Marxism Is in the Brain, Not the Gut

29 March 2026

Dear comrades,

I decided to write this letter after having had a front row seat at the LFI’s intervention into the Fête de Lutte ouvrière. My impression was that of an extremely brittle organization unable to deal with contradictory political situations, much less chart a revolutionary course. Here is my unsolicited advice to comrades who feel that their organization may not be on the best track and want to do something about it.

1) Moralism is the road to hell

At multiple points during the Fête, comrade Negrete insisted that being a revolutionary is in the gut. Of course, basic class and social instincts are crucial for anyone who wants to become a communist. But to judge comrades according to their perceived subjective will is a bankrupt approach. How are we to measure or test this?

More importantly, are comrades who have made political mistakes, even grave ones, irredeemable for the cause of revolution? What of Chen Duxiu, who was both the leader of the CPC that betrayed the Second Chinese Revolution and the founder of Chinese Trotskyism? What was in his gut?

Many LFI comrades appear to think that older ICL cadre are irredeemably corrupt while the younger ones live and breathe opportunism. This may be a simple and comforting way of approaching politics, but it is not an approach that is conducive to building a revolutionary party. Even when confronted with comrades who undoubtedly express opportunist views or act dishonestly, it is essential to first and foremost confront them politically, not through moral injunctions.

2) You need political arguments

Since our Eighth International Conference, the ICL has written dozens of articles with carefully reasoned criticisms of our past trajectory and perspectives for revolutionaries today. I cannot think of a single article by the LFI which seriously takes on any of the arguments we make.

For example, the ICL has written many articles reacting to the various developments in Iran, fighting for a course which is both anti-imperialist and proletarian. Here is what the LFI writes in the guise of polemic:

“Today, the born-again International Communist League, which masquerades as the continuation of the Spartacist tendency while renouncing almost everything it stood for, including the Marxist line taken in 1979, calls for an ‘anti-imperialist united front’ with the mullah regime. As a speaker at a March 7 LFI educational on Iran trenchantly put it, this amounts to telling the next generation of Iranian leftists to ‘stick their necks in the noose’ again.”

This is the entirety of the polemic; there is nothing else. Beyond the fact that it is just a false polemic—we call for the defense of Iran in exactly the same way as the LFI does—there is not the slightest attempt to deal with what we have actually argued regarding Iran.

3) You need better political senses

Comrade Negrete also insisted during the Fête on the importance of having a political nose. I can only agree with the comrade on this point, but having seen the LFI in action I worry that there is something seriously wrong with its sense of smell.

The ICL forum at the Fête was titled “Why China Is Not Imperialist.” It sought to throw down the gauntlet in the French Trotskyist movement on this crucial question. Over a hundred people attended the forum, including comrades from multiple different tendencies, most of which think China is both imperialist and capitalist. There was a heated debate in a crowd more or less split down the middle on the question.

Since the ICL and LFI both have the same formal position on China, it would have made sense for the two organizations to aim most of their fire in the same direction against the portion of the crowd who considered China imperialist. But no, the LFI comrade who intervened decided instead to aim all his fire at the ICL, arguing that our refusal to side with Russia in the Ukraine war means we don’t want to defend China, and denounced the fact that we used the term “far left” in our leaflet.

The problem here isn’t so much that the comrade decided to criticize us—I doubt many were swayed by his arguments. Rather, the issue is that in his haste to denounce the Spartacists, the comrade forgot that the main political polarization was between those who defend China and those who don’t.

4) You need to bridge your program with concrete reality

At the LFI forum I intervened to ask how you posed your tasks for building a revolutionary party in the current period. I simply asked this question and said nothing else. In response, I was accused by one of your comrades of being like Eduard Bernstein, that I cared only about the movement and not about the aim. In fact, the purpose of my intervention wasn’t to ignore the goal but to ask how were we going to get there?

I have found this to be a constant theme in discussions with LFI comrades. You know what needs to be done in broad general terms: break with the Democrats, stop arm shipments to Israel, mobilize workers against ICE, black liberation through socialist revolution, etc. But you are unable to explain how we are to overcome the obstacles to get to any of these aims.

It is certainly your right to consider our Open the Police Archives campaign, our fight for a clean break in the DSA and our electoral tactics to be opportunist gimmicks. But beyond ignoring the stated purpose of each of these, you never seem to propose anything yourselves for overcoming the gap between current consciousness and the communist consciousness we know workers need.

5) Program first

I was glad during the Fête to see comrades of the LFI and BT engage in an org-to-org dialogue. As far as I can tell, you both have the same program on all decisive questions concerning the current world situation. It only makes sense for you to collaborate and eventually fuse. However, it seems the LFI leadership told the BT to get lost—their gut is deemed incompatible with LFI membership.

Although we have no particular interest in seeing the LFI and BT grow their forces, we also cannot see any principled basis for them to remain two separate organizations. The presence of two rival groups with the same politics only creates confusion, not least because the BT shares almost the same name with another organization, the IBT. A fusion would have the merit of being clarifying. But once again, we see the subjective feelings of LFI leaders take precedence over questions of principle.

I sincerely hope that through interventions and events comrades of the LFI will come to see the limits of their current political course. But one thing that we have learned from our own experience is that a wrong political course doesn’t get changed by itself. It requires comrades who will fight to challenge entrenched sterility while holding on to core Marxist principle.

One thing which appears certain to us is that the LFI’s current trajectory is leading it over a precipice.

Comradely,

G. Perrault