An Open Discussion on the ICC and Current Issues

Your attitude is disturbing. ICCs internal documents have been leaked. Publicly making available a revolutionary organization's secret documents is a police method for every sane female or male, young or old, European or Asian person. If you don't think that ICC is a revolutionary organization it is fine. But for people like me who see it as an organization that belongs to communist left tradition supporting ICC is a duty.

I hear what you are saying Jamal and I for one think it is encouraging that someone who has remained close to the ICC and one of the tiny handful of people who have participated in the english language forum of the ICC you are at least asking some of the right questions, though you wouldn't of course be the first. However as someone who has never been a member of the ICC but also an old a '68er' associated with one of the much earlier of many splits in the ICC, I'm afraid I am marked out as one of 'the enemy' despite recognising that the organisation, or at least some of it's (ex) members, has still managed to make some useful contributions to discussions including on this site for instance. My formal organisational commitments are long past but I remain at least a critical sympathiser with some elements emmerging from the left communist tradition such as the ICT, Mouvement Communiste and Internationalist Perspective. However I think there is a long and difficult path ahead before any degree of healthy unity among genuine communists can be achieved and this will depend as much on objective changes in the crisis of capitalism and class struggle as on the subjective efforts of the existing or newly emmerging communist minorities with some existing organisations inevitably falling by the wayside in the process. If it happens at all it will need people to re-examine and draw strength from a wider range of experiences in the class struggle both past and current outside of the narrow ideological frameworks that have sustained past minority groups with their roots in past events.

And now I'm taking a break from all this for a bit.

Quite frankly the ICC is not open to discussion according to all the available evidence. If they want to have secret internal discussions to decide positions and then announce them then they are welcome to do so. It's a bit of a cheap shot to publicise those bulletins but quite honestly it's hard to see how it harms the organisation, it's a bit strange to insist that they welcome discussion and then keep those discussions secret even though the aim of them is to produce positions that will be published.

Mikhail just seems to be a controversialist at this point.

This is what mikail is referring to. What GIGC did was clearly wrong, however the way this article was put out didn't help the ICC in anyway.
http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201405/9742/communique-our-read....

No open forums for left com discussion? What about worldsocialism.org/SPGB/forum? Or revleft.com even in the groups section?
As for secret discussion papers, the only thing that should be secret is people's identities not discussion.

jondwhite;

In Turkey almost every week police is raiding houses of individuals who belong to tiny and small leftist groups. I feel like in western Europe/North America people might have forgotten that police and state are real and hence revolutionary activity is really challenging them. So, a revolutionary group has every right to keep secret whatever it deem it necessary to keep secret. Honestly, I can't believe I am even trying to explain that.

Yes I rush. As I rush -for example- to the defense of anacho-syndicalist comrades who are imprisoned in Serbia by whatever means I can, because I consider anarchist syndicalists as genuine internationalist revolutionaries even though I disagree with them on several points. Similarly I feel it my comradely duty to rush to the defense of the ICC -by word or by other means- if I think it is under attack.

In my world view secretly acquiring and publishing a revolutionary organization's internal documents is a counter-revolutionary activity, just as imprisoning revolutionaries is.

I studied in several states' archives and I read publicly accessible police surveillance records on revolutionaries. I read FBI, Scotland Yard, and Okhrana documents. Nobody should fool themselves about police. The police do care and is very much interested in the tiniest and miniscule revolutionary group. This is in fact their job.

Today of course there is something unprecedented. I doubt the police attitude has changed at all but people in the radical left milieu seem to believe that they are actually politically irrelevant so police has nothing to do with it. This cynical attitude is utterly false. When the world war broke out in 1914 only few radicals took an internationalist anti-war stance around the world. Few of them were known by the public and even in the left many ridiculed those internationalists. Police did not. One should only look at the Okhrana police files to see how they devoted special attention to internationalist radicals. Their world view was perverted. The Russian police considered internationalists as German agents, as traitors to the nation. This may look stupid but the police had a point. The radicals like the bolsheviks aimed to subvert the Russian army from within during the war. Were they effective? Not at all! Internationalist bolsheviks were probably even smaller than the ICC! But for the state bolsheviks were -together with the anarchists- the most dangerous political tendency.

Also political groups have every right to have a internal culture of discussion, all anarchist groups do it, it's not something that only happens in left communist organisations.

I might be missing something but since when is it out of line for a membership based organization to have internal discussion?

This is just bizarre - organisations go through shit patches, people fall out, names get called - how is opening this up for the consumption of typically non-aligned readers of Libcom going to steady the ship? It's like the Jeremy Kyle show.

What is a "right" to internal discussion? Who enforces this "right"? Clearly if police raids are taking place, there is no "right" to internal discussion. I don't support police raids but why should I respect a "right" to internal discussion of a group I am not a member of? No, revolutionary groups do not have the "right" to keep secret "whatever they deem necessary". The revolution is too important to have secret cliques debating policy behind closed doors with the working-class denied the opportunity to participate.

Libcom is as good a place as any to expose the secret cliques claiming to represent the people it denies the opportunity to participate in policy discussion.

Jamal Rayyan - what gives you the right to put people like Mikhail on trial on here? As I said earlier, this is not the place, and whether you are right in your convictions about the state of the ICC or not, punching it out on here means fuck all in the grand scheme of things.

I understand your reasoning as outlined on the ICC thread (i.e., you don't want others to see old posts and think they reflect your current position wrt the ICC).

But deleting all of your posts is not a reasonable request. It would remove a large number of posts from a large number of thread, making these threads very difficult to follow. This can already be seen in the ICC thread that spawned this one, where a number of your posts simply read "redacted."

The bottom line is that a good deal of the content we create online (and in print, for that matter) escapes our control. To believe otherwise is a fundamental misunderstanding of the web and the way data is used in this day and age.

Actually the "right" to have your posts deleted is one "right" that is actually legally enforceable. Unlike the supposed "right" to keep secret internal discussion or not to be raided by police.

It's an internal problem, sort it internally. If your organisation's members can't sort there problems out without resorting to tearing strips out of its members in public then you need to give up the ghost. But as I said, organisations are forever in some state of turmoil, those who really want things to work find a way. If you want to look more nuts than you deserve, then by all means carry on.

They are obviously in internal turmoil. I don't think thatJamal is a member of their organisation though. They tend not to publicly attack members of their own organisation. They wait until they are outside the organisation until they turn them be on on them. I presume the next candidates will be the former Tufkish section, and perhaps myself.

Devrim

hi there jamal.

i'm a mod on another site and schalken is right here. threads belong (so to speak) to everyone who posts in them and deleting posts can only be done if the rest of the thread isn't made into gibberish. it's inconsiderate of the other posters and the effort they put in to respond. if an entire thread is removed, the other posters need to (or ought to) be notified. all of this adds to the time spent by the mods.

i think you were rudely treated by their presumptuous delay in deciding on your membership, which would leave anyone frustrated, and i don't agree either with their decomposition idea. but they think it's fundamental, so it seems a legitimate test. still, your concern about internal disagreement was shared by at least one member i know.

Yeah, not deleting everything someone posted is standard forum practice. It makes reading past threads difficult and it can be a burden on the moderators/admin.

I still don't understand the attitude that a political organization is obligated to have its discussion open to the public. I can't imagine there have been many on this planet that have done so, regardless of their aspirations in representing a tendency or not.

A very simplistic view offered by Jamal above. Communists, anybody in the workers' movement are essentially discussing the same things all the time. I'm not a member of the ICC but from what I've read of Jamal I'm not at all surprised that he couldn't agree with them on organisation. I have no knowledge of any of the details of his discussions but on organisation he seems a world apart from the ICC. Most of the people that I know that have left the ICC because discussion has been "stifled" have left because the majority of the organisation wouldn't back their positions.

If I don't see Jamal as a member of the ICC then why it integrated Devrim, and why he went along with it, is a mystery to me. As soon as he joined the ICC he seemed to me to disagree with many of its fundamental positions.

Your attitude is really ugly. ICC never blamed you for "deserting" it. Only I wrote something about the importance of not deserting rev. org.s, when they are in crisis - and I meant that as a general comradely-moral principle. I never blamed you for deserting the ICC, and I did not refer to any specific event.

Second, your "criticism" of icc for having internal debates taking years is just senseless and meaningless. Debates can take years. So what? Russian Social Democratic Party debated its internal differences from 1902 to 1917. Meanwhile they participated in two of the most significant revolutions in the 20th century.

Marxist vs Bakuninist divide continued from 1872 until 1876. And this fracture gave birth to the two main currents of the workers movement. In the Second International revinisonism debate started in 1899 and continued, evolved and finally resolved only in 1914 with the collapse of the international. Some of the best marxist theoretical analyses (Rosa Luxemburg's "Mass Strike", Pannekoek's texts on "Mass Action") were advanced in the revisionism debates. In my view the problem with the whole controversy was not that it took "too long" but that it was not deep and widely participated enough. Anti-intellectualist currents especially those around union bureaucrats and SDP party officials, those activists who cared more about "action now" instead of the "ultimate goal", gradually became bored of the debate and left it to the "irrelevant" intellectuals like Luxemburg, Kautsky, Pannekoek, etc.

So yes ICC debates a lot. Good for them, because it is a sign of health and vitality.