Echoes of an International Conference: Critique or Detraction?

We have recently published a comprehensive evaluation of the internationalist conference that took place at the end of May 2023 by one of its initiators, together with the invitation letter and the (earlier) first accounts by Internationalist Perspective (IP) and Critique Grand Large.

Albeit with a considerable delay, we hope to have sufficiently informed our readers to acquire a preliminary understanding of the character and scope, and of the discussions at the meetings of this first international conference since long. We intend to publish further relevant documents and contributions as far as possible.

In this article we comment on certain repercussions that this initiative has been confronted with as soon as a public notice of its tenure had been given by IP as one of its organizers, namely its denunciation by Aníbal and Fredo Corvo in their joint publication as “a travesty of an international conference” (July 25, 2023) and its sequel.

An Internationalist Meeting at Brussels (May 2023) – Presentation and Evaluations

At the end of May 2023, an international conference was held in Brussels, bringing together some twenty participants from six countries (USA, UK, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands) with references to the historical internationalist communist Left. At the initiative of Internationalist Perspective and Controverses, they were able to debate for two full days.

Documenting the invitation criteria and aims of the conference; its composition, agenda and the discussions at its meetings, this section assembles the respective evaluations made by its  initiators and some participants, starting with the invitation letter.

H.C., January 29, 2024.

Internationalist Leaflet: “Fight the Nightmare Which Haunts Us All!”

The all-out military escalation of the Israeli reaction to the bloody terrorist attack of Hamas on October 7 has left more than one speechless who is not prepared to take sides in favor of either side of the imperialist confrontations, wars and massacres.

Faced with the physical destruction of the Gaza Strip, its infrastructure and its inhabitants locked between the hammer of Israel’s systematic bombing campaign and the anvil of Islamist repression; faced with the onslaught of the West-Bank “settlers” under auspices of the Israeli army and State, and faced with the unremitting hypocritical propaganda drums on both sides, proletarian voices make themselves heard who unequivocally denounce the barbarism of war and destruction, and its capitalist-imperialist character, on all sides.

One of these is from the group Internationalist Perspective, who has consequently followed the  confrontation in the Near and Middle East, just as it has been doing with the war in Eastern Europe  since Russia started its military assault on Ukraine in February last year.

Hereafter we reproduce their leaflet of December 8, recommending to read the related articles on IP’s website as well.

H.C., December 9, 2023.

P.S. A discussion about the leaflet on IP’s website (February 8, 2024)

The Uncontrollable Megafires of Global Imperialism

Pantopolis apropos of the carnage and imperialist  maneuvering in the Near and Middle East

The Russian-Ukrainian war since February 24, 2022, the recurrent wars in the Near and Middle East from 1948 to 2023, the wars in the making in the Far East under the leadership of China and the USA… These are all imperialist wars to re-divide the capitalist world for the benefit of one side or another. These conflicts, in which civil­ians are the first victims, are engulfing the whole world like megafires, totally uncon­trollable but perfectly predictable!

Controverses N°6 (May 2023)

By the end of last Spring, a new issue of the review ‘Controverses’, organ of the Forum for an internationalist Communist Left, has been released in French language. Hereafter we present and introduce its contents. By way of introduction to its depth and scope, we offer our translation of its lead article: The Combination of Capitalism’s Four Crises: economic, social, imperialist and ecological.

The editor, October 2023.

 

‘Barbaria’: Against Israeli and Palestinian Nationalism

As internationalist statements of position and analyses on the current exacerbation of imperialist standoffs and maneuvering in the Middle East over the bloody Israeli-Palestine conflict have started to come to the fore, we limit ourselves to highlighting contributions that we esteem to merit attention. Such as the following statement by the ‘Communists against commodity and state’ group ‘Barbaria’ from Spain, which notably recalls the commencement of class confrontations within the Gaza zone only some weeks before the terrorist onslaught by Hamas and the monstrous counter-reactions by the Israeli state officials and their sponsors in a wider framework.

The editor, October 15, 2023.

Against the Imperialist Massacres in the Near-East: Internationalist Statement by the I.C.T.

The Latest Butchery in the Middle East is Part of the March to Generalised War

The unprecedented attack on Israel by Hamas is due to closely intertwined domestic and international motives:

1. The removal of Abu Mazen’s Palestinian National Authority (PNA), a corrupt and incompetent body which colludes with the Israeli state, and which is now highly discredited amongst the Palestinian population, giving Hamas exclusive leadership in the fight against the State of Israel.
2. Undermining the path opened by the 2020 Abraham Accords, which sees (or saw) ongoing negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and where the PNA also participated. The Abraham Accords were between Sunni countries and Israel, and thus Hamas felt isolated, fearful of no longer receiving financial aid from Riyadh and Qatar. More generally, Hamas’s objective is to involve the Arab states in a sort of “holy alliance” against Israel: an Arab front (Egypt, Syria and Lebanon) in contrast with the pact between Israel and some Arab countries (the Emirates and Bahrain) with the prospect of including Saudi Arabia.

Further, it is also important to note that an action of this weight hinges on Iran and the ayatollahs, i.e. an anti-European, anti-NATO and anti-American imperialist front. Which means throwing fuel on the fire of the war in Ukraine: everything is linked together in the carnage of war that both “Western” and “Eastern” imperialisms are waging.

Iran has every interest in making the region a theatre of war against Israel, both to weaken its number one enemy, and to force its historical allies (Russia, China and North Korea) to support Tehran in its regional strategy, even if this is unrealistic at present.

The Western media point the finger at jihadist barbarism, but “forget” or downplay the discrimination, oppression and violence perpetrated by the Israeli ruling class against the Palestinian proletariat, even when they are citizens of Israel. Recently the violence has increased under the influence of the more or less religious far right, a leading partner in the Netanyahu government.

Let’s not forget that Hamas was originally supported by Tel Aviv to counter Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the “left-wing” armed formations of the PLO. As for the Taliban, as for ISIS — both “sponsored” in their time by the USA — the imperialist “sorcerer” has lost control of the “monsters” of its own creation which are now strengthening enemy ranks. The dog is now biting the hands of those who fed it.

The ruling class has always tried to divide and oppose the various segments of the working class along “ethnic-national” lines, a practice taken to extremes by Nazism. This is also true in the supposedly so “democratic” State of Israel, where the working class of Palestinian origin is oppressed, harassed and exploited in the most brutal and “primitive” forms — as happens to migrant workers throughout the world. The Gaza Strip is an open-air prison, which the Israeli state often deprives of water, electricity and gas, and where healthcare is extremely parlous: in short, where the vast majority of people are forced to suffer inhuman conditions of life.

However, even in Israel, there exists an Israeli working class, which the current war exposes even more to nationalist and warmongering intoxication, precisely as on the other side the Palestinian working class is injected with the ideological poison of Islamist propaganda, to the point of putting it in the hands of the imperialism of the ayatollahs.

Thus the working class on both sides is driven to massacre defenceless populations and allows itself to be massacred in order to wage a so-called “holy war” or defend a supposed “democracy”, in reality for the interests of opposing bourgeoisies, who can perpetuate their domination only by the oppression, exploitation and blood of the proletariat. The fact that, historically, the number of Palestinians who died in Israeli repression and raids is much higher than that of the victims of the Islamist bourgeoisie – Hamas – does not make the latter less murderous or more excusable than the Israeli bourgeoisie.

Wars between the ruling class — nowadays that means capitalists — are always wars against wage workers: exploited, injured and killed as a matter of course in the workplace in peacetime; even more exploited and killed wholesale in wartime, when the conflicts between the bosses, their crises and economic interests, can only be resolved with weapons.

Every war reveals the true nature of political parties and trade unions which claim to be on the side of the working class. By lining up to support this or that capitalist faction in the name of the presumed right to self-determination of peoples, wars expose any illusion that social democracy stands for the working class. They do not understand, they cannot understand, that there have been no progressive wars of national liberation in the present epoch. Any possible new state would be just another prison for the working class, a tool to enable a faction of the world bourgeoisie to oppress its “own” proletariat, without sharing the fruit of that oppression with other factions of the world bourgeoisie. To obscenely rejoice over the massacres carried out by Hamas is to share the murderous logic of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, an attitude mirrored by those who deny the devastation created by the State of Israel: both are equally criminal.

Support for the deadly error of so-called national liberation struggles not only poisons the formations spawned by the degenerate Third International (Stalino-Maoism, Trotskyism, etc.), but also sectors of anarchism and even those who, falsely, claim to be internationalist. The war in Ukraine and, now, in Palestine-Israel is yet more proof of this.

In this context, the fundamental argument of class unity by all sectors of the working class — against the bourgeoisie, its states, its imperialist alignments — regardless of the “national” origin of its constituent parts, is even more valid. We are well aware that in a context like the Israeli-Palestinian one it is very difficult to carry this out. But there is no other way to avoid becoming cannon fodder for one or other faction of capitalism, whether “democratic” or reactionary, secular or religious. All capitalists are equally mortal enemies of the working class, who should not shed one drop of blood for those who exploit them, much less for their national-imperialist objectives.

Accepting this viewpoint is the first fundamental step to beginning the fight against the wars of the capitalist class. We have to start with our “own” bosses, because the revolutionary principle that “the main enemy is at home” is always valid. This struggle has to begin in the workplace, where the exploitation that fuels the capitalist mode of production, and therefore bourgeois society, takes place. It is a struggle against both the open enemy — the bosses — and false friends, primarily trade unions and “left” political parties which confine workers’ struggles within the legal framework of the system, undermining them to the point of suffocating them.

In the same way, anyone who supports only Palestinian workers and ignores the Israeli working class, jumps from the frying pan into the fire. They think that the former clashing with the latter is not important because the latter is just a slave to the ultranationalist policy of its government. But the Palestinian working class, in its turn, is under the thumb of a bunch of capitalists who have no hesitation about siding with the imperialism of the ayatollahs: one of the most vicious set of rulers when dealing with internal opposition. Thus both sets of workers are trapped in the logic of capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism, where war is the only solution and not liberation from wage slavery.

After decades of capitalist attacks the world working class is still stunned, still struggling to raise its head, disoriented and confused by the material upheavals it has been hit with (restructuring, globalisation, precarity, etc.) and by the ideological blow felt by the collapse of state capitalism in the former USSR: the country which many deluded themselves into believing represented the socialist alternative to capitalism.

But the genuine alternative really does exist. Indeed, it is a vital alternative, given the dangers of localised wars developing into a generalised war which would destroy humanity or, equally, through a climate catastrophe which is already on the horizon.

Once the working masses shake off their fear and resignation and rediscover their own path of genuine class struggle, today’s small revolutionary vanguards will be in a position to grow and bond with the more combative and class conscious sectors of the proletariat, to forge the indispensable political instrument for overcoming this bloody and inhuman society: the party of the world revolution, the new communist International.

Communism or Barbarism!

Internationalist Communist Tendency, 11 October 2023

Source: The Latest Butchery in the Middle East is Part of the March to Generalised War

Photo: Al Jazeera – Hatem Moussa/AP Photo

Ph. Bourrinet: The Workers’ Councils, in the Theory of the German-Dutch Communist Left

“[This study] traces the political struggles born within the Second International to understand the nature of the emergence of this new form of organization that appeared in the struggle of the proletariat at the hinge between the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, a hinge that saw a capitalist system that had reached maturity with a numerically important and concentrated working class beginning to pose the question of revolution by bringing about the emergence of these unitary organs that were both economic and political… “the form finally found of the dictatorship of the proletariat” as Lenin will state during the revolution in Russia 1917. It also details the evolution of the understanding that this political current has released, while pointing out its strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, it sheds valuable light on the place assigned to the Workers’ Councils, both in the revolutionary phase and during the transitional period and the future society, formulating in passing, and to our knowledge, one of the best presentations and criticisms of the work of one of its eminent representatives – Jan Appel – on the organization of the future society: Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. (¹) It also exhumes – and this is precious – some elements not often underlined in Marx on this subject. Finally, it closes by posing a whole series of relevant political questions that still need to be deepened in order not to fall back into the ruts of the past and to pose future questions in the clearest possible terms.” (Controverses, January 27, 2023)

The following English translation is published as a work in progress. The finished chapters can be accessed via the Table of Contents.

1 Read, on this site: ‘Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution’ (G.I.C.,1935), on the completed version in Dutch of 1935, and its first German and English translations; and: The G.I.C. and the Economy of the Transition Period – Introductory Article – situating the G.I.C.’s main work and the difficulties of its reception within the milieus of the communist Left. (Editor’s note)

Guy Sabatier (1947 – 2023), Tribute to an Internationalist

In the following we publish the obituary of Guy Sabatier, written by a companion of his, which has been published in French, Italian and English on the ICT’s website. It relates his lifetime engagement as an internationalist in the milieu(s) of the communist Left since the end of the 1960s in France. We have accompanied this by a provisional list of titles from his works that tries to demonstrate their scope, versatility and depth.

We have become acquainted with Guy through his participation in the Forum for the internationalist communist Left (Controverses), and express our condolences to his family members, close friends and companions for the loss of this remarkable person and militant.

Henry Cinnamon, January 14, 2023.

Pages: 1 2

Axel Weipert: The Second Revolution. The Council Movement in Berlin 1919-1920

A Book Review by Ph. Bourrinet

The history of the council movement seemed a long outdated history after a myriad of studies in the 1960s and 1970s in both parts of Germany, often under very clear ideological banners: democracy versus dictatorship. After a long historiographical slumber on revolutionary events in Germany; after the so-called “collapse of communism”, important studies on the council movement emerged in 2013 with a volume devoted to the Hamburg Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. (¹) Axel Weipert’s study, published in Berlin in 2015, is a very notable contribution to the new historiography after the downfall of the (Berlin) wall, this time devoted to the “second revolution”, the second phase of the council movement after the January 1919 workers’ defeat in Berlin. (²)