In number 523 of its paper, Le Proletaire, dated February/March/ April 2017, the International Communist Party (PCI) published an article: Populism, populism you say?, in which it confronts this phenomenon and its current growth and, on the basis of this analysis, also undertakes a criticism of the analysis of the ICC on this question. The first part of our response to this polemic will be centred on the elements of analyses used by the PCI itself in order to evaluate its capacity to explain the phenomenon of populism.

We have already, in IR 50, briefly presented the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista of Mexico, on the publication of the first issue of its review, Revolucion Mundial. We are reprinting here a text from Revolucion Mundial no 2: a critique of the "Theses of the Alptraum Communist Collective" (CCA), also from Mexico[1], which were published in IR no 40 in January 1985.

We will let the GPI present themselves to our readers:

"We came together as a political group, only a few months ago under the name GPI, and united around principles set out[2] in the first issue of our publication Revolucion Mundial. Just beforehand, we were essentially a "discussion group": a largely informal grouping from the organizational standpoint, (without a name, or rules of functioning etc.), and polit­ically concentrated and orientated in an effort of political discussion and clarification, mainly towards giving more precision to the "class frontiers", ie the principles we should defend.

In February 2007 the Prague infocafe "Mole's Column" organised a public meeting on the class struggle and the question of national liberation in the Middle East, with the participation of the internationalist group "Kolektivně proti kapitálu" - Collectively against Capital). An ICC delegation took part the meeting. The discussion took place in a fraternal atmosphere among revolutionaries with the same goal: to struggle for a really human society, without classes, nations, wage labour, and the alienation that is its result.

This leaflet has been produced by Enternasyonalist Kömunist Sol (Internationalist Communist Left) a new proletarian group in Turkey. It is being distributed in Turkey, Britain and Germany. In Britain and Germany it is being distributed by the International Communist Current, which associates itself with the internationalist views it defends.

The exchange of views below continues a discussion with Red and Black Notes on the vitally important question of class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization. As readers will recall, in Internationalism 134 we published a letter to R&BN commenting on a joint public forum they held with the Internationalist Workers Group, the Canadian affiliate of the IBRP, last winter. We publish below R&BN’s response to our letter, followed by some further comments that we offer in an effort to deepen the discussion on consciousness and revolutionary organization.

Since we published the article ‘The NCI has not broken with the ICC’ (see our website), a number of sympathisers of the ICC have sent messages of support and financial contributions for the comrades of the Nucleo Comunista Internacionalista in Argentina, who, despite the terrible living conditions they face, are determined to continue political activity alongside the ICC. We want to give very warm thanks to all the comrades who have expressed their solidarity in this way. This can only encourage the comrades in Argentina to maintain their militant commitment; and it shows that, despite their geographical isolation, they are not alone. Such gestures are an illustration of the international nature of the solidarity of the proletariat, the class that bears within itself the communist future.

Over the past year Internationalism has been involved in a correspondence with the Toronto based group Red and Black Notes that publishes a journal of the same name. We have already published previous installments of this correspondence. The following letter is a reply to the Red and Black letter published in our last issue (#129).

Earlier this year, Internationalism received copies of two leaflets distributed by the Toronto based Red and Black Notes at the anti-war demonstrations of last winter. In an effort to develop a constructive process of debate and criticism among the various tendencies in the “proletarian political milieu” (PPM) in North America, we have responded to these two leaflets with the letter that we reproduce below. 

The November 2002 issue of Internationalist Notes (publication of the newly constituted Internationalist Workers Group regrouping the remaining sympathizers of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) in the US and Canada) rejects the ICC's expression of solidarity in the face of the Los Angeles Workers Voice's (LAWV) parasitic attacks against the IBRP(see Internationalism 122). Readers will recall that in that article we not only defend the IBRP against the ludicrous LAWV accusation that it was no longer a working class organization, but also supported the IBRP's criticism of LAWV's reprehensible behavior on the organizational level and its headlong retreat from the political legacy of the communist left. Calling our article an "unfortunate intervention," IN criticizes specifically our criticism of the LAWV for violating revolutionary principles of fraternalism and organizational functioning because "they held secret and private political and organizational discussions in Los Angeles." Dismissing our expression of solidarity, IN writes:

In the last two issues of World Revolution we have published articles concerning discussion groups: in WR 257 we reproduced a text on the Paris Commune of 1871 that introduced a discussion in the Midlands Discussion Group; in our previous issue, WR 258, we published a brief history of the MDG. In the following article we want to look at some more general aspects of what a discussion group is, what function it fulfils and what in our view a discussion group is not, and what objectives it shouldn't try to serve.

ICC Introduction

We are publishing the platform of one of the new groups in Russia, which is moving towards the positions of the communist left. The ICU originated as the Kirov Marxist group in 1997 following a strike by teachers in that city. Initially the group attempted to work with the official Communist Party, later with various leftist groups, but more and more found that such activity was a “useless waste of time”. The current title of their paper in Russia is World Revolution.

In WR 231 and IR 100 we published a sticker distributed in Moscow by a group of internationalists opposing the war in Chechnya. In this issue we are publishing an article written by other proletarian elements elsewhere in Russia. Although we don’t agree with all its formulations, we warmly welcome this text as further proof that, despite the Russian bourgeoisie’s efforts to flatten all criticism of its bloody imperialist adventure in the Caucasus under a steamroller of nationalist hysteria, the voices of working class internationalism continue to make themselves heard. The comrades in Russia have asked us to ‘re-translate’ their own hand-written English translation and we apologise in advance for any misreadings and mistakes, especially where Russian names are concerned.

The international wave of workers’ struggles of 1968-72 put an end to the long period of counter-revolution which descended on the proletariat following the defeat of the revolutionary attempts of 1917-23. One of the clearest expressions of this was the re-appearance of a whole number of proletarian groups and circles who, despite enormous inexperience and confusion, tried to repair the broken links with the communist movement of the past. During the 1970s, when the immediate (and indeed immediatist) optimism generated by the revival of the class struggle was still very much alive, proletarian political currents like the ICC or the Bordigist ICP went through a phase of accelerated and even spectacular growth. However, the construction of a communist organisation – as with the progress of the class struggle as a whole - proved to be a much more difficult and painful process than many of the ‘generation of 68’ first believed; and not a few of that generation of militants or ex-militants have gone from facile optimism to an equally superficial pessimism, concluding that the period of counter-revolution never came to an end, or expressing their disappointment in the working class by abandoning revolutionary politics altogether.

Presentation

We are publishing below extracts from a long article by the comrades of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional in Argentina which makes an in-depth analysis of the so-called “piquetero” movement, denouncing its anti-working class nature and the self-interested lies with which leftist groups of every hue “have dedicated themselves to deceiving the workers with false hopes to make them believe that the aims and means of the piquetero movement contribute to advancing their struggle”.