Confusing with Bordiga?

[Jacob Cliff]

I'm beginning to really enjoy reading Bordiga's essays and short works, especially regarding the party and class. But there is something that is confusing me, and if a Bordigist will answer that'd be great:

I understand that Bordiga and the Left Coms in Italy advocated the dictatorship of the party as the dictatorship of the proletariat – that is, the party is the animation of the proletarian class interests. But what bestows the party – specifically the communist parties Bordiga opted for, I.E. vanguard parties – as exclusively representing the will of the proletariat? What makes *them* – as opposed to, say, other secretarian communist parties – the 'party of the proletariat'?

Also, on organic centralism: Bordiga believes the party (being non-democratic) will transform into a central administration in the sphere of production (If im wrong, notify me). He believes that things being withheld from others (or: others are restricted from) is a form of private property, and that socialism would mean SOCIETAL ownership (not 'workers ownership'). But my question is this: what makes the absolute rule and decision making of this non-democratic body of "planners" and experts the will of society? How is the 'central organization,' or the social brain of society, dictating what is produced and how going to be "societal" control? Is this not control by an elite clique, devoid of any societal decision making?

Sorry if my understandings are wrong, but that's why I'm asking.

[Tim Cornelis]

First question would be a correct application of proletarian science: Marxism.

Second, you are correct to observe the inconsistency, as others have also criticised:

"Bordiga does not seem to have realised the extent to which restricting decision-making to a minority within society, even to an elite of well-meaning social and scientific experts, conflicted with his definition of socialism as the abolition of property. For property, as Bordiga well realised, is a social fact, not a legal state; it exists when control over the use of some thing is de facto in the hands of some individual or some group to the exclusion of all other individuals and groups. Clearly, this situation would still apply in Bordiga's socialism, with the elite central administration as the owners (de facto controllers) of all the means of production, since the power to decide how to use them would be exclusively theirs ... The technocratic aspects of Bordiga's 'description of communism' were ignored by most of those influenced by him, including to a large extent the members of the group with which he was associated (the International Communist Party). "

https://libcom.org/library/bordigism-adam-buick

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I'm not a Bordigist, although I do find bits and bobs in Bordiga that I like. If someone who is more familiar with the subject thinks I've interpreted the old man incorrectly, please say so, I don't want to end up spreading misinterpretations.

Now, as far as I understand, Bordiga would answer the first question by saying that the proletariat only becomes a class when a proletarian minority has formed its own independent party; then the party gives the class the "unity of action and movement". So, rather than the party representing the proletariat, the party (in Bordiga's conception) brings it into being.

As for the second, here I'm basing myself mainly on how I understand "The trajectory and crisis of capitalist forms". I don't know if Bordiga ever laid out a detailed vision of how a socialist society might be administered. But his "social brain" is not the party or the remains of the party, but the technical and scientific knowledge of society. The social brain is the brain of the Social Man, that is, human society in general, as an organic unity. Therefore to say that the social brain will direct production is not to say that the entire general social plan will leap from the foreheads of some committee of old men, but that it will be made by the practical application of human technical and scientific knowledge. Yes, Bordiga deprecates voting (as do, for that matter, Preobrazhensky and Bukharin in the ABC), but why do most of us presume that voting gives us an insight into social will? I think that's a leap we need to explore: it works, to an extent, if we conceive of people in abstract, but unfortunately people are concrete. Perhaps we need to move beyond one-man-one-vote, and not into either corporatism or its "progressive" reflexes like "progressive stacks".

I also don't think the planners can in any case be called elites; nothing Bordiga said (again, to the extent of my knowledge) even suggests they would be distinguished from other members of society in their possessions, prerogatives etc.