Dev get a life. You have surely got more to do than defending the ICC (or Revol for that matter). Coming on like king of logic just is too sad. A lot of people dislike the ICC and express it, it doesn't bother them as they see it as proof that they are right, so what are you bleating on about.
I see it's a dastardly plot by the left commies.
Well to be fair i'm sure the ICC do think that much of the opposition is an organised capitalist plot.
I'm not tired of them; they are always polite and If I am short of time or tired I can skip their replies.
Dev, I think the problem is that people don't see the point in arguing with them. We have all had the experience of talking to people defending party lines, it's too much like trench warfare.
Look, you have asked me a question in another thread and in order to put together a reasonable answer I have gone away and given it some thought. I could write something that would be glib asnd useless but I want to try to do something that will further the debate. The interesting thing is that the more I consider my own position the more I realise that it is very easy to slip into pre-prepared positions that, in the end, make discussion pointless. What is the point in me talking to you if I am not open to being positively influenced by the process? In other words I have to be prepared to move & I have to hope that you might be moved a little to, if only to understand my arguments & respect them.
The ICC are already in their foxholes.
i think it's ridiculous to even let the ICC parasites post here tbh, fairplay to the admins it is their site but i have no intention of engaging with ICC members or supporters
the ICC are not interested in constructive debate and i would never work with ICC on anything it is pointless, and they are a pointless irrelevence
the ICC are currently attempting one of the periodic smash and grab raids on the petit bourgeios anarchist swamp, they are making an organised intervention on this board for the sole purpose of recruiting a few naive and disenchanted libertarian communists, i don't care if they do - the sort of waster attracted to them is welcome to fuck off from the field of class struggle and into the realms of peaceful 'purity'
i'm not tired of them, i don't read their posts - but i do think it is pointless engaging with them - they have a party line and are not here for debate
if any openly declared ICC members turn up on any board i admin, i will seek to ban them straight away - i would rather have bnp supporters posting than them
I don't mind the ICC posting on here. As you say Devrim, they are usually polite and do have some interesting things to say, and some of those things I wouldn't actually disagree with. You can get the occasional good laugh out of them as well. But in real life (not on t'internet, that is), I've found anyone connected with the ICC really hard to take and am more than happy to do without them.
i'm not tired of them, i don't read their posts - but i do think it is pointless engaging with them - they have a party line and are not here for debate
Says the man who throws abuse nearly everytime they post.
the ICC are not interested in constructive debate and i would never work with ICC on anything it is pointless, and they are a pointless irrelevence
Says the man who throws abuse nearly everytime they post.
If you don't want to engage with them why not just ignore them. I think that it would be less boring than your constant flaiming.
Devrim
I fear I might have played a large part in starting this "ICC bashing". now I think the ICC are rather dull, that they reduce debates to one or two positions and could drain the life out of a Duracell bunny. BUT I do not think they should be banned or other such nonsense, rather my only issue was theat the are brought to task for twisting and their looping logic be called out. My problem was that "flaming" was that the admins seemed to be more concerned about pulling up swearing and explicit rudeness than political content and intellectual dishonesty.
I agree with Pepe on this. I may have more in common politically with the ICC than many anarchists, but their terms of engagement and (to be frank) organisation are equally, if not more, futile than the crap anarchists we constantly berate on here. In fact, I'd say they're probably more ghettoised and subcultural than the Womrades we're all so fond of baiting. Just cos they have a heavily developed quasi-academic internal debating society does not make them anymore revolutionary.
The key point is what's already been said though: revolutionary politics is not the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Do you not want to convince people that your ideas are right?
I'd rather convince them that they're right. To be honest, I think this sort of attitude can come over as pretty patronising. I'd much rather supervise the death of ideology (as if it hasn't already happened) and encourage the subjective, autonomous, libertarian communist seed already planted in every workplace and community.
I'd much rather supervise the death of ideology (as if it hasn't already happened) and encourage the subjective, autonomous, libertarian communist seed already planted in every workplace and community.
Sorry? What now?
The death of ideology? Is ideology dead? I'd suggest that the ideology par excellence is that ideology is dead, that there can be an outside from ideology. Is the death of ideology not bound up with the death of "politics" and the rise of "administration", when Tony Blair tells us that the way forward is not ideology but pragamatism. When what matters is not principles or concepts of justice but what "works", aren't we forced to ask, "works" within what configuration and towarsds what ends. Zyklon B was pragamtic, it got the job done, it was cheap and it matterd not an once that it was developed by a jew.
It would be all too easy and somewhat cheap for me to point out the originators of the "Third way".
Your's is a recipe for pure oppurtunism, for the jettisoning of historical lessons and utter inertia.
To finish with a line from The Devils Advocate,
"The greatest trick the devil ever played was convinced the world it didn't exist".
Yes i for one am fucking sick to death of their stale shite. They are a dull annoying sect whose only two arguements are that unions are 'the' enemy of the working class and that internationalism is like well good innit, every single conversation they are involved in eventually gets dragged back to these two arguements.
Just because i happen to agree with them on the principle of internationalism and think some anarchists are a bit crap on that issue, doesn't mean i have that much in common with them. I dislike the way they wait around forums looking to pouce whenever a more inexperienced anarchist says something about internationalism that isn't 100% correct so they can then say ''oh lok we're the ICC, unlike anarchists we have the pure communist line, etc etc'. Now chances are if i'm talking to a work colleague or someone on the bus, ''the principles of internationalism'' isn't going to be on the agenda of conversation.
I mean lets do the next door neighbour test. If you introduced your mate to an average ICC member, they'd think you were a fucking nutjob, largely because the ICC are individually a bit anti-social and weird, and collectively quite mental at times. While pes flaing is a little pointless, i don't see why exactly i should be polite to these sub-bolshevik party hacks when i couldn;'t give a shit about their sect. I want to push workplace struggles and get involve in community campaigns, not talk to a bunch of banal stale leftists who seem to have swallowed an entire morgue. Fair enough if dialogue with the left is your cup of tea, then go for it, but don't expect the rest of us to follow suit.
I mean do we really have to go into the reasons why the ICC are a little loony tunes? I would have thoufght reading this would have told you all you need to know.
http://en.internationalism.org/joinicc 
But sure, i suppose if we really have to get the list of mentalness rolling then go for it, but i really can't be asked right now.
Alan,
Firstly, I think that Revol's post is talking a lot of sense.
Secondly on your comments about ideas. We hold the ideas that we do because we think they are right. If we didn't we would hold other ideas. I don't think that trying to persuade people is patronising. A collective discussion is good for developing ideas. There are people in our organisation who I disagree with on certain issues. Of course not fundamental ones, or we wouldn't be in the same organisation. Talking about, Leo, somebody who post on these boards occasionally, we have had discussions in the past couple of weeks, and in one he admitted that I was right, in another I realised that he was right. A collective development is part of organisational development.
Finally, you say that:
I may have more in common politically with the ICC than many anarchists, but their terms of engagement and (to be frank) organisation are equally, if not more, futile than the crap anarchists we constantly berate on here. In fact, I'd say they're probably more ghettoised and subcultural than the Womrades we're all so fond of baiting. Just cos they have a heavily developed quasi-academic internal debating society does not make them anymore revolutionary.
In which case why not discuss what you see as their problems with them. Let's try to the issues about the ICC's organisation, and terms of engagement to this thread.
They are not the static immobile mass that some people imagine them to be.
So explain seriously where you think they have problems without just slaging them off, and I am sure that they would answer in the same fashion. It might turn out to be a waste of time for you, but it could be interesting, and you could even both learn something.
Devrim
Revolutionary militancy also demands a loyal, disinterested dedication to the proletarian cause, a real will to defend the precious instrument of the organisation whenever it is attacked, denigrated and slandered by the forces of the bourgeoisie and their accomplices in the parasitic milieu.
You can't parody this shit.
Yes i for one am fucking sick to death of their stale shite. They are a dull annoying sect whose only two arguements are that unions are 'the' enemy of the working class and that internationalism is like well good innit, every single conversation they are involved in eventually gets dragged back to these two arguements.
Do you disagree with these two positions? If you do please remove the label 'council communist' form your description as these are the positions that the council communists agreed with historically. If you don't maybe you would recognise that people, both the ICC, and myself included keep going on about these things as we believe they are important.
Chances are if i'm talking to a work colleague or somone on the bus, ''the principles of internationalism'' isn't going to be on the agenda of conversation.
I mean lets do the next door neighbour test. If you introduced your mate to an average ICC m,ember, they'd think you were a fucking nutjob, largely because the ICC are individually anti-social weirdos, and collectively fucking insane.
No, I don't talk about the principles of internationalism on the bus that much either, nor ı suspect do the ICC. Actually on the issue of the next door 'neighbour test', I recently introduced my next door neighbour (she's an anarchist) to an ICC's supporter (a Turk from Germany), and she actually enjoyed meeting him, and was quite disappointed that she didn't have time to meet him agian before he left. In fact when I told her that we had a visitor coming from the same organisation in the near future, she offered to cook him dinner. Now, most people I presume don't have anarchist neighbours, but if you went round to your neighbours, and started spouting off about anarchism, I am sure that you would have a pretty similar response to someone presenting the 'theory of decadence'.
I want to push workplace struggles and get involve in community campaigns
I too want to push workplace struggles (I am a bit unsure about some of what passes for community campaigns, but the question is how we do it. How do we behave in a struggle? For us this isn't an academic question. Although we are a very small group, one of our members could be involved in a massive strike very soon, and I was involved n organising a small strike this Spring.
I think that the ICC have a useful input into these discussions.
Yes, often I disagree with them. I disagreed with them on a thread the other day:
http://libcom.org/forums/current-affairs/exeter-wildcat-postal-strike
The point is that ı think that it is worth keeping up a dialogue with all 'internationalists' (for want of a better word). I don't just throw insults like 'sub-bolshevik party hacks' when I disagree with people (ok maybe I accused Nastyned of having bourgeois politics 
.
So what is the problem? Maybe if people address this openly, we can make some progress, and try to sort things out.
Devrim
Before this discussion continues, are we talking about Althusserian dominant ideology or its conventional, non-Marxist definition as a coherent, objective body of ideas? Not that the two are mutually exclusive.
Alun, I realy don't have a clue what you are talking about here. I think that my next door neighbour might though. She is a philosophy teacher. And people say that the left communists are not understandable.
Devrim
well as I've said on another thread i'm no althusserian scholar, but I have read IISA.
Now I think there is a need to understand ideology in many different contexts, to recognise the different levels or possibilities of it's meaning. But I still think there is no escaping ideology, infact any attempt to disavow ideology is an ideological act and this is where I take serious issue with Althussers split between theory and ideology.
Alan wrote:
Before this discussion continues, are we talking about Althusserian dominant ideology or its conventional, non-Marxist definition as a coherent, objective body of ideas? Not that the two are mutually exclusive.Alun, I realy don't have a clue what you are talking about here. I think that my next door neighbour might though. She is a philosophy teacher. And people say that the left communists are not understandable.
Devrim
I hope you don't mind too much if I read your post like this.
Alan I really don't have a clue what you are talking about here. I think that my next door neighbour might thiugh. She is an anarchist and therefore necessarily smarter, prettier and interesting than me, a bastard off spring of Bolshevism who is not fit to clean her boots.
Not that this could be a projection of my anarcho submissive fantasies. 
Rattail - Well i had to read it last year, but I was in a real hurry so I'm not sure how much sunk in. Here's the link, in case anyone wants to remind themselves.
I do feel that ideology as a whole tends to be a tool of the ruling class. It's an objectivised abstract that tends to undermine and contradict subjective experience. You're right that ideology is nigh on inescapable, but you can attempt to deconstruct its centrality to "politics" by starting any praxis from the basis of everyday life. You talk about ideology existing on several levels: I agree. On the same token, perhaps there exists strengths and intensity of ideology. The ICC purports a highly developed, theoretical ideology, whereas my idea of anarchism prefers an ideology (if you must) arising out of experience.
Yeah yeah, that's right, I finally finished Vaneigem.
Actually, following Lukacs (in his good period) we make a distinction between ideology (arising from classes - in particular exploiting classes - whose material interests prevent them from arriving at a coherent view of social reality), and proletarian class consciousness, which tends (I say tends because we are against any idea that it is complete or static)towards a unified and lucid view, because this corresponds to the nature of the working class as the first revolutionary class to be an exploited class.
Cheers Devrim for defending us. Things have been getting quite ridiculous and positively irrational on some threads recently. Really, some people must get fed up saying the same things over and over again...
Dev - is that to say you haven't read about ideological state apparatuses? I'm just about the least read person on here.
No, I haven't, and I still don't know what you are talking about.
It is kind of off the point though (he says covering his ignorance at the same time as trying to return the thread to the point ).
Dev
cantdocartwheels wrote:
Yes i for one am fucking sick to death of their stale shite. They are a dull annoying sect whose only two arguements are that unions are 'the' enemy of the working class and that internationalism is like well good innit, every single conversation they are involved in eventually gets dragged back to these two arguements.Do you disagree with these two positions?
You know fullwell thats irrelevant to the argument, the AF share both of those positions and they're an approachable honest bunch i'm more than willing to debate with.
Your simply trying to twist the agrument in the exact same way that the ICC does.
If you do please remove the label 'council communist' form your description as these are the positions that the council communists agreed with historically.
So you just read my profile before replying to search for other inconsistencies to twist the arguement again. You obviousy know more about the history of the council communists than i do so great you've got the arguement back onto your terrain, and yeah i'm not outside and against so well done there i'm probably not a council communist and was just using it as a loose label, congratulations.
(he says covering his ignorance at the same time as trying to return the thread to the point
Dev
To be honest, I think this is the point:
ICC wrote:
Revolutionary militancy also demands a loyal, disinterested dedication to the proletarian cause, a real will to defend the precious instrument of the organisation whenever it is attacked, denigrated and slandered by the forces of the bourgeoisie and their accomplices in the parasitic milieu.You can't parody this shit.
Whilst I think some of the ICC arguments have actually been quite interesting, I think for many people on this site the attraction of anarchism is that it explicitly disavows vanguardism.
Why, then, do the ICC spend so much time trying "attract people towards the organisation", when the organization openly claims their role is
to contribute to the development of consciousness in the working class. As Marx and Engels affirmed in the Communist Manifesto, "the communists have this advantage over the rest of the proletariat, that they have a clear understanding of the conditions, the line of march and the general results of the proletarian movement".
and also
Because the activity of revolutionaries is part of a historic perspective, militants have to hold out over the long term, without getting demoralised. This is why comrades who want to join the ICC have to avoid any immediatism, any impatience in the process of integration.
This sounds pretty much like a perfect definition of vanguardism (and, ironically, it also sounds highly exclusive and, therefore, highly uninternationalist!).
So, for me, the point that the ICC have to address, and the reason why so many people seem to get annoyed with them, is how do they justify their vanguardism, and why do they keep acting in a vanguardist way, on a forum where anti-vanguardism is one of the core shared principles?
john - I think you have raised the right question: the question of class consciousness and the role of the political organisation. I agree that it's our conception of the latter which causes so much hostility among the anarchists, because we think that a proletarian political organisation is indeed a vanguard (but probably not in the way most anarchists see it). It's too late now to deal with this, but I'll try to come back to it soon.
Alan wrote:
Dev - is that to say you haven't read about ideological state apparatuses? I'm just about the least read person on here.No, I haven't, and I still don't know what you are talking about.
It is kind of off the point though
I don't really think it is that much, but that strand of debate can wait until tomorrow.
To be honest, I find the ICC's attempted recruitment (if that's indeed what it is - I wonder how many posters on here would actually be successful in an application to membership) less of a political issue and more just a little irksome. However, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest that it is more the nature of their engagement in debate that fosters residual hostility than their politics per se.
To cantdocartwheels,
You know fullwell thats irrelevant to the argument, the AF share both of those positions and they're an approachable honest bunch i'm more than willing to debate with.
If the AF share those positions why are they flocking to join the IWW?
I think that the AF is a very loose organisation that will recruit anybody, which the ICC for all these allegations that they are only interested in recruiting don't actually do, and therefore seem 'approachable' in that they don't question peoples' opinions, and what sort of activity is worth while.
Your simply trying to twist the agrument in the exact same way that the ICC does.Quote:
If you do please remove the label 'council communist' form your description as these are the positions that the council communists agreed with historically.So you just read my profile before replying to search for other inconsistencies to twist the arguement again.
This is bizarre. I look at your profile to see what organisation you are in, and then you claim that I am searching for inconsistencies with which to twist the argument with.
To john,
I will let the ICC themselves answer your point about vangaurdism (maybe another thread would be good for it), but I think you will find that their definition of vanguardism is very different from Leninism's, and actually a lot less subsitionalist than a lot of anarchist groups.
To Alun,
The ICC purports a highly developed, theoretical ideology, whereas my idea of anarchism prefers an ideology (if you must) arising out of experience.
Where do you think that communist theory comes from if hot from experience? The positions of the communist movement derive from the experience of the class.
Devrim
If the AF share those positions why are they flocking to join the IWW?
well yeah, forgot about that one, i've found that change of heart extremely odd.
I think that the AF is a very loose organisation that will recruit anybody, which the ICC for all these allegations that they are only interested in recruiting don't actually do, and therefore seem 'approachable' in that they don't question peoples' opinions, and what sort of activity is worth while.
well thats the entire problem really isn't it, i'd be far happier if they were engaging in debate over organisational structure, or what kind of activity is worthwhile, or how we should organise in estates, or giving out practical guides on workplace issues, rather than blanket statements about how unions are bad and we need autonomous workplace groups. The truth is however the ICC doing or discussing any of these things, they seem to have little to no imagination, they are stale, leftsit, collectivist and crude and their modus operand is to push their leftist groupsicule, and continue to stick to a mere handful of abstract positions.
Their bordigist politics fall fairly close to bolshevism http://en.internationalism.org/manifesto1991 and their utter inability to self criticise is quite frankly worrying.
Even a mass recrutiment policy of some sort would be less offensive than a bizarre obsession with having the most tight nit group of isolated militants they can possibly build.
I mean seriously
http://en.internationalism.org/joinicc
Read their recruitment blurb and tell me they don't have a few 'problems' there.
This is bizarre. I look at your profile to see what organisation you are in, and then you claim that I am searching for inconsistencies with which to twist the argument with.
i'm sorry but i don't find this relevant or honest at all.
What does it matter what organisation i'm a member of? I'm not 'critquing from the platform of group x, y and z', in fact that sort of attitude where the role of the revolutionary organisation overrides the actual issues is exactly what i'm having a go at. In short i'm accusing the ICC of having utterly abandoned the terrain of everyday life in favour of leftist dogma.
New clashes between locals and riot police erupt in the south Corfu town of Lefkimi over the construction of open refuse dump.
An account of a group of 153 sacked Cellatex chemical workers in France who won a massively improved redundancy deal due to militant struggle, albeit one with some misguided tactics
A couple of quotes from a recent thread:
http://libcom.org/forums/current-affairs/jewist-left-wing-website
So, let’s start with the basis of the criticism:
Well that seems to be a pretty heinous crime, trying to provoke a discussion on a discussion board. Whatever will they think of next. I think that a discussion on whether people should organise in separate groups, Jews, blacks, gays, etc… is certainly a relevant discussion on a thread about a Jewish socialist group. I would agree with Alf, but that is not the point that I am trying to raise here.
This is superb. Stressing basic points of the communist programme has now become sectarianism.
Actually what I find quite tiresome is people not responding to the discussion at all, and just attacking the ICC whenever a member of that organisation makes a post. We don’t end up discussing the point, but the people who claim to be tired of the ICC just end up whinging about them again.
It seems to me that those who claim to be tired of the ICC are actually the ones who talk about them the most.
This is the most bizarre point of the lot. Why do you post on here, Pepe? Do you not want to convince people that your ideas are right? Do you not want to contact new people, and engage in discussion with them, and maybe joint work? And yes, even horror of horrors, attract people towards the organisation that you are in?
I think that these are among the reasons why the ICC post here, and I think that people in any anarchist organisation would if they were being honest agree that this is part of the motivation for them doing it too.
Or maybe I picked up the wrong end of the stick, and that your reason for posting on here is actually just too insult people, and derail threads by criticising political groups that you dislike. In which case I would agree. I don’t think that that is why the ICC post here.
Devrim