Bordiga Hypocrisy

[Jacob Cliff]

In one of Bordiga's essays, he writes:

"A process of internal degeneration of the new political and administrative apparatus began to develop however. A privileged circle began to form, monopolising the advantages and posts in the bureaucratic hierarchy while continuing to claim to represent the interests of the great labouring masses."

Is this not contrary to (what I at least conceive as) Bordiga's analysis of the USSR that they degenerated not because "a bureaucratic elite dominated," but because of being wrapped up in efforts to modernize the countryside and ultimately take on the role of the national capitalist? I thought Bordiga vehemently criticized the simplistic notion that "lack of democracy" killed the SU? (Because that's what is implicitly implied when talking of "bureaucratic elites" and "privileged circles).

Furthermore, isn't this a bit hypocritical, given that Bordiga actually ADVOCATED a top-down, hierarchical one-party state not subjective to democracy at all, where the economy is left up to the whims of an unelected elite of central planners?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't think Bordiga is being hypocritical in the essay. He is talking about the degeneration of the administrative apparatus, one aspect of what he saw as the Soviet Union becoming counter-revolutionary. Likewise one can talk about how the sexual libertarianism of revolutionary Russia was replaced by Stalinist family-mongering - but this doesn't mean that this caused the degeneration of the revolution.

Also note that Bordiga never talks about a lack of democracy, either as a symptom or as cause of the counter-revolutionary turn of the Soviet Union. He points out that the bureaucracy could no longer represent the toiling masses - but not because there was no democracy (there is democracy in bourgeois states, after all, but their apparatus does not represent the working masses), but because of their material privileges.

Bordiga never claimed that planners in a socialist society would have material privileges other members of society will not; that would be in complete contradiction to how he and other communists of the period viewed the socialist society. Also I don't think it's fair to say Bordiga wanted the economy to be run by the whims of planners; the point was in fact to structure society so that the collective knowledge of the human species (what Bordiga calls the social brain) is utilised in the best possible way.