Communism Is The Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today by Loren Goldner

Here is the link.

Bordiga's analysis of Russia (as developed after 1945) is as follows. While his faction had totally supported Trotsky in the faction fight of the 20's, largely for reasons related to Soviet/Comintern foreign policy, the Bordigist analysis took its distance from the super-industrialization strategy of the Left Opposition, for ultimately "Bukharinist" reasons. He felt after 1945 that only something like Bukharin's strategy had any hope of preserving the international revolutionary character of the regime, (which to Bordiga was more important than Russian industrialization) because it would not destroy the Bolshevik party. Bukharin said in the 1924-28 faction fights that the implementation of Trotsky's leftist "super-industrialization" strategy could only be carried out by the most elephantine state bureaucracy history had ever seen. (10) When Stalin stole the left's program and put it into practice, he completely confirmed Bukharin, as Trotsky himself acknowledged in a backhanded way after most of his faction in Russia had capitulated to Stalin. (11)

I think that the "international revolutionary character" of the revolution necessarily goes hand in hand with industrialization and development. I do agree with the above, though.

Trotskyists had always said that in April 1917 "Lenin became a Trotskyist" by accepting the theses of permanent revolution. But Lenin had actually disagreed with Trotsky on nuances, and this showed up in his 1920-1922 formulations on the nature of the new regime, above all his remarkable speeches to the 1921 party congress, in his polemics against the First Workers' Opposition and their charge that the Soviet state was "state capitalism". In reply, Lenin said that state capitalism would be a tremendous step forward from what Russia actually was, which was a petty producer capitalism with a working-class political party controlling the state. (15) For Bordiga, once this politicalexpression of the working class was destroyed by Stalinism, all that was left was petty producer capitalism. Lenin's use of the term "workers' state with bureaucratic deformations", in the early 20's was quite different from Trotsky's use of the same term in 1936. It is not possible or necessary here to recapitulate the whole evolution of who said what on this question. What lurks behind these differing strategic and tactical judgments are two opposed conceptions of Marxism. What is important is that for Trotsky and the Trotskyists, the permanent character of the revolution was congealed in "property forms" and later was expressed in the growth of the productive forces. For Bordiga, the growth of the productive forces was merely proof of the bourgeois character of the Soviet phenomenon. He turned the Stalinists on their head by saying that Trotsky's problem was not his "underestimation" of the peasantry, but his overestimation of the possibility that the peasants, and the agrarian revolution of petty producers, could have anything to do with a proletarian revolution. In Bordiga's conception, Stalin, and later Mao, Ho, etc. were "great romantic revolutionaries" in the 19th century sense, i.e. bourgeoisrevolutionaries. He felt that the Stalinist regimes that came into existence after 1945 were just extending the bourgeois revolution, i.e. the expropriation of the Prussian Junker class by the Red Army, through their agrarian policies and through the development of the productive forces. To the theses of the French ultra-left group "Socialism or Barbarism" who denounced the regime, after 1945, as state capitalist, Bordiga replied with an article "Avanti Barbati!" ("Onward Barbarians!") that hailed the bourgeois revolutionary side of Stalinism as its sole real content. (18) (One does not have to agree with Bordiga to acknowledge that this was a more coherent viewpoint than the stupidity of the Trotskyists' analysis after 1945 that saw the Stalinists in Eastern Europe, China or Indochina as quavering "reformists" eager to sell out to imperialism.)

The above is very, very interesting. I agree with it, and I do think Bordiga's analysis on Stalinism is correct.

I also think that Bordiga's insistence on the development of productive forces was not socialist, but essentially bourgeois.

This was the nub of his critique of democracy. For it was in the name of "conquering the masses" that the Comintern seemed to be making all kinds of programmatic concessions to left-wing Social Democrats. For Bordiga, program was everything, a gate-receipt notion of numbers was nothing. The role of the party in the period of ebb was to preserve the program and to carry on the agitational and propaganda work possible until the next turn of the tide, not to dilute it while chasing ephemeral popularity. One can argue with this conception, which can lead to the closed world of the sect, as the Bordigists indisputably became. But it has the merit of underscoring another truth to which the Trotskyist wing of the international left opposition and its heirs have been blind: when the "mass" parties outside Russia swallowed Stalinism whole in the mid-1920s, the foundations had been laid by the 1921 turn. It is hardly necessary to accept Bordigia's anti-democratic viewpoint to see this: he completely missed, and dismissed, the role of soviets and workers' councils in Russia, Germany, and Italy. But on the "sociological" consequences of the 1921 united front for the future of the Western CPs - their "Bolshevization" after 1924 - Bordiga was right and the Comintern was wrong. Because historically, the social base of much post-1924 Stalinism had entered the Western CPs through the "united front" tactic of 1921. (29) Bordiga provided a way of seeing a fundamental degeneration in the world communist movement in 1921 (instead of in 1927 with the defeat of Trotsky) without sinking into mere empty calls for "more democracy". The abstract formal perspective of bureaucracy/democracy, with which the Trotskyist tradition treats this crucial period in Comintern history, became separated from any content. Bordiga throughout his life called himself a Leninist and never polemicized against Lenin directly, but his totally different appreciation of the 1921 conjuncture, its consequences for the Comintern, and his opposition to Lenin and Trotsky on the united front issue illuminates a turning point that is generally obscured by the heirs of the Trotskyist wing of the international left opposition of the 1920's.

I really like the above and it illustrates why mass parties aren't something to strive for in all situations, but are something that depends wholly on the consciousness of the proletariat. It also shows the dangers of united fronts with social-democrats.

To merely enumerate the major events of world history since 1975 is to see how profoundly the way we see the world has changed; we need only conjure up the 1980's realities of Thatcher's Britain, Reagan's America, Mitterand 's France, Gorbachev's Russia, Teng's China, i.e. the "neo-liberal" (in the von Hayek/ von Mises sense of that term) tidal wave that has overwhelmed the statism of Social Democracy, Stalinism, Keynesianism and Third World Bonapartism. A thorough knowledge of the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1928 and the "world view" derived from it seems a poor guide to China's post 76-evolution, Russia under Gorbachev, the appearance of the NICS, the China/Vietnam/Cambodia war, the collapse of the Western European CPs, the utter containment of the British Labour Party, the American Democratic Party and the German SPD by the right, the evolution of Mitterand to neo-liberalism, or the appearance of significant "anti-statist" currents even in mercantilist regimes like Mexico or India. One might well add to this list a workers' movement in Poland with a heavy dose of clericalist nationalism and the revival of fundamentalism in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, de-industrialization, high tech and gentrification. None of these events discredit Marxism, but they do discredit the virtually universal penchant of the Western left, into the 1970's, to view reality through lenses inherited from the Russian Revolution and its fate.

The above is completely and utterly correct.

I will finish this up tommorow. I am tired right now.

Capitalism is first of all the agrarian revolution.Before it is possible to have industry and cities and urban workers, it is necessary to revolutionize agricultural productivity to have the surplus to free labor power from the land. Where this had not been accomplished by 1648 (the end of the Thirty Years' War and hence of the wars of religion), it had to be done by top-down statism. This created the continental mercantile tradition that, after the French Revolution, persisted into the 20th century as a more mature mercantilism. This characterized Louis Napoleon's Second Empire (1852-1870) and above all Bismarck's Prussia and Prussia-dominated Germany. (32) The latter, in particular, was copied by all the "late developers" all over the world after German unification in 1870, starting with Russia.

I agree with the above.

If the German revolution had saved Russia from isolation, the 20th century would have taken a completely different course. That view of history was a very useful "heuristic device" to avoid all the pitfalls of Social Democracy, Stalinism, Maoism, and Third Worldism. To live within that tradition, whether as a Trotskyist, a Third Camper, or an ultra-leftist, is to measure history from the vantage point of the German and Russian soviets of 1917-1921. It is not at all a bad benchmark for historical judgment; it is certainly superior to the Keynesian welfare state, the Stalinist successes in the first Five Year Plan, or labor-intensive agrarian communes in China as a notion of socialist society. But it leads to an impasse. It leads one to viewing history as a strategist for the Comintern in 1920, of taking up where the Central and Eastern European revolutions against the Hohenzollems, Hapsburgs and Romanovs left off. Yet an historical chasm separates those revolutions, and their dual character, from the present. (34) The dual nature of the October revolution was that of a revolution in which historical tasks of the bourgeois revolution were realized under the leadership of the working class, after which the proletarian political content was completely snuffed out by Stalinist counter-revolution. To draw the line of "continuity" uncritically through Lenin and Trotsky, as the exact extensions of Marx in the early twentieth century, to make the Russian Revolution the touchstone of the 20th century ("the turning point of history where history failed to turn", as someone put it) is to "buy into" a whole view of history, before and, since 1917. It is above all to accept a mythology about German Social Democracy as a revolutionary Marxist formation prior to some date, whether 1890, or 1898, or 1914, when the SPD was taken over by "revisionism". If there is one single myth at the bottom of the outlook informed by "the best of German Social Democracy and Russian Bolshevism" which has now become problematic, it is that rose tinted view of the early SPD. It is through that view that the international left was colonized by the lenses of Aufklaerungwhich originated in the civil service of the enlightened despotic states.

Interesting, but I am not really sure about this.

How does one arrive at a Marxist explanation of the historical hegemony of vulgar Marxism, since Marxism rejects out of hand the psychological/moralistic judgment that "they had the wrong ideas"? The answer did not seem so complicated: if the materialism of the classical workers' movement centered in the SPD from 1860 to 1914, and extended by the Russian Revolution, was epistemologically little different from revolutionary materialism of a bourgeois character, it must be that the classical workers' movement in Central and Eastern Europe was an extension of the bourgeois revolution.

Again, interesting but I don't know how I feel about it exactly.

The most interesting perspective developed to illuminate these questions was that of the "neo-Bordigists", French currents influenced by Bordiga, but not slavishly; the best of them attempted to synthesize Bordiga, who was oblivious to the historical significance of soviets, workers' councils, and workers' democracy, and who placed everything in the party, with the German and Dutch ultra-left who glorified workers' councils and explained everything that had gone wrong after 1917 in terms of "Leninism".

The most I have to say about this is that Bordiga wasn't oblivious to the councils, etc. but this was discussed before.

Overall, it is a very good read. I would reccomend it as a good look into Bordigist thought, but some stuff was missing (although I don't think the article was a generalization of Bordigism, rather showing that the agrarian question is really a question of capitalism, etc.)

The article doesn't really explain the politics of Bordigism. For example, it's claimed that Bordiga was opposed to working in existing unions. Does the opposition to united fronts mean that Bordigism is either "revolution now" or nothing? Would a Bordigist party have supported the civil rights movement, or the anti Vietnam war movement demand of "Out Now" in the US? How would this current have related to the recent Occupy movement?