Liquidationism and political cowardice

At the last "public" meetings organized by the ICP-Le Prolétaire in Paris, as for the last one of Feb.7th, there in now an important absent : the "official" ICC. There was no liquidationists' delegate in one of the few space for political debate existing today.

Just a few years ago, it would have been imposible. The ICC of that time didn't satisfy with organizing regular public meetings in a great number of cities in France and around the world. It had a rule : to participate to all the discussions posible and defend its positions.

But now, since more than two years, the liquidationist leadership of our organization sneaks off the honest debate and discussion. After having deserted the debate within its own ranks with our fraction, it refused it in its own "public" meetings with banning us first of speaking, than of attending. It even went up to dissolve its own August 2003 public meeting in Mexico in front of our presence ! Then, the other groups of the Proletarian Political Milieu (mainly the "bordiguist" ICP and the IBRP) have been ostracized through "polemics" based on insults and denigrations (see Révolution internationale 340 and 341 against Le Prolétaire). We might understand the liquidationists ignore the meetings of the other groups in order to avoid being obliged to confront us when they fear that we can be present : new desertion ! And this shameful escape in front of the political debate is followed by the desertion in front of the class struggle as we've seen it, for instance, last spring in France.

In two years, the ICC which was the kingpin of debate within the proletarian camp, the main pole around which the dynamic of regroupment articulated, has thrown every thing overboard. Not only it isn't any more this pole, but it becomes the major obstacle to all the dynamic of confrontation and debate ; and thus of regroupment.

The real ICC experience and method for analysing
the dynamic of class struggle

"This «analysis is optimist», «The ICC sees the revolution every where», «the ICC overestimates the class struggle» say much political groups and organizations. Skepticism still rules within the revolutionary milieu. This skepticism on the class struggle evaluation comes from the constatation of the weaknesses of the present wave of struggles (...) : the workers struggles remain controlled by the left political apparatus and the unions ; they remain on economical demands (...) ; the working class hasn't constituted its own autonomous organizations (...).

If these weakenesses are real, staying on this simple constatation is nevertheless false. It mixes up the beginning of a movement with its full expansion. It forgets the international context of the development of the class struggle, its historical dimension which requires the development of the consciouness of the whole working class and its capacity to forge the true revolutionary world Party. Waiting for the revolution or even the mass strike at once, is an expression of an immediatist and narrow vision which is tipical of the «radical» petit-bourgeoisie impatience" (International Review 40, December 1984, translated by us from french).

After the important struggle in the public service in Belgium in 1983, a serie of different workers struggles developed all around the world, particularly in Europe, amongt them the british miners strike (1984-1985), the french railway strikes (1986-1987) up to the end of the 1980. At the time, the ICC, our ICC, led a political struggle for convincing of the existence of an international revival of struggle in order to arm the revolutionaries and the militant workers in relation to the potentialities opened up. It had to fight against a certain kind of "skepticism". Today, we still use the same method which is given up by the present ICC. The difference is that, today, the kind of skepticism, when it's not the ignorance and the silence on the struggles, isn't impatience but the conscious liquidation and destruction of the ICC experience and tradition on that matter.

The present ICC or the Invariance of the opportunism methods

Banning the attendance to its own "public" meetings, absent to the meetings of the other communist groups, shameful and disgusting polemics against them consciously ignoring their political criticisms and arguments, absolute silence on our criticisms of the activities reports and resolutions on the international situation adopted since 2001, rejection without discussion of our alternative reports (see in particular our bulletins 1, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16 and 21), refusal of the political confrontation under the most diverse pretexts, "nazis, stalinists, thiefs, kidnappers, sneakers and police", with our fraction considered as "the most dangerous of the clan", with the other groups because they are "gangrened by parasitism" and by our fraction, such is the method of the ICC today. Nevertheless, refusing the political confrontation in the name of the most repugnant and slanderous accusations isn't a new method. Trotski shows us where it comes from and what are its consequencies :

"At the 6th Congress [of the Communist International in 1928], the Program Commission raised the question of what should be done with a criticism [of the proposed program] whose author wasn't only excluded of the IC but also exiled in Central Asia. Timid voices rised up to say that it was worth educating through the adversaries and that exact opinions remain exact what ever was the personality of who expresses them. But an other group, much more solid, triumphed almost without resistance and without struggle. An old respectful lady - who in the past used to be Clara Zetkin - stated that one couldn't consider correct ideas coming from Trotski (...). The timid voice of the reason shut up at once ; and, closing its eyes, the Commission let aside my «criticisms» (foreword of The International after Lenin, 1929, Presses Universitaires de France, underlined and translated into english by us).

Even considering we could have done organizational mistakes, what we fully reject, the disciplinary remedy used is worse than our supposed disease. The consecuencies ? "In every controversial question and every difference of opinion, the leadership and the official press, not only of the C.P.S.U. but also of the Comintern and all its sections, has immediately shifted the debate over to the question of factions and groupings. Without temporary ideological groupings, the ideological life of the party is unthinkable [Trotski's underline]. Nobody has yet discovered any other procedure. And those who have sought to discover it have only shown that their remedy was tantamount to strangling the ideological life of the party" (underlined by us, The question of the internal Party regime).

The reader would have understood that it suffices to replace "Trotski" by "parasite groups" and "factions and groupings" by "clans" and we have the exact characteristics of the new "remedy [which is] tantamount to strangling the ideological life of the ICC" with the catastrophical political consecuencies that every body can now notice in the press of this organization.