The Communist Workers’ Organisation was founded in 1975 and joined with the Internationalist Communist Party (Italy) to form the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party in 1983. The Internationalist Communist Party, was the only significant organisation to emerge in the Second World War (1943) condemning both sides as imperialist. It is the most significant organisation produced by the internationalist communist left which fought the degeneration of the Comintern in the 1920s as well as the process of “bolshevisation” (i.e. stalinism) imposed on the individual communist parties.

We are for the revolutionary party but we are not that Party. Nor are we the only basis for that party which will emerge from the workers’ struggles of the future. Our aim is to be part of that process by participating in all the struggles of the class that we can with the aim of linking the immediate struggle of the class with its long term historic programme — communism.

The basic positions on which the International Bureau was founded are those established by the International Conferences which ended in the early 1980s. These are:

• acceptance of the October Revolution as proletarian
• recognition of the break with Social Democracy brought about by the First Two Congresses of the Third International
• rejection without reservation of state capitalism and self-management
• recognition of the Socialist and Communist Parties as bourgeois
• rejection of all policies which subjects the proletariat to the national bourgeoisie
• an orientation towards the organisation of revolutionaries recognising Marxist doctrine and methodology as proletarian science
• recognition of international meetings as part of the work of debate among revolutionary groups for co-ordination of their active political interventions towards the class in the class struggle, with the aim of actively contributing to the process leading to the International Party of the Proletariat, the indispensable political organ for the political guidance of the revolutionary class movement and the proletarian power itself.

Extract from the Platform of the IBRP

BM CWO — London — WC1N 3XX — email: leftcom.org

Revolutionary Perspectives: leftcom.org