[AW2024] Report from Prague

BY WAY OF “PREAMBLE”

First, let’s set the scene. It was an autumn evening, we were several comrades gathered around a table, enjoying a few dishes that had been simmering for hours, savoring a few local beers or other non-alcoholic beverages (according to everyone’s tastes and choices), and we were chatting away about the last developments in the war in the Ukraine, about the events in Israel and Gaza, and more prosaically, about the increasingly marked course towards generalized war. Outside and against all the geostrategic analyses peculiar to the bourgeoisie and the far left of capitalism, what we were putting forward above all, for our part, was the need to get organized and coordinated – in short, to centralize at international level a genuine revolutionary and defeatist activity against capitalist war and peace!

We were therefore considering an international meeting between several groups and comrades whom we already know and with whom we already had the opportunity to take on a series of practical tasks: international discussions, translation of various programmatic materials as well as agitation and propaganda materials, editing and distribution of numerous contributions, etc., without any sectarian or partisan spirit. A maximum two-day meeting, over a weekend, seemed to us not only appropriate for this kind of gathering, but also in keeping with the weak militant forces we and other comrades have in this period, when the proletariat is not yet globally in the driver’s seat, and consistent revolutionary minorities are few and very isolated in relation to the rest of our class.

But very quickly, the comrades who were going to organize this event in Prague began to think “bigger” – too big, as we’ll find out later… The initial international meeting was now joined by a (“small”) anarchist bookfair and a “concert of welcome”. So here we are, already with three events – one evening and two full days.

Very quickly too, we tried to react and emphasize what seems to us essential, for us and for the militant needs we want to meet. Here’s what we wrote to the comrades who initiated the organization:

“What’s most important for us in your proposal is the “non-public conference”, i.e. a practical discussion on how to organize defeatist revolutionary activities.

From this discussion, we hope the following:

* that it contributes to the consolidation and organization of revolutionary and class forces, and that it increases the possibilities of action in the anti-war struggle and in the class struggle in general;
* that it helps us to coordinate our response to the war as capital’s attack on the proletariat – joint leaflets and simultaneous agitation campaigns, sharing of information and suggestions, practical relations and actions;
* that it helps us to further clarify our class program, not only as regards the struggle against capitalist war, but also as regards the struggle to realize the communist project of human community, of which it is an integral part.

We believe it is necessary that only those individuals and groups who not only support the points of the program proposed, but above all implement them in their practice, take part in this “conference”. We are not concerned with theoretical agreement on particular points, but with the practical activity of individual participants.”

What is clear, and today more than ever we criticize ourselves for this, is that we were not firm enough to impose what was necessary and to refuse the superfluous, the non-essential; we let too much be done and let the comrades’ structure continue on its “freewheeling” way. Then came the plan for an “Action Week” with various activities spread over several days, and always a “non-public conference” to round things off. As a bonus, the organizers even wanted to call for a street demonstration. We told ourselves that if we (our small militant structure) weren’t capable of organizing such events, no doubt (more than likely, we thought) these comrades in whom we had every confidence were… The way events turned out proved we were wrong…

We won’t go into detail here about the doubts that began to grow within us as we approached the fateful date for the start of the “Action Week”. Alarming echoes of the organizers’ meetings were reaching us, and comrades who believed we were organizing the event (since we had published the various invitations, calls and clarification texts on our blog and spread them via our mailing-lists) were contacting us to ask for an answer to their questions about the welcome on site, for example, and about security, as well as the promises of accommodation these comrades had received. All we could say was that we will contact the organizers, push the latter to get in touch with them and speed up the organization process. Although it may not seem like it, all this also took up a lot of our time and energy, which we could have devoted to other central activities.

To conclude this “preamble”, we’d also like to silence the countless rumors that have been circulating about us, mainly from certain circles of the so-called “Left Communism” (but not only, some “anarchists” have also taken part in this gossiping!), both before and during the “Action Week”, claiming that our group (Tridni valka) was the organizer of the Prague events. Some even claimed to have seen the “manipulative invisible hand” of our structure behind “the organizers”… All this is totally and unmistakably FALSE and is sheer bloody phantasmagoria, which finally grasps the practical movement to abolish the old world, and to divide it, by using the categories of our enemies: on one side the manipulated and on the other the manipulators, or on one side the masses and on the other the leaders, etc. ad nauseam.

The icing on the cake of stupidity in this respect can more than likely be awarded to the IGCL (the self-proclaimed “International Group of the Communist Left”), which in its review boasts about the “Anti-War Congress” that the “driving force seems to be the revolutionary group Class War – also known by its Czech name, Tridni Valka – more or less descended from or influenced by the Groupe communiste internationaliste (GCI-ICG)”. Thank you for all this information, which history will certainly judge as very “important” but which doesn’t advance the practical organization of revolutionary activity at all; we sincerely and actually see no point in spouting such one-sided assertions and fantasies, except feeding the police version of history and thus denouncing those they imagine to be behind every action of our class in the gigantic struggle for its self-emancipation.

WHAT ABOUT THE “ACTION WEEK”?

But let’s get back to the “Action Week” itself and the “Anti-War Congress”. If, from the outset, we never considered ourselves to be the organizers of these events (for the reasons already expressed above), let’s be clear about our role in their organization, what did we do? Nothing more (or so little), and nothing less either, than what constitutes our everyday militant tasks and activities: reading and critique of the various contributions, discussions at international level, translating and/or distributing the documents in question, helping in the on-line publishing, helping to set up mailing-lists in preparation for discussions at the congress, etc. In short, nothing very exceptional if we consider what we usually do and which constitutes, in our view, the minimum of what needs to be done today.

From the outset, we had warned the organizers, given our limited resources, that they were not to count on us for anything more than what we have just briefly recalled here, that our presence on site during the “week” would be limited to the weekend, essentially for the non-public session of the “Anti-War Congress” on Sunday. And when we arrived, the dice had already been cast, as it were, following the announcement that the organizers no longer had the premises rented for the activities of the week-end… And what we then witnessed was such a level of disorganization that we were stunned, or at the very least, frightened.

We’d like to make it absolutely clear that, from our point of view and that of many other comrades, the “Action Week” was a total disaster, a fiasco, in terms of the organization of events. The organizers, or rather the misnamed “organizing committee”, were playing lousy ball and were incapable of really assuming their responsibilities. For the moment, we’ll focus on a probable overestimation of the real capacities of the comrades who gave themselves perspectives they proved incapable of assuming.

What’s more, various structures of the so-called “Left Communism” – which were not invited, by the way, but self-invited (which we won’t criticize here!) – clearly did nothing to “save the day”, more interested as they were, on the one hand in seeing an “anarchist” experience of internationalism fall flat on its face, and on the other in trying to recruit militants in search of coherence. Not to mention the villainous denunciations worthy of the dirty work of the Okhrana and Cheka combined (see our postscript below)!

A group of internationalist comrades, who had not participated in the “joyous events” of the previous few days, comrades who already knew a part of the “organizing committee” and had their full confidence, set about the task of trying to right the ship – “invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest”, as Bakunin said. And all this, amidst uproar and invectives that came from all sides during what some participants pompously called the “self-organized assembly”, which in fact seemed to us to be nothing more than a kind of scarecrow created out of thin air under the principal and essential leadership of a few groups claiming to belong to the so-called “Left Communism”, a bunch of Leninists and other Bolsheviks… and some of their more or less anarchistic cronies, who pretended to be organizing a parallel congress. At one point, after the events, some even talked about the fact that “two congresses” were taking place!

In short, these internationalist comrades, we initially referred to, despite the insults and invectives, despite the lynch-mob atmosphere that prevailed, made it possible for part of the program of the public session of the “Anti-War Congress” to take place the following day, Saturday, in a venue that was admittedly small but nonetheless secure – or so we thought. Two presentations made by comrades from the Balkans (Antipolitika) and Germany (AST) enabled to develop interesting discussions against capitalist war and peace; meetings between comrades who didn’t always know each other personally were very warm and enthusiastic; perspectives for future activities were outlined…

We must now also return for a moment to the “excuses” and “pretexts” put forward by the “organizers” for the “sabotage” perpetrated by pro-Ukrainian Czech governmental “anarchists”; “pretexts” which did not satisfy us at all. First of all, from a semantic point of view, the word “sabotage” derives from “sabot”, i.e. the wooden shoes worn by workers, which they threw into machines in order to destroy them. Therefore, from a programmatic point of view, at the highest level of abstraction, the “saboteurs” are not them, but us! It’s the revolutionary proletariat that sabotages the economy through its uncompromising struggles; it’s us who will sabotage the capitalist war (and its peace!) when the balance of forces will turn in our favor, as a result of the subversive action of our class. Of course, these so-called “anarchists” have already demonstrated their true essence on numerous occasions: they are the reformers of capital, the “alternative” social democrats who are more “radical” than the official ones, the far-left and even ultra-left fractions of capitalism and its democracy… ad nauseam! And they already had the opportunity to prove time and again in the past, and even in the very recent past, their true capacity for nuisance towards any expression, manifestation of the genuine internationalism that explodes in the face of all the defenders of this old rotten dying world (not so much dying as we hope for the moment, alas!). But it would be to fall once again into the trap of the myth of democracy to imagine that we could organize, coordinate and centralize genuine revolutionary and defeatist activity against capitalist war and peace on an international level, without the capitalist forces (its State, its police, its unions, its social democracy, ad nauseam…) reacting, repressing us, banning us from our meeting places and so on. The “organizers” were not prepared for this, and somehow neither we were, despite all the strong reservations we had expressed beforehand. A word about democracy is necessary here…

MYTH AND FETISHISM OF DEMOCRACY

Here, we’d like to address a fundamental point: that of democracy and its dictatorship over our lives and activities, or rather the permanent lack of rupture with democracy. Democracy can by no means be reduced to those forms and categories vulgarly accepted by all: the right to vote, the right of assembly, freedom of the press, legalized parties and trade unions, ad nauseam. Democracy, from the point of view of the communist historical critique, is first and foremost the social dictatorship of capital, of the commodity, of the world market, of the value valorizing itself… it is the negation in action of the irreconcilable antagonism between two social classes, the owners of the means of production and those dispossessed of the means of existence… Democracy is also the toxic poison that infiltrates each of our struggles, our activities, and even our militant structures. Finally, democracy is the establishment of false communities: the nation, the “sovereign people”, money… against the one and only liberating community: the community of proletarian struggle, heralding the genuine human community, the Gemeinwesen! This is to say that the struggle against democracy will be “permanent”, i.e. as long as capitalist social relations exist, and will only end with the definitive destruction of what is destroying us on a daily basis.

Going back to Prague, as soon as we arrived there and faced with the “mess” made by both the “organizers” and the so-called “self-organized assembly”, some of us pointed directly to this crucial issue: the fetishization of democracy. We get organized against capital and its wars, so we cannot count on capital and its democracy to let us quietly structure our activities, to guarantee us “freedom of expression” or the “right of assembly”, to respect “signed contracts” and so on. On the one hand, these are concepts that are alien to the communist movement, and on the other hand, capital only applies them à la carte when it suits it to confirm its domination, but never when it is (or feels) threatened. The “organizers” relied too much on democracy (and its soporific atmosphere) to let the action take place as it was, they relied too much on the fact that democratic forces would not act against us, whoever they might be: the various repressive forces, the police, the secret services, the Ukrainian (or Russian, as well) embassy and its avatars, NATO, the defensist and warmongering “anarchists”, ad nauseam. In short, the “organizers” were too open, too democratic, too compliant, too naïve, giving unfriendly forces a chance to intervene. For the future and the development of subversive activities to come, we must be more aware than ever that this is indeed a social war, a class confrontation, and choose the means, forms and measures accordingly…

One example, among many others, of this (at the very least) naivety on the part of the “organizers”, which we must point out and criticize here, is the security of these events. In addition to the inability of the “organizers” to organize anything eminently practical, such as simply welcoming and accommodating the participants (while they claimed to be able to solve the logistical problems), there was a major problem with the security of participants throughout the “Action Week”. We’re not going to talk about the identity checks by the Czech police at Monday’s demonstration, as we weren’t there. But posting slogans such as “No photography” and “No video recording” on the walls and on the blog is obviously not enough to ensure that this is indeed the case. The “getaways” made by a Czech pro-Ukrainian think tank at the very heart of the “Anti-War Congress” is the very example and evidence, firstly, of the ineffectiveness of grand proclamations on “security” without giving ourselves the real and practical means to assume it, and secondly, of our current incapacity (in the state of our weak forces and as a result of the situation of the class struggle in the Czech Republic, and even in Europe) to organize or participate in such a public event, open to all, more or less.

WHO TO INVITE AND WHO NOT TO INVITE!?

We’d like now to address an issue of a relative importance. In the process of preparing the “Action Week” as a whole, and especially, for our part, the non-public session of the “Anti-War Congress”, the question of who to invite and who not to invite obviously arose. Organizers often turned to us to ask what we thought of particular groups and organizations, and whether it was worth inviting them to this or that level of the event. There’s a thing we’ve been criticized for: why the “big” structures and organizations of the so-called “Left Communism” weren’t welcome at the “Action Week”, and why they weren’t invited at all? First of all, we’d like to make it clear that we’re generally opposed to ALL ideological families (“anarchism”, “Marxism”, “communism”, “councilism”, etc.), but here in this chapter we’re particularly critical of the self-proclaimed “Left Communism”.

First of all, we do not agree with the terminology “Left Communism” used to designate the revolutionary forces that emerged from the 1917-21 period, even though it is a historical denomination that embraces the historical materialization of ruptures with social democracy. Those designated by the counter-revolution as “Left communists” are, for the most part, the genuine and only authentic communists of that period. Programmatically (despite the common terminology imposed by revisionist history), they have nothing in common with those they have in fact continually opposed throughout their struggle.

The fact that Lenin (and behind him other red-painted social democrats using a “communist” rhetoric), persisted in denouncing communist practice as an “infantile disorder” and communists themselves as “anarchists”, “leftists”, “anti-party” elements, etc., is but a demonstration of the growing and clearer distinction between the Bolsheviks’ counter-revolutionary policies and the revolutionary expressions that continued to struggle against the current of centrism.

The definition of the term “communist”, as Marx said, is not determined by what a militant says about himself, but rather by what he’s doing, i.e., by his actual communist action in historical perspectives.

There is no such thing as “Left” communism, or “Right” or “Center” communism. Communism is defined in and by the revolutionary practice of men and women who struggle for the destruction of the State, and therefore stand from the point of view of the destruction of the army, nations, capitalist management bodies, capital and work, etc.

It’s no coincidence that social-democratic leftists were so keen to denounce as “infantile” and “diseased” those who opposed their policy of State reconstruction and management, those who advocated revolutionary war against peace agreements with the bourgeoisie, those who fought against entryism in the trade unions and against revolutionary parliamentarianism. The social democrats – and we’re talking here in historical, not formal, terms, in terms of forces which, beyond their name, practically assume responsibility for reforming the world! – the social democrats intended to appropriate the title of “communist” (without further qualification), because this was the best way, at a time when revolution was on the agenda, to protect themselves from all those who would denounce their practice of State reconstruction as counter-revolutionary.

And since they couldn’t deny the revolutionary character of the actions of those who opposed them, they attributed to communist militants the adjective “Leftist”, to designate them as “diseased” and “infantile”, as well as to stand on a political line, where no qualitative rupture appears, not even in the terminology.

If we sometimes use pleonasms like “revolutionary communists”, “internationalist communists” or even that distortion expressed by “Left Communism”, whereas we don’t accept the terminology of our enemies, it’s only because the weight of history rewritten by the Stalinists and other right-wing or left-wing bourgeois, is, like all ideologies, a force that has materialized throughout these decades of counter-revolution. We have to resort to such language tricks to distinguish ourselves from all those – and there are many! – who have indeed violently plundered our flags, banners and mottos.

This being said, and to make it very clear, our historical programmatic references are obviously to be found in all the militants, groups, organizations and structures that have made the most determined ruptures with the ideology and practice of social democracy, including its “extremes”. Whether these ruptures are called “Left communism” or “revolutionary anarchism” or whatever… But we love communism too much, as a project, as a movement, as a dynamic, as a total subversion of this world and what exists nowadays, as a human community… to claim to be part of any “Left” that is only a sad and dreary mirror of it…

Going back to more “concrete” aspects of the question, we affirm clearly and unequivocally that none of the organizations openly belonging to any of the ideological families has been invited – families which aren’t internationalists in deed (in the sense we understand it!) but nevertheless get organized on an international level, constitute de facto “internationals”, and claim to frame the struggle of the proletariat (be it the aforementioned “communist” or “Marxist” or “anarchist” family): neither the ICC (International Communist Current), nor the ICT (Internationalist Communist Tendency), nor all their offshoots, nor the various PCInt (International Communist Party), nor the IWA (International Workers’ Association), nor the IAF (International of Anarchist Federations), ad nauseam…

For us, it was not a question of sectarianism, but of setting criteria to enable constructive discussion and progress in the task of promoting revolutionary defeatism and encouraging its development as an integral part of the proletarian movement. We want to stress that we need a real discussion, not just listening to each other’s contributions without being able to reach a common point.

We saw the “Action Week” (or rather the non-public session of the “Anti-War Congress”, and even originally the international meeting as we expected it) not as D-Day, but as a moment in the process of strengthening, developing and consolidating the defeatist revolutionary community, which is not to be built, but is already historically pre-existing, emerging from the fertile soil of class societies and the need to abolish them. A process that includes the exchange of texts and critiques, discussions, the organization of concrete actions, the continuity of the community, and so on… in short, the very opposite of what the left and far left of capital has accustomed us to in its conferences and congresses… A ruthless critique of “conferentism” and “congressism” is more necessary and fundamental than ever…

What we hoped for (and continue to promote) is the building of stronger relationships within the camp of revolutionary defeatism and, if possible, achieving a certain level of programmatic centralization while retaining a certain decentralization of actions.

Unfortunately (or more prosaically, hic et nunc!), we cannot interpret the “defeatist” practices of so-called “Left Communism” groups as being aimed at this objective.

Based on the activities of certain groups, we get rather the impression that their aim is not to build a genuine community of struggle (centralized programmatically, but not necessarily practically), but to build a “party”, and a mass party furthermore. By way of example, we can see in the activity of the “No War but the Class War” collectives and platform an attempt to create a kind of “minimum program” to which as many people as possible can adhere without exacerbating the particularisms of those various elements; in this way, we can consider them as nothing less than recruitment offices. We can see in these practices certain concessions to those who are programmatically unclear, so that they can bring the mass dimension to their activities. For our part, we want to do exactly the opposite.

Of course, we didn’t expect all the groups invited to the “Action Week” to be on the same programmatic level, and we’re well aware that some organizations’ critique of capitalism is not developed and deepened in the same way. But our hope was to enable them, through discussion and common practice, to reach a higher, more dialectical and therefore more radical level of understanding of the reality of the world based on exploitation, and thus to open up the possibility of a common struggle.

Another thing we cannot endorse is the effort of so-called “Left Communism” groups to prefer so-called “theoretical” discussions to discussions about the real, practical struggle of the defeatist revolutionary movement. Their methodological approach is certainly based on the assumption that we should first agree on the origin of the war – which for most of them seems to be the decadence of capitalism, before discussing anything else.

For us, there should be no separation between a so-called “theoretical” discussion and a “practical” one. What we’re interested in is a discussion of how we can concretely struggle against capitalist war and peace, and what we can practically do about it. And within such a discussion, theoretical and programmatic questions will necessarily arise and be addressed. In short, we prefer to go from practice to theory, whereas for all these groups, it seems to be the other way round.

But this didn’t prevent most of these “big” organizations of the so-called “Left Communism” from inviting themselves and wreaking havoc in the mess left by the “organizers”, in short adding a serious layer of disorganization to the disorganization inherent in the “organizers” themselves. As one comrade, very active on site, put it: “their activities aimed at taking control or at least setting their agenda were significantly consolidated by the chaos caused by the disorganization”.

Shortly before the “Action Week”, on May 1st to be precise (you can’t make that up!), the ICT published an article on its blog announcing that they will come to Prague, either directly or via their satellite structures such as the “No War but the Class War” collectives. Among other things, it was asserted that “the call of the Prague Action Week is not different in essence from the five basic points which those of us in the No War but the Class War (NWBCW) initiative adhere to. […] None of the eight points in the description of who the Prague call is aimed at contradicts the basic aims of NWBCW. Indeed we could quite happily expand those five points to encapsulate the Prague eight.”1

Some, claiming to be from the so-called “Left Communism”, pointed out that none of the “anarchist” groups invited corresponded to the criteria developed in those “eights points”, while the groups from the so-called “Left Communism” did! “The original list of invitees contained about 60 names, most of them anarchists, anarcho-communists, communization, black bloc, who could fit one or more of the criteria. Missing were the names of left communists, both Italian or German-Dutch communist left, Leninists with internationalist positions, who fit all the criteria.” To this type of argument, we reply, as we did it previously by letter, that while “theoretical positions” may correspond to these criteria, it is rather the actual practice of organizations claiming to belong to an ideological political family (in this case, and as a reminder, the so-called “Left Communism”) that does not coincide with the points put forward in the document in question.

For example: it is above all their “position” (and actual practice) regarding Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and their whole policy of rebuilding the State and the national economy in Russia, and of repressing strikes and proletarian struggles, that does not correspond to both the fourth and seventh points, namely:

* To those individuals, and groups, who fight against the policy of “defense of the national economy”, and “sacrifice in favor of the war economy”, to those who do not accept the expansionist tactics of their own bourgeoisie, even if it faces an economic, political or military attack.
* To all those who recognize in their practice that the proletariat has no fatherland to defend. Our enemy is not the proletarians driven into the trenches on the other side of the front, but the bourgeoisie – in practice, above all, the bourgeoisie “in our own country”, “our own” bourgeoisie, the one that directly organizes our exploitation.

On the whole, all the groups of the so-called “Left Communism” are calling for, or more prosaically are advocating, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which was a real stab in the back for proletarians in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, a “betrayal” some would say!), which is in total opposition to what we mean by revolutionary defeatism (in the sixth point):

* To all those who want to turn the inter-bourgeois war into a revolutionary war, the war between states into a struggle for the destruction of all states.

In order to deepen somehow the issue of Brest-Litovsk and the agreements/relationships that the proletariat could develop/build with its class enemy, let’s just say that any “proletarian power”, as the Bolsheviks falsely claimed to be in Russia from October onwards, could never remain so if it negotiated, parleyed or signed agreements that contravene our class interests. If a “proletarian power” sits down at the negotiating table with the bourgeois State (whatever its formal representatives may be), the latter has already won, and the “proletarian power” loses its subversive substance, if it has any at all. If the capitalist State is “negotiating” with the proletariat, it’s because our struggle, our offensive, is already very much in decline, that we’re on the defensive, on the ropes, that we’ve already lost… The bourgeois State is “negotiating” with us only to crush us definitively…

And we won’t go into the other disagreements we have with groups of the so-called “Left Communism”, such as their claim to the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. Overall, this meeting of pacifists was essentially aimed at organizing outside official social democracy, but not against it; it gave rise to spectacular speeches and sensational statements, but not to a real rupture with the methods, practices and programs of social democracy.

And as for the so-called “Zimmerwald Left”, the presence of communist militants in this mess ultimately served only as a radical guarantee, as a recruitment office to bring genuinely proletarian expressions back into the ruts of a social democracy whose facade had simply been cleaned. It’s hardly surprising, then, that almost all organizations of the so-called “Left Communism” now wants to do “a new Zimmerwald” – it fits them perfectly. Finally, to paraphrase Rosa Luxembourg (!!!), we can basically sum up the activity of the so-called “Zimmerwald Left” as follows: “Better a bad Zimmerwald than no Zimmerwald at all”!

The Bolshevik Party and Lenin himself actively promoted the counter-revolutionary, pacifist program of the International and its various member parties. This is in opposition to the fifth point:

* To all those who do not consider themselves pacifists but revolutionaries. To all those who do not aspire to a bourgeois peace where the exploitation of our labor force can continue in slightly different conditions.

What’s more, the so-called “Left Communism” defends (more or less, depending on the shades favored by each of these organizations) the position of the Third International on the colonial question. This is not in line with the third point either:

To those who do not support either faction of the bourgeoisie against the other, but fight against each of them. Those who do not defend or participate in inter-class fronts.

LET’S SUMMARIZE THE EVENTS IN PRAGUE

There were two different levels with two equally different contents.

On the one hand, there was the “Action Week”, with demonstrations, happenings and other “festivities”, which remained in the sphere of the spectacle. The organizers’ basic idea was to make revolutionary defeatism more visible, to compete with pro-war anarchists, to offer themselves as a “pole of attraction for the undecided”. But all this proved illusory and, above all, counter-productive in the light of our weak forces. We criticized the organizers in this sense, and made it clear that such an event could not be a demonstration of the existence of the anti-war movement, of the movement against capitalist exploitation more generally, since this movement exists only in embryonic form and is currently limited to a few scattered minorities around the world. We have also stressed that revolutionaries cannot create such a movement. They cannot (and don’t want to) bring any kind of consciousness to the proletariat, because this can only arise from the material conditions in which the proletariat stands, and from struggle of our class against these conditions. The task of the communists is to expose the invariant content, the real immediate struggle of the working class against exploitation, which lies behind the more or less clear manifestations of the proletariat, to link it to other struggles in the present and in the past, and to generalize it. We also reminded them that our task and our only interest is the potential consolidation of the defeatist revolutionary forces that already exist, which are willing and able to oppose the war both programmatically and practically.

We did not participate in these events, and at no time did we promote (on our blog, mailing-lists, etc.) this level of activity; on the contrary, we criticized it (too often “in private”, alas!). At the same time, we weren’t strong enough to impose our point of view on the organizers and persuade them not to hold these more than anecdotal events.

On the other hand, there was the “Anti-War Congress” (or conference, or international meeting), an event we considered extremely important and which we publicly promoted as an attempt to organize and centralize our defeatist revolutionary activities, to strengthen our already and previously existing community of struggle, which is based among other things (and as far as the few minorities who already know each other are concerned) on the practice of different groups, on common discussions, on practical activities. For us, the aim of this international meeting was really to try to set up a certain level of centralization and formalization of existing practices, and to try to direct them towards a certain materialization: a common campaign against war, as we specified in our contribution to the mailing-list. This is also what we tried to develop and encourage in Prague. The future will show whether our attempts have been in vain, or whether they will give rise to something useful for proletarian resistance against war and against social peace.

In a very fraternal critique we received a few days before the “Action Week”, some comrades had this to say about our hope of being able to “overcome our isolation” through this action: “There are no shortcuts, there are no magic formulas, it is the immediate struggle of the proletariat against exploitation, for the defense of its material needs and the development of this struggle that provides the substance which constitutes the process of proletarian organization and determines the actions of revolutionary minorities. The rupture with isolation – at all levels – only develops in this process, as a development of proletarian associationism; everything else belongs to the world of spectacle and serves only to divert and neutralize the various attempts of our class to get organized. It’s like the myth of certain currents of the past who believed that the call for a general strike was the basis for initiating revolution.”

This is absolutely true, and we fully agree with this point of view. We are aware that we cannot create an anti-war movement, nor can we stop the war. But that doesn’t mean we have to wait for the class struggle to develop without doing anything. Insofar as the rupture with capital’s social relations is limited to minorities, we must organize those elements whose practice expresses the ruptures with capital, we must clarify our positions, the lessons drawn from the proletariat’s present and past struggles, we must synthesize the experience accumulated in the development of revolution and counter-revolution. We are an integral part of the proletariat as a class in struggle and an expression of this process, and we must assume the real, practical tasks of the subversive movement, even if we know that the material consequences of our activity are negligible for the moment.

Finally, the events in Prague have shown us (to inversely paraphrase the renegade Lenin) “what’s (not) to be done”!? From the outset, we didn’t want to organize neither a public meeting, let alone a demonstration (to prove what to whom!?), nor a bookfair and various additional and related activities to be grouped together under the label “Action Week”. What we’ve been focusing on (and continue to focus on) is the need to coordinate and centralize our activities with other militant structures, not “simply” against war and social peace, but to actually participate in the vital process, the elementary dynamic, of transforming capitalist war and peace into a world social revolution, a revolution for the abolition of capitalist social relations, a revolution for communism!

And to achieve this, a non-public international meeting between groups and structures that already know each other and are already acting together, remains nowadays a necessity that we continue to emphasize more than ever. Unvarnished and unadvertised, with no prior resounding declarations!!!

AS A POSTSCRIPT

Following this immense organizational fiasco, it was only to be expected: the new Torquemada struck again, or rather they talked shit as it would be more appropriate to say, in this case through that furuncle of the working class constituted by the insignificant little paranoid sect known as the ICC. We can indeed smell the fetid breath of the lesson-giver sermonizers, all those scavengers who chuckled after the events in Prague, and who have come for the antepenultimate time to whisper their dark advices to us, mixed with a few phrases of demagogic admiration, as good “bankrupts of the revolution” (dixit Bordiga) they are. And it’s still the same vultures who, for decades, have been circling around our corpses of proletarians slaughtered by repression, while sneering: “They should not have taken up arms” (Plekhanov).

If these were nothing more than the pitiful, bitter comments of social-democratic hyenas disguised as revolutionaries, they could be ignored and firmly thrown in their appropriate place of destination: the dustbins of history. But once again, and for more than forty years, when the ICC reserves the right to express its sententious rumbling from the heights of its ideological chairs and from the balconies of political spectacle, it’s always the pernicious intrigues, slanders, denunciations, and in fine the police version of history, that triumph. So, let’s quote one last time the venomous bile of these mortifying Kapos, from their recent statements on the events in Prague: “Regarding the official committee’s position on security, we should also make the point that Tridni Valka claims a certain continuity with the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, although there have been some unstated disagreements between them in the past, and the GCI as such no longer exists. But the GCI was a group which had a very dangerous and destructive trajectory – above all a flirtation with terrorism [our emphasis, CW] which posed a serious danger to the whole revolutionary movement. This involved a kind of cloak and dagger [idem] approach which Tridni Valka appear to have taken on, and which certainly contributed to the disorganisation of the week and the distrust that many of the participants developed towards them.” Amen!

The ICC, like other similar sects, can only understand and denounce the activity of revolutionaries as “conspiracies”. But to conspire is to breathe, as the saying goes, and for our part we claim loud and clear, against all attempts to shackle our class, the international conspiracy of the proletariat! Yes indeed, we conspire like “steam and electricity conspire against the status quo” (as Marx said), we conspire “like the sun against darkness” (idem)… In any case, it’s very likely that the Czech (and other) State security services will delight in this kind of “revelation” and “information” about our group’s alleged links “with terrorism”. Thank you to the stoolies of the ICC, that would do better to rename itself ICC-B, with a B for “Bolshevik” but above all for “Betrayer”! Fucking SNITCHES!!!

1 As a reminder, the “eight points” explaining to whom the Prague call was addressed can be read on Action Week’s blog: https://actionweek.noblogs.org/english/ and on our own: https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/action-week-prague-20-26-may-2024/.

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