In the previous issue of this bulletin, we had pointed out the incredible silence of the ICC french publication, Révolution internationale and the International Review, on the recent workers struggles. Finally, in front of the internal and external criticisms, RI has been obliged to mention them in its April issue. It means three months after the struggles in Italy. The french newspaper has thus reprinted a World Revolution article and an other one of the italian Rivoluzione Internazionale. But obviously it was reluctantly and without enthusiam. The first deals with a serie of struggles in Great-Britain but it doesn't mention the most significant strikes : the October english postmen (see our bulletin 23). The french reader of RI still knows nothing of it and no doubt he'll never know anything. Is this an error ? Or a deliberated willingness to underestimate, even to hide, the worth of the present workers struggles ? With no doubt, it's a conscious policy as shows the reprint in RI of the Rivoluzione article.
The french reprint offers changes and deletions in relation to the initial italian writing which have an important political significance on the internal reality of the present ICC and on the political contradictions which tear it apart. On one hand the italian healine, A Significant Struggle, a Struggle Full of Lessons, is replaced by the Base Unionism Sabotages the Struggle. The first healine tends to present the strengths and the positive dynamic of the Italian struggles. The second underlines the "weaknesses" and the powerlessness of the workers. Here there are two different political insistences, two contradictory political choices. The Parisian liquidationist faction has consciously decided to change the headline which was not to its taste. If not, why have they changed it ? But above all, it's the deletion done in relation to the original version which is significant and which confirms the Parisian liquidationist faction's willingness to underestimate the struggles and to deny any dynamic of international resumption of the workers struggles. Here is the suppressed passage in the french version : "Before all, the importance of this movement [the Italian tramway workers strikes] is on one hand in the militancy which has been expressed, a combative spirit which proves that the working class is leaving this period of reflux of the militancy which had followed the collapse of stalinism and the following campaign on the end of communism" (Rivoluzione Internazionale 134, February 2004, translated from italian and underlined by us). Without using the word "revival" which makes react violently the liquidationist faction, Rivoluzione affirms the "exit of the previous period", it means the end of the reflux of the workers struggles consecutively to 1989. It's precisely what the liquidationist faction "disagrees" with. In itself, there is nothing grave that there is political disagreements. But under the condition they are clearly posed and discussed at the internal level as well as publicly. And that's precisely what the liquidationist faction opposes with all its strength since now many years, and even since it became "majority" within the ICC. It's why it ignores, it passes over in silence, the workers struggles as much as it can, or that it misrepresents them. It's why RI has not reprint the article of November WR 269 on the Turning point in the class struggle which puts forwards, even though shyly, the existence of a beginning of international "revival" of the workers struggles.
This refusal to openly pose, without fear, the disagreements and the legitimate political questionnings, is catastrophic, politically disastrous. And what an illusion to believe that by ignoring them, by refusing to discuss them, they're going to disappear or to be overcome ! But, isn't there the policy led since now almost three years towards our fraction and other oponents ? To the militants who remain faithful to their convictions and to the ICC positions : open your eyes. It's not but by putting, frankly, openly, on the table the divergences - which are obvious to any serious reader and whom most of the militants are conscious of - and in the confrontation with the political criticisms, in particular those which our fraction don't stop posing, that the ICC will be able to stop the spiral in which it is dramatically brought.
Burying one's head in the sand waiting that "it" passes away, is the worst of the policies.
Internal Fraction of ICC -- Bulletin 24