Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism (Part 3)

Here is a link to the text.

The way to overcome this short-coming – which will involve many battles along the way – is through forming organisations which avoid modelling themselves on those drawn from the bourgeois world. These organisations are the proletarian party and the proletarian State, within which the society of tomorrow crystallizes in advance of its existence in a historical sense. Within those organisations which we define as "immediatist", which copy and bear the physiological imprint of present-day society, all they can do is crystallize and perpetuate this society.

Yep, the importance of the party and state.

This next quote is very interesting about the autonomous commune system proposed by many anarchists.

In fact, these various communes would have no option but to trade amongst each other on the basis of free exchange. And even if we admitted that a "universal consciousness" would suffice to peacefully regulate these relations between the different locally based economic nuclei, there would still be nothing to prevent one commune extracting surplus value from another due to a fluctuating equivalence between one commodity and another.

Bordiga's examples he brings up in the "post-war Red years" of the unions, etc. is really good.

This next party is awesome.

To clarify our point, let us imagine that the organisation of bread production, and of all other wheat-based products, is entrusted to the "Bakers' Union", with analogous arrangements for all other trades and industries. In other words, we have to imagine that all the products of a given branch of production have been placed at the disposal of large organisations resembling national trusts. Since all the capitalist managers would long since have been removed, these organisations would need to make decisions about how to utilise the entire product (in our example: bread, pasta etc,) in such a way as to receive, from other parallel organisations, not only what their members require for their personal consumption, but new raw materials, instruments of labour, etc, as well. Such an economy is an exchange economy, and it continues to be so whether or not the exchanges take place at the "higher", or the "lower", levels of the organisation. In the first case, exchange takes place at the apex of the various sectors of production, each of which distributes the various products required for production and consumption down through its hierarchical structure. Here the system of exchange remains, at its upper levels, a mercantile one, that is, it requires some law of equivalence in order to equate the value of the stocks of one syndicate with another; and we can easily suppose that these syndicates would be very numerous, and just as easily suppose that each of them would need to separately negotiate with all the others. Let us not even ask who is to establish this system of equivalent values, or what would guarantee the "social atmosphere" within which all this fantastical independence and "equality" of the various producers' unions, would take place. But let us be so "liberal" as to think it possible that the various equivalent values could be peacefully determined through a spontaneously arrived at equilibrium. A measuring system of such complexity couldn't operate without the age-old expedient of a general equivalent, in other words, money, the logical measure of every exchange.

It is no less easy to conclude that the "higher" system would eventually break down into the "lower", since it would be impossible to restrict the handling of money in such a society just to those top people entrusted with arranging the exchanges between one production trust and another (and here the word syndicate is entirely appropriate); inevitably this right would be extended to all trust members, to all trust workers, who would thus be empowered to "buy" whatever they wanted after receiving their quota of money from their particular trade syndicate: in other words, their wages, just like today, the only alleged difference being that it would be 'undiminished' (as in Duhring, Lassalle et all) by the bosses profit margin.

Bordiga's critique of Merlino is interesting.

This next part is hilarious in my opinion.

As to "class autonomy", all we can say is that it is complete and utter crap.

Bordiga is so elegant with words, and in the above paragraph he is so blunt and direct.

This next quotation is very good.

Each association in possession of 'its own' instruments of labour, and producing in "its own" way, does not socialism make! Instead it substitutes class struggle, whose ultimate aim is dictatorship, with the absurd bellum omnium contra omnes: the war of all against all; a historical outcome which, fortunately, has proved to be as fruitless as it is absurd.

Slaves would be in a position of "Class autonomy" if they were to declare 'we are happy to remain slaves, but we want to decide what food to serve to our masters at table, and which of our daughters they can take to their beds!' Even the Christian position was thousands of times more revolutionary than that, for although it didn't herald a classless society, it did nevertheless clearly proclaim: "no difference between slaves and free men".

This next part is great too.

All immediatists – that is to say, all those who have travelled only a thousandth of the distance separating them from the level of communist thought – want to get rid of society and put in its place a particular group of workers. This group they choose from the confines of one of the various prisons which constitute the bourgeois society of "free men" i.e.;the factory, the trade, the territorial or legal patch. Their entire miserable effort consists in telling the non-free, the non-citizens, the non-individuals (such is the great idea with which the bourgeois revolution unconsciously inspires them) to envy and imitate their oppressors: be independent! free! be citizens! people! In a word: be bourgeois!

For us, the objective is not simply to take one of the existing groups from the present social set-up and attribute to it functions which already exist under capitalism; our goal is a non-capitalist society. Such is the abyss which separates us from these petty little groups with their endless bickering. Confronted with the abortive results of their theories, they witter on about a new autocracy, a bureaucratic centre, an oppressive leadership having been created, and that in order to avoid this, that all-powerful, impersonal entity – society – will have to be broken up into lots of 'autonomous' fragments, free to ape the ignoble (and, furthermore, already obsolete) bourgeois models.

Bordiga's writing on Khrushchev, the workers' opposition, etc. was very interesting.

Bordiga's take on what role trade unions play in the state-capitalist stage of development is interesting.

This next quote is very good.

T

he real danger lies in the individual enterprise itself, not in the fact it has a boss. How are you going to calculate economic equivalents between one enterprise and another, especially when the bigger ones will be stifling the smaller, when some will have more productive equipment than others, when some will be using 'conventional' instruments of production and others nuclear powered ones? This system, whose starting point is a fetishism about equality and justice amongst individuals, as well as a comical dread of privilege, exploitation and oppression, would be an even worse breeding ground for all these horrors than the present society.

The concluding remarks section is good.

The anti-Stalinists, Stalinists and XXth Congress post-Stalinists all make the same error. All of them share the illusion of a society in which the workers have defeated their employers at a local level, within their trade, or within their firm, but have remained trapped in the web of a surviving market economy. They don't seem to realize that this market economy is the same thing as capitalism.

Again, I really like how Bordiga reveals the fundamental similarities between seemingly opposed tendencies (e.g. Stalinism and factory socialism).

It is a very strange fact that the libertarians, who around 1870 or so engaged in their polemics against Marx in the First International, and whose short-sightedness we have already referred to, are still widely considered to be "to the Left" of Marx.

I find this odd as well. The whole left-right spectrum within the far left, ranging from the "ultra-leftist" anarchists and "libertarians" to the "right-wing" Stalinists and Maoists has always baffled me and seems to based on no objective criteria whatsoever. If Bordiga has demonstrated anything in this text, it is that Marxism is far more to the left than both "libertarianism" and Stalinism, both of which ultimately fail to transcend the capitalist mode of production and abolish private property in all of its forms.

The rather abstract form of future society based on local "communes" doesn't seem that different from today's bourgeois society, and its economic procedures don't seem that different either. Those who set out to describe this future society, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, thought it enough merely to link it to a set of philosophical ideologisms, rather than to an analysis of historically verified laws of social production. When they did take up Marx's critique, it was only in the most minimal and selective way since they were unable to infer the conclusions implied by the theory: they were impressed by the concept of surplus value (which is an economic theorem) but used it merely to support their moral condemnation of exploitation, which they saw as arising from human beings exerting "power" over each other. Unable to attain the theoretical level of dialectics, they were debarred from understanding, for instance, that in the transition from the appropriation of the physical product of the serf's labour by the landowning lord to the production of surplus value in the capitalist system, an actual "liberation" from more crushing forms of servitude and oppression has taken place; for even if the division into classes, and the existence of a State power, still remained a historical necessity, and benefited the bourgeois class, in that period it also benefited the whole of the rest of society as well.

I generally agree with Bordiga's critique of anarchism here. However, I disagree that they (or at least Bakunin, anyway) were "[u]nable to attain the theoretical level of dialectics[.]" Bakunin was actually quite the dialectician. In fact, his anarchism was based, in part, upon his unique conception of dialectics in which the Negative, rather than the Positive, as in Hegel's system, is the thesis and the Positive the antithesis.

increase (fully condoning the Marxist view) in the wealth of the bourgeoisie and in the power of each of each of its states, and along with this the production of surplus-value, does not immediately mean that an absolute increase in the gross revenue extracted is at the expense of the lower classes. To a certain extent, it is still compatible with a lessening of the hours of labour and with a general improvement in the satisfaction of needs. Therefore, the idea of dismantling capitalism by breaking up the national State into little islands of power, characteristic of the pre-bourgeois Middle Ages, makes no sense at all. It would clearly be a retrograde step to force the economy back into these limited confines, even if the sole aim were to prevent a few lazy, non-workers from appropriating any of the resources from each of the little communes.

In this system of egalitarian communes, it is certain that the cost of the daily food supply, calculated in terms of the hours of labour of all the adult members of the community (leaving aside the niggling question of those who didn't want to work, and who would compel them to do so!) would be more than if production was organised at the level of the nation

I agree with this. Breaking society into isolated, autonomous communes, even accepting that it would end capitalistic relations of production (it would not), would require far more labor per capita to ensure the same level of living standards that the current capitalist mode of production provides.

these various communes would have no option but to trade amongst each other on the basis of free exchange. And even if we admitted that a "universal consciousness" would suffice to peacefully regulate these relations between the different locally based economic nuclei, there would still be nothing to prevent one commune extracting surplus value from another due to a fluctuating equivalence between one commodity and another.

And here Bordiga shows how capitalistic relations of production would still manifest themselves in such a federation of communes.

This imaginary system of little economic communes is nothing more than a philosophical caricature of that age-old petty-bourgeois dream self-government. It can easily be seen that this system is just as mercantile as the one which existed in Stalin's Russia or in the increasingly anti-proletarian post-Stalinist Russia, and it is equally clear that it involves a totally bourgeois system of monetary equivalents (without a State mint?!) which is bound to weigh down the average productive labourer far more than a system of national or imperialist, large-scale industries.

Once again, I like how Bordiga, after demonstrating the fundamentally bourgeois nature of a federation of communes, ties this in with the fundamentally bourgeois nature of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, all of which are prima facie quite different systems of production.

these "free producers' economies" are shown to be just as far removed from the social economy, which Marx called socialism and communism, as capitalism, if not further.

I completely agree with this. Ironically, advocacy of a "free producer economy" would probably be considered "to the left" of Marx on the revolutionary left's own left-right spectrum that I mentioned earlier.

In the socialist economy, it is not the individual who makes decisions about production (what is to be produced, and how much) or about consumption, but society, the human species as a whole. Here is the essential point. The independence of the producer is just another of those vacuous, democratic stock-phrases which achieve precisely nothing.

While I agree that the control of production by "the human species as a whole" is what really characterizes a truly property-less society, I don't know how production would occur under communism without individual persons making decisions. It's not like the entirety of humanity will or even could be involved with every production decision.

In bourgeois society, the proletarian produces whatever the capitalist requires (or put in a more generalised and scientific way whatever the general laws of the capitalist mode of production require; whatever the inhuman monstrosity of capital requires) but as far as his own consumption is concerned, although restricted in terms of quantity, the proletarian can consume whatever, and however, he likes. In Socialist society, individuals will not be free to make "independent" choices regarding what productive activities they take part in, and what they consume, as both these spheres will be dictated by society, and in the interests of society. By whom? is the inevitable stupid question. To which we unhesitatingly reply: in the initial phase it will be the "dictatorship" of the revolutionary proletarian class, whose only organ capable of arriving at a prior understanding of the forces which will then come into play is the revolutionary party; in a second historical phase, society as a whole will exert its will spontaneously through a diffused economy, which will have abolished both the independence of classes and of individual persons, in all fields of human activity.

I think my last concern also applies to this section.

For them, their ultimate heart-felt cry is always "Bureaucratic centralism, or class autonomy?". If such indeed were the antithesis, instead of Marx and Lenin's "capitalist dictatorship or proletarian dictatorship", we would have no hesitation about opting for bureaucratic centralism (oh horror of horrors!), which at certain key historical junctures may be a necessary evil, and which would be easily controllable by a party which didn't "haggle over principles" (Marx), which was free from organisational slackness and tactical acrobatics, and which was immune to the plague of autonomism and federalism. As to "class autonomy", all we can say is that it is complete and utter crap. The socialist society is one in which classes have been abolished. Even if we concede that under a regime of class domination the dominated class may advance the demand for independence as a form of protest, in a society without a capitalist class, 'independence' can only signify a struggle between one set of workers and another, between one confederation and another, between different trade unions, between different sets of "producers". Under Socialism, producers are no longer a distinct and separate part of society.

I really like and agree with this part.

Each association in possession of 'its own' instruments of labour, and producing in "its own" way, does not socialism make!

Absolutely! Socialism is not merely "workers' control" of production, which can easily exist within a fundamentally capitalist mode of production, but is the abolition of classes, the market, the law of value, the anarchy of production, etc., etc. -- or, what encompasses all of these things, the abolition of (private) property.

Marxist determinism . . . destroys the bourgeois fiction of "the individual", "The person", "the citizen", and reveals that the philosophical attributes of this mythical entity are nothing but a universalization and eternalization of the relations which benefit the individual member of the modern ruling class, the bourgeois, the capitalist, the owners of land and money, the merchant. Having turned this wretched idol, the individual, on its head, Marxism replaces it with the economic society, which is "temporarily a national society".

Yes, "the individual" is a bourgeois conception and must be rejected as such by revolutionary leftists.

the transition to socialism is not something you contract out to a building firm. Marx, who weighed his words carefully (just as Lenin re-weighed them), would never have dreamed of using such a crassly bourgeois and vulgarly voluntaristic expression as "building socialism".

Well, the idea of "building socialism" wasn't something characteristic of only the Stalinist (and later post-Stalinist) era. A lot of the Bolsheviks talked of "building socialism" far before the rise of Stalin. In fact, Lenin himself used such rhetoric (emphasis added):

If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism (although nobody can say just what that definite ‘level of culture’ is, for it differs in every Western European country), why cannot we began by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers’ and peasants’ government and Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?

Personally, I don't have any qualms with the phrase "building socialism," which is not in any way synonymous with Socialism in One Country.

It is a scheme in which production and distribution do not attain the social, or even "national", level, since it is the "freely confederated" or "confederately free" trades unions who have the instruments and products of labour at their disposal, and who are free to do with them whatever they like. And even if these sectional organisations did manage to shut themselves off within their respective "independent" spheres of production, a competitive struggle would inevitably follow and lead to physical confrontations, especially given the "absence" of any kind of State.

In this fictitious programme, not only production is not carried out by society for society, but by trade unions for trade unions, but commodities continue to be produced; meaning that production is still non-socialist, since each article of consumption transferred from one trade-union to another does so as a commodity, and since this cannot occur without the existence of a monetary equivalent, it is necessarily transferred, as such, to each individual producer. As is always the case in these utopias of undiminished labour, the wage system still survives, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the autonomous trades unions, and eventually into those of private individuals, also survives. If our critique has relied largely on a "reductio ad absurdum" approach, it is entirely the petty-bourgeois content of all these various utopias which is to blame!

The above is a very good critique of syndicalism.

In the period between the 1920 and the 1921 international communist congresses, a debate took place at the 10th congress of the Russian party (3-16 March, 1921) with the so-called "Workers' opposition" (we've covered this topic in greater depth elsewhere in our study of Russia). We should remark that the oppositional stance put up by the Italian Left in 1920/21 (see our publication La Question Parlementaire dans L'Internationale Comuniste) was very different from the line of this opposition, which was harshly defined by Lenin as a «syndicalist and anarchist deviation within our party». . . .

The "workers' opposition" based themselves on the immediatist conception of socialist economy and on the false and naïve opinion that socialism can be established in any place, at any time, as long as the workers are left alone and allowed to get on with managing the economy by themselves. Lenin reports the main 'thesis' of the workers opposition as: «The organisation of the management of the national economy is the function of an All-Russia Congress of Producers organised in industrial unions which shall elect a central body to run the whole of the national economy of the Republic».

Bordiga here displays a negative impression of the Workers' Opposition and seems to agree with Lenin's assessment of it as a "syndicalist and anarchist deviation[.]" Although I agree with them and their criticisms of the Opposition, I think that it did reflect a more or less proletarian reaction to a real degenerative process taking place within the Party and the state. (That's not to deny that there were petty bourgeois elements within the Workers' Opposition, which there certainly were.)

The "Leninist" criterion for dealing with this problem is that the Trade Unions lag far behind the revolutionary party, and if left to their own devices fall prey to petty-bourgeois weaknesses and collaboration with the bourgeois economy.

I agree with this conception of trade unions, and it forms the basis of my opposition to syndicalism.

The real danger lies in the individual enterprise itself, not in the fact it has a boss. How are you going to calculate economic equivalents between one enterprise and another, especially when the bigger ones will be stifling the smaller, when some will have more productive equipment than others, when some will be using 'conventional' instruments of production and others nuclear powered ones? This system, whose starting point is a fetishism about equality and justice amongst individuals, as well as a comical dread of privilege, exploitation and oppression, would be an even worse breeding ground for all these horrors than the present society.

Completely agree with the above.

In the lower stage of socialism class differences have still not been eliminated; the State can't be abolished yet

In the article on Bordigism by Adam Buick, Buick says that Bordiga made the distinction, following Marx, between three distinct stages: the proletarian dictatorship, the lower phase of communism, and the higher phase of communism. Here, Bordiga seems to confound the lower phase of communism with the proletarian dictatorship, a mistaken conception that seems to be common among Leninists.