Amadeo Bordiga
Italian left communist who split from the reformist Socialist Party, formed the Communist Party of Italy and contributed heavily to a critique of the Soviet Union.
Considerations on the party's organic activity when the general situation is historically unfavourable
Bordiga's 1965 essay on the activity of communist militants when class struggle is at a low-ebb.
1. The so-called question of the party's internal organisation has always been a subject in the positions of traditional Marxists and of the present Communist Left, born as an opposition to the errors of the Moscow International. Naturally, such a topic is not to be isolated in a watertight compartment, but is instead inseparable from the general framework of our positions.
The System of Communist Representation
In launching our communist programme, which contained the outlines of a response to many vital problems concerning the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, we expected to ace a broad discussion develop on all its aspects. Instead there has been and still is only furious discussion over the incompatibility of electoral participation, which is soberly affirmed in the programme. Indeed, although the electionist maximalists proclaim that for them electoral action is quite secondary, they are in fact so mesmerized by it as to launch an avalanche of articles against the few anti-electionist lines contained in our programme. On our side, apart from the ample treatment given in these columns to the reasons underlying our abstentionism, we have only now begun to use Avanti! as a platform to reply to this deluge of electoralist objections.
Party and Class Action
In a previous article where we elaborated certain fundamental theoretical concepts, we have shown not only that there is no contradiction in the fact that the political party of the working class, the indispensable instrument in the struggles for the emancipation of this class, includes in its ranks only a part, a minority, of the class, but we also have shown that we cannot speak of a class in historical movement without the existence of a party which has a precise consciousness of this movement and its aims, and which places itself at the vanguard of this movement in the struggle.
Characteristic theses of the party
Amadeo Bordiga's essay on the role of the communist party in which he attacks political opportunism of Leninist-inspired communist parties.
(Produced at a Party meeting held in Florence, 8-9 December, 1951)
[b]I. THEORY [/b]
What was the USSR? Part III
In the previous articles we examined various Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist positions on the nature of the USSR.
We now turn to the theories of the less well known but more interesting Communist Left, who were among the first revolutionary Marxists to distance themselves from the Russian model by deeming it state capitalist or simply capitalist.The Russian Left Communists' critique remained at the level of an immediate response to how capitalist measures were affecting the class, whereas in both the German/D
