What is special about Bordiga?

[Smash Monogamy]

He seems really popular with members of this board. I tried reading about him, but it went over my head.
Can you explain as simply as possible what he contributed to Marxism?

What he a left communist, Trotskyist, MList? How did he view Lenin and the USSR?

[Os Cangaceiros]

He thought that Lenin wasn't nearly Lenin-y enough.

[Remus Bleys]

Bordiga is very important to understanding many of the ultra left currents - he can even be genetically traced to the primitivists. This was basically because of the fact that bordiga developed a critique of democracy (and of Democratic centralism - preferring organic centralism - click on my tendency for an elaboration of this), that the ussr wasnt state capitalism but capitalism, the fact that capitalism entered its totalitarian phase, that the return of liberalism and nice capitalism was in fact utterly reactionary and anti communist, a dual revolution view of the Russian revolution, that absentism was the only thing to do as the bourgeois Democratic regime had no longer anything left to offer (communists do not demand legal demands), critique of United front and antifa etc.
This is ironic to me because bordiga was a very proud leninist (as is the whole of the Italian left, ie the Italian communist left/Italian left communists). Bordiga had the typical leninist view of unions and anti imperialism (as opposed to the stalinist and trotskyist views of unions and imperialism). This leninism lead bordiga to deduce that "one cannot speak of the class without first speaking of the party" and that the Party's Program was the most important aspect of communism, that one should not deviate from the program in troublesome times, lest they turn to oppurtunism and revisionism.
Bordiga, I think, was a genius. This isn't because he came up with anything (on the contrary, for bordigists the program is invariant and (attempts to be at least) anonymous), but rather because he understood what came before him and put it in an understandable and ingenius way, being able to actually apply communist theory instead of revising it.
Important things to read are:
Rome Theses
Russia and Community (1) by Camatte
The origin and function of the party form by Camatte
The Democratic Principle by Bordiga
Party and Class by Bordiga
Murder of the Dead by Bordiga
The Spirit of Horsepower by Bordiga
the Guignol in History by Bordiga
The Historical Invariance of Marxism
the great alibi (ignore the introduction) by a jewish member of the ICP
Seize the factory or seize the state by Bordiga

Though I really like others (such as Force and Dictatorship, Party in Proletarian Dictatorship, Considerations on the Party's Organic Activity when the situation is historically unfavorable) but these are what I started reading with.
Here is the links to where you can find his shit.

http://www.international-communist-party.org/EnglishPublications.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/

http://libcom.org/tags/amadeo-bordiga

http://www.sinistra.net/lib/bor/bordiga.html

[Dr Doom]

the great alibi (ignore the introduction) by a jewish member of the ICP


pretty sure this was written by bordiga. good read though, and yeah the intro you're referring to is awful.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I didn't really like "Auschwitz, Or The Great Alibi". To me it seemed like an attempt to force the entire experience of the Holocaust into a rather mechanistic analysis of "the base" (as opposed to "the superstructure"). That's not to say that the origins of WW2 didn't reside in "the base"...books have been written about this subject which are quite good, like Paul Hehn's "A Low Dishonest Decade: The Economic Origins of World War Two". But I do think that a component of what happened during WW2 resides in an element of ideology that completely went off the rails. I don't think that Hitler really served the interests of German capital except in the early years. Furthermore the analysis of capital merely eliminating some excess actors in the field of production may seem enticingly "scientific" at first glance, but I think that ultimately it's just another subjective interpretation of events that's pretty hard to prove without resorting to some sort of dogma.

The apologetic intro is pretty dweeby though, the work should be judged on it's own merits.

[Remus Bleys]

pretty sure this was written by bordiga. good read though, and yeah the intro you're referring to is awful.

Nah I talked to some Italian comrades about it. It's hard to judge because no one signs anything of course, but it's quite right to speculate it isn't bordiga - because it was a German French Jew who wrote it. It's completely another thing to act like it wasnt official party text or that Bordiga would disagree with it, though. To state bordiga would disagree with it is nonsense that just shows one never read bordiga and to try and discredit it with "was it bordiga" is idiotic because it was published and distributed by the party, and that bordiga rarely signed anything.
On the other hand it is absurd that it has been taken off of Bordiga's MIA page.

[Remus Bleys]

http://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/article-store/the-human-species-and-the-earths-crust/about-amadeo-bordiga/
lest I forget, this is a good biography (as an introduction biography, to get an overview of where the Italian left and the bordigists were coming from).

[Left Voice]

A slightly bizarre question, but how do Trotskyists view Bordiga? Just curious how their view compares with that of other Leninists.

[Devrim]

A slightly bizarre question, but how do Trotskyists view Bordiga? Just curious how their view compares with that of other Leninists.

Trotsky himself was originally quite warm to the Italian left:


The Platform of the Left (1926) produced a great impression on me. I think that it is one of the best documents published by the international Opposition and it preserves its significance in many things to this very day.

In those days the international Opposition wasn't a rigid organisation, and wasn't specifically Trotskyist. The Italian left supported the Trotskyists in the Russian party. For later Trotskyists, the Italian left was always just ultra-left.

There is a CWO article discussing relationships between the Italian left and Trotskyism here (http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2000-10-01/trotsky-and-the-internationalist-communist-left).

Devrim

[Left Voice]

^Thanks for that. Somewhat ironic that while Stalin and other MLs were accusing Trotsky of having fascistic sympathies, the Italian Left criticised Trotsky for allying with social democrats and other imperialists against fascism (rather than seeing both fascism and social democrats as reactionary).

[Smash Monogamy]

If Bordiga was such an anti-democratic Leninist, why is he influential among left communists?

[jookyle]

If Bordiga was such an anti-democratic Leninist, why is he influential among left communists?

There's a difference between the Italian Left and the German Left, of which you probably associate the term "left communism" as it was the German Left that had been formally addressed as so by Lenin.