Philippe Bourrinet's revised edition of his history of the 'Italian' communist left, and its Belgian and French fractions in exile.
This edition taken from the "Left Wing" Communism - An Infantile Disorder? website.
The original edition of this history is available via the International Communist Current.
An updated version can be found here
Comments
Are there any differences
Are there any differences between this and the version we publish. If so what are they?
Devrim
From what I can tell, and
From what I can tell, and that is only from skimming over the two versions of the introduction, the conclusion, and the final part of chapter 9, it is essentially the same text, with a few minor but politically significant differences.
Those differences I've found are:
1) In the intro. (Bourrinet pamphlet, p. 8) we find this sentence:
"Today — the nineties — when the whole ruling class is crowing about the ‘death of communism’, id est the “death of the world revolution”, when the lie that Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism equal “communism” has reached a point of ideological paroxysm, it is necessary to show that these Italian militants were authentic revolutionaries who resisted all forms of counter-revolution from the beginning, and who both maintained and critically developed the real acquisitions of the revolutionary wave in Europe (1917-1921), against all the distortions and defamations of the Leninist-Stalinist counter-revolution."
Aside from minor grammatical differences, the ICC pamphlet's version of this sentence (p.10) omits "... Leninism, Trotskyism and ...", leaving only "Stalinism" (as equaling "communism"); and again near the end, in place of "Leninist-Stalinist", there is just "Stalinist".
2) In the second last paragraph of the Conclusion in Bourrinet's pamphlet we find:
"Despite its [the Italian Left's] progressive Leninist degeneration after 1945 to the point of complete fossilisation or blow-up (1982), the theoretical lessons contained in Prometeo, Bilan, Communisme, and Octobre, are still reach of political lessons."
In the ICC's version, the word "Leninist" is omitted. (minor other difference: ICC has "are still alive" as the final phrase; while Bourrinet's should obviously read as "are still rich in political lessons" -- one of many grammatical errors in his pamphlet's English version, likely resulting from the translation.)
3) In Bourrinet's version the final sentence/paragraph of the Conclusion is the following:
"Today bolshevism, leninism and stalinism are fortunatly dead ideologies, whose lethal effects had contributed to crush mercilessly the proletarian revolution in Russia (Workers Councils), in Europe and in Asia (China). The rebirth of a true proletarian revolution depends not only of the economic class struggles but of the appropriation of the Marxist lessons left by all communist Lefts: Italian and Dutch-German Lefts."
This sentence/paragraph does not appear in the ICC's version.
4) Finally, and most significantly, in relation to the ICC itself, Bourrinet's version (p.166) has this to say:
"But this current never escaped from the sectarian state, without obtaining so much political interest than the Dutch-German and Italian Communist Lefts, as historical currents. Caught between both antagonistic currents, involving in Leninist positions and claiming its “inconditional defence of the Russian Revolution” as “Proletarian Revolution”, it plunged finally into political contradictions. It had to be affected by series of splits (between 1977 and 1997)." [unfortunately, more of those grammatical/translation errors]
Needless to say, these sentences do not appear in the ICC version.
There is a newer (2013)
There is a newer (2013) English version of this in PDF format on Bourinnet's site :
http://www.left-dis.nl/uk/
Most obvious difference between this and the previous version is that the new one contains a large number of photographs and illustrations. (These are quite fascinating). It also has a lot more pages - 478 to 202 - but some of this will be due to the fact that it uses a larger font and 88 pages are a series of appendices reprinting various documents.
lurdan wrote: There is a
lurdan
some stuff is in German in that version