Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism (Part 1)

Here is a link to the text.

When Bordiga is talking of revisionists and reformists, he has this to say.

What both of them share is an aversion to the identifying, discriminating feature of Marx's theory: armed force, no longer in the hands of particular oppressed individuals or groups, but in the hands of the liberated and victorious class, the class dictatorship, bugbear of social-democrats and anarchists alike.

This next part is very interesting.

Those who oppose our thesis that Party and State are main, rather than merely accessory, elements within the Marxist scheme, and who prefer to insist that Class is the principal element, with party and State as accessory features of class history and class struggles (and as easy to change as the tyres on a car) are directly contradicted by Marx himself. In a letter to Weydemeyer (March 5, 1852) quoted by Lenin in State and Revolution, Marx wrote that the existence of classes wasn't discovered by him but by bourgeois economists and historians. It was other people who discovered Class struggles as well, which doesn't mean they were communist or revolutionary. The content of his doctrine, he said, resides in the historical concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary stage in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Thus speaks Marx, and it is one of the rare times when he speaks about himself.

I think that the above is important and essentially correct.

I really like this next part on the importance of the proletariat dictatorship and the party.

The organ of the dictatorship and operator of the State-weapon is the political class party; the party which, through its doctrine and its continuous historical action, has been potentially granted the task, proper to the proletarian class, of transforming society. We not only say that the struggle and the historical task of the class cannot be achieved without the two forms: dictatorial State, (i.e. the exclusion, as long as they exist, of the other classes which are henceforth defeated and subdued) and political party, we also say – in our customary dialectical and revolutionary language – that one can only begin to speak of class – of establishing a dynamic link between a repressed class in today's society and a future revolutionised social form, and taking into consideration the struggle between the class which holds the State and the class which is to overthrow it – only when the class is no longer a cold statistical term at the miserable level of bourgeois thought, but a reality, made manifest in its organ, the Party, without which it has neither life nor the strength to fight.

The part where Bordiga talks of how the party finds the class is interesting and essentially correct. It also affirms the importance of the party. I really like this part below.

By putting forward the idea of a proletariat without a party, a party which is sterilized and impotent party, or by looking for substitutes for it, the latest corrupters of Marxism have actually annihilated the class by depriving it of any possibility of fighting for socialism, or even, come to that, fighting for a miserable crust of bread.

This next part is equally good.

Therefore Party and State are at the heart of the Marxist viewpoint. You either accept or reject it. Searching for the class outside of its Party and its State is a waste of energy, and depriving the class of them means turning your back on communism and the revolution.

Bordiga's critique of Proudhon is very good as well and I enjoy how he traces his critique of Proudhon to a critique of Stalinism.

Overall, a very good read and I can't wait to read the 2 other parts.

may be referred to as the philosophical aspect of Marxism, or dialectical materialism.

Perhaps I'm being a bit of a quibbler here, but I would replace the word "philosophical" with "scientific."

the historical invariance of Marxism which, it was maintained, is not a doctrine still in the process of formation but rather one completed in the historical epoch appropriate to it, that is, the period which witnessed the birth of the modern proletariat. It is a touchstone of our historical vision that this class will go through the whole arc of the rise and fall of capitalism using the same unaltered theoretical armoury.

The idea of Marxism being completely unalterable sounds dogmatic and anti-scientific to me. If Marxism is a science, it should be in a constant state of development through the refutation of false hypotheses and proposition of new ones.

I like Bordiga's distinction between the three groups of critics of Marxism: the deniers, the falsifiers, and the modernizers. However, I think there's a lot of overlap between the modernizers and the falsifiers. Bordiga classifies revisionists as falsifiers, but most prominent revisionists, such as Bernstein, sought to falsify Marxism under the guise of modernizing it, leaving them in both categories.

Their [Sartre et al.] not entirely unsuccessful condemnation of Moscow sounds something like this: abuse of dictatorship, abuse of the centrally-disciplined political party, abuse of the State power in its dictatorial form. All of them put forward similar remedies: more liberty, more democracy, socialism to be brought into the ideological and political atmosphere of liberal and electoral legality, and the use of State power in relation to different political proposals and opinions should be renounced. . . .

We hold exactly the opposite point of view, so let's set the record straight immediately. The revolutionary movement, freed from servile admiration of the American "free World", freed from subjection to a corrupt Moscow and immune from the syphilitic putridity of opportunism, can only re-emerge by recovering its original radical Marxist platform, and by declaring that the content of socialism surpasses and negates such concepts as Liberty, Democracy, and Parliamentarism and reveals them to be means of defending and propping up Capitalism.

Classic Bordiga. This reminds me of something Bordiga said in "Force, Violence, and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle," which happens to be one of my favorite Bordiga quotes:

Our condemnation of the Stalinist orientation is not based on the abstract, scholastic, and constitutionalist accusation that it committed the sinful acts of abusing bureaucratism, state intervention, and despotic authority. It is based instead on quite different evaluations, i.e. the economic, social, and political development of Russia and the world, of which the monstrous swelling of the state machine is not the sinful cause but the inevitable consequence.

The organ of the dictatorship and operator of the State-weapon is the political class party; the party which, through its doctrine and its continuous historical action, has been potentially granted the task, proper to the proletarian class, of transforming society.

I agree with this. The Party is the primary organ through which the proletariat exercises state power.

one can only begin to speak of class – of establishing a dynamic link between a repressed class in today's society and a future revolutionised social form, and taking into consideration the struggle between the class which holds the State and the class which is to overthrow it – only when the class is no longer a cold statistical term at the miserable level of bourgeois thought, but a reality, made manifest in its organ, the Party, without which it has neither life nor the strength to fight.

I completely agree with this, that the proletariat only really begins to exist as a class, i.e., as a social force within historical development, with the formation of the Party. Bordiga goes into more detail on this point in his "Party and Class."

One cannot therefore detach party from class as though class were the main element and the party merely accessory to it. By putting forward the idea of a proletariat without a party, a party which is sterilized and impotent party, or by looking for substitutes for it, the latest corrupters of Marxism have actually annihilated the class by depriving it of any possibility of fighting for socialism, or even, come to that, fighting for a miserable crust of bread. . . . [I]n diluting the party and its function as the main revolutionary organ they [the anti-partyists] declass the proletariat; which having been deprived of the ability to overthrow the ruling class, or even to mitigate its effects in restricted fields of activity, ends up helplessly shackled to it.

This might be going in my signature! I absolutely agree with this. The proletariat only begins to exist as a social force through its class party. Anti-partyism, then, is nothing more than opposition to class action by the proletariat.

Party and State are at the heart of the Marxist viewpoint. You either accept or reject it. Searching for the class outside of its Party and its State is a waste of energy, and depriving the class of them means turning your back on communism and the revolution.

Again, completely agree.

Proudhon rejects the idea of political conflict because his view of the way societies change is fundamentally flawed: it doesn't involve the complete overthrow of capitalist relations of production; it is competition orientated, localised and co-operativist, and is trapped within a bourgeois vision of business enterprise and market. He might have proclaimed that property was theft, but his system, remaining a mercantile system, remains one which is property orientated and bourgeois. Proudhon's myopia about economic revolution is the same as today's "factory socialists", who duplicate in less vigorous form the old Utopia of Robert Owen; who wanted to liberate the workers by handing over to them the management of the factories, right in the middle of bourgeois society. Whether these people label themselves Ordinovists in Italy, or Barbarists in France, they are in the end, all of them, chips off the same Proudhonian block and deserve the same invective as Stalin: Oh Poverty of the Enrichers!

I agree with Bordiga's critique of Proudhon here and love how he ties it in to the fetishism of factory councils, which, like Proudhon's mutualism, leaves the basis of private property and the capitalistic relations of production firmly intact.

In Proudhon's system we find individual exchange, the market, and the free will of the buyer and seller exalted above all else. It is asserted that in order to eliminate social injustice, all that is required is to relate every commodity's exchange value to the value of the labour contained within it. Marx shows – and will show later, pitting himself against Bakunin, against Lassalle, against Duhring, against Sorel and against all the latter-day pygmies mentioned above – that what lies beneath all this is nothing other than the apologia, and the preservation, of bourgeois economy; incidentally, there is nothing different in the Stalinist claim that in a Socialist society, which Russia claims to be, the law of exchange of equivalent values will continue to exist.

This sounds familiar! This is among my favorite quotes from Bordiga. I really love how he reveals the fundamental similarities between Proudhonian mutualism, (factory) councilism, and Stalinism, ideologies usually considered quite distinct and very much opposed to one another.

This extract, one of the many gems that can be found in the classic writings of our great school, shows how shallow it is to maintain that Marx loved to describe capitalism and its laws, but never described socialist society for fear of lapsing into. .. utopianism. A view shared by Stalin and second-rate anti-Stalinists alike.

While I agree that the term "utopianism" is often, and has historically been, abused to reject any discussion of how socialist society will function and operate, I do think that most attempts to discuss such issues, while important, cannot be any more than mere speculation. We shouldn't elevate Marx's speculations on future society (e.g. the higher and lower phases of communism) to irrevocable principles of Marxism.

Along with his defective view of the revolutionary society, Proudhon is the precursor of the worst aspects of today's fashionable "factory socialists": the rejection of Party and State because they create leaders, chiefs and power-brokers, who, due to the weakness of human nature, will inevitably be transformed into a privileged group; into a new dominant class (or caste?) to live off the backs of the proletariat.

These superstitions about "human nature" were ridiculed by Marx a long time ago when he wrote in a short, pithy sentence: Monsieur Proudhon ignores that all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature. Under this massive tombstone can be laid to rest countless throngs of past, present and future anti-Marxist idiots.

The "anti-Marxist idiots" line made me laugh. I agree with this part that the Proudhonian and anarchist opposition to "leaders" is based on a static conception of human nature in which power, by its very nature, corrupts human beings. This argument of the anarchists has no more legitimacy than the bourgeois argument that inequality, oppression, poverty, etc. are natural, and therefore inevitable, aspects of human behavior and society.

The party's superiority lies precisely in its overcoming of the disease of labourism and workerism.

I agree with this.

The idea of Marxism being completely unalterable sounds dogmatic and anti-scientific to me. If Marxism is a science, it should be in a constant state of development through the refutation of false hypotheses and proposition of new ones.

I agree with you completely. I think that here Bordiga was just being a stinky-winky doo doo head

I completely agree with this, that the proletariat only really begins to exist as a class, i.e., as a social force within historical development, with the formation of the Party. Bordiga goes into more detail on this point in his "Party and Class."

I agree as well. I think, as others have criticized Bordigists for believing, that the party finds the class.

This might be going in my signature! I absolutely agree with this. The proletariat only begins to exist as a social force through its class party. Anti-partyism, then, is nothing more than opposition to class action by the proletariat.

Lol, that was my sig. for a short while!

I agree with Bordiga's critique of Proudhon here and love how he ties it in to the fetishism of factory councils, which, like Proudhon's mutualism, leaves the basis of private property and the capitalistic relations of production firmly intact.

Yep.

This sounds familiar! This is among my favorite quotes from Bordiga. I really love how he reveals the fundamental similarities between Proudhonian mutualism, (factory) councilism, and Stalinism, ideologies usually considered quite distinct and very much opposed to one another.

That is why it is my current signature

While I agree that the term "utopianism" is often, and has historically been, abused to reject any discussion of how socialist society will function and operate, I do think that most attempts to discuss such issues, while important, cannot be any more than mere speculation. We shouldn't elevate Marx's speculations on future society (e.g. the higher and lower phases of communism) to irrevocable principles of Marxism.

I agree

I think that here Bordiga was just being a stinky-winky doo doo head

I suppose that's one way to say it lol