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Amadeo Bordiga | |
|---|---|
 Bordigac. 1920s | |
| General Secretary of the Communist Party of Italy | |
| In office January 1921 – January 1924 | |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Antonio Gramsci |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1889-06-13)13 June 1889 |
| Died | 23 July 1970(1970-07-23) (aged 81) Formia, Italy |
| Political party | PSI (1910–1921) PCdI (1921–1930) PCInt (1952–1970) |
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Amadeo Bordiga (13 June 1889 – 25 July 1970) was an ItalianMarxist theorist. Arevolutionary socialist, Bordiga was the founder of theCommunist Party of Italy (PCdI), a member of theCommunist International (Comintern), and later a leading figure of theInternationalist Communist Party (PCInt). He was originally associated with the PCdI but was expelled in 1930 after being accused ofTrotskyism. Bordiga is viewed as one of the most notable representatives ofleft communism in Europe.
Bordiga was born atResina in theprovince of Naples in 1889. His father, Oreste Bordiga, was an esteemed scholar ofagricultural science, whose authority was especially recognized in regard to the centuries-old agricultural problems ofSouthern Italy. His mother, Zaira degli Amadei, was descended from an ancientFlorentine family and his maternal grandfather Count Michele Amadei was a conspirator in the struggles of theRisorgimento. His paternal uncle,Giovanni Bordiga, another militant of theRisorgimento, was amathematician and professor at theUniversity of Padua.[1]
Bordiga's upbringing, while being thoroughly radical, was also of a highly scientific nature. An opponent of theItalo-Turkish War as an Italian colonial war inLibya, Bordiga was introduced to theItalian Socialist Party (PSI) by his high-schoolphysics teacher in 1910. Bordiga eventually founded the Karl Marx Circle in 1912, where he would meet his first wife, Ortensia De Meo. Bordiga graduated with a degree inengineering fromUniversity of Naples Federico II in 1912. Bordiga married De Meo in 1914. They had two children, Alma and Oreste. Ortensia died in 1955, and Bordiga married Ortensia's sister, Antonietta De Meo, ten years later in 1965.[2]
Within the newly founded Karl Marx Circle, Bordiga rejected apedagogical approach to political work and developed a "theory of the Party", whereby the organization was meant to display non-immediate goals as a rally of similarly minded people and not necessarily a body of theworking class. Bordiga was deeply opposed torepresentative democracy, which he associated with bourgeoiselectoralism. In a 1914 issue ofIl Socialista, he wrote: "Thus if there is a complete negation of the theory of democratic action it is to be found in socialism." Bordiga opposed the parliamentary faction of the PSI being autonomous from central control. In common with most socialists inLatin countries, Bordiga campaigned againstFreemasonry, which he identified as a non-secular group.
Following theOctober Revolution, Bordiga rallied to thecommunist movement and formed the communistabstentionist faction within the PSI, abstentionist in that it opposed participation inbourgeois elections. The group would form with the addition of the formerL'Ordine Nuovo grouping inTurin aroundAntonio Gramsci the backbone of theCommunist Party of Italy (PCdI). This came after a long internal struggle in the PSI as it had voted as early as 1919 to affiliate with theComintern but had refused to purge itsreformist wing. In the course of the conflict, Bordiga attended the 2nd Comintern Congress in 1920, where he added two points to theTwenty-one Conditions of membership proposed byVladimir Lenin. Nevertheless, he was criticised by Lenin in his work"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920) over a disagreement regarding parliamentary abstentionism.Victor Serge, who witnessed the 2nd Comintern Congress, remembered Bordiga as "exuberant and energetic, features blunt, hair thick, black and bristly, a man quivering under his encumbrance of ideas, experiences and dark forecasts."[3]
When the PSI held its congress atLivorno in January 1921, representatives sent by Comintern, all insisted that the party must expel its reformist wing led byFilippo Turati but were divided over whether to continue to work withGiacinto Menotti Serrati, who advised delaying the split. Bordiga advocated an immediate break with both Serrati and Turati, and hence with the majority of the PSI, and prevailed against the opposition of the leading Comintern representativePaul Levi but also with the backing of others, includingMatyas Rakosi, the futureStalinist dictator of Hungary.[4]
After the congress, Bordiga emerged as leader of the newly formed Communist Party of Italy. He was one of five members of the executive but was "the actual director of all party activity".[5] For Bordiga, the party was the social brain of theproletariat whose task was not to seek majority support but to concentrate on working for an armed insurrection in the course of which it would seize power and then use it to abolishcapitalism and impose acommunist society by force. Bordiga identified with thedictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the party, and argued that establishing its own dictatorship should be the party's immediate and direct aim.[citation needed] This position was accepted by the majority of the members of the PCdI but was to bring them into conflict with the Comintern when in 1921 the latter adopted a new tactic, i.e. that of theunited front with reformist organisations to fight forsocial reforms and even to form a workers' government. Bordiga regarded this as a reversion to the failed tactics which the pre-warsocial democrats had adopted and which had led to them becoming reformists.
Out of a regard for discipline, Bordiga and his comrades (who became known as theItalian communist left) accepted the Comintern decision but were in an increasingly difficult position. When Bordiga was arrested in February 1923 on a trumped-up charge by the new government ofBenito Mussolini, he had to give up his post as a member of the Central Committee of the PCdI. On his acquittal later that year, Bordiga decided not to reclaim it, therefore implicitly accepting that he was now an oppositionist.
At the Fifth Congress of Comintern in Moscow held in June–July 1924, Bordiga was the sole voice of theultra-left who opposed any cooperation with socialist parties in favour of a "united front from below, not from above", which received support except within the Italian delegation. He argued that the rise of Mussolini and theItalian fascists was only "a change in the governing personnel of the bourgeois class."[6] Also in 1924, the Italian communist left lost control of the PCdI to a pro-Moscow group whose leader Gramsci became the party'sGeneral Secretary in June. In March 1925, Bordiga refused to go to Moscow to attend a plenum of Comintern's executive, and in his absence was accused of taking up a "hostile position against Comintern by declaring his complete solidarity withTrotsky".[7]
At the Third Congress of the PCdI held in exile in Lyons in January 1926, the manoeuvre of the pro-Moscow group was completed. Without the support of the Communist International to escape fromFascist control,[citation needed] few members of the Italian communist left were able to arrive at the Congress, so the theses drawn up by Bordiga were rejected. Those of theStalinist minority group accepted.[citation needed]
In December 1926, Bordiga was again arrested by Mussolini and sent to prison inUstica, an Italian island in theTyrrhenian Sea, where he met with Gramsci and they renewed their friendship and worked alongside each other despite their political differences. Bordiga was concerned about Gramsci's ill health but nothing came of a plan to help him escape the island. In 1928, Bordiga was moved to the Isle ofPonza, where he built several houses, returning after his detention in 1929 to finish them.[8]
Following his release, Bordiga did not resume his activities in the PCdI and was in fact expelled in March 1930, accused of having "supported, defended and endorsed the positions of theTrotskyist opposition" and been organisationally disruptive.[8] With his expulsion, Bordiga left political activity until 1943 and he was to refuse to comment on political affairs even when asked by trusted friends; many of his former supporters in the PCdI went into exile and founded a political tendency often referred to as Italian communist left.
In 1928, its members in exile in France and Belgium formed themselves into the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, which became, in 1935, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. This change of name was a reflection of the Italian communist left's view that the PCdI and the other Communist parties had now become counter-revolutionary. A faction of the party, with their theory of the party and their opposition to any form offrontism, held that the program was everything and a gate-receipt notion of numbers was nothing. Bordiga would again work with many of these comrades following the end ofWorld War II.
According to the reports of Angelo Alliotta, a secret informant of the fascist police in Italy who visited Bordiga's home in Formia where he holidayed with his wife, Bordiga showed support for theAxis powers. According to Alliotta, Bordiga believed Nazi Germany was weakening the "English giant", which to him was "the greatest exponent of capitalism", and thus the defeat of Britain would bring about revolutionary conditions in Europe. Bordiga also criticisedJoseph Stalin for allying with the western Allies against the Axis in April 1943.[9] Other sources cast doubt on the analysis that Bordiga supported Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, citing ‘contradictory’ testimony on the issue. He supported the ‘proletarian’ partisan movements, as well as the anti-fascist Warsaw uprisings of 1943 (Warsaw ghetto) and 1944.[10]
After 1944, Bordiga first returned to political activity in theNaples-based Fraction of Socialists and Communists. When this grouping was dissolved into theInternationalist Communist Party (PCInt), Bordiga did not initially join; despite this, he contributed anonymously to its press, primarilyBattaglia Comunista andPrometeo, in keeping with his conviction that revolutionary work was collective in nature and his opposition to any form of even incipientpersonality cult. Bordiga joined the PCInt in 1949. When the current split in two in 1951, he took the side of the grouping that took on the nameInternational Communist Party, publishing itsIl Programma Comunista. Bordiga devoted himself to the party, contributing extensively. Bordiga remained with the ICP until his death atFormia in 1970.
Bordigism is a variant ofleft communism espoused by Bordiga. Bordigists in theItalian Socialist Party would be the first to refuse on principle any participation inparliamentary elections.[11]
On the theoretical level, Bordiga developed an understanding of theSoviet Union as acapitalist society.[12] Bordiga's writings on the capitalist nature of theSoviet economy in contrast to those produced by theTrotskyists also focused on the agrarian sector. In analyzing theagriculture in the Soviet Union, Bordiga sought to display the capitalist social relations that existed in thekolkhoz andsovkhoz, one a cooperative farm and the other a wage-labor state farm.[13] In particular, he emphasized how much of the national agrarian produce came from small privately owned plots (writing in 1950) and predicted the rates at which the Soviet Union would start importing wheat afterImperial Russia had been such a large exporter from the 1880s to 1914.[14]
In Bordiga's conception ofMarxism–Leninism,Joseph Stalin, and laterMao Zedong,Ho Chi Minh, and so on, were greatRomantic revolutionaries, i.e.bourgeois revolutionaries. He felt that theMarxist–Leninist states that came into existence after 1945 were extending thebourgeois 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.[15]
Bordiga defined himself asanti-democratic, believing himself to be following the tradition ofKarl Marx andFriedrich Engels. Bordiga's hostility toward democracy was unrelated to the Stalinist narrative of thesingle-party state, as he sawfascism andStalinism as the culmination ofbourgeois democracy. Followers of Bordiga often state that there is no functional difference between democracy and dictatorship, as one class will inevitably establish control. To Bordiga, democracy meant above all the manipulation of society as a formless mass. To this, he counterposed thedictatorship of the proletariat, to be implemented by theCommunist party based on the principles and program enunciated inThe Communist Manifesto (1848). He often referred to the spirit of Engels' remark that "on the eve of the revolution all the forces of reaction will be against us under the banner of 'pure democracy'" as every factional opponent of theBolsheviks in 1921 from the monarchists (theWhite movement) to theanarchists, such as theRevolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, called forsoviets without Bolsheviks—or soviet workers councils not dominated by Bolsheviks. As such, Bordiga opposed the idea of revolutionary theory being the product of a democratic process of pluralist views, believing that theMarxist perspective has the merit of underscoring the fact that, like allsocial formations,communism is above all about the expression of programmatic content. This enforces the fact that, for Marxists, communism is not an ideal to be achieved but a real movement born from the old society with a set of programmatic tasks.[16]
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Bordiga resolutely opposed theComintern's turn to the right in 1921. As leader of theCommunist Party of Italy, he refused to implement theunited front strategy of the Third Congress. He also refused to fuse the newly formed party with the left-wing of theItalian Socialist Party from which it had just broken away. Bordiga had a completely different view of the party from the Comintern,[17] which was adapting to the revolutionary ebb that was announced in 1921 by theAnglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, theKronstadt rebellion, the implementation of theNew Economic Policy, thebanning of factions, and the defeat of theMarch Action in Germany. For Bordiga, the Western European Communist parties' strategy of fighting this ebb by absorbing a mass of left-wingsocial democrats through the united front was a complete capitulation to the period ofcounter-revolutionary ebb he saw setting in. This was the base 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.
Bordiga's analysis provided a way of seeing a fundamental degeneration in the world communist movement in 1921 (instead of in 1927 with the defeat of Trotsky) without simply calling for more democracy. The abstract formal perspective of bureaucracy/democracy, with which the Trotskyist tradition treats this crucial period in Comintern history, became separated from any content. Bordiga throughout his life called himself aLeninist and never polemicised against Lenin directly; his totally different appreciation of the 1921 conjuncture, its consequences for the Comintern and his opposition to Lenin and Trotsky on the united front issue illuminates a turning point that is generally obscured by the heirs of the Trotskyist wing of the international left opposition of the 1920s.
Although most Leninists distinguish betweensocialism andcommunism and he did consider himself a Leninist, Bordiga 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". Bordiga usedsocialism to mean what Marx called thelower-phase communism. Sticking to Marx's concept of communism, for Bordiga both stages of socialist orcommunist society—with stages referring tohistorical materialism—were characterised by the absence of money, capital, the market, and so on, the difference between them being that earlier in the first stage rationing would be done in a way in which "a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form",[18] with deductions being made from said labor to fund public projects, and difference in interests between the rural and urban proletariat would exist, whilst in communism "bourgeoisie law" would be no more, hence the equal standard applied to all peoples no longer would apply, and the alienated man "will not aim to win back his person" but rather become a new "Social Man".[19] Arguing against what Bordiga saw as the bourgeois idea of "free producer economies", he instead declared that under communism, whether it be the lower stage or higher stage, production and consumption are both enslaved to society.[20]
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; 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. Within the Marxist movement,socialism was popularised during theRussian Revolution by Lenin.[21] This view is consistent with and helped to inform early concepts of socialism in which thelaw of value no longer directs economic activity. Monetary relations in the form ofexchange-value,profit,interest, andwage labour would not operate and apply to Marxist socialism.[22]
Jacques Camatte began corresponding with Bordiga from the age of 19 in 1954, and Bordiga developed a long-standing relationship with Camatte and ideological influence over him. Camatte's early work very much reads in line with the Bordigist current, and Bordiga frequently contributed to Camatte's journalInvariance near the end of his life. Even after Camatte's break with Marxism following Bordiga's death, Camatte's preoccupation within the subject ofGemeinwesen (community, commonwealth) within Marx's work was consistent with Bordiga's emphasis on the anti-individualist and collectivist aspects of Marxism.[23] Bordiga also influencedGilles Dauvé, and had great influence over theultra-leftist currents of the 20th and 21st centuries.[24]
The Amadeo Bordiga Foundation was established in 1998 in Formia, in the house where Bordiga spent the last several months of his life. The foundation organizes publications of Bordiga's works and encourages further expansions upon his ideas.[25] In August 2020,Historical Materialism publishedThe Science and Passion of Communism, an anthology of English translations of Bordiga's work.[26]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)By 1888, the term 'socialism' was in general use among Marxists, who had dropped 'communism', now considered an old fashioned term meaning the same as 'socialism'. ... At the turn of the century, Marxists called themselves socialists. ... The definition of socialism and communism as successive stages was introduced into Marxist theory by Lenin in 1917 ..., the new distinction was helpful to Lenin in defending his party against the traditional Marxist criticism that Russia was too backward for a socialist revolution.
According to nineteenth-century socialist views, socialism would function without capitalist economic categories – such as money, prices, interest, profits and rent – and thus would function according to laws other than those described by current economic science. While some socialists recognized the need for money and prices at least during the transition from capitalism to socialism, socialists more commonly believed that the socialist economy would soon administratively mobilize the economy in physical units without the use of prices or money.
