Internationalist Communist Tendency

The document which follows comes from a speech at a public meeting held by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) on 16 October 1979, two days after the death of Onorato Damen. Neither we nor our Italian comrades have ever made a fetish of Damen, despite his stature as a revolutionary, and the enormous contribution he made to the foundation of what today is our Internationalist Communist Tendency. However, we could not let the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his death go unmarked.

We have been asked from several quarters to give our views on the new group, Emancipación. As a context for our reflections we start with a brief summary of our guidelines for debating, orienting and regrouping the world’s revolutionary forces.

2019 finds humanity in an increasingly dangerous place. The consequences of global economic stagnation, itself the product of a much deeper crisis of profitability, can be seen in the rise of nationalism, racism and xenophobia. These in turn threaten not only to add to the increasing proliferation of unending wars around the world but to the possibility of more general conflict further down the line. Not unconnected to the current wars are the environmental disasters which the pursuit of profit has already inflicted on millions across the globe. If allowed to proceed unchecked capitalism threatens, in one way or another, the very existence of the only home humanity has.

Twenty years ago, from 24 March to 10 June 1999, United States and other NATO airplanes conducted bombing raids over what was left of Yugoslavia. Ever since the late 1980s, as capitalism’s world economic crisis sharpened and the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia went down with the USSR, rival war lords had been whipping up ethnic and religious divisions in order to carve out new state territories for themselves.