Draft:Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT)

The Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) is an international left communist organization composed of various national affiliates. The ICT was formed in 2009. It maintains a website and regularly publishes articles on a variety of topics all from an internationalist communist perspective.

History
The ICT has its origins in the Italian Communist Left. Its oldest branch is the Internationalist Communist Party, also known as the PCInt. Many of the founders of the PCInt were also founding, and leading, members of the Communist Party of Italy. From early on they opposed what they saw as the Bolshevization of the Communist Party. This would culminate in the establishment of the Committee of Intesa in 1925.:

Development of the PCInt
The PCInt, as a fully formed organization, was founded on July 25, 1943 by a group of revolutionaries organized around the journal Prometeo (Prometheus). This formation included many notable militants including: Onorato Damen, Bruno Maffi, Mario Acquaviva, Fausto Atti, and others. Its formation occurred in the turmoil of the Allied invasion of Italy. The group opposed the pro-Allies position of the mainstream communist movement which they saw as capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. Instead, the PCInt called for fraternization between all proletarians, and for the communist movement to fight against all nations and nationalisms in the name of international communist revolution. Between 1943 and 1977 the PCInt would remain a dynamic force in the European left, maintaining dialogues with groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie in France and others.

The Communist Workers Organization (CWO)
The second founding branch of the ICT was the British Communist Workers Organization (CWO). The group which would become the CWO was founded in 1975. In 1973 the groups that would become the CWO had coalized into Revolutionary Perspectives and Worker’s Voice. In September 1975 the two groups held a conference in Liverpool and united into the CWO. At this time the CWO followed the positions of the German Communist Left, particularly the theories of the KAPD and Otto Ruhle.

In 1977, members of the CWO would begin to attend a series of international conferences initiated by the Internationalist Communist Party. Through these conferences, the CWO adopted the political line held by the PCInt, rejecting both their former German Council Communist positions as well as the Bordigist form of Left Communism. By 1983 the two organizations agreed to form the International Bureau for a Revolutionary Party (IBRP).

The founding of the ICT to Today
Between 1983 and 2009 the IBRP would grow to include branches in Canada, the United States, and Germany. In 2009 the IBRP reconstituted itself as the Internationalist Communist Tendency in order to foster greater unity and cooperation among its member organizations. Since then the ICT has continued to grow, gaining a branch in France and developing groups of sympathizers in Turkey, South Korea , Iran, and beyond.

The bulk of the ICT’s work today is committed to their No War but the Class War initiative. This project hopes to promote an internationalist communist position in regards to, what the ICT views, as a recent upsurge in international conflict. To this end, the initiative argues that communists and workers ought to reject all forms of national chauvinism or “lesser evilism.” Instead, the ICT argues, workers around the world should unite under the banner of international communism.

Ideology
The ICT is a Left Communist organization in the legacy of the Italian Communist Left. The group upholds the theories of Marx and Lenin, as well as many of the theorists particular to the Italian Communist Left.

The ICT rejects all forms of nationalism, including left wing nationalism, such as national liberation movements. Further, they eschew other communist groups, such as Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism, which they see as degenerations of the legacy of Marx and Lenin. The ICT also rejects any forms of class collaboration as well as parliamentarianism.

The basic founding positions of the PCInt which all branches of the ICT still adhere to are as follows


 * Rosa Luxemburg and not Lenin was right on the national question.
 * The old Communist Parties (now fully Stalinised) were not centrist but bourgeois.
 * There was no hope of conquering the unions and that new strategies towards the daily class struggle would have to be evolved to connect the daily struggle of the class to the longer term struggle for communism.
 * The USSR was neither a communist or socialist society but state capitalist.
 * There could be no substitution of the party for the class as a whole.