racketeerism and parasitism

I'm sure that you make half of this up.

The Bakuninists in the international were conspiratorial. That doesn't mean that anarchists today are. I don't think that the ICC is either. Also I think it is pretty open. I actually explained how it worked when somebody asked on here a few months ago.

Devrim

I agree with Knightrose here. I don't think that going over the history of the split in the international, and who behaved worse helps.

I agree with the first part of this too. Most of the disagreements can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s.

And hanging onto that is really important. For a start it stops us thinking of earlier revolutionaries as some kind of demi-gods whose merest thoughts have the kind of status of holy write - and I'm not having a pop at the ICC here any more than a load of anarchists.

When we say, "No Gods, No Masters", that means human ones too. We should not be marxists or bakuninists or leninists or malatesta-ists or whatever. We are revolutionary (or pro-revolutionary, if you prefer that term) communists.

Come on Devrim, this is the ICC I'm talking about, I don't need to make anything up. You just need to read the ICC press and familiarise yourself with the history of left communism.

I do read the press, I am an ICC member, and I have never heard anything about a publication of that name.

Devrim

Small discussion circles - fuck that - I'd rather join the Republican Party. Discussion circles are completely idealistic anyway, even if the racket theory were true theory can only come from action, not from observing from outside. So if the racket theory is true it's better to become a nihilistic hedonist and enjoy life than form a discussion circle.

To Nastyned: there is a pamphlet called 'The decadence of capitalism' but never a newspaper / magazine. What was you source for this 'information'. I have a lot of time on my hands and have looked at every issue of WR and don't remember seeing any reference to this. If you going to criticise the ICC at least make sure it's for something we have actually done / said.

FC! Morven

Do you ACTUALLY read what I wrote? ( I know English does not appear to be your mother tongue from the use of words like secrete for secret and personnel for personal but nevertheless..)
This is what I wrote:
"Bakunin was in close contact with militants who shared his outlook, who had some of them, indeed developed their own ideas remarkably similar to Bakunin, within the workers movement.
It would be equally naive to deny the same state of affairs existed with Marx, as Malatesta has noted. "
Marx had already written in private correspondence to Engels in September 1869 that "If the Russian doesn't take care, he will be excommunicated" ( Interesting enough, this papal pronouncement)
The investigating committee set up by the General Council concluded that Bakunin had "tried to establish and perhaps succeeded ( so then no actual evidence -battlescarred) in establishing a society in Euope called the Alliance, with rules on social and political matters entirely different fromm those of the International". Interesting, as the International did not actually have its own programme. As Lehning notes "The Provisional Rules of 1864 and the Statutes of 1869 were vague enough to admit all kinds of organisations and schools of thought".
Bakunin continued to emphasise that the programme of the International should be general enough to unite all workers in one International. The resolution on the capture of political power by Marx and his coterie at the London Conference of 1871- that the working class should organise itself into a political party to accomplish this- was never confirmed by the federations and in fact was rejected by the vast majority of the International.
Another charge was added to the reasons for the expulsion of Bakunin, the letter from Nechaev threatening a St Petersburg editor for whom Bakunin was translating the first volume of Capital, to release the latter from his obligations. Marx read this out at a secret meeting of the investigating committee. Bakunin had not authorised this letter and was not aware of its contents. Marx had been informed of this, but still produced the letter as evidence.
Interesting that after the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume, Marx's up to then loyal henchman for twenty years, Eccarius, was sufficiently disgusted by these machinations to articulate his concerns and was as a result dismissed as general secretary of the Council and that the English section, certainly no "Bakuninists" by any stretch of the imagination announced a formal and complete boycott of the General Council.
And in the end Marx used the same trick as when he had the Central Board of the Communist League moved from London to Cologne, with Engels standing up at and proposing out of the blue that the General Council be transferred to New York at the Hague Congress of 1872.
The Italian Federation had already broken away in disgust and now it was the turn of the French with the majority walking out. When the investigating committee did meet on the following day to pass its pronouncements it had taken a u-turn announcing that Bakunin had once attempted to form a secret organisation, that it was doubtful whether he had carried this out and that such an organisation actually existed and that no one knew whether or not it still existed. The committee informed Guillaume that afternoon that there were "No serious results".
It was at the point that Marx produced the Nechaev letter again. In the end the committee added a paragraph dictated by Marx which read :" Citizen Bakunin has used fraudulent measures for the purpose of appropriating all or part of another man's wealth- which constitutes fraud; and further, in order to avoid fulfilling his engagements, has, himself or through his agents, had recourse to threats". By now only half the delegates were present at the Congress and the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume was carried.
This was followed up with 160 pages authored by Marx, Engels and Lafargue where further slanders against Bakunin were elaborated.It was alleged that Bakunin had not so much been exiled in Siberia but through the favours of the governor there had acted as a plundering corrupt and tyrannical ruler. As Ruhle noted ( ibid. above ) " A malicious pamphlet, in which almost every line is a distortion, almost every allegation an injustice, almost every argument a falsification, and almost every word an untruth". Seconded by Franz Mehring in his "Karl Marx" "Of all the works that we have from the pen of Marx and Engels, this is perhaps the most unworthy".

Battlescarred post 130

The information is very useful and the points very well argued. You let the documentation almost speak for itself. I was aware of aspects of this sordid affair but here they are well put together and make sense (pointing to a case of manipulation and racketeering by Marx, Engels and Lafargue). The Marx biographies by Mehring and Rühle confirm your points.

The ICC case against 'Bakunin the parasite' is not supported by evidence, one could throw back some of the charges against Marx and his supporters in the IWA. The most destructive aspect, apart from the personal defamations, is that the political and philosophical differences are muddled or addressed in the midst of racketeering issues. A similar non-case based on slander and insinuation was made by the ICC against Karl Radek, another historic 'parasite'. The 2001 study by Palinorc on the Radek persecution throws a different light on what happened, and the manipulative use of the 'Jury of Honour' by Marxists prior to 1914.

Capricorn:" What ever one thinks of Marx's tactics, he never stooped as low as Bakunin did in this dispute.

In a post script dated October 1983 to his article "Marx théoricien de l'anarchisme" (Marx, theorist of anarchism) the Marxologist (and council communist) Maximilien Rubel wrote referring to Bakunin:

Quote:

What to think of an "anarchist" or a "revolutionary communist" who believes and affirms that the Jew Marx is surrounded by a "crowd of little Jews", that "all this Jewish world", "a bloodsucking people" is "intimately organised (... ) across the differences of political opinions", that it is "in large part at the disposition of Marx on the one hand and of the Rothschilds on the other"? "
Oh that old chestnut, of course these views are totally abhorrent but can you give me any example outside of this personal correspondence as to whether Bakunin waged a campaign of anti-Semitism against Marx and his coterie within the International, whether this was systematised, whether there were any open manifestations of this in speeches to meetings of the International or in publications. If you are can, then I will eat my hat ( Don't worry I've got a few, so one won't be missed).
On the sort of pronouncements from the pen of Marx and Engels I could construct something similar, , but I won't.
Engels on Lasalle. Letter to Marx, March 7th 1856:" The Jew! A typical Jew from the Slavic border, always ready to exploit everyone for his private ends... This mania for forcing his way into distinguished circles and making a successful career, at the same time concealing, with all kinds of hair-oil and make-up, the fact that he is nothing but a greasy Jew from Breslau, has always been repulsive to me". and later on May 8th, "oi, oi, that ridiculous Jew!" Reciprocated by Marx "The little Jew" and the "little kike" (Dec 22 1857) "Ephraim Smart" (July 2, 1858) "Baron Izzy" (Feb 4th, 1860). Marx compounds things further in a letter to Engels, 30th July 1862
"It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicate, he is descended from the negroes who joined in the flight of Moses from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father's side was crossed with a nigger). Now this union of Jewishness to Germanness on a negro basis was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid. The importunity of the fellow is also niggerlike." Of course, evidence will be offered that Engels welcomed Jews like Kautsky and Adler to the socialist movement, and they would be right,But the same standards have to be applied to Bakunin as well.
And as I said, Bakunin confined his foul anti-semitism to private correspondence. Whereas Marx went beyond private correspondence to publicly enunciate such sentiments. In an article in the New York Tribune on 'The Russian Loan" January 4th , 1856 he writes:
Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.
… the real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loanmongering mysteries by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade in securities… Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment, there is ever one of these little Jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. The smartest highwayman in the Abruzzi is not better posted up about the locale of the hard cash in a traveler’s valise or pocket than those Jews about any loose capital in the hands of a trader…"
And of course the more famous On the Jewish Question ( first published 1844)where Marx's views can be translated in a number of different ways but where there seems to be no room for a cultural or ethnic identity of the Jews as divorced from Marx's conception of Jews as hucksters and money makers with no recognition of a Jewish proletariat. "What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.
An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement."

Beltov: "Battlescared's post raises the central issue which divided the Marxists ('State-socialists') from the Bakuninists ('anti-authoritarian communists') - what was the role of the International? In the wake of the defeat of the Paris Commune, the General Council saw the need for a much longer political preparation of the working class in elections and party building, whereas the Bakuninists were still stuck in the mode of insurrectionism. "
Where was this possible? Not in France where socialist groups and trade unions were proscribed,and no such possibilties emerged until 1877 with the implosion of the MacMahon regime, and were not concretised until the amnesty a bit later. Not in Italy, where similar circumstances prevailed. Again we have the usual ignorance around the "Bakuninists". Guillaume for his part, who shared Bakunin's current views , believed that mass workers organisations needed to be created bit by bit- not the false alternative of "elections and party building" whilst other "Bakuninists" did indeed see insurrection as the way forward. In Italy, the insurrectionist tactic was not as far-fetched as the "official" historians of socialism have made out.As Carl Levy points out in ahis article Italian anarchism, 1870-1926 : " THe historical verdict passed upon the Internationalist uprisings is usually extremely negative. These incautious attempts, it is argued, undermined the development of a mass-based organisation of (libertarian0 socialists. Certainly, it must be admitted that in the late 1870s many members of the fasci operai were thoroughly alienated from the International's leadership, but none the less historians have been too dismissive of the Internationalist strategy. The recent Risorgimento had been based upon such tactics. Indeed, the middle-class jurors who acquitted the Internationalists after their arrests following 1874 and 1877 must have drawn these parallels." He points to the massive wave of unrest throughout Italy in this period, particularly in the south. Many foreign and domestic observers believed that the Italian state was about to collapse. It was within this context that Internationalists decided to launch their insurrections. If they failed ( and if they are now portrayed by both bourgeois and Marxist historians as comic opera events) they had perfectly credible justifications. And what was most harmful in the long run, that or the creation of social democratic parties that acted as tamers of the working class, prepared it for the slaughter of World War One and the betrayals of the German Revolution?
The ICC cannot think beyond these mechanical categories. For example in their The Dutch and German Left the great revolutionary Domela Nieuwenhuis is first described (rightly) as " a great figure of the international workers' movement.. After his split with the organised workers movement ( this is debatable, he didn't break with this but with electoralism-battlescarred) he remained faithful to the movement in struggle, by taking part in the great strikes "( thought he had broken with the organised workers movement-?battlescarred) Nieuwenhuis's activity is seen as "out of phase with the historical period , which was not yet a period of revolution but still one of reforms.." Gorter is then enthusiastically quoted by the ICC who says that " the difference between him and us marxist revolutionaries is that we are for revolutionary methods in a period of revolution, whilst he wanted them prematurely."
So it is premature to break with social democratic organisations and attempt to set up autonomous organisations of the working class. This is precisely the logic that kept Luxemburg and co with the Social Democratic Party even with the declaration of world war and , I would argue, prepared the way for her own death.

MacIver, it should be remembered that Marx used the accusation of embezzlement against Karl Grün in 1846,. Shortly after Weitling and his followers were driven out of the Communist League, a campaign began against Grün who also had supporters in the League. I have no brief for Grün, but in these circumstances, divorced from the rights and wrongs of Grün's politics, he was unfairly treated. Engels first raised the suggestion that "Grün did the workers out of about 300 francs" August 19, 1846 letter to Marx.. The money had been supplied by supporters in the League and they supported him by saying it was a loan that would be paid back. Grün was not himself a member of the League but his followers were driven out in Paris, virtually dissolving the League there.

Battlescarred, I appreciate that you are trying to put forward serious arguments, but I could not pass up the opportunity to make you eat your hat.

The manuscript that Capricorn refers to is available in Michel Bakounine, Oevres Complétes: 2, p. 121. The anti-semitic passages referred to, however (p. 124-125), are reproduced word for word in Bakunin's December 1871 "Lettre aux Internationaux de Bologne" on page 109 from the above source. This was a circular letter to Bakunin's supporters in Italy. Another circular letter filled with anti-semitic verbiage was sent to the Jura Federation during the same pre-Hague Congress period. It is entitled "Aux Compagnons de la Fédération des Sections Internationales du Jura" and is available in Michel Bakounine, Oevres Complétes: 3, p. 1. These long tirades were part of a "campaign" against Marx, and they were not "personal correspondence."

The sorce of this 'information' is something I read in the ICC press. My recollection is that the British and US sections of the ICC were going to be bringing out a paper called the decadence of capitalism. But I might have got it mixed up with the pamphlet, I haven't looked through every issue of WR to check.

FOAD! Nasty

Don't be so nasty, Ned. It's easy to get confused when there are points to score, axes to grind, etc.

Frats, Morven

Even if Battlescarred accepts to eat his marzipan hat, I hope it's only a nibble. He's essentially correct in the sense that both factions, the 'Bakuninist' and the 'Marxist', engaged in racketeering activities in the workers' movement of that time. Racist slurs were clearly anti-proletarian. If one wants to calibrate anti-semitic filth being disseminated, clearly Marx's newspaper article in the New York Tribune tops it. The factional letters by Bakunin didn't have such a circulation. But this in no way excuses Bakunin, who shared rabid anti-semitic and other racist sentiments with many of his contemporaries like Marx and Engels (poor Lafargue must have known).

But there are no 'lesser evils' here, the point that has been established is that BOTH factions engaged in these assaults on the integrity of individuals, for the benefit of coteries. Marx and Engels were not only racists but homophobes and patriots when it was suitable. Of course their contributions can't be reduced to that, but this must not be ignored.

There was a faction around Bakunin, as there was also a Marx-Engels faction in the IWA. Nothing particularly unusual, and not something following 'the needs of the world bourgeoisie'. The 'Marxist faction' also used secret correspondence and manoeuvres, like their rivals. This is part and parcel of racketeering. Just by putting the stamp 'workers' movement' doesn't suddenly deodorise and vanish the intrigues, low blows and slanders. And jumping onto the high horse with goody two-shoes doesn't buy credibility either, as if Marx, Engels and his German supporters (like Liebknecht ) were above using dirty tricks. According to the ICC, Mehring was affected by petty-bourgeois sentimentalism, for his heretical attempt to find the truth (he also defended Radek in 1914, a further concession to parasitism).

In spite of all the historical evidence, the ICC chose to defend the cult of Marx and Engels, embraced by left communist rackets. In their case, the pantheon includes the warlords Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party in power, and the tradition of left communism. It is not supposed to suffer from any blemishes, not serious ones that is. If the evidence of Bolshevik mass slaughter and lying as system of domination is too overwhelming, then the category 'mistakes' deals with this, or 'immaturity'. As if killing masses of people were a neutral pastime, something that can suddenly be discovered as 'not recommended'. When Thiers and Gallifet do it against the Paris Commune, it's an atrocity. When Tukhachevsky and Trotsky do it in Kronstadt, it's a 'mistake' (one that really dampens eyes). But Engels already had some training in this mindset -- in the American Civil War he enthusiastically rallied for one side, with Marx and IWA, as hundreds of thousands of troops perished in the first mass slaughters of the industrial age (at least 618,000 soldiers killed).

As I suggest above, only a nibble.

Battlescarred, you're right about Marx and Engels's offensive remarks about Lassalle and Lafargue, but wrong about Marx's article on The Jewish Question.( I think you're wrong too about Kautsky being from a Jewish background.)

On the Jewish Question is an attack on Judaism as a religion not on people from a Jewish background. After all, Marx was one of them. As an atheist he hoped that Judaism would die out, but by its adherents becoming atheists (rather than Christians, as urged by those he was polemicking against). And it argues in favour of full political and civil rights for people of Jewish religion. I agree that Marx didn't succeed in his argument that Judaism was the religion of capitalism. That was Protestantism as Weber, Tawney and others were to argue later.

On the Jewish Question is also an attack on money and the State as expressions of human alienation and a call for their abolition in a truly human society. It could even be argued that this article was the first theoretical exposition of the case for a State-less, ie anarchist, society. And far better than anything Bakunin wrote on the subject since he wasn't against money.

Agree with Capricorn on this, cf this article on our site: http://en.internationalism.org/ir/114_jewish_question.html

No question that some of the attitudes expressed in Marx and Engels' correspondence are gross, even making allowance for the historic context. Engels' rant on homosexuality is stunningly bad (letter to Marx, 22 June 1869), as noted in this article: http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/6/gay-oppression

Thanks Dave C for your corrections re Bakunin, Looks like I'll eat my hat but as MacIver has helpfully mentioned a more palatable titfer, and as I like marzipan, it won't be just a nibble. I'll look into those sources you mention.
Yes MacIver that about sums it up. Both the Marx and Bakunin coteries engaged in some appalling stuff, but of course with one big difference, the Marx coterie actively worked towards the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume whereas as far as I can see, this was not on Bakunin's agenda.
In retrospect the Italians and Swiss should not have pulled out of the Internatiional so precipitately. This certainly caused annoyance among other Bakuninists and the repercussions re. the expulsions of Bakunin and Guillaume would have most likely been different with the defeat of the Marx manouevres.But that's by the by.
I do feel that the outllook and behaviour of founding figures and their groupings can act, if you like, as a genetic imprint on future generations so that the events in the Communist League were duplicated within the International, etc.
Marx, enthusiastic admirer of Hegel, was to re-iterate his ideas and to put them into practice in all his time in the working class movement. “Without parties no development, without division no progress” he was to write. In a much later letter to Bebel written in 1873, Engels sums up this approach: “For the rest, old Hegel has already said it; a party proves itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can stand the split. The movement of the proletariat necessarily passes through stages of development; at every stage one section of the people lags behind and does not join in the further advance; and this alone explains why it is that actually the “solidarity of the proletariat” is everywhere realised in different party groupings which carry on life and death feuds with one another”.
This Manichaean outlook in fact is unfruitful as the Communist League was totally wrecked with neither the Marx-Engels faction or the Schapper-Willich faction benefiting and with a repeat performance with the International, with both the Marxists and the "anti-authoritarians" severely weakened. Bakunin retreated into retirement in profound disgust and dejection and things were not much better for Marx for the last years of his life.
As I say in a book I am writing on the development of anarchist communism:
"The London group of the League of the Just had answered favourably to the idea of increased communication between communists and made clear that they had broken with the conspiratorial tactics of the Blanquists and the outlook of Weitling, which sought to rouse the masses through spiritual inspiration. However, they warned against the vicious denunciations that Marx had made against Weitling and Kriege and emphasised that correspondence between communists was to encourage ideas not to curb political debate. Later they wrote another letter where they stated:
“We believe that all these different orientations must be expressed and that only through a communist congress, where all the orientations are represented in a cold-blooded and brotherly discussion, can unity be brought to our propaganda…If people from all the communist positions were sent, if intellectuals and workers from all lands met together, then there is no doubt that a lot of barriers, which still stand in the way, would fall,. In this congress all of the different orientations and types of communism would be discussed peacefully and without bitterness and the truth would certainly come through and win the day”."
This is the outlook that has to be returned to.
P.S.
"Racketeering" manifests itself in anarchist circles too. I cannot justify some of the strong arm tactics used by FAIstas in their internal struggles with different currents within the CNT either before The Civil War or in the run-up to the split in the CNT in the 1970s- early 80s. Neither can I justify some of the tactics used by Fontenis and the OPB within the Federation Anarchiste in France or with the acrimonious split within the Anarchist Workers Association in the 1970s which I was an actor in.

This is a silly argument (since in the end it doesn't matter). This is what Kautsky himself wrote in some autobiographical notes:

It doesn't sound as if he regarded himself or was regarded by others as Jewish but I suppose one of his grandparents could have been of Jewish origin. Enough to have those who saw Marxism as a Jewish plot to label him as such.

In the end it doesn't matter, no, although various encyclopedias give his parents as Jewish.
One final thing. On the Jewish Question is more about an analysis of bourgeois society and the propunding of Marx's dialectical methods than about the Jewish question per se. As I reiterate the stereotype of the Jew as a capitalist and moneylender, the quintessence of bourgeois society, is at odds with the reality that there existed Jews who did not match this unsavoury caricature.
Anyway, I won't have access to the Internet for 3 weeks so bye bye for now.

Battlescarred

If it's hols, have a great time. I agreed with your post 142, look forward to the book, you must write it. And enjoy the marzipan. My favourite is from Niederegger, in Lübeck. I have suggested they confect some shaped like arthropods...and rackets. With any luck, Noa can have the best gift set. He deserves it, this is his thread. It's been a revelation and I learned a lot. Well done Noa.

I really liked:

One final Parthian shot.
Thanks for your appreciation MacIver. Lubeck is a town dear to me. I spent a wonderful evening there with two other comrades, one of whom is Nasty Ned, wandering through the gangen ( network of narrow alleys) slightly drunk , on a delightful psychogeographical voyage. We stood outside the chemist shop that had been run by Erich Muehsam's parents and outside the school where he was was "taught" and where he first showed his insurgent spirit by refusing to eat their shit as e.e. cummings might have said. What an excruciating last few months of his life he suffered under the Nazis. And yet he never gave in. That can be said of very few people.
And from there we went on to Wilhelmshaven where we paid our respects to the revolutionary "toilers of the sea" as Icarus would have said.
And one final thing ,sir, as he swings around in his crumpled raincoat , cradling a cheap stogie in the cup of his hand, just to put those puss cats among the pigeons, what exactly was the difference between Noske and Scheidemann , bloodhounds of the counter revolution, and Lenin and Trotsky, errmm, borzoi of the counter revolution?

You're welcome. An inspiring recollection, the names and places bring back memories too, of things read, imagined and discussed, including e.e.cummings. Hope nasty ned remains as nasty as ever.

Best.

I don't know for others, but this thread is coming to a natural end for McIver. For the record:

Ernie, Post 111

Rosy fantasies, smooth-talking PR, about a ruthlessly driven motorcade. Choosing 'current' as a brand name never precluded believing that your own was the best, the only real pole of 'regroupment'. This vision animated Mark Chirik 100%, there was nothing 'liberal' in the stance. Naturally this wasn't going to be stated in print. It was for the inner Zentrale, to energise the party spirit and a fanatical devotion to the heritage. The foot soldiers believed in lenient fantasies. But still, after 35 years? The new ones aren't any better, as Devrim, Leo, Soyonsrien and the Devorator suggest. Take that babies. A daddy, not a mom (or chaperone) founded the ICC.

To be fair, the other gurus were not that different, each in his own ward, Munis, Damen, the ICP gang known to Camatte in '69, and the few micro-bordigas in Italian cities. Hasn't Ernie heard about the 'market', and 'competition'? That's where brands meet in their wars, no prisoners taken, and Marx and Engels (inspired by Hegel) understood this well, it also applies to political groups of 'the proletariat', as Battlescarred pointed out. Lenin understood this even more, and once he won the first prize, state power, he and the Bolsheviks were going to going to keep it. No two ways about it, unless he agreed to sign his own death warrant. His overthrown opponents were equally ruthless and murderous, but stupid and arrogant, like the Hohenzollerns. Marxism could give an edge then, or at least it seemed.

Competing in international conferences in the 70s again doesn't deny the above. True, the competition was not about beauty (let's be serious), but about being the 'clearest' and thus the 'best', not in looks but in circularity. You prove this by competing, by selling your wares, by being seductive as Camatte noticed. Like now, in this historic turn towards anarchism. The bunker mentality of the 'official Bordiguists', who refused to attend these contests, simply meant a different megalomania: Pininfarina doesn't compete with Minis, nor Hugo Boss with Matalan.

Sadism and amalgams with 'the world bourgeoisie' are candidly described as 'basic acts of solidarity' in Ernie's narrative. One should just recall the clear and above-board polemics with the IBRP-ICT over many years, to illustrate Ernie's charming claims. The IBRP's seduction by lustful parasites (genus IFICC) comes to mind. Of course there was no 'hostility' in these amiable salon exchanges, it was like a reading club of La Fontaine's latest fables. The sessions involved, it transpires, rigorous critiques of various swamp creatures enamoured of parasites. Now the invitation, repeated on the wonderful dream of Devoration1 on the overlapping thread on 'left communism and anarchism', is extended to the 'revolutionary anarchists'. Hopefully they won't ask questions.

The below is even more candid:

Ernie, Post 112

This is baffling. Yes, lost by the ICC most of all. In 1981 the Lille ex-section (Internationalist Worker), proposed precisely this, a 'Jury of Honour', or of 'pro revolutionaries', to deal with the slanders of the ICC, and their raids. The apparat studiously ignored this call, and in any case the ICC didn't call for one in September 1981, when 'their property' was taken by the seceders. The reason given then was that 'the milieu' (swamp and all) didn't understand 'the principle of not ripping-off the organisation', therefore there was no option except to unilaterally and secretly plan a chekist raid (and a Stalinist amalgam campaign). No 'Jury of Honour' needed when it doesn't serve the needs of the apparat. When, under a grand mal they imagined it could have mileage, like against JJ in 1993-97, it zealously pushed for it (McIver's and the IBRP's versions of this sordid saga exist on these threads, for those who want to search the links). The Cercle de discussion de Paris also dissected this sham in their excellent 'Pourquoi sommes nous sortis du CCI?', included in their pamphlet Que ne pas faire? (Paris, June 2000).

As an aside: Liebknecht Papa was a brave and self-sacrificing militant, like his son was to be. But Wilhem's sordid racketeering actions should be exposed as well, because they did happen. This historical undercurrent of systematic lying and intriguing contributed, cumulatively, to a lasting undermining of communism as representation of the proletariat.

It's pertinent to quote from a letter from News of War & Revolution to the CBG, after the 1981 raids:

The latest newspaper from WR says 'the defence of a communist organisation becomes a question to be taken as seriously as the defence of the proletariat itself", but they say this in a context which implies their ex-members are not communist, or are at least some lower form of life in their conception of things, and are therefore the people against who it is permissible to use violence. For it is against these people that the ICC poses the need for defence. Can we suggest you re-read the arguments which were used to justify the imprisonment, exile, death and expulsion of the various oppositionists within the Russian CP between 1920 and 1927. The wording is almost identical.

The Bulletin (CBG) June 1982, N.1, page 28

This was a prophetic warning. They noticed that a 'lower form' of human being was being fabricated by the apparat's ideologists, including Alf. It's doubtful that the ICC has abandoned this Bolshevik mind set, at least Ernie's delusional fantasies don't suggest it. Also, the mere hot air about 'how new we are now' is just that, PR and brand re-positioning. But the core, the repressive need for domination, hasn't been transcended, it's still there, confirmed by various posts.

The ICC's Theses on Parasitism haven't been cited on this thread. The passages below are pertinent as well, because they confirm the profound insight of News of War & Revolution in 1982. They went but perceptive and intelligent minds should live on. They are needed. The mindset below lives on, unfortunately, it hasn't mutated as some smart parasites can:

To some, exposing and analysing the ICC's past is just academic shit, what matters is NOW, let's do som'e. Those who react like this, will, one does what one must, and to each his own. No debate on that.

Rata's clear and relevant recent post 207 on thread 'Communist left and internationalist anarchism' confirms that the envisaged entente cordiale is going to be rocky. The question of 'the state in the period of transition' (and implicitly Bolshevism) sounds non-negotiable:

Rata's reply to Firtinaci's zealotry is also a sober warning:

Patronising apparatchiks shouldn't underestimate even the 'best of anarchists'. Zentrale of course doesn't, that's why the Theses stay. Just in case.

I'm rather confused by the logic here: Why would forming a discussion circle stop you from taking part in action? Or for that matter, why would forming a discussion circle stop you from becoming a nihilistic hedonist and enjoy life?