The ICC looses its bearings

This is issue 64 of International Review (IR), the journal of the Internationalist Communist Current (ICC). It was published shortly before the Gulf War (or rather the US attack on Iraq) in 1991. The ICC, a Left Communist group, didn't support any side in the war. The IR contain polemics against the Bordigists, the CWO and Battaglia Comunista, other Left Communist groups which also opposed both the United States and Iraq, but which the ICC feel were unclear in other ways. ICC's perspective is (as usual) super-sectarian, and really amounts to doing nothing at all. The other groups wanted to actively campaign against the war, or call for strikes against it.

Two other articles deal with something the ICC dubs "decomposition". The ICC, originally a very optimistic group, had begun to develop a pessimistic perspective after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ICC didn't support the Soviet Union (quite the contrary - they considered "Stalinism" to be counter-revolutionary), but its collapse was nevertheless something they couldn't explain, since they had previously seen Soviet "state capitalism" as the logical end-point of the capitalist system, to which the Western powers somehow also tended. When the Soviet Union collapsed before Western capitalism, ICC's theories and perspectives lost their bearings.

To save the theory, the ICC postulated that the Western bloc, too, would collapse soon enough, taking the whole world down with it. Thus, the ICC argues that the "decadent" capitalist system has entered its final phase, "decomposition", in which the great power blocs split up and give way to a general war of all against all. This take on things looked reasonable at the time, and I admit that I had it myself, albeit from a very different angle than this strange ultraleft group. It seems we were both about 30 years to early... Well, maybe next time?

This issue of International Review also contains a polemic against Battaglia Comunista on the "Party-Fraction relationship", and an angry attack on a small group in Argentina, Emancipacion Obrera.

Not sure how to rate this voice from the past, but since we seem to have survived the decomposition back in 1991 (well, sort of), I'll give it three stars and hope for the best.