Our presence on the Internet - ICG

Who are we?

Rather than being the fruit of the subjective efforts of a handful of militants, a communist organisation is first and foremost the result of historical determinations that irresistibly push the proletariat to constitute itself as a class, to organise itself as a force, as party, distinct from, and opposed to, all bourgeois parties. The organisational effort of proletarian minorities, concretised in time and space by the creation of a communist group, is fundamentally determined by communism as a movement and by its historical party, i.e. by the accumulated memory of the whole of the experience of previous struggles, condensed into a programme. The creation of our group did not escape these historical determinations.

The Internationalist Communist Group (ICG) has existed since 1978.

We publish central reviews in French, German, English, Arabic, Spanish, Hungarian, Kurdish and Portuguese. We also have texts in Greek, Persian, Russian, Serbo-Croat and Turkish.

Our group has no national reality. It is not linked to any country and does not refer to the history of any nation.

Its starting point was the centralisation of a handful of militants coming from different continents, speaking different languages, who, from many different experiences of struggles and reflexions on the defeat of these struggles, were willing to develop and centralise their common militant activity worldwide together.

With the common political content of our ruptures, we then chose to formalise our discussions and polemics in a common organisational structure and define ourselves as the "Internationalist Communist Group".

"Internationalist" - Well aware that this term is redundant when used in association with the term "communist", we characterise ourselves as "internationalists" first of all to stress that communism, from its very origins and as the movement, excludes country, nation, national struggle. It signifies that our group is directly organised on an international level. We did not first constitute our group as a "national party" and then later open ourselves up to the "international". We started directly with a central organ, translated into different languages of course, which always deals with the general interests of the movement, always stresses the homogeneity of the conditions of exploitation of the proletariat throughout the world and always puts forward what all these conditions have in common: the reality of capital and therefore of the proletariat and the conditions for the realisation of communism.

On another level, the term "internationalist" also allows us to dissociate ourselves from the many counter-revolutionary variants disguised as communists (Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Bordigists,...) who, by more or less shamefully supporting one or other so-called revolutionary nation, allow dominant ideology to amalgamate communism with the red-painted capitalism of the so-called "communist countries".

"Communist" - From time immemorial, all the bourgeois fractions (Versaillais, fascists, republicans, Stalinists, liberals,...) have fiercely attacked the spectre constantly haunting the capitalist world: communism. However, revolutionaries (and our modest grouping no more than the others) never let themselves be impressed by the flood of insults and the continuous falsifications formulated throughout history against communism. Communism - the human community, the collective beinng, the classless society - remains the perspective for which we passionately fight. It is as communists that, facing the capitalist catastrophe, the dictatorship of profit and money, the constant degradation of our living conditions, we loudly and clearly demand the abolition of this world of death, the abolition of private property, of the state, of the exploitation of man by man. With our comrades throughout history and all over the world, we once again affirm the necessity for a classless society, without money, without work, where the free disposal of time and things will constitute the only terrain for human activity to blossom.

"Group" - By forming a group, we are once again expressing the historical will of revolutionary proletarians to organise themselves as a force, to centralise themselves as party. If we do not claim to be a "party", it is because we know that true constitution into class (and therefore party) does not depend upon any pompous self-proclamations, but upon a material qualitative step in the social confrontation against Capital, State, bourgeoisie. Therefore we consider ourselves to be a faction of the communist movement; we struggle to exist as an international nucleus of the centralisation of the proletariat and, as such, participate in the efforts of vanguard minorities to centralise the community of struggle that exists throughout the world.

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It is thus as the Internationalist Communist Group that we have chosen (for more than twenty years now) to carry on our international discussions. To reappropriate history - the communist programme - we have naturally centred our interest and discussions on the highest moment of rupture that our class has produced up until now: the international revolutionary wave of struggles of 1917-1923. The numerous texts published in our reviews which try to draw, without any ideological a-priori, the lessons of the revolution and counterrevolution in Russia, Germany, Hungary, America,... during that period are testimony to this collective work and the passionate debates it gave rise to.

But beyond the centralisation of the international discussion on 1917-23, our reviews also fight against all ideologies and take a stand on many questions: the criticism of science, work, economy, philosophy, texts against the State, reproduction of historical texts of our class ("our class memory"), texts taking a stand on facts and current events, on historical polemics,...

Of course, it is impossible to describe here the real life of our group, the essence of the lessons we draw from history and even less so the content of our positions. However our reviews, texts, leaflets,... describe quite well how:
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communism, the classless society, does not mean the end of history but the beginning of the conscious history of the human species.
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capitalism, by its universal essence and by the simplification of class contradictions, creates the conditions for its own negation, the conditions for communism as well as the social force that will impose it: the proletariat.
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the revolutionary dictatorship of our class will abolish the state and will crush any attempts to restore value.
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democracy cannot be reduced to a form of capitalist domination but constitutes the substance of bourgeois dictatorship.
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the communist movement opposes all bourgeois parties of the "right" or of the "left", parliamentarianism, trade unionism and all the forces that maintain social peace.
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the affirmation of communism is the negation of the whole of present society, negation of private property, of money,... but also of work, school, family, science,...

To give an overview of our contributions, we recently produced a general summary of the articles published in our reviews in French and Spanish; this brochure is available on request at our central addresses (post box or e-mail).

Besides the central reviews that we produce regularly, in 1989 we also published in Spanish, French and Arabic our "Theses of programmatical Orientation", the English version coming out in 1999. These Theses represent an attempt to synthesise the international discussion and the communist criticism that we have continued from our very origin. We did not want to elaborate the nth version of some or other holy text, but to present a "snap-shot", a moment, of the collective permanent work of programmatical restoration that we have started. Enemies of all bibles, with this kind of document we are only seeking an increasingly precise delimitation of the communist practice of rupture from capitalist society. Our Theses try to express the real movement of abolition of the established order; they are thus, of course, imperfect and unfinished and will remain so until revolution itself puts the pleasures of a life without money, class and State into practice.

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Sectarianism is one of the characteristics of periods of social peace and groupings of militants themselves hardly escape the crazy logic of competition of a society centred on division and on the war of all against all. Aware of these difficulties and willing to fight against sectarianism, we try (just as we do in our internal debates) to systematically put forward our convergence in the framework of the international community of struggle.

In this sense, we call on all those who continue to fight against a world based on the exploitation of man by man to appropriate our texts for themselves, to reproduce, circulate them and to consider our reviews as theirs. The result of collective works, our texts are no one's property in particular, they belong to a class that is living and fighting to abolish its own condition as an exploited class, and hence all classes, all exploitation.

Just like the revolutionaries who preceded us, we conceive our press as an indispensable means of revolutionary propaganda, collective agitation, programmatical development, action.

We want our texts to be subjected to a militant reading, discussed, criticised and used to confront other positions in order to clearly define the terrain of revolution and counterrevolution and to support, always more determinedly, the revolutionary direction imposed by our class in its constitution as a class and a worldwide historical force.