Amadeo Bordiga

Amadeo Bordiga (June 13, 1889 - July 23, 1970) was a prominent Italian Marxist and a key contributor to Left Communist theory (see also Council Communism).

Biography

Early life

Bordiga was born at Resina, in the province of Naples.

An opponent of the Italian colonial war in Libya, he was active in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), founding the Karl Marx Circle in 1912. He 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 a necessary body of the working class. He was, however, deeply opposed to representative democracy, which he associated with bourgeois electoralism:

Thus if there is a complete negation of the theory of democratic action it is to be found in socialism. (Il Socialista, 1914)

Therefore, he opposed the parliamentary faction of the Socialist Party being autonomous from central control. In common with most Socialists in Latin countries, Bordiga campaigned against the Freemasonry, which he identified with as a non-secular group.

In the PCd'I

Following the October Revolution, he rallied to the Communist movement and formed the Communist Abstentionist faction within the Socialist Party. 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 (PCd'I) —founded at Livorno in January 1921. This came after a long internal struggle in the PSI: it had voted as early as 1919 to affiliate to the Comintern, but had refused to purge its reformist wing. In the course of the conflict, Bordiga had attended the 2nd Comintern Congress in 1920, where he had added 2 points to the 19 conditions of membership proposed by Vladimir Lenin. Nevertheless, he was critisised by Lenin in his work An Infantile Disorder.

Bordiga was leader of the PCd'I until his arrest in 1923 (part of the political repression carried out by the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini). After successfully defending himself at his trial, he nevertheless refused to rejoin the Executive Committee and, in 1924, refused to be named as the Vice President of the Party. He attended his last meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1926, the same year in which he confronted Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin face-to-face, accusing him of betraying the Revolution (calling Stalin "the gravedigger of the revolution"); he was the last person to do such a thing and survive. In 1930, he was expelled from the PCd'I for taking the defence of Leon Trotsky.

Opposition

With his expulsion, Bordiga left political activity until 1944. He was to refuse to comment on political affairs even when asked by trusted friends. However, many of his former supporters in the PCd'I went into exile and founded a political tendency, often referred to as Italian Left Communism. Bordiga would again work with many of these comrades following the end of World War II.

After 1944, he first returned to political activity in the Naples-based Faction of Socialists and Communists. But, when this grouping was dissolved into the International Communist Party, Bordiga refused to join in. However, he did contribute 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.

When the ICP split in two in 1954, he took the side of the grouping that retained the name, publishing its Il Programma Comunista. Only some time later did he formally become a member of what was known as the ICP(PC). On the theoretical level, Bordiga developed an understanding of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society. In addition to this, he continued to view himself as a Leninist, while he remained a constant critic of Stalinism.

Amadeo Bordiga died at Formia in 1970.

External links

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Biography

Early life

In the PCd'I

Opposition

External links