Communiqué to our readers: The ICC under attack from a new agency of the bourgeois state

In October 2013, a new ‘political group’ was born and gave itself the pompous name of ‘International Group of the Communist Left’ (IGCL). This new group doesn’t tell us much about its identity: it is in fact made up of the fusion between two elements of the group Klasbatalo in Montreal and elements from the so-called ‘Internal Fraction’ of the ICC (IFICC), who were excluded from the ICC in 2003 for behaviour unworthy of communist militants: as well as robbery, slander, and blackmail, these elements crossed the Rubicon with their deliberate behaviour as snitches, in particular by publishing in advance, on the internet, the date the conference of our section in Mexico and plastering up the real initials of one of our comrades, presented as the ‘leader of the ICC’. We refer our readers who are unaware of this to the articles published in our press at the time1.

In one of these articles, ‘The police-like methods of the IFICC’, we clearly showed that these elements were freely offering their good and loyal services to the bourgeois state. They spend the greater part of their time assiduously surveying the ICC’s website, trying to inform themselves about everything going on in our organisation, nourishing themselves with and spreading the most nauseating gossip dragged up from the sewers (especially about the couple Louise and Peter, two ICC militants, who have obsessed and excited them to the highest degree for more than 10 years!). Shortly after this article, they further aggravated their case by publishing a document of 114 pages, reproducing numerous extracts from the meetings of our international central organ, supposedly to demonstrate the truth of their accusations against the ICC. What this document really demonstrates is that these elements have a sickness of the mind, that they are totally blinded by hatred towards our organisation, and that they are consciously handing over to the police information that can only help them with their work.

Hardly was it born that this new abortion named the ‘International Group of the Communist Left’ uttered its first cry by unleashing some hysterical propaganda against the ICC, as we can see from the title page of their website: ‘A new (final?) internal crisis of the ICC!’, accompanied by an ‘Appeal to the proletarian camp and the militants of the ICC’.

For several days, this ‘international group’ made up of four individuals has been carrying out a frenzied activity, addressing letter after letter to the whole ‘proletarian milieu’, as well as to our militants and some of our sympathisers (those whose addresses they have got hold of) in order to save them from the claws of a so-called ‘liquidationist faction’ (a clan made up of Louise, Peter and Baruch).

The founding members of this new group, the two snitches of the ex-IFICC, have just taken a new step into ignominy by clearly revealing their police methods aimed at the destruction of the ICC. The so-called IGCL is ringing the alarm bells and crying at the top of its voice that it is in possession of the internal bulletins of the ICC. By showing off their war trophy and making such a racket, the message that these out and out informers want to get across is very clear: there is a ‘mole’ in the ICC who is working hand in hand with the ex-IFICC! This is clearly police work which has no other aim than to sow generalised suspicion, trouble and ill-feeling in our organisation. These are the same methods that were used by the GPU, Stalin’s political police, to destroy the Trotskyist movement from the inside during the 1930s. These are the same methods that the members of the ex-IFICC have already used (notably two of them, Juan and Jonas, founding members of the IGCL) when they made special trips to several sections of the ICC to organise secret meetings and circulate rumours that one of our comrades (the “wife of the ICC’s chief”, as they put it) is a “cop”. Today, it’s the same procedure to try to sow panic and destroy the ICC from the inside, but it’s even more abject: under the hypocritical pretext of wanting to “hold out a hand” to the militants of the ICC and save them from “demoralisation”, these professional telltales are really addressing the following message to all the militants of the ICC: “there is one (or several) traitors among you who are giving us your internal bulletins, but we won’t give you their name because it’s up to you to look for them!”. This is the terrible objective of all the feverish agitation of this new ‘international group’: to once again introduce the poison of suspicion and distrust within the ICC in order to undermine it from within. This is a real enterprise of destruction which is no less perverse than the methods of Stalin’s political police or of the Stasi.

As we have recalled several times in our press, Victor Serge, in his well-known book which is a reference point for the workers’ movement, What every revolutionary should know about repression, makes it clear that spreading suspicion and slander is the favourite weapon of the bourgeois state for destroying revolutionary organisations:

“confidence in the party is the cement of all revolutionary forces....the enemies of action, the cowards, the well-entrenched ones, the opportunists, are happy to assemble their arsenal – in the sewers! Suspicion and slander are their weapons for discrediting revolutionaries...This evil of suspicion and mistrust among us can only be reduced and isolated by a great effort of will. It is necessary, as the condition of any real struggle against provocation - and slanderous accusation of members is playing the game of provocation - that no-one should be accused lightly, and it should also be impossible for an accusation against a revolutionary to be accepted without being investigated. Each time that the least suspicion is aroused, a jury of comrades must pronounce and rule on the accusation or on the slander. Simple rules to observe with an inflexible rigour if one wants to preserve the moral health of revolutionary organisations”

The ICC is the only revolutionary organisation which has remained faithful to this tradition of the workers’ movement by defending the principle of Juries of Honour in the face of slander: only adventurers, dubious elements and cowards would refuse to render things clear in front of a Jury of Honour2.

Victor Serge also insists that the motives which lead certain revolutionaries to offer their services to the repressive forces of the bourgeois state don’t always come from material misery or cowardice:

“there are, much more dangerously, those dilettantes and adventurers who believe in nothing, indifferent to the ideal they have been serving, taken by the idea of danger, intrigue, conspiracy, a complicated game in which they can make fools of everyone. They may have talent, their role may be almost undetectable”

And as part of this profile of informers or agents provocateurs, you will find, according to Serge, ex-militants “wounded by the party”. Simple hurt pride, personal resentments (jealousy, frustration, disappointment...) can lead militants to develop an uncontrollable hatred towards the party (or against certain of its militants who they see as rivals) and so offer their services to the bourgeois state.

All the ringing ‘Appeals’ of this stuck-up agency of the bourgeois state which is the IGCL are nothing but calls for a pogrom against certain of our comrades (and we have already denounced in our press the threats made by a member of the ex-IFICC who said to one of our militants , “You, I will cut your throat!”). It’s no accident that this new ‘Appeal’ by the snitches of the IFICC was immediately relayed by one of their friends and accomplices, a certain Pierre Hempel, who publishes a ‘blog’ as indigestible as it is delirious, ‘Le Proletariat Universel’, in which you can read stuff like “Peter and his floozy” (*cf note below). The “floozy” in question being none other than our comrade who has been harassed for over ten years by the snitches and potential killers of the ex-IFICC and their accomplices. This is the very ‘proletarian’ literature that circulates the ‘Appeal’ of the ‘IGCL’ which will pique the curiosity and voyeurism of the so-called ‘proletarian’ milieu. You get the friends you deserve.

But that’s not all. If you click on the links on the note below3, our readers who really do belong to the camp of the communist left can get a more precise idea of the pedigree of this new ‘International Group of the Communist left’: it has been sponsored for several years by a tendency within another office of the bourgeois state, the NPA (the ‘New Anticapitalist Party’ of Olivier Besancenot which stands at elections and is regularly invited to appear on the TV). This tendency in the NPA often makes loud publicity for the IGCL, putting it on the front page of its internet site! If a group of the extreme left of capital makes so much publicity for the IFICC and its new disguise as the IGCL, this is proof that the bourgeoisie recognises one of its faithful servants: it knows it can count on it to try to destroy the ICC. Thus the snitches of the IGCL would have every right to claim a decoration from the state (obviously from the hands of the Interior Minister), since they have rendered much more eminent services to it than most of those who have been graced with medals by the state.

The ICC will cast as much clarity as possible on all this and inform its readers about the follow-up to this affair. It is quite possible that we have been infiltrated by one (or several) dubious elements. It wouldn’t be for the first time and we have had a long experience of this type of problem going back as least as far as the Chenier affair. Chenier was an element excluded from the ICC in 1981 and a few months later was seen officially working for the Socialist party which was in government at the time. If this is the case them obviously we will apply our statutes as we have always done in the past.

But we can’t rule out another hypothesis: that one of our computers has been hacked by the services of the police (who have been surveying our activities for over 40 years). And it’s not impossible that it was the police itself (by passing themselves off as a ‘mole’, an anonymous ICC militant) which transmitted to the IFICC certain of our internal bulletins knowing quite well that these snitches (and especially the two founding members of the IGCL) would immediately put them to good use. This would not be at all surprising since the IFICC cowboys (who always shoot faster than their own shadows) have done the same thing before, in 2004, when they flirted with an ‘unknown’ element from a Stalinist agency in Argentina, the ‘Citizen B’ who hid himself behind a so-called ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’. This purely fictitious ‘Circulo’ had the great merit of publishing gross and ignoble lies against our organisation, lies which were complacently relayed by the IFICC. As soon as these lies were exposed, ‘Citizen B’ vanished, leaving the IFICC in consternation and disarray.

The IFICC/IGCL claims that “the proletariat needs its political organisations more than ever to orient it towards the proletarian revolution. A weakening of the ICC still means a weakening of the whole proletarian camp. And a weakening of the proletarian camp necessarily implies a weakening of the proletariat in the class struggle”. This is the most disgusting hypocrisy. The Stalinist parties declare themselves to be the defenders of the communist revolution when they are in fact its fiercest enemies. No one should be taken in: whatever the scenario – the presence in our ranks of a ‘mole’ of the IFICC or manipulation by the official forces of the state - this latest ‘coup’ by the IFICC/IGCL clear shows that its vocation is in no way to defend the positions of the communist left and work towards the proletarian revolution but to destroy the main organisation of the communist left today. This is a police agency of the capitalist state, whether it gets paid or not.

The ICC has always defended itself against the attacks of its enemies, notably against those who want to destroy it through campaigns of lies and slander. This time it will do the same. It will be neither destabilised or intimidated by this attack by the class enemy. All the proletarian organisations of the past have had to face up to attacks from the bourgeois state aimed at destroying them. They defended themselves ferociously and these attacks, far from weakening them, on the contrary strengthened their unity and the solidarity between militants. This is how the ICC and its militants have always reacted to the attacks and informing of the IFICC. Thus, as soon as the ignoble appeal of the IGCL was known about, all the sections and militants of the ICC immediately mobilised themselves to defend, with the utmost determination, our organisation and the comrades targeted in this ‘Appeal’.

International Communist Current. 4.5.14

1 The police-like methods of the 'IFICC'; The ICC doesn't allow snitches into its public meetings ; Calomnie et mouchardage, les deux mamelles de la politique de la FICCI envers le CCI. 

2 See in particular our communiqué of 21 February 2002, Revolutionary organisations struggle against provocation and slander

3 tendanceclaire.org/breve.php?id=655

tendanceclaire.org/breve.php?id=2058

tendanceclaire.org/breve.php?id=7197

(*) We should point out that this sinister buffoon does not hesitate to write in his blog that "If the police had sent me such a document [ie the ICC's internal bulletins], "I would have thanked them in the name of the proletariat". No comment.