This summer 2004 lives an acceleration of the international situation which, because it sums up the historical stakes, sets the tone of the year to come for the international proletariat as well as for the revolutionaries.
The economical capitalist crisis not only does confirm itself, but it also suffers a rough aggravation. Today it imposes both the increase in number of regional imperialist wars and slaughters and thus too the development of the process towards a new imperialist order articulated around two poles (whose outcome cannot be but generalized war) ; and attacks of an extraodinary violence against the working class working and living conditions.
During the summer, the increase and the brutality of the measures, against the pensions, against the social security systems, against the unemployed benefits, the wages blockage, the increase of the work time being not paid, the closure of companies and the redundancies, have get to levels unknown for ages. Inevitably, these measures provoke workers reactions, as the strikes and demonstrations in Germany illustrated it in July and August in the very heart of the European industrial proletariat. Since two years, these reactions follows one another in the countries of capitalism center : France, Austria in 2003, Great-Britain in Winter 2003-2004, and now in Germany, just to mention the main ones. It is well an international revival of the workers struggles which is the proletariat's response to the deepening of the economical crisis of capitalism which exacerbates, within the world ruling class, the economic and... imperialist competitions. By striking its violent attacks against the working class, every national bourgeoisie doesn't look only for making its own capital more competitive on the international scene, but also to make paid by the workers its military interventions more and more numerous and its politics of development of arms industry and constitution of modern armies.
Never in the history of our generation of communists and workers, the questions of crisis and imperialist war were raised so clearly, it means so generalized, simultaneously and so linked between them. And, new phenomenon too for our generation, the obvious manifestations of the crisis, such as the open recessions, had always known a gap with the workers reactions. Just as they didn't influence directly the exacerbation of the imperialist rivalries and wars. Today, the economic recession - which notably expresses itself through the lack or the weakness of the "economical resumption" but also through the explosion of the raw materials prices - obliges the capitalists to massively and frontally attack the working class. And, at the same time,it pushes them to battle more and more directly between them through military interventions.
The perspective of important and inevitable classes confrontations can provoke feelings of anguish and fear in front of the next vicissitudes and dangers that history is presenting. But, opposed to that, the working class and the communists must take up this perspective with confidence and enthusiasm. Confidence since the working class has already showed that it tends to refuse, it's precisely what express the recent struggles, to sacrifice for capital. Enthusiasm since, behind the class battles of today and of tomorrow, the perspective of capitalism destruction and the advent of communism are at stake. There is no inevitability in the historical situation which is emerging. The proletariat can be as well victorious as defeated. But what we're certain of, is that it has the arms and the means for victory. The working class and particularly its revolutionary minorities must take up this period with determination and confidence.
In particular, the present situation - the simultaneity of the economic crisis, of the imperialist war and of the workers struggles - underlines and revives at first level one of the traditional positions of the communist movement : the bankrupcy of capitalism raises with no ambiguity the following historical alternative : imperialist war or communist revolution.
"Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago : either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or ; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat" (The Junius Pamphlet - The Crisis of Social Democracy, chapter one, Rosa Luxemburg, underlined by us in bold).
This historical alternative imposes to the today revolutionaries, to the existing communist groups, to confront the present social reality, to act in a clear and resolute way within their class, and to work as much as possible to their own regroupment.
From this point of view, one of the elements enabling to develop our confidence in the today and tomorrow situation is the ability of a significant part of the "proletarian camp" to fit itself within this historical perspective and to assume its task consequently. The IBRP capacity, of its components, and of the most part of the bordiguist groups, to carry on putting forwards the historical alternative to our class, to try to clarify the roots of the economical crisis and its consequences, to denounce imperialist war in general and the perspective of the generalized war in particular, not in itself, not as an "idea", but in its concrete manifestations of today - it means the tendency towards the appearance and the constitution of two antagonistic imperialist poles - and finally their ability to fit themselves within the workers struggles, to acknowledge the reality of the struggles revival and to defend in it concrete orientations (see our bulletin 23), are encouragement for all the communist organizations worth of this name and their sympathizers. Other element particularly promising, and that our fraction stimulates as much as it can, is the willingness to debate and to confront the political positions of the ones and the others. This continous and serious policy enables today the IBRP to think seriously to the perspective of a new section in Germany. In Germany where the proletarian geant is coming back on the foreground. In Germany where the bourgeoisie affirms itself more and more openly as the true leader of the imperialist pole opposed to the United States one. We deal with this question of regroupment in Germany in this bulletin. It's also this political and active willingness of the IBRP which enabled the holding of fraternal and fruitful meetings and discussions between this organization and our fraction (see our report on this issue). The reader will be able to note the important points of agreement we have on the present historical situation.
Unfortunately, one of the components of this proletarian camp carries on with "its descent to hell" of opportunism and it opposes every time more to this dynamic of political clarification and regroupment. It is the present ICC, the "new" ICC, which throws overboard, officially, the historical alternative "war or revolution" to the benefit of a third way, the end of humanity into decomposition, without classes struggle (see our bulletin 21 and our criticism of the Resolution on International Situation adopted at the 15th international congress); and this at the very moment when the affirmation of the historical alternative is a key element of the political struggle between the classes. It is deaf and blind in front of the tendency towards imperialist polarization of the capitalist world in the name of "decomposition" and of "each one for himself" ; and it presents the international situation as if it is plunging into chaos and into irrationality while a new international "order" is appearing and is asserting. It rejects the reality of the international revival of the workers struggles in which it only sees maneuvers and traps of the bourgeoisie under the argument that the capitalist "decomposition" weighs so heavily upon the working class. It rejects the whole internationalist forces and groups as "parasites", or influenced by parasitism, and it adopts towards them a rejection and contemptuous attitude, characteristic of the worst sectarianism.
But this general drift doesn't go with no resistance more or less conscious in its ranks. Besides the existence of our internal fraction which refuses the March 2002 expulsion of all its members and which carries on considering itself as being part of the ICC - our bulletin is an internal bulletin directed to the militants of the proletarian camp and in particular to the ICC ones -, the political heterogeneity which is revealed through the international press of the ICC is one of the expressions of this resistance to the ruling opportunist and revisionist course. It is quite significant to notice that it's precisely the sections which had to intervene in the workers struggles - except the section in France where the seizure of the liquidationist family faction is the strongest and the most vigilant - which, confronted to reality, express in their press these resistances. Lately, it has been particularly visible in Rivoluzione Internazionale, the publication in Italy, as our reader will be able to note in this bulletin.
But beyond this internal resistance, it remains that on all the crucial questions of the situation, a cleavage has been made between the present ICC and the other forces of the proletarian camp. The most important groups, as the IBRP and the ICP-Programme Communiste (of course on the basis of their own positions) find themselves on the same side of the barricade : on the historical alternative, on the imperialist perspective, on the course of the workers struggles, on the debate and the confrontation of the political questions (even though the position of principle of bordiguism limits enormously its capacity). And on all these questions, the ICC stands on the other side of the barricade, opposed to the needs of the proletariat.
It goes the same with the question of the building up of the party, of its dynamic, on the means and methods, on the "internal regime", on the functionning of the revolutionary organizations. There too, there is two sides of the barricades, two visions and two antagonistic dynamics. And the today ICC finds itself on the opposed side to the rest of the proletarian camp (with its theory of clanism and gurus) and opposed to the experience of the workers movement, in particular to the 1903 and bolcheviks one in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, despite all its lying claimings and "theoretical" texts which do falsify history. Again our reader will be able to verify it in this issue.
Thus, the opportunist course of this organization unfortunately carries on. And its organizational crisis doesn't fail despite its triumphant rantings about its regained "unity".
So it's an important year, an important period, which present for the proletariat and to its ability to assert its resistance to the economical, political and ideological attacks of the bourgeoisie as well as for the communist groups and their capacity to look at, to understand, the historical reality (and its dynamic) as it is and to confront it with political resolution and courage. The stakes are clear for the international proletariat. They must be even clearer for the main representatives of its vanguard, it means its organizations and militants of the present proletarian camp;
September 4th, 2004.
Bulletin 27 (english version) of the Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current