Class War’s Edition
Here we present to you the text written by the Internationalist Communist Group [GCI-ICG] — originally published in its central review Communisme n. 54 in 2003 — during “the Second Intifada” uprising. It is a very important contribution to the deconstruction, denunciation and dismantlement of the bourgeois myth of a national community, supposedly bridging the unbridgeable class conflict between the exploited — the proletariat — and the exploiters — the bourgeoisie.
Against the myth that the territory of “Israel/Palestine” takes the form of either “Jewish homeland” or “Palestinian national liberation”, this text asserts the perspective of proletarian militant subjectivity. It brings forward many examples of class struggle in the territories under the control of either the Fatah-led Palestinian government, and of Hamas — at the time of writing not yet in government, but in ascendance and already fulfilling its role of the Islamic social-democracy — or of the Zionist regime. Nowadays, although Hamas has become the ruling faction in Gaza and with the brutality and intensity of the war, in particular the extermination tactics by the IDF in Gaza, having reached unprecedented levels, the insistence of communists on revolutionary defeatism without compromise and against all bourgeois falsifications does not change.
Historically, the social-democratic forces have occasionally adopted the concept of revolutionary defeatism but applied it so inconsistently — only to wars in the past, wars on the other side of the globe, or wars in which none of their bourgeois allies were involved in — that it became only empty (and manipulative) rhetoric.
Against this, ICG stresses the invariant and central role of the revolutionary defeatist position of the communist program, the necessity of struggle for defeat of “our own” side in any capitalist war, against the bourgeoisie in “our own” country, the necessity to fraternize with the proletarians in the “enemy” camp, all this regardless of which side of the inter-bourgeois conflict is considered “the attacker” or “the attacked”, “the oppressor” or “the oppressed”, “the colonizer” or “the colonized”.
To get this point across, ICG references a leaflet “Jewish workers, comrades” produced by the group RKD (Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands or Revolutionary Communists of Germany) and distributed at the height of the biggest capitalist slaughter of proletariat so far, on May 1st, 1943. The leaflet is also attached in the bulletin, with comments by ICG, as well as a brief history of RKD and other revolutionary groups at the time of “WW2”.
The last point we want to make concerns the ICG organization itself. We consider their decades long activity and their contribution to the reappropriation of the historical program of the proletarian class by the community of struggle to be particularly important and very close to our positions. It is also important to emphasise that the historical ICG does not exist anymore. As with any militant organization in the history of the movement, despite all its strengths, it was not immune to internal contradictions. Eventually, a couple of years ago, these contradictions led to its dissolution as an organization to retain its militants' continuity. Several ex-militants (in a literal sense), formed a so-called Kilombo ['war camp'] collective, continuing to speak as and signing their materials with ICG’s name but, in reality, having completely hijacked the programmatic content of the group in favor of vulgar, idealist and conspiracy-theory prone ideological fantasy. We have to warn our comrades of this falsification.
Class War / April 2024
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