Internationalist Communist Tendency

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Internationalist Communist Tendency
Founded1983
NewspaperInternationalist Communist (discontinued 2005)
Ideology Left communism
Website
http://www.leftcom.org

The Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) is a political international whose member organisations identify with the Italian left communist tradition. It was founded as the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party in 1983 as a result of a joint initiative by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) in Italy and the Communist Workers Organisation (CWO) in Britain. Its other affiliates are the Internationalist Workers Group in the United States, the Gruppe Internationaler SozialistInnen (GIS) in Germany and a small French Section.

A political international is a transnational organization of political parties having similar ideology or political orientation. The international works together on points of agreement to co-ordinate activity.

Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista)

The Internationalist Communist Party is a left communist party in Italy and an affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party.

Communist Workers Organisation (UK)

The Communist Workers Organisation (CWO) is a British left communist group and an affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. It publishes quarterly magazine Revolutionary Perspectives and distributes an agitational broadsheet, Aurora.

Contents

Tendency

There were two main reasons for this initiative. The first was to give organisational form to an already-existing tendency within the proletarian political camp. This had emerged from the International Conferences called by Battaglia Comunista between 1977 and 1981. It was grouped around the following political precepts:

The proletariat is the class of wage-earners in an economic society whose only possession of significant material value is their labour-power. A member of such a class is a proletarian.

October Revolution Bolshevik uprising during the Russian Revolution of 1917

The October Revolution, officially known in Soviet historiography as the Great October Socialist Revolution and commonly referred to as the October Uprising, the October Coup, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Bolshevik Coup or the Red October, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was instrumental in the larger Russian Revolution of 1917–23. It took place through an armed insurrection in Petrograd on 7 November 1917.

State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes commercial economic activity and where the means of production are organized and managed as state-owned business enterprises, or where there is otherwise a dominance of corporatized government agencies or of publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares. Marxist literature defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by a state—by this definition, a state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting the surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, and some people argue that the modern People's Republic of China constitutes a form of state capitalism.

In Marxism, bourgeois nationalism is the practice by the ruling classes of deliberately dividing people by nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion, so as to distract them from initiating class warfare. It is seen as a divide and conquer strategy used by the ruling classes to prevent the working class from uniting against them.

Practice

The second was to act as a focus for organisations and individuals newly emerging onto the international scene as capitalism's deepening crisis provoked a political response. In the event, the first decade of the Bureau's existence has hardly been one of a massive revival in the class struggle. On the contrary, workers' response to increasing attacks by capital have in the main been limited to sectional conflicts, even if militant (such as the British miners' strike of 1984-5 or the continuing struggle of Spanish shipyard workers) and have as a result been defeated. International capital has thus been given a breathing space in which to restructure at the cost of millions of workers' livelihoods, increasing austerity measures, worsening conditions of work and the terms for the sale of labour power.

In this context, it is not surprising that there were relatively few newcomers to proletarian politics during the Eighties. Many who did make an appearance later disappeared as political isolation overwhelmed them. Nevertheless, despite the unfavourable objective situation, the organisational existence of the Bureau has been consolidated. As well as sharing responsibility for worldwide correspondence and where possible organising face-to-face meetings and discussions with the political elements with whom the IBRP come into contact, the IBRP has issued several international statements and distributed them in various languages at crucial points over recent years.

Finally, the Bureau exists as a specific and identifiable tendency within "the broad proletarian camp". The IBRP define this as those who stand for working-class independence from capital; who have no truck with nationalism in any form; who saw nothing socialist in Stalinism and the former USSR at the same time as recognising that October 1917 was the starting point for what could have become a wider world revolution. Amongst the organisations which fall within this broad framework there remain significant political differences, not least over the vexed question of the nature and function of the revolutionary organisation. The IBRP's framework is as follows:

Stalinism theory and practice for developing a communist society

Stalinism is the means of governing and related policies implemented from around 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin (1878–1953). Stalinist policies and ideas as developed in the Soviet Union included rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, a totalitarian state, collectivization of agriculture, a cult of personality and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.

  1. The proletarian revolution will be international or it will be nothing. International revolution presupposes the existence of an international party: the concrete political expression of the most class conscious workers who organise together to fight for the revolutionary programme amongst the rest of the working class. History has shown that attempts to form the party during the revolution itself were too little too late.
  2. The IBRP thus aims for the creation of the world communist party as soon as the political programme and international forces exist for this. However, the Bureau is for the party, and does not claim to be its sole pre-existing nucleus. The future party will not be the simple expansion of a single organisation.
  3. Before the world party can be formed the precise details of the revolutionary programme will have to be clarified in all its related aspects via discussion and debate amongst its potential constituent parts.
  4. The organisations which eventually come to form the world party must already have a meaningful existence inside the working class in the area from which they spring. The proclamation of the international party (or its initial nucleus) on the basis of little more than the existence of propagandist groups would be no step forward for the revolutionary movement.
  5. A revolutionary organisation has to strive to become more than a propaganda network. Despite the limited opportunities, it is the task of proletarian organisations today to work to establish themselves as a revolutionary force inside the working class; this in order to be in a position to point the way ahead in the class struggle of today as a precursor to organising and leading the revolutionary struggles of tomorrow.
  6. The lesson of the last revolutionary wave is not that the working class can do without organised leadership, nor that the party is the class (a metaphysical abstraction they attribute to latterday Bordigists). Rather, that leadership and its organisational form (the party) is the most important weapon that the revolutionary working class has. Its task will be to fight for a communist perspective in the mass organs of proletarian power (soviets). The party, however, will remain a minority of the working class and is not a substitute for the class in general. The task of establishing socialism is one for the working class as a whole. It is a task which cannot be delegated, not even to the class conscious vanguard.

In 2009, the organisation renamed itself as the Internationalist Communist Tendency. [1]

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References

  1. The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party becomes the Internationalist Communist Tendency Archived 2009-11-26 at the Wayback Machine , 26 September 2009