Bordigism

Amadeo Bordiga (13 June 1889 – 25 July 1970) was an Italian Marxist theorist. A revolutionary socialist, Bordiga was the founder of the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI), a member of the Communist International (Comintern), and later a leading figure of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt). He was originally associated with the PCdI but was expelled in 1930 after being accused of Trotskyism. Bordiga is viewed as one of the most notable representatives of left communism in Europe.

Early life, family, and education

Bordiga was born at Resina in the province of Naples in 1889. His father, Oreste Bordiga, was an esteemed scholar of agricultural science, whose authority was especially recognized in regard to the centuries-old agricultural problems of Southern Italy. His mother, Zaira degli Amadei, was descended from an ancient Florentine family and his maternal grandfather Count Michele Amadei was a conspirator in the struggles of the Risorgimento. His paternal uncle, Giovanni Bordiga, another militant of the ''Risorgimento'', was a mathematician and professor at the University of Padua.

Bordiga's upbringing, while being thoroughly radical, was also of a highly scientific nature. An opponent of the Italo-Turkish War as an Italian colonial war in Libya, Bordiga was introduced to the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) by his high-school physics 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 in engineering from University 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.

Political career

Italian Socialist Party

Within the newly founded Karl Marx Circle, Bordiga rejected a pedagogical 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 the working class. Bordiga was deeply opposed to representative democracy, which he associated with bourgeois electoralism. In a 1914 issue of ''Il 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 in Latin countries, Bordiga campaigned against Freemasonry, which he identified as a non-secular group.

Following the October Revolution, Bordiga rallied to the communist movement and formed the communist abstentionist faction within the PSI, abstentionist in that it opposed participation in bourgeois elections. The group would form with the addition of the former '' L'Ordine Nuovo'' grouping in Turin around Antonio Gramsci the backbone of the Communist 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 the Comintern but had refused to purge its reformist wing. In the course of the conflict, Bordiga attended the 2nd Comintern Congress in 1920, where he added two points to the Twenty-one Conditions of membership proposed by Vladimir 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."

Communist Party of Italy

When the PSI held its congress at Livorno in January 1921, representatives sent by Comintern, all insisted that the party must expel its reformist wing led by Filippo Turati but were divided over whether to continue to work with Giacinto 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 representative Paul Levi but also with the backing of others, including Matyas Rakosi, the future Stalinist dictator of Hungary.

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". For Bordiga, the party was the social brain of the proletariat 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 abolish capitalism and impose a communist society by force. Bordiga identified with the dictatorship 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. 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 the united front with reformist organisations to fight for social reforms and even to form a workers' government. Bordiga regarded this as a reversion to the failed tactics which the pre-war social 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 the Italian 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 of Benito 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 the ultra-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 the Italian fascists was only "a change in the governing personnel of the bourgeois class." Also in 1924, the Italian communist left lost control of the PCdI to a pro-Moscow group whose leader Gramsci became the party's General 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 with Trotsky".

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 from Fascist control, 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 the Stalinist minority group accepted.

Under arrest

In December 1926, Bordiga was again arrested by Mussolini and sent to prison in Ustica, an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian 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 of Ponza, where he built several houses, returning after his detention in 1929 to finish them.

Opposition

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 the Trotskyist opposition" and been organisationally disruptive. 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 of frontism, 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 of World 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 the Axis 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 criticised Joseph Stalin for allying with the western Allies against the Axis in April 1943. 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.

International Communist Party

After 1944, Bordiga first returned to political activity in the Naples-based Fraction of Socialists and Communists. When this grouping was dissolved into the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt), Bordiga did not initially join; despite this, he contributed anonymously to its press, primarily ''Battaglia Comunista'' and ''Prometeo'', in keeping with his conviction that revolutionary work was collective in nature and his opposition to any form of even incipient personality 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 name International Communist Party, publishing its ''Il Programma Comunista''. Bordiga devoted himself to the party, contributing extensively. Bordiga remained with the ICP until his death at Formia in 1970.

Theories and beliefs

Bordigism is a variant of left communism espoused by Bordiga. Bordigists in the Italian Socialist Party would be the first to refuse on principle any participation in parliamentary elections.

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 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 after Imperial Russia had been such a large exporter from the 1880s to 1914.

In Bordiga's conception of Marxism–Leninism, Joseph Stalin, and later Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, 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 defined himself as anti-democratic, believing himself to be following the tradition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases