction declaring that "the period that followed the Congress has confirmed this analysis" and that it "doesn’t derive from any particular merit of our organisation" since this one would be, they claim, "faithful to the classic analyses of the workers’ movement"... except that since its 16th Congress, the ICC has amongst other things rejected the theoretical basis for the understanding of capitalism' Decadence : the cycle crisis-war-reconstruction ; that, since it 17th Congress, it has worsened this betrayal of "the classic analysis of the workers’ movement" by declaring the definitive disappearance of the perspective of the generalized imperialist war and, at the level of the historical alternative, the appearance of a "third way" (the destruction of Humanity by the Decomposition).

What can be said too of this last Congress according to which "the very brutality of the attacks provoke a feeling of powerlessness in the workers' ranks" while massive struggles have not cease to develop for more than a year, particularly all around the Mediterranean ? The only kind of struggle which find favour to their eyes is in Spain "where the movement of the “indignant” has for several months acted a sort of beacon for other countries in Europe and other continents" ; this analysis confirms that the present ICC is not only influenced by the councilist vision of the classes struggle but, above all, that it has particularly become permeable to the bourgeoisie's ideological and political campaigns, in particular the Democratic one, up to take them over ⁷ !

The ICC of today tends increasingly to replace the clarity of the marxist conceptions by a poor thought borrowed from the bourgeoisie and the class positions of the genuine ICC (inherited from the Communist Left) by the "fashioned" ideology, the one that the ruling class is presently hurling against the working class.

Despite the theory of the "culture of debate" which the Liquidators went on and on about during all these years, we'll know nothing about the "different points of view [that] were put forward" about the evolution of the economical crisis ; nothing too about the lack of "total homogeneity in the discussions" about the development of the classes struggle and thus about the contradictory arguments and reflections which, it seems, have been put forwards at that congress.

As well we'll know nothing, no exposition or sum-up, even concise, of the numerous and "rich discussions" that has raised the new "collaboration" with the anarchist groups (and even trotskist as the article tells us). We won't know no more about the arguments of the new members of the ICC, in Turkey in particular, who reject the analysis of parasitism - one of the political weapon of Liquidationism against the ICC and against the Communist Left. Finally, the balance-sheet informs us that the congress has come back about the Resolution of the 16th Congress (which we had denounced at its time) which had proclaimed that "the ICC is already the skeleton of the future party”. But why, how, such a position which was fully breaking with all the the policy of the ICC since its origin could have been adopted ? And why is it abandoned today ? Nobody will know and the Liquidators are very careful not to "open the debate".

The policy of liquidation of the political lessons and positions thus carries on and this congress is its last conclusive manifestation. For us, what is essentially striking, is that the Liquidators keep their control on the organisation and they obviously have the intention of completing successfully their enterprise up to its destruction, indeed up to the Communist Left one as a whole - particularly aiming at the destruction of the other organisations of this Left and, firstly, its main one : the Internationalist Communist Tendency ⁸.

For the honest militants of the ICC, faithful to its principles and its political positions, it is time to draw a balance-sheet of the last ten years. This one is dramatical at all levels and this 19th Congress confirms it. The result is a demoralisation and an increasing lack of conviction which express through dismissals and withdrawals more or less important of members. Lie ? Interpretation ? Exaggeration ? It is enough to read the last sentence of the article about the congress to get an idea of the "militant and committed" state of mind which rules today in the ICC amongst the militants [this sentence in French has been rephrased by the English translator, the term "after all" being moved in the previous sentence which fully changes the political meaning - an old militant ? Thus we translate ourselves from French the conclusion of the article]⁹ : "After all, a fundamental characteristic of every communist militant is to be a fighter". Should we recall you, comrades of the ICC, that a communist militant is above all a fighter ?

November 2011.

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