On the 25th, 26th and 27th April the Internationalist Communist
Party held only the sixth congress in its fifty four year history.1
Unlike the Annual General Meetings of the Party Congresses are
called for particular purposes to mark a new stage in the development
of the organisation.
The current Congress was called largely to consolidate a new and
younger membership in the organisation. To this end new Theses
on the Current Situation of Capitalism and Reformism, on globalisationand
imperialism, on trades unions and on the tactics of communist
in capitalismís periphery were presented and debated. These
will all be published in full in the next issue of Prometeo, the
theoretical magazine of the Party. They will be translated into
English and appear in special issue of Internationalist Communist
central review of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary
Party.
The CWO also sent a delegation to the congress which not only
conveyed the the greetings of the comrades in the UK but also
of those comrades who are in discussion with the Bureau in North
America (particularly Los Angeles Workers Voice and The
Internationalist) , Scandanavia and France.
The Congress opened with the presentation of the theses on the
current situation of capitalism The main plank of the argument
was that capitalism has been in an acute economic crisis for over
twenty years. This crisis has been unleashed by the operation
of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism,
despite adopting all kinds of different strategies has been unable
to escape from this crisis which offers only a progressive worsening
of the living standards of the working class. Every country today
has a national debt which exceeds 50% of the Gross Domestic Product.
The numbers of the very poor has reached 42 millions out of 250
millions in the United States whilst in Europe the same figure
is 50 millions. In this situation the working class response has
been at one of the lowest levels in its history partly on account
of the unprecedented restructuring of capitalist industry, partly
due to the fact that the workers had been inoculated against revolution
by seventy years of Stalinist and Social Democratic mystifications.
Our point of departure as a communist vanguard is to start again
from ABC so that the working re-acquires its own class identity
and ultimately its own class party.
The theses on globalisation took into account the difference between
the current technological revolution of the microprocessor and
earlier technological revolutions under capitalism. Whilst all
previous technological innovations have led to a reduction in
the workforce they have also led to an extension of production
into new sectors to sustain the development of that new technology.
Today this is not happening since the microprocessor revolution
leads only to a reduction of the workforce without an expansion
of new forms of production.
The Theses on the Tactics of Communist in the Periphery
were an update to the draft published in Internationalist
Communist No.3 amended to take account of the collapse
of the Stalinist bloc. The few minor changes that were made was
testimony to the validity of the method used in drawing them up
twelve years ago.
The Theses on the unions focussed on the question of the fragmentation
of the great industrial concentrations of the past and noted that
the factory was not the only area of action of the working class
under modern capitalist totalitarian conditions. Factory groups
may still be formed but there was also a need to take into account
the fact that the class struggle will also articulate itself on
a territorial basis, a factor which communists have to take into
account.
The Congress was animated by a lively debate, in which the youngest
members were highly visible. Generally the debates focussed on
practical problems such as the role of communists in demand struggles.
This culminated in the adoption of new statutes designed to secure
the effective operation of the party as a party of cadres (i.e.
committed and active members) in the future.
Finally the Bureau Platform was amended. For the last three or so years both the P.C.Int and the CWO have bandoned their own individual platforms and have used only the Bureau Platform. However this only exposed the need to make some aspects of the Platform clearer. The CWO Annual General Meeting of December 1996 had already suggested some amendments and passed a resolution mandating the delegates to present and discuss them at the VIth Congress. This they duly did. Fundamentally there were three areas of alteration; The Platform was made more precise in certain areas by inserting some historical dates, criticisms of Trotskyism and Stalinism (which were criticised obliquely in the original version) were stated more clearly, and the section on democracy was expanded to include our views on Parliamentarism and electoral campaigns. Here the debate from the floor exactly mirrored that held within the CWO itself which was further evidence of the fundamental unity of our two organisations not only on matters of basic positions but also on methodology. The comrades of the PCInt adopted a resolution on the revised Platform which stated that
The Platform of the Bureau drawn up on the basis of Marxist methods and principles and in the political line of the internationalist movement of the present time, represents thus the common basis which is complete and general enough to be adopted as the political Platform of both the current members of the International Bureau.
This Platform is now ready and will be published as a separate
pamphlet soon. Those interested in receiving it in document form
as it was presented to the Congress should send an A4 sae.
Footnote
1. We have published articles on the early history of the PCInt in Workers Voice these are still available
50 Years of Clandestine Prometeo WV70
The PCInt in 1944
Part One in WV73
Part Two in WV74
The End of World War Two in Italy WV78