Commercially unviable?

Supposedly a photo of Miasnikov and his friends 

This is the eighth issue of International Review, the organ of the International Communist Current (ICC), one of several groups in the Left Communist tradition. Left Communism is a somewhat heterogeneous movement, comprising both anarchistic "council communists" such as Pannekoek and Mattick, and super-Leninists like Bordiga. The common denominator is a kind of "left" criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The ICC (founded in 1975) is very small and frequently erratic, but has managed to recruit supporters in a dozen different nations, including Britain, the United States and Sweden. The main section is French. This has made the ICC one of the more visible Left Communist groups, perhaps unfortunately so. In Sweden, they have always been considered more or less barking mad!

This particular issue of the ICC's publication, dated January 1977, contain two articles of interest. One is the first part of "The Communist Left in Russia", dealing with various "left" oppositions to the Bolshevik leadership: the Left Communists around Bukharin, the Democratic Centralists and the Workers' Opposition.

The other interesting piece is a heated exchange between the ICC and Onorato Damen, founder and leader of the Italian Left Communist "Internationalist Communist Party", which for a short period after World War II had a relatively large membership base. (This party is sometimes known as Battaglia Comunista, after its paper.) The ICC believes that Damen's party became large by compromising its political message, adapting itself to democratic anti-fascism in the wake of Mussolini's fall and the liberation of Italy by the Allies and the Partisans. Thus, the ICC charges Damen's party with attempting to penetrate the Partisans, something Damen actually admits that Battaglia Comunista did do. Two of their activists were murdered by the Stalinists for trying to recruit among the Partisans. The ICC regards Battaglia Comunista's actions as a form of pseudo-Trotskyist "entryism", and takes strong exception to it.

The bulk of International Review consists of documents from the second congress of Révolution Internationale, the French main section of the ICC. These articles are probably not of great interest to the general reader. But then, the International Review has never been a best-seller. This is driven home in an unintentionally funny protest by the ICC against a Portuguese chain of alternative book stores, which apparently decided not to sell ICC's publications for lack of buyers... (In a later issue, the chain partially reverses its decision in an ironical letter piquing the ICC for the super-theoretical contents of their journals!)

Well, at least *somebody* has humour around here...

I'm not sure how to rate this commercially unviable review, but in the end, it gets three stars. Just don't try to sell it in Lisbon!