Infantile disorders

This is the 36th issue of International Review, a super-theoretical, boring and somewhat weird journal published by the "International Communist Current" or ICC. This issue is dated 1984.

The ICC is a miniscule group in the Left Communist tradition. At this point in time, they had a quasi-apocalyptic perspective, claiming that a new world war or a world revolution were the only possible options left for humanity. Capitalism inevitably marches towards World War III, and the only thing to hold it back is the struggle of the working class, which is still "undefeated". This perspective is easily disproved by the 1930's, when there were "struggles of the working class", but a world war broke out anyway. The ICC would have responded that the working class back then was controlled by Stalinism and other "bourgeois" factions, while the working class since 1968 has been breaking out of the Stalinist/reformist/union stranglehold, a ridiculous proposition.

Indeed, a large part of this issue is devoted to a polemic against Battaglia Comunista, a competing Left Communist group in Italy with a somewhat more realistic assessment of the real world. This group frankly admitted that they didn't know whether war or revolution was the most likely outcome of the system's crisis, and that nobody *can* know such a thing, á la Nostradamus. Battaglia also pointed out that revolutions often happen *as a result of* war, a point the ICC grudgingly concedes. What about the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, for instance?

The ICC called the 1980's "The Years of Truth", when the other Left Communist groups would see the light and finally realize that the ICC was right all along. Naturally, the ICC got into acute trouble when the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989-91. Seeing the Soviet Union as a particularly heinous form of "state capitalism", the ICC expected Western capitalism to "decompose" shortly thereafter, repeating the Soviet collapse. This was "the wind from the East" which made the ICC revert to a super-pessimistic, Dark Age scenario and turned in on itself, expelling long-time members in a series of bizarre purges of "clans" and "Freemasons" (sic). By contrast, Battaglia simply continued as before, stirred but not shaken. Ironically, though, peak oil and other synergistic, long-term crises might yet turn the ICC's Dark Age scenario into reality!

What otherwise struck me when reading International Review was the intemperate, sectarian tone of many polemics. The ICC had issued an "address to proletarian political groups", only to ream out everyone who responded. The Communist Bulletin Group in Aberdeen supposedly stole things from the ICC and supported a police agent, the Communist Workers Organisation is a vacillating bunch, and Battaglia Comunista had talked with the Iranian émigré SUCM, a group which is "Stalinist", "nationalist", "bourgeois", "counter-revolutionary" and has a lot of money at its disposal. A bit like the Bolsheviks getting money from Western banks? Freemasons, Freemasons...

And no, I'm not writing this in a particularly serious mode, LOL. An infantile disorder, I suppose.