100 Years Since Livorno
Submitted by Internationalis... on Jan 22 2021 22:43
In January 1921, more than three years after the October Revolution in Russia, some two years since the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin at the behest of the German Social Democratic Party, and in the aftermath of two wasted years of workers’ factory occupations in Italy itself, the intransigent revolutionaries in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), led by Amadeo Bordiga, finally won the day and broke from the old party of compromise and accommodation with capital to form the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I).
“Black” anger shakes the rotten pillars of bourgeois and democratic “civilization” - Bordiga, 1965
I'm not a Bordigist, but... This text by Bordiga on the Watts Rebellion of 1965 seems somehow relevant to recent protests against racism.
I discovered the French translation and realised that there was no decent English translation of the text available. Plus, the French edition had some relevant footnotes, including one quite harshly criticising Bordiga for being soft on the American Antebellum slave economy...
The Italian Communist Left
Submitted by Internationalis... on Feb 5 2020 23:43
Via this red thread, which involved the interpretation, application and defence of revolutionary Marxism against various denials and betrayals, the Italian Communist Left in 1943 formed the Internationalist Communist Party.
Immutable tablets of the communist theory of the party
Amadeo Bordiga’s 1960 article, translated here into English for the first time, which summarizes and then extends his earlier commentary on Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Rejecting all notions of Marx’s profound or lasting indebtedness to Hegel, the author advocates for the return of the communist party (in the historical rather than formal sense) to the “tablets of stone” upon which it was founded already in 1844. These consist of the programmatic description of communist society, which will bridge the gap between man and nature by abolishing the individual and personality, and resolve the riddles and contrasts that have plagued philosophy for thousands of years.
Gramsci: Between Marxism and Idealism
Submitted by Internationalis... on Aug 14 2019 13:57
This edition of Revolutionary Perspectives goes to press at the same time as our English translation of Onorato Damen’s book Gramsci between Marxism and Idealism published after his death in 1979 (see leftcom.org or footnote 8 for how to purchase). By way of a taster we present an obituary which we translated from Prometeo.
The original content of the communist program is the obliteration of the individual as an economic subject, rights-holder, and agent of human history (Part II)
The second part of Amadeo Bordiga’s exposition of the features of communist society and of the revolutionary party that, in his estimation, is the only entity able to bring it into being. Critique of democracy, and of the “immediatist” conceptions of those who would like to see the party replaced by different forms of organization, is here tightly interlinked with a vision of society which will know nothing of classes or exchange and which will spatially and temporally integrate the entire human species into the Social Man, who will not even have any use for “freedom” in the conventional sense of the word.
"Vae victis", Germany!
A 1960 article by Amadeo Bordiga on the role which Germany played in the two world wars and which the author expected it to play in a future communist revolution, translated into English for the first time. The translation does not imply endorsement; the article is reproduced here for reference and to illustrate Bordiga’s uneasy internationalism, which was characterized by a firm rejection of support for either the US or the USSR, but also by a dismissive, if not sympathetic attitude toward Nazi Germany.
The original content of the communist program is the obliteration of the individual as an economic subject, rights-holder, and agent of human history (Part I)
In this text, whose French translation appeared in Camatte’s book Bordiga et la Passion du Communisme and which is translated into English for the first time here, Amadeo Bordiga lays out a concrete vision of communist society as reconstructed from Marx’s fragmentary writings on the subject. Communist production, while following “a common and rational plan”, will as a joyful act constitute “its own reward”. However, to attain such a state of affairs, a revolutionary “dictatorship over consumption” will first be necessary according to Bordiga.
The revolutionary program of communist society eliminates all forms of ownership of land, the instruments of production and the products of labor - Partito Comunista Internazionale
In this 1957 text drafted for the Partito Comunista Internazionale, Amadeo Bordiga, with his usual acerbic wit, restates some of the “invariant” principles of Marxism, denounces the idea that communism means collective or individual “property” or “ownership”—terms he subjects to historical analysis as transitory juridical forms—argues in favor of social usufruct as the concept most adequate for the future classless society, ridicules the “metaphysical and idealist” error of the “immediatists” who hold that “socialism is a struggle for the individual liberation of the worker” and, just to rub it in, condemns drinkers and smokers as “usufructuary traitors” against the health of the species.
Bordiga and the passion for communism – Jacques Camatte
Jacques Camatte’s 1972 essay on Amadeo Bordiga, discussing the Italian Marxist’s notorious “invariance”, his “hermeneutics” of “the precise connection between the proletariat and theory”, his “prophetic vision” of the communist future, his identification of the party with the class, his disdain for the cult of personality, his “anti-gradualism”, the impact of the publication of the Grundrisse and the Economic Manuscripts of 1844 on his thought, his precocious environmentalism, his anti-individualism, and his failure to recognize the significance of May ’68, pointing out that despite all his contradictions and limitations “his works are full of starting points for new research”.
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