The International Communist Current (ICC) is a left communist international organisation. It was founded at a conference in January 1975 where it was established as a centralised organisation with sections in France, Britain, Spain, United States, Italy, and Venezuela.[1] It would go on to establish sections in Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, India, Turkey, Philippines, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico. The ICC published the first issue of its theoretical journal International Review in April 1975 and since then has published it quarterly, mainly in English, French and Spanish.
In 1977, two years after both the formation of the ICC and Communist Workers Organisation, the Aberdeen and Edinburgh sections of the CWO left to join the ICC.[3] In 1981, many of those same members would split from the ICC to form the Communist Bulletin Group.
With Marc Chirik's death in 1990, having given his last 15 years to the organisation, the ICC published a brief summary of his life.[4][5]
Political positions and intervention
The ICC outlines its political positions in their short Basic Positions published on the back of every ICC publication as well as in their manifestos and platform.[6] It claims to have created a "synthesis" of the different elements of the left communist tradition, in particular those targeted by Vladimir Lenin in his famous "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder: against participation in parliament or the trades unions, and against "entryism" into the Social Democratic, Labour, Communist or Trotskyist parties.[7] However, at the same time they reject varieties of councilism which reject the Russian Revolution, saying that they express "a movement away from the conceptions of revolutionary Marxism".[8]
The "Basic Positions" published on the back of every ICC publication define the organisation's activity as follows:
"Political and theoretical clarification of the goals and methods of the proletarian struggle, of its historic and its immediate conditions.
Organised intervention, united and centralised on an international scale, in order to contribute to the process which leads to the revolutionary action of the proletariat.
The regroupment of revolutionaries with the aim of constituting a real world communist party, which is indispensable to the working class for the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a communist society."
From the beginning, the ICC attached considerable importance to the republication and critique of texts from the workers' movement.[9] Over the years, it has published a number of books and texts including:
A history of the Russian Communist Left[11] (recent issues of the International Review have included a previously unavailable complete edition of a document by Gavril Myasnikov[12])
A history of the Italian Communist Left
A history of the Dutch and German Communist Left[13]
A history of the left wing of the Turkish Communist Party
The ICC's conception of practical activity within the day-to-day struggles of the working class was set out in a "Reply to our critics".[14] The organisation's French section was heavily involved in the steelworkers' struggle in 1979.[15] The ICC has defined itself as anti-freemasonry, stating that "As exploiting classes, these enemies of the proletariat necessarily employ secrecy and deception both against each other and against the working class."[16]
The ICC publishes its theoretical quarterly International Review in English, French, and Spanish.
It publishes regular agitational articles (in its printed press and/or on its web site), in the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Tagalog, and Portuguese.
It also publishes less regularly or occasionally in Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Korean, Persian, Japanese and Swedish.
It has also published basic texts in Greek, Finnish, Chinese, Arabic and Hungarian.
India
Communist Internationalist is the press of the International Communist Current in India. It publishes pamphlets, leaflets and statements in English, Hindi and Bengali.
↑ Authier and Barrot's La Gauche Communiste en Allemagne mentions the critique of Daad en Gedachte published in the second issue of the International Review http://en.internationalism.org/node/2511
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Marx, Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg.
The Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, originally the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), was a Marxist political party founded in 1893 and later served as an autonomous section of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. It later merged into the Communist Workers Party of Poland. Its most famous member was Rosa Luxemburg.
The International Communist Party (ICP) is a left communist international political party.
Jacques Camatte is a French writer and former Marxist theoretician and member of the International Communist Party, a primarily Italian left communist organisation under the influence of Amadeo Bordiga. After Bordiga's death and the events of May 68, his beliefs began to fall closer to the tendencies of anarcho-primitivism and communization, and would later influence accelerationism.
The Internationalist Communist Party was a Trotskyist political party in France. It was the name taken by the French Section of the Fourth International from its foundation until a name change in the late 1960s.
The Communist Workers' Organisation (CWO) is a British left communist group, founded in 1975, and an affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. It publishes a quarterly magazine called Revolutionary Perspectives and distributes the agitational broadsheet Aurora. Works of the CWO and ICT have been cited in various academic and political sources internationally, across several countries and languages. The organisation has its origins in north England and Scotland, though it has since grown to encompass other areas with members and sympathisers across the world.
Gilles Dauvé is a French ultra-left political theorist, school teacher, and translator, associated with the development of communization theory.
Boris Souvarine, also known as Varine, was a French Marxist, communist activist, essayist and journalist.
Marck Chirik, also known as Marc Laverne or simply MC, was a communist revolutionary and one of the founding militants of the International Communist Current.
Jan Appel was a German revolutionary who participated in the German Revolution of 1918. He became a prominent Left Communist activist and theorist.
The Marxist–Leninist Communist Organization – Proletarian Way is a French Maoist organization formed in 1976, whose political practice is Marxist-Leninist and Maoist.
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they regard as more authentically Marxist than the views of Marxism–Leninism espoused by the Communist International after its Bolshevization by Joseph Stalin and during its second congress.
The Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party was formed in 1923 to oppose the excessive power of bureaucrats and managers in the new soviet society and in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Its leading member was Gavril Myasnikov.
The Internationalist Communist Organisation was a Trotskyist political party in France. Its successor was the Internationalist Communist Current of the Workers Party.
In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a condition in which the proletariat holds state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, compels the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party, and institutes elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalise ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership. During this phase, the administrative organizational structure of the party is to be largely determined by the need for it to govern firmly and wield state power to prevent counterrevolution and to facilitate the transition to a lasting communist society.
Vanguardism, in the context of Leninist revolutionary struggle, relates to a strategy whereby the most class-conscious and politically "advanced" sections of the proletariat or working class, described as the revolutionary vanguard, form organizations to advance the objectives of communism. They take actions to draw larger sections of the working class toward revolutionary politics and to serve as manifestations of proletarian political power opposed to the bourgeoisie. This theory serves as the underpinning of the leading role of the Communist party, usually enshrined in the constitution, after the seizure of power in the state by Communists.
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all proletarian revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.
"Auschwitz or the great alibi" is a 1960 article published in Programme communiste, the French magazine of the International Communist Party (ICP), later reedited in the form of a brochure. The authorship of this text has been attributed to both Amadeo Bordiga and Martin Axelrad. However, the Programme communiste was a Bordigist revue, publishing its texts anonymously in order to emphasize its character of a collective work.
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