Amadeo Bordiga (13 June 1889 – 23 July 1970) was an Italian Marxist, a contributor to communist theory, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I), a member of the Communist International (Comintern) and later a leading figure of the International Communist Party.
VIEWS :
ON MARXISM-LENINISM :
On the theoretical level, Bordiga developed an understanding of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society. Bordiga's writings on the capitalist nature of the Soviet economy in contrast to those produced by the Trotskyists also focused on the agrarian sector. In analyzing the agriculture in the Soviet Union, Bordiga sought to display the capitalist social relations that existed in the kolkhoz and sovkhoz, one a cooperative farm and the other a wage-labor state farm.
In Bordiga's conception of Marxism–Leninism; Joseph Stalin, and later Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and so on were great Romantic revolutionaries, i.e. bourgeois revolutionaries. He felt that the Marxist–Leninist states that came into existence after 1945 were extending the bourgeois nature of prior revolutions that degenerated as all had in common a policy of expropriation and agrarian and productive development which he considered negations of previous conditions and not the genuine construction of socialism.
ON DEMOCRACY :
Bordiga proudly defined himself as anti-democratic, believing himself to be following the tradition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, Bordiga's hostility toward democracy was unrelated to the Stalinist narrative of the single-party state. Indeed, he saw fascism and Stalinism as the culmination of bourgeois democracy. To Bordiga, democracy meant above all the manipulation of society as a formless mass. To this, he counterposed the dictatorship of the proletariat, to be implemented by the communist party based on the principles and program enunciated in The Communist Manifesto (1848)
ON COMMUNISM :
Although most Leninists distinguish between socialism and communism and Bordiga did consider himself a Leninist, being described as "more Leninist than Lenin", he did not distinguish between the two in the same way Leninists do. Bordiga did not see socialism as a separate mode of production from communism, but rather just as how communism looks as it emerges from capitalism before it has "developed on its own foundations". This is coherent with Marx and Engels, who used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably. Bordiga used socialism to mean what Marx called the lower-phase communism. For Bordiga, both stages of socialist or communist society—with stages referring to historical materialism—were characterised by the gradual absence of money, the market and so on, the difference between them being that earlier in the first stage a system of rationing would be used to allocate goods to people while in communism this could be abandoned in favour of full free access.
This view distinguished Bordiga from other Leninists and especially the Trotskyists, who tended and still tend to telescope the first two stages and so have money and the other exchange categories surviving into socialism, but Bordiga would have none of this. For him, no society in which money, buying and selling and the rest survived could be regarded as either socialist or communist—these exchange categories would die out before the socialist rather than the communist stage was reached.
ON THE UNITED FRONT :
For Bordiga, the Western European communist parties' strategy of fighting this ebb by absorbing a mass of left-wing social democrats through the united front was a complete capitulation to the period of counter-revolutionary ebb he saw setting in. This was the nub of his critique of democracy, for it was in the name of conquering the masses that the Comintern seemed to be making all kinds of programmatic concessions to left-wing social democrats. For Bordiga, program was everything, a gate-receipt notion of numbers was nothing. The role of the party in the period of ebb was to preserve the program and to carry on the propaganda work possible until the next turn of the tide, not to dilute it while chasing ephemeral popularity.
NECESSARY BORDIGA READING LIST :
These are all articles and not books. They take at most a few hours to read.
THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1922/democratic-principle.htm
THE LYONS THESIS - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1926/lyons-theses.htm
DOCTRINE OF THE BODY POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/doctrine.htm
THE SPIRIT OF HORSEPOWER - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1953/horsepower.htm
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNISM - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1957/fundamentals.htm
CONSIDERATIONS ON THE PARTY'S ORGANIC ACTIVITY WHEN THE GENERAL SITUATION IS HISTORICALLY UNFAVOURABLE - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1965/consider.htm
IMMUTABLE TABLETS OF THE COMMUNIST THEORY OF THE PARTY - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1960/immutable-tablets.htm
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