We can't keep silent about the incredible issue of the International Review n°116 of January 2004, publication which is under the direct responsibility of the central organ of the ICC and of its International Secretariat. What do they do with this publication if not discrediting, if not destroying, if not liquidating its notoriety and its reputation ? Our text in this bulletin on the ICC press already says a few words on it. We already raised the fact, incredible fact, that this issue does not say anything about the workers struggles which occurred these last months. Nothing on the English post-office workers’ strike. Nothing on the Italian tramway workers' one.
The International Review, our Review, is focused :
- on the denunciation of the "alternative worldism" movement - nothing less than two articles ! - which shows that the ICC rushes, without any distance, without any stand back, in all the ideological and propagandist topics the bourgeoisie puts forwards in the current situation ;
- towards the proletarian camp, on the one hand with the text The scourge of sectarianism in the internationalist camp, which tries to replace the current ICC in the center of the proletarian camp while drapping itself in the banner of antisectarianism - and by so hiding its really sectarian and destroying enterprise towards this camp -, and on the other hand with 1903-1904 : the birth of Bolshevism, which seeks to adapt Lenin and his struggle against menchevism to the benefit of its own sectarian and destructive struggle against our fraction – one has just to see the conclusion of the article - and, behind us, against the whole proletarian camp.
And what for the situation ? A really miserable editorial, obviously written in emergency and catastrophe (with no date) by a militant who tried to save the review from the mess at the last minute. He decided to center on… "the arrest of Saddam Hussein [which] has definitely allowed the United States to gain points by lending a certain degree of legitimacy to its intervention in Iraq" ; at the very moment when this review comes out, the international medias, the American ones leading the movement, don't stop going back over the lack of legitimacy of this intervention with the scandal on the absence of weapons of mass destruction. Useless to say that this editorial is already out of subject and out of time as soon as it appears. And worse, a few lines further, the editorial says exactly the opposite by specifying that"the arrest of Saddam Hussein changes nothing" (1). Then, why centering all the editorial on this question ?
But the contradictions and the absence of political and writing control appear throughout its reading. Doesn't it start from its first line to warn us against "the media hype about the arrest of the «bloody tyrant»" and to speak of "a scenario appropriate to a B-series western"? However this does not prevent the article from continuing to be centered on the Saddam's arrest. It means that the analysis on the imperialist rivalries doesn't take as an axis the major tendencies which make act all the fractions of the world bourgeoisie, but precisely what the American medias use to beguile the public opinion !
In addition, it should be noted that the editorial speaks, by the way, as a banal fact - contrary to Saddam's arrest -, of a "Franco-German alliance". However, there never was any fundamental or basic article which speaks lately about this question in the ICC. And suddenly, appeared of nowhere, the editorial starts to speak about this "alliance"… without stopping and thinking only one moment on the historical implications, on the disruption in the imperialist relations that this alliance of the two European Powers means historically. Quite the contrary, the article ends with the usual and sacro-sanct old story on the tendency to decomposition, instead of recognizing the tendency to imperialist bipolarisation, whose German-French alliance is the highest expression, and its consequences.
And that is added by the absence of any reference to the class struggles… as if this one did not exist whereas, simultaneously, several territorial sections of the ICC recognize the wildcat strikes in a constrained and contradictory way and even evoke a possibility of an "international revival of the working class struggle" ! All that is a brutal demonstration, crude one, of the domination of idealistic dogmatism in the current ICC. A manifestation of the ruling and increasing disorientation of this organization and of its militants, unable to direct themselves in the present situation because it has widely opened the door to opportunism and to the revisionist theory of the decomposition.
7/2/04
NOTE:
1. Here is what, for our part, we have said on the subject in our preceding bulletin: "the presentation by the bourgeois press of the arrest of Saddam Hussein like a «significant bounce in the situation», like a «victory of the US policy», like a «major, historical event» opening the way with a resolution of the situation, all that is only propaganda. Let us be clear : the factors which determine the bases of the situation today, i.e. primarily the growing competition between the great powers (the bipolarisation) are always present and determining in this situation" (Bulletin 22).
Communist Bulletin 23 – Internal Fraction of ICC