It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our comrade Olivier, which took place on July 3rd.
Only mortal illness was able to crush the generosity, passion and tenacity of a true revolutionary militant, who for more than fifty years fought to radically change this world, the inhuman world of the bourgeoisie, a world which has long outlived its usefulness. He did so without sparing himself, ever since, at the age of twenty, he approached the positions of the international Communist Left, and participated in the foundation of the International Communist Current (ICC).1 There, due to his skills and dedication, he held roles of responsibility, until, at the beginning of the 2000s, he and other companions were thrown out – or forced to leave – with the most infamous but, of course, unfounded accusations. In reality, as always happens in these cases, the slander against Olivier and other comrades aimed at discrediting the criticisms of politically inconvenient elements who did not share, and opposed, the new political direction taken by the organisation they had helped to create.
Many comrades would have been so deeply demoralised and disappointed that they would have abandoned revolutionary militancy, but Olivier, amongst very few others, did not, and after having participated for a short time in the activity of the Internal Fraction of the ICC (IFICC), he embarked on the path which led him towards our Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT).
For years, practically alone, he carried out with patience and determination a political work aimed at sowing the seeds of our organisation in France. He edited the French editions of two books by Onorato Damen, one on Amadeo Bordiga, and the Selected Writings; at the same time, he resumed regular publication of the magazine Bilan et Perspectives, writing original articles and translating documents from the national sections of the ICT.
While he carried out his tenacious, more directly militant activity, making and intensifying contacts with comrades interested in our positions, he developed his work as a historian, always from the perspective of revolutionary militancy, never academia; this work materialised in the publication of texts on the Italian Fraction Abroad in the 1930s; on the KAPD; on the Turkish Left; in the publication in French of texts from the magazine Kommunist, the organ of the “Left Communists” of the Bolshevik Party in 1918; and on the Russian Communist Left opposition in the 1920s. They are important works, which make a notable contribution to the knowledge of pages of history that are usually unknown or, worse, deliberately distorted by Stalinism and its political heirs.
His intense activity finally bore fruit with the formation of the Groupe révolutionnaire internationaliste (GRI), affiliated to the ICT, whose official foundation was in Paris in September 2023, during a meeting against imperialist war. At that meeting he astonished all of us who knew how many months of cancer treatment he had already survived, speaking for more than 45 minutes on the threat of war and our response, as well as dealing calmly with insulting attacks from the floor of the meeting. It was a final demonstration of his courage and integrity. Without taking anything away from the other comrades, it can be said that Olivier made a decisive contribution to the presence of the ICT in France, and he did so knowing that perhaps he would not survive, so that in France there would be something, a revolutionary point of reference, to build from.
Olivier knew how to pass on to his comrades his passion for communism, which combined a deep knowledge of the history of left-wing fractions with a keen eye for world developments. His interest led him to take international relations into account, which he summarized and explained clearly. The worsening of imperialist tensions represented for him a source of grave danger, and confirmed his conviction that the threat of war had to be opposed by a revolutionary perspective. This has motivated his latest political interventions, and the search for forms of intervention through which this resolutely internationalist perspective might find its way.
He vigorously defended the lessons of historical experience, in which he saw inescapable class positions, and was equally attentive to the changing conditions of social struggles. The eruption of movements with sometimes unexpected forms was a constant source of interest for him, as were the material transformations of capitalism he had witnessed with the erosion of large working-class concentrations in a country like France. He had drawn from his own experience a distrust of the sclerotic, sectarian practices of organizations that devitalize them while exhausting their militants.
His revolutionary spirit was less attached to the outward forms of the communist movement, which he believed to be permanently polluted by Stalinism and its reactions, than to its living substance. “We’re not yes-men”, “we don’t have a mom or dad”, he liked to joke in his strong, warm and slightly provocative voice. By this he meant that all communists must be capable of examining situations and using their own thinking to intervene in their development, rather than acting out of conformism or the recitation of a few agreed-upon formulas.
He also wanted us to question the answers he himself gave, to show that we were capable of playing a role in class movements. He challenged simplistic formulas and the excesses that justify them, pointing to the need to make a positive contribution to the resistance of the exploited. For him, it was important for communists to rise to the occasion, i.e. to be capable of making real progress in class struggles and consciousness.
With Olivier, a comrade who we are sorry to have lost, it would not be an exaggeration to point to him, as an example to those who remain.
With his passing, a real communist, one of us, has gone.
Au revoir, Olivier
Internationalist Communist Tendency
July 2024
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