when the icc describe folk as 'modernists'...

[ed miliband]

and not like ezra pound or h.d. or whatever.

what do they mean?

[Thirsty Crow]

and not like ezra pound or h.d. or whatever.

what do they mean?
Yeah, this was a bit puzzling for me as well since I solely encountered the term in relation to literature in particular and art in general.

I think they're referring to what is know as communization current. Think Theorie Communiste and Endnotes (though, I'm not sure whether they include the likes of Tiqqun, I think they don't).

[Devrim]

think lots of people fall into this category for them. Think Jean Barrot.

Devrim

[ed miliband]

yeah, i associate it with barrot, communisation, etc. but i can't really conceive of any connection between the term "modernism" as i understand it and as the icc use. should have been clearer.

i wonder if it's essentially based on a mistranslation?

[Android]

Yeah, this was a bit puzzling for me as well since I solely encountered the term in relation to literature in particular and art in general.

I think they're referring to what is know as communization current. Think Theorie Communiste and Endnotes (though, I'm not sure whether they include the likes of Tiqqun, I think they don't).

Yeah I think that is essentially it. Although the background to its origins seems to be an identifier for those groups and writers post-68, particularly in France, who were broadly ultra-left but sought to go beyond the historical ultra-left (Italian and German-Dutch lefts). I think the that political background probably contributed to its use in ICC press because the ICC is centered around its French section. The ICC use this category and others like it a lot less nowadays.

Although it may be used by Bordigists too, I don't know I can't read Italian or French.

e.g.:

Today, the first group is represented nowadays by the open defenders and apologists of capitalism, who portray it as the ultimate form of human "civilization". We won't be paying too much attention to them; they have already received a knockout blow from Karl Marx and this frees us to apply the same knockout blows to the other two groups. (We put here in parentheses here, once and for all, that our declared "re-proposition" does not aspire so much to a definitive polemical victory, but aims, within the limits of this summary, to clearly define our positions and our characteristic features, and to show how they haven't changed at all in over a 100 years).

The defeat of Marx's deniers, today only doctrinal (tomorrow social) is confirmed by the fact that as every day goes by more and more of them are compelled to "steal" the truths discovered by Marx; but having found it impossible to destroy these truths when stated clearly (we revolutionaries have no such fears about their classical theses) they join the second group, the falsifiers, or (why not?) the modernizers.

The falsifiers are those who have been historically defined as "opportunists", revisionists or reformists, i.e. those who have eliminated from the integrated whole of Marx's theories – as though it were possible without destroying it in its entirety – the prospect of revolutionary catastrophe and the use of armed violence. However there are also many falsifiers among those who claim to accept violent rebellion: they are just as bad, and just as prone to the superstition of activism. What both of them share is an aversion to the identifying, discriminating feature of Marx's theory: armed force, no longer in the hands of particular oppressed individuals or groups, but in the hands of the liberated and victorious class, the class dictatorship, bugbear of social-democrats and anarchists alike. We might have entertained the false hope in 1917 that this second group, rotten to the core, had been laid out by Lenin's blows; however, although we considered this victory as definitive in the realm of doctrine, we were also among the first to warn that the right conditions existed for the re-emergence of that infamous breed. Nowadays we can see it both in Stalinism, and in the Russian post-Stalinism which has been current since the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party.

Finally in the third category, the modernizers, we put those groups which, despite considering Stalinism to be a new form of the classical opportunism defeated by Lenin, attribute this dreadful reverse in the fortunes of the revolutionary labour movement to defects and inadequacies within Marx's original doctrine; which they claim to be able to rectify on the basis of evidence which historical evolution has provided subsequent to the theory's formation; an evolution, according to them, which contradicts it.

http://www.quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/the_fundamentals.htm

[black magick hustla]

if i remember correctly, "modernism" is identified by the icc as "anti-organizational" and lack of faith in the revolutionary nature of the working class (obviously to barring degrees - barrot is less of a modernist than late camatte). it essentially is a curse word for anything that isn't a continuation of the historic communist left