The Communist Left of Italy and the International Communist Party – Jacques Camatte

Invariance

In the 8th issue of Invariance, it is stated that the theses of the Italian Left and
those of other currents will be published in the future in separate booklets, "this is
because we do not claim an organizational continuity with a movement whose work is
finished and has now a historical character. The link with the Italian Left is theoretical in
the sense that we claim the contribution of this current, but in a restrictive way because
it did not restore Marxism integrally. It was a unilateral affirmation of this one " (p. 60).

The preceding affirmations, in connection with what was written in n°5, p. 5

and in n°6 thesis I.5. "The Communist Left of Italy after the war", already allow any
serious reader to realize the origin of the elements that produce Invariance. This review,
in fact, has never had any relation with Socialisme ou Barbarie as Le Monde of 04.04.70
and Lutte Ouvrière of November of the same year affirmed. In this last newspaper it is
even indicated that Invariance is an old review. However, it has only existed since 1968.
In order to clear up any misunderstanding, let us give some details.

In 1966, the process of disintegration reached its climax in the International

Communist Party. It had begun at the end of 1964 with the offensive return of the
purely Leninist position that wanted to remove the ambiguity of the movement, which
we spoke about in n°5, abandoning the characters and the way of life of the small party
and applying the Leninist principles in the matter of organization with, in particular, the
reaffirmation of democratic centralism and the creation of leaders at the head of each
section. Against this deviation, A. Bordiga rose firmly by publishing the "Notes for the
theses on the organization". In doing so, the old ambiguity was reaffirmed. It was the
same in Naples in 1965, where with the Theses on the historical task, the action and the
structure of the world communist party, according to the positions that for more than
half a century form the historical patrimony of the communist left, the affirmation of
the existence of the small party was assured through the continuity of the communist
left. These theses operated all the same a certain retreat in the sense that they
operated a more sustained allegiance towards the 3rd International. From then on, the
affirmation of the ambiguity became a work of Sisyphus, because in fact it was no longer
possible historically (cf. Invariance, n°5, p. 5). The additional theses of Milan tried once
again to fight against the Trotskyist reabsorption, but in vain. From then on, there could
only be dissolution of this movement into its components. The elements that emerged
in 1966 had, in reality, few positions in common. The fundamental statement made at
the time: the creation of the party had been premature in 1943, one does not build a
party at a long historical distance from the revolution, with its corollary it is necessary to
situate this party historically, that is to say, to study in what way it is related to the great
tradition that starts from 1848, and to highlight what it has stumbled on leading it to
disappear as a formal party, was in fact only accepted by a tiny minority? This was to
lead to a new separation in 1967, from which two magazines were born: Le fil du temps,
which we have characterized in n°8, p. 59, and Invariance. One of the essential
differences between the two journals is summarized in the sentence quoted above.

One last remark about the articles in Le Monde and Lutte ouvrière: we do not
consider ourselves to be part of an extreme left. If there is a left, it is because there is a
center and a right. However, as we indicated in n°8, all the groupuscules - and, with
respect to the class, even the PCF is a groupuscule - are only political rackets. The
elements that publish Invariance are linked to the vast international movement, which is
developing underground and is therefore still little perceptible to agitators on all sides,
of the new revolutionary phase whose center is in the United States of America. This
means that we are outside of all the currents, structured or not, of the old workers'
movement, whose antiquity was perfectly revealed in May 1968.

To say that the Left has completed its work implies delimiting the contribution of this
current, its originality, its specificity; this requires, first of all, that we make its texts
known; this is what we have endeavored to do since the beginning. This is all the more
necessary since the Left is not well known in France. However, on this subject, it is
necessary to specify the honest, serious, and happily composed little book: Le marxisme
après Marx, by Pierre Souyri, ed. Flammarion, which correctly exposes the positions of
what he calls the Italian bordiguists (cf. pp. 79-81). On the other hand, the brochure of J.
Barrot, Contribution à la critique de l'idéologie ultra-gauche, (La Vieille Taupe, 1 rue des
Fossés Saint-Jacques, Paris 5°) also indicates some characters of the Italian left (cf. pp.
37-38).

When one wants to present the positive core of the communist left in Italy,
its contribution, one runs up against another difficulty which is not specific to it: the
heterogeneous character of the movement. Contrary to the proclamations of the PCI,
there was never a homogeneous line that had the assent of all the militants. In fact, very
often the left was the place of meeting of various positions, while keeping its own. On
the other hand there are in Italy three organizations which claim to be of the left, two in
France.

We will not deal with the question of the specificity of the Left in its entirety,
we will limit ourselves to the period after 1945 and in so doing we will clarify what was
written in theses I.5 of Invariance n°6. In this period, it is a question of seeing what is the
relationship between the Left and the international communist party. This is all the
more important because at the present time the latter is carrying out a real deification
of the former. We will give as an example the introduction to the booklet Communism
and Fascism that, apart from the superficiality that characterizes the ICP, exalts the Left
in relation to all the other currents and in particular the German Left defined as
"infantile, syndicalist, workerist and spontaneousist" (p. 20). It is at this moment that
the KAPD is mentioned which, in fact, and we will show it better in a next work, carried
a virulent, serious and coherent criticism to the CI; criticism that A. Bordiga was to take
up after 1923. On the other hand, what stupidity to take back the adjective of infantile
applied by Lenin to the German left and to evade it about the Italian left; without
forgetting that Lenin declared several times that Bordiga was an anarchist. On the other
hand, it is not true that the Left faced the class enemy on its own basis, on the ground of
communism, since it had accepted the revolutionary Leninist position of participation in
the elections (cf. "Elections: Electoral Manifesto of the Communist Party of Italy, 1921"
in The Parliamentary Question in the Communist International, edited by Communist
Program).

The suppression of the period 1916-21, when the different currents of the
German left individualized, unified and were defeated by the CI, allows the authors of
the brochure to show a German workers' movement only at the orders of Moscow,
always ahead in the application of the decisions of the Moscow center.

Any apologetic is a cover-up, a camouflage of something: it is based on the

avowed or unavowed will to hide the differences; it leads to monolithism a posteriori.
As far as the subject that interests us is concerned, this concerns the origins of the ICH.
In n°6 of this review, we simply stated that there were different currents at the origin of
this party. We must specify in more detail the nature of these currents.

During the war of 1939-45, groups that remained on the basis of the position
of the Italian left wrote and worked against it; it was they who founded the
Internationalist Communist Party in 1943, which changed its name in 1964 to the
International Communist Party. It quickly gathered a large number of militants. This
growth was largely due to the position of the Italian Communist Party - then in the anti-
fascist bloc - and to the fact that many militants were under the illusion, as was also the
case in France, that it would be possible to bear arms against the bourgeoisie at the end
of the conflict. This position did not break with that of the faction that had always
affirmed that the world war would generate revolution.

In 1945, at the Turin conference, there was enthusiasm and the different
positions could not emerge in their specificity. This was not the case at the first congress
in Florence in May 1948.

This congress of Florence was in fact the one of the disarray. Following the
passage of the Stalinists in the opposition, the ranks of the party were literally emptied.
The perspective of the revolution at the end of the war had thus proved to be false.

One of the most ardent supporters of the permanence of the party, O.

Damen, recognized the defeat of the proletariat and affirmed that a new cycle of
accumulation was underway, which would lead to another war: "In a word, the
consolidation of the capitalist regime was made possible by the enslavement of the
proletariat, and it is on these presuppositions that the problem of a new cycle of
capitalist accumulation is based, from which the historical necessity of the new war for
the domination of the world in a unitary and totalitarian sense follows." But the
hypothesis of a new period of accumulation opens "the perspective of a rekindling of
the social struggles to which the working masses will be pushed because of the
deterioration of their living conditions...". This leads him to consider that the positions
of the Turin Conference were right and that the existence of the party was justified:
"There is a tendency in some comrades that tends to restrict its tasks if not to deny the
historical legitimacy of its existence". He rejected the thesis that "the party should
reappear after the reversal of the current reactionary course".

"We affirm that, insofar as the party exists and lasts in a phase in which the
defeat of the proletariat and the consolidation of capitalism and the development of the
alignment of forces for war appear more and more evident, this is due to the fact that
the party expresses a concrete demand of the historical continuity of the proletarian
movement. This is the kind of demonstration of the necessity of existence by the proof
of existence.

"From the point of view of the class conflict, which the omnipotence of the
capitalist victory can at the limit attenuate but not eliminate historically, the party is the
only salient episode of this post-war period and represents dialectically the proof of the
possibility of a class rebirth.
 "The party arose when the fraction had fulfilled the motives for which it was
born from the atmosphere of the centrist experience". Then he affirms, that since "the
Italian Communist Party became the party of the democratic war and the most valid
defender of the capitalist property and its traditional organs of defense [...] the task of
the fraction was finished, and the problem of the construction of the party of class was
posed by the history".

It was thus the end of an entryism of the Luxemburgist type. On the other
hand, Damen has a vision of the party that recalls that of the Kapedists for whom the
party was educator and conscience (social brain) and the element that completes the
union of the proletariat.

"... the proletariat must be helped to find itself, as a revolutionary force; it

must be helped to individualize its enemies and to free itself from the influence of the
workers' parties that have gone over to the counter-revolution. It is up to the party to
create in the struggle the human class potential for the revolution, the revolutionary
solution of this crisis, which otherwise will go to war. In this aspect the party reveals
itself as the critical and organizational theoretical presupposition of this revolutionary
solution: revolution rather than war".

He considers the formation of trade union fractions as an important task of

the party. The trade union fraction, he says, is not a "doublet of the party insofar as it
also gathers sympathizers and elements of other political formations", on the other
hand he proposes the participation in the elections. In conclusion a small Trotskyist
note: "the future chances of our party are linked to our capacity to give ourselves a
center of direction in which prevails not the personality, but the unitary effort,
tenacious, inflexible, for the elaboration of the revolutionary theory". Basically, the
party must intervene in the action.

Here a remark is necessary: apart from the question of the elections, it can be
said that later Damen's position had to be accepted by many elements who had
separated from him after 1952. Indeed, the internationalist and then the international
communist party, from the 1960s onwards, made the question of trade union fractions
fashionable again, asserted that the existence of the party (in its formal sense) is
continuous and that in the course of the class struggle it never disappears. Also the
following judgment of Damen, is not without foundation: "It then happened that the
Bordiguiste group began to make its own, with the usual political effrontery, all the
positions of the party, against which it had launched so many anathemas, from the
necessity of the permanence of the party to trade union work, the conquest of the
interior and, therefore, democratic, of the trade unions, pushing extremely to the right
as it had been pushed extremely to the left before, to such an extent that it is legitimate
to ask what were the real and unconfessed reasons for the split."

Quite different is the position of Vercesi (pseudonym of O. Perrone, an Italian

left-wing activist who emigrated in the 1920s to France and then to Belgium and made a
substantial contribution to the editing of the journal Bilan; he died in 1957) who states:

"The reference point of our work is the Turin conference. I must declare that I
made a serious error in assessing the developments of the situation following a
perspective that I will call historical messianism, I postulated the delimitation of a series
of situations of the type that led to the victory of the Russian October and the opening
of a world revolutionary situation. This mistake (see my article on the commemoration
of the Russian revolution in Battaglia comunista) does not seem fatal to me; [...] but
another mistake was made in Turin and it is so much more serious that it is still being
made today. The comrades who openly affirm the insertion of a reactionary perspective,
did not exclude but included the possibility of an affirmation of the proletarian class and
therefore of the class party".

"In a word, the party has applied with a casualness that cannot be approved
to the present capitalist cycle, the scheme valid for the previous cycle".

"I firmly believe that the party will fail completely and definitively in its
function if it does not reverse the present orientation...".

"Capitalism gives total freedom to the boasters who make the workers
believe that they can make strikes, extend them, intensify them and that this is the
proof that there is, or that we are moving towards socialism. Apart from the fact that it
is very likely that there will be less and less talk of strikes, we have to say openly that, to
limit ourselves to the past, if the strikes were possible, it happened because the Stalinist
crony was there to lead them and bring them to their certain defeat...".

After explaining why he had called the party a left Stalinist, he explained the
position that would be his until his death: "In my opinion, the position that can bring us
back to the process of revolutionary struggle is the one that, revealing the capitalist
function of the two accomplices, also poses the problem of the violent struggle against
both of them, against the one who opposes the strike as well as against the one who
leads it. Does this mean that we are currently immobilized in a solely critical and
destructive situation? Well, if this is the case, and I am convinced that it is, the only way
that can lead us to the formation of the class party is the one that is maturing in the few
proletarians who follow us with the only conviction that it is necessary to understand
the nature of this evolution in order to be able to personify the class that will be able to
overturn this evolution when the historical conditions will have produced the
antagonism on which it is based.

"I have explicitly said that I am not in a position to carry out an analysis of this
kind. [...] I affirm categorically that this has not been done by anyone, because no one -
even if our masters were among us - is able to do it; in order to do it it is necessary that,
with the course of the maturation of the class antagonism, history sets the conditions
for its understanding".

Later, Vercesi considered that only

A. Bordiga was in a position to undertake such a task and that, therefore, it was better
to keep the immediate divergences quiet, waiting for the necessary clarification.
The other interventions are polarized around the two previous ones and do
not bring any essential affirmation, except that of Daniélis indicating that there is
already a fraction in the party. Finally, the intervention of B. Maffi is that of conciliation:
"He laments that neither the rapporteur (O. Damen) nor the counter-rapporteur
(Vercesi) have bothered to develop the analysis on the basis of the documents
presented by the executive; that one has ridden the white horse of a party patriotism,
that the other has launched the atomic bomb of the problems that were not discussed
prior to the congress and for which the congress was not prepared. However, he takes
back the proof of the necessity of the existence of the party by the affirmation of its
very existence. "The fracture is expressed in the existence of the party, that is to say by
the presence of proletarian forces that escape the pressure of the steamroller of the
bourgeoisie". He avoids dealing with fundamental problems except to affirm that
participation in elections is harmful. It is on a motion firmly supported by him and La
Camara that the unification will take place. "In the expectation of the conclusions
reached in the discussion that must take place within the party on the question of
participation or abstention, the congress decides that the party will not participate in
any election.

This is how the Florence Congress ended, with a compromise that avoided
the questions, that avoided them...

To have a more accurate idea of what the left could be after the war, at the
time of the formation of the PCI, it is necessary to consider the position of comrades
from other countries than Italy. The ideas of Vercesi, who lived in Brussels, were more
or less completely shared by the Belgians. As for the French, they were unconditional
supporters of the creation of the party. Here is what a member of the French fraction of
the communist left (F.F.G.C.)[1] wrote in the Internationalist n°2: "We have called the
most conscious workers to form the class party. And this call we have renewed in this
newspaper and in every meeting where it has been possible for us to express ourselves.
That's right. We even add that our organization is going to work with all its strength for
this formation of the party". And, in order to base his affirmation of the possibility of the
formation of the party now when it was impossible before, he writes: "A break has
begun between the trade union, Stalinist and reformist socialist political leaders and a
part of the workers" (Chazé, La formation du parti de classe, hier non, aujourd'hui oui).

This theoretical elaboration of the purest Trotskyist style was criticized by

other comrades of the left, former militants who had been part of the fraction before
the war but who had not been recognized by the "center" of the party (they formed an
independent group: the Communist Left of France - GCF) because they criticized its
organizational activism.

"The FFGC is the crystallization, in France, of the mystification of the party in

Italy. We have never split from these comrades for the simple reason that the comrades
who are part of it were not members of the International Communist Left (ICL) before
the existence of the ICP was revealed in France" Internationalism n°27, 15 October
1947, p.20. Here a precision is necessary: the international communist left grouped the
Italian fractions, which published Bilan before the war, the Belgian, publishing
Communisme; in France, there was the formation of a French nucleus of the communist
left during the war and, at the end of it, the FFGC was formed, which published
L'Etincelle and L'internationaliste. It was strengthened in 1946 by the acquisition of a
Trotskyist group, which explains the previous article.

The communist left of France affirmed that the creation of the PCI was
premature, recalled the positions of the fraction during the interwar period, declared
itself to be the ultimate defender of it, and made the following criticism: "Not only was
the positive work that the Italian fraction had done during that long period between
1927 and 1944 left aside, but on many points the position of the new party fell short of
that of the abstentionist fraction of A. Bordiga in 1921. Notably in the political united
front where some local manifestations of proposal of united front were made to the
Stalinist party, notably on the participation in the municipal and parliamentary elections
abandoning the old position of abstentionism, notably on the anti-fascism where the
doors of the party were widely opened to the elements of the Resistance, not to
mention that on the trade union question, the party took back entirely the old Leninist
position of the CI going even further in this way, for the formation of the trade union
minorities [... In a word, under the name of the party of the international communist
left, we have an Italian formation of classic Trotskyist type with the defense of the USSR
less. The same proclamation of the party independently of the reactionary course, the
same practical opportunist politics, the same sterile agitating activism of the masses, the
same contempt for the theoretical discussion and the confrontation of ideas, both in the
party and outside with the other revolutionary groups" (n°23, 15.06.47, p. 27).

In opposition to this creation of the party, the elements of the communist left
of France try to present a theory of the party from which we extract the following
passages:

" 11. - The tendency to the constitution of the party of the proletariat is done
from the birth of the capitalist society. But as long as the historical conditions for
socialism are not sufficiently developed, the ideology of the proletariat as well as the
constitution of the party can only remain in the embryonic stage. It is only with the
"League of Communists" that a completed type of proletarian political organization
appears for the first time.

When we examine closely the development of the constitution of the class parties,
it immediately becomes clear that the party organization does not follow a constant
progression, but on the contrary registers periods of great development alternating with
others during which the party disappears. Thus the organic existence of the party does
not seem to depend only on the will of the individuals who compose it. It is the
objective conditions that condition its existence. The party, being essentially an
organism of revolutionary action of the class, can only exist in situations where the
action of the working class emerges. In the absence of conditions of class action of the
workers (economic and political stability of capitalism, or following deep defeats of the
workers' struggles) the party cannot subsist. It breaks up organically or it is obliged to
adapt itself to the new conditions that deny the revolutionary action, in order to survive,
that is to say, to exert an influence, and then the party inevitably fills itself with a new
content. It becomes conformist, that is, it ceases to be the party of the revolution.

Marx better than any other understood the conditioning of the existence of
the party. On two occasions he became the architect of the dissolution of the great
organization, in 1851 after the defeat of the revolution and the triumph of reaction in
Europe, and a second time in 1873 after the defeat of the Paris Commune. The first time
of the League of the Communists, and the second time of the First International.
 13. - For these reasons the constitution of party, of an international for the
Trotskyists since 1935 and the recent constitution of an internationalist communist
party in Italy, while being artificial formations, can only be enterprises of confusion and
opportunism. Instead of being moments of the constitution of the future class party,
these formations are obstacles, and discredit it by the caricature they present.

Thus all these organizations are not only caught in their positivity by their
immediate activism in the gear of their opportunism but also produce in their negativity
a narrow-mindedness proper to sects, a parochial patriotism, a fearful and superstitious
attachment to its "chiefs", to the caricatured reproduction of the game of the big
organizations, to the deification of rules of organization and to the submission to a
"freely consented" discipline all the more tyrannical and intolerable as it is in inverse
proportion to the number.

These examples teach us, not the inanity of the party as a superficial and
fatalistic analysis claims..." (On the nature and the function of the political party of the
proletariat in Internationalism, n°38, October 1948)

These long quotations allow to realize that the GCF[2] criticized, before
Vercesi, the premature creation of the party. On the other hand they are necessary to
prove that the assertion of 1966 about the premature character of the party was totally
insufficient. In fact its creation was an absurdity. It was inevitably to become, like all
other groups, a political racket. The very accurate critical remarks of the article we are
reproducing are accompanied by false considerations about the party-class relationship,
because the authors fail to take up the fundamental position of K. Marx on the party,
which is nothing other than the class as a class. They only reason about the dissociation
and the autonomization provoked by the defeat. On the other hand, all this is wrapped
up in absolutely erroneous perspectives on the imminence of a third world conflict, on
Russian state capitalism, on workers' democracy, etc. All that was to be noted here was
a correct position once its limits had been clarified. Finally, it was important to report
these quotations because to some extent they show a certain convergence with the
positions of A. Bordiga's positions, in particular the refusal of activism.

We have not spoken of him with respect to the formation of the PCI and the I
Congress, for the reason indicated by O. Damen: he was not a member of the party and
was absent from the congress. However, he states that Vercesi was his spokesman,
which is not true. To expose the position of A. Bordiga we will be thus obliged to call
upon articles not signed or signed of a pseudonym, Alfa or Orso, as much for the period
previous to the congress as for that which is contemporary to it [3]. We will therefore be
led to extract it from a desired, necessary, revolutionary anonymity. It is necessary to lift
the anonymity in order to destroy a mystification. This mystification operates as well by
exalting the name of the men and by denying their work in its foundations as by keeping
the name silent and being formally faithful to a so-called common work. This makes it
possible to conceal the "turns", to rework the old articles in order to make them say
what one wants at the desired moment, it is the screen for all the banalities, and it
makes it possible to acquire a minimum of theoretical decency at little cost.

The death of A. Bordiga's death is in no way the pretext to this lifting of

anonymity. Only theoretical considerations are at stake and it will not be possible to
expose them all within these remarks on the left. Let's say right away that we reject as
stupid the considerations about the person and his role in history that G. Galli put at the
beginning of Struttura economica e sociale della Russi d'oggi, ed. Editoriale Contra,
1966[4], in order to justify the fact of having exhibited the name: Amadeo Bordiga.

On the other hand, there is no question of using this name to make a profit,
to make a "best-seller" or for the purpose of proselytizing. Like him, we are against all
activism. It is moreover so because we consider the work of A. Bordiga's work, despite
its power and greatness, as outdated in the Hegelian-Marxist sense. He accomplished a
partial restoration of Marxism. As such, at the present time, his work accepted as a
totality would lead to a false absolute. The further work will consist in presenting the
fundamental points from which one can progress towards a reappropriation of the
theory.

The question of anonymity was linked to all the others, the whole of which
formed what he called the "body of doctrine"; it is obvious that lifting anonymity will
impose the analysis of all these questions, in particular that of the program and that of
anti-enrichment, one of the causes of the sclerosis of the PCI.

At this point, in the class struggle, anonymity is a false problem. It was of great
importance in a period of total counter-revolution. It was an absolutely positive point
that the left did not exhibit a superman as the Trotskyist movement did. In such a period
it was absolutely necessary to guard against an influx of elements that most of the time
are determined in their acts by superficial considerations. However, if anonymity can be
effective in relation to the outside world, it is no longer so in relation to the inside
world, where the cult of the leader becomes all the more repugnant because it is
hypocritical!

The fundamental content of the demand for anonymity, which cannot be

questioned without taking a huge step backwards, is the affirmation that the revolution
will be anonymous or it will not be; the proletariat must not wait for the salvation of any
messiah, of any superman, and the vast insurrectional movement that will finally sweep
away the present infamous society will not be characterized by any name, not even the
name of a being, no matter how brilliant. The movement can only be called communist
according to the goal it will tend to reach, according to the social relations emerging in
the society and pushing men to realize the true human Gemeinwesen: the human being.
To remain firm on this position is to put in the foreground the affirmation of K. Marx:
the party is the class constituted as a class.

To draw A. Bordiga of the anonymity amounts to double the study of the

relation between Italian left and international communist party by that of the relation of
this one to the left and to the PCI. It is important, for the period 1945-1966, to confront
his positions with those of O. Damen, who from 1952 onwards was the main
theoretician of the other internationalist communist party claiming to be on the left,
and with those of other members of his own party, especially for the period of the
second half of the 1960s.

A last remark is necessary: different comrades have thought for a long time to
publish "the works of A. Bordiga" but their motivations were very diverse; it is useless to
consider them except for those of certain elements that in 1967 wanted to do it in order
to show, already, the specificity of his work. Our refusal, at the time, was the result of
an incomplete break with the old groupuscular practice.

How to explain the activity of A. Bordiga's activity in favor of a party whose

existence he did not accept, or at least whose mode of being he did not approve of, to
say the least. It is here that it is necessary to return to the Luxemburgist entryism we
have already spoken of, which is totally different from the Trotskyist one. The
Trotskyists "enter" a given organization by hiding their positions and affecting those of
their host while waiting for the privileged moment when they can intervene and reveal
themselves. Luxemburgist entryism is linked to the idea that the proletariat in its
revolutionary movement recovers its party, its international. Hence the permanence in,
and the non rupture with, the party or the international even if, objectively, it turned
out that this party, this international are no longer on revolutionary bases. Such a
position implies the rejection of maneuvers and the continuation of an intense
theoretical work in order to make the fundamental theses prevail. At the limit it is
declared that it is necessary to work together because the development of the
revolutionary movement will come to reconcile the protagonists of positions, at the
beginning, divergent, perhaps because of a different grip on the reality without there
being for all that divergences of principles; indeed some can see the totality, the others
a partiality lodged either in the future, or in the present moment. However, this implies
that there is a minimum of common positions between the various fractions or informal
groupings of comrades within a party; it also supposes the persistence of the
revolutionary possibility or at least the proximity of it. Anticipating the whole
movement, we can say that A. Bordiga practiced such an entryism in the CI then in the
internationalist communist party, international then.

This said, the reader can easily realize in the reading of the theses how much
they are in discontinuity with the theoretical affirmations of the participants in the
congress of Florence, in particular with those of O. Damen. A. Bordiga rejects all activism
and its corollary the mysticism of the organization. The party should not construct "the
intermediate conditions" (cf. above, p. 117); at the same time he rejects the buffoonery
of all the rites of organization, including the congresses, which are, most of the time,
nothing but vulgar masquerades with more or less great spectacle.

Its fundamental position is: "the program of the world proletarian party must
be restored, and then the network of its organization in each country must be woven
again"[5]. However, it is important to locate the moment of restoration, what is
restored. It is here that we see that the break with the third international is not
completely made. In fact, in the "Political Platform of the Party" - 1945 - the possibility
of intervening in the elections is mentioned. But even if he had not written it himself, he
would have approved it in any case, since he quotes it several times in the theses of the
left. As far as the party is concerned, the explicit demand for organic centralism is not
taken up; in other words, democracy is rejected, in particular the famous internal
democracy (cf. the end of "Force, Violence, Dictatorship in the Class Struggle", a text
published before the Florence Congress), but there is no positive affirmation.

On the subject of the trade unions, A. Bordiga affirmed their integration into
the state, but he did not speak of the famous question of trade union fractions, so
agitated at the 1st Congress and which was already agitated at the Turin conference
where a comrade (Stefanini) even proposed not to participate in the trade unions any
more in order to move towards the creation of soviet type organizations. On Russia, the
fundamental position remains: what counts in the appreciation of the Russian
revolution are not the economic data, because in Russia there was never socialism
(except in the fact of the existence of possibilities due, for a moment, to the existence of
a proletarian state), but the political data of the Russian state and of the International
that allow to situate the involution. However, this absolutely correct position is not
accompanied by an extremely important characterization which will be made later: the
Russian revolution was a double revolution, bourgeois and proletarian, what the KAPD
affirmed however since 1922. Moreover, the Theses do not bring any essential precision
about the State capitalism: they take again the explanations of V. Lenin. However, A.
Bordiga rejects the position of those who, like Damen, saw in state capitalism (later, it
will be mainly bureaucratic capitalism; there will be a convergence between O. Damen
and Chaulieu) the most important element of the state capitalism. Damen and Chaulieu)
the realization of the domination of capitalism, the completion of its power and, as a
result, the USSR would be enemy number one.
 Thus the restoration is that of the Theses of 1926, theses of withdrawal, and
not those more clear-cut and purer from the communist point of view of the
abstentionist fraction, which gives reason in part to the communist left in France (cf. the
criticisms of this current reported above).

We have seen on the other hand that the positions of the GCF converged
with those of A. Bordiga, however there will be no real confluence between the two.
This is due to the fact that, as a continuator of the fraction, which had wanted to make a
synthesis of the Italian, German and Russian movement, the GCF carried with it
Luxemburgist, Kapedist positions and even positions of various oppositions to the
Bolshevik party. However, being firmly opposed to all these influences which one still
finds in O. Damen in his conception of the party and the united front: "Our party, which
does not underestimate the influence of the other parties with a workers' tradition and
the importance of such an influence on the masses, makes itself the defender of the
united front, organic manifestation of the workers' unity above the parties..." (Platform
of 1944) (affirmation of 1944) (Platform of 1944) (affirmation characterized falsely of
Trotskyist in Thesis 1.5.1.), A. Bordiga was led to ignore the just criticisms made by this
current. And, it is to distance himself from the previous positions that he will accuse his
allegiance to Leninism.

However, a return to the abstentionist fraction supposed to complete the

break with the CI, thus to go back on the withdrawal adopted at the 2nd Congress. This
non-break is externalized in its appreciation of opportunism. To speak of opportunism
for before 1914 is valid but afterwards it is only a question of parties which are openly
integrated with capital; in the same way one can speak of opportunism for the CI
between 1919 and 1921 (in 21, there is the break) but after the Vth Congress it no
longer makes sense. In order to speak of opportunism, there must be a workers'
movement on a more or less autonomous basis and not a movement integrated with
capital as is the case at the moment. This does not diminish the importance of the
affirmation that Stalinism realized the content of social democracy; but social
democracy was precisely an organization that destroyed the autonomy[7] of the
proletariat.

On the other hand, there is a phenomenon about which there is an

absolutely rigorous and just position: fascism. This will allow the small movement of the
left not to sink into anti-fascism, into the sphere of capitalist recuperation.

There is, in a way, an immediate, precise, clear delimitation, which puts

obstacle to the integral absorption of the share of the capital; it allows a resistance to
the assault of the revisionist doubt, to all the pressures of the ambient social and
ideological forces.
 Although Bordiga's theoretical behavior was to integrate the particular facts
in the total historical arc of the movement of the class or of the development of a given
social form, there is a lack of immediacy in his work because he did not specify enough
the historical place of the cuts, of the discontinuities. That's why, if in the end he carried
out the analysis of which Vercesi spoke, he didn't push it to the end perhaps because of
his anti-creativity, anti-enrichment position, to his sometimes very narrow affirmation of
the invariance, to his conception of the program. Revisionist doubt could not be
combated simply by a reaffirmation of a "body of doctrine" but it was also necessary to
externalize the theory by attacking the facts mentioned above on page 19[8]. But if
these facts were not perceived in all their specificity, this amounted to repeating, in
order to explain them, the elements of the old theoretical baggage; if their specificity
was fully revealed, we ran the risk of seeing the theory of the genial leader necessary to
solve the new enigmas of history reappear. This possibility inhibited in some way the
work of Bordiga who remained halfway.

We are speaking here of immediacy with respect to a whole historical phase

and not of immediatism in the sense that he gave to this word, in particular in the texts
published in n°3 of Invariance.

Let us anticipate a little: A. Bordiga recognized the decisive importance of the

defeat of 1914, which was not yet overcome, but he never explained in a clear, clear
way that Marxism, theory of the proletariat, had been in fact destroyed before this date
and that the Russian revolution had been unable to reimpose it. He himself, as a result
of the 1920 compromise with the Bolsheviks, did not do the necessary work. However,
his position was not dependent on the one of Moscow, it was not born suddenly in 17,
as he affirmed to G. Berti - then still in the abstentionist fraction - in 1920, before
leaving for Russia to attend the 2nd Congress of the CI:

"Our theses derive from Marxism, from a rigorous and not diluted Marxism
like the one that dominated for many years in the 2nd International, and if even, one
day, the Russian revolution disappeared and if the soviets and the Bolsheviks proved
that they are not able to fulfill their function correctly, we would not change a comma in
our program..."

To affirm that Marxism had not been restored (the reflections of G. Lukacs in
22 and K. Korch in 23 on the philosophical question already showed it in a striking way)
would have led A. Bordiga to question the kautsko-leninist thesis of the consciousness
coming from outside. Then, according to such presuppositions and according to the
appalling defeat of the proletariat in 1945, not only would any possibility of formation of
the party have been pushed back, which he did, but, also, any Luxemburgist type of
entryism would have been abandoned. On the other hand, he had the illusion of being
able to establish an organizational bridge between the counterrevolution and the
revolution, hence all the declarations about the importance of organizational continuity,
while opposing organizational agitation. This is why we so often find the idea that the
real party will come tomorrow. However, by his work he endorsed the existence of the
ICP and allowed the followers of the immediate organization to thrive in its anonymity.

This negativity of the position of A. Bordiga's position provides the reason and
explains the falsehood of the various polemics directed against him by the communist
left of France (very often by proxy), by Vega in Socialisme ou Barbarie, for example. The
party could continue to live as long as the partisans at all costs of a true party did not
externalize themselves to the point of calling into question all the serious work of
theoretical reflection. It is to this negativity that the PCI owes the possibility to claim it,
to assert itself as its continuator. It could, in case someone would raise a polemic about
it, show that it is faithful to his work.

If we highlight and publish the latter, it is not at all to lead such a polemic
because the question of the current relationship of A. Bordiga to the PCI is of little
importance to us. What interests us is to identify his work in its specificity because it has
an original character (and therefore an undeniable importance) linked to a well-defined
moment of the history of the proletariat and the struggle of communism against
capitalism. He is the most consistent representative of the ultimate resistance against
the accession of the capital to its real domination, without managing to delimit it, to
describe it in a rigorous way; the work of A. Bordiga's work, while being stuck in the
theoretical position correlative to the revolution in formal domination of the capital,
already lays the bases for the correct theoretical formulation of what will be the
revolution in real domination of the capital, the pure communist revolution, the one
where the proletariat can immediately deny itself. These bases are due to all his work to
re-impose the critique of the political economy conducted according to K. Marx. He took
up all the categories one by one and showed how communism differs from capitalism as
well as from the so-called socialisms. His entire work is determined by the vision of
communism.

It is not a question for us to oppose to certain affirmations that the PCI draws
from A. Bordiga (for example what he wrote in "The text of Lenin on The infantile
disease of the communism (the leftism)" written in 1960 which is his worst work, as the
"text" of V Lenin is his most deplorable writing) of the quotations that would say the
opposite. It is not a question of choosing his A. Bordiga, but to show that the ambiguity
inscribed in the totality of the work is linked to the historical period that he lived,
entirely dominated, since the catastrophe of 1914, by the question: how to be a party
when the historical conditions are unfavorable, how to be separated from the gangrene
that ravages the class and be for the unification of this class?

On the other hand, it is not a question of glossing over certain assertions to

the benefit of others considered essential for the point of view from which one places
oneself; thus, one should not forget that the fundamentally just criticism of all
managerial theory, including that of the KAPD with its Betriebsorganisation, is
accompanied by an acritical apology of the Bolshevik party, which prevented any cut not
only with Leninism but with Trotskyism and to a certain extent with Stalinism itself.

This said, it is possible in complement of the theses I.5.1 to I.5.22 to define

the position of A.Bordiga in the history of the proletarian movement. What is
fundamental, in this respect, it is his relation to the Bolshevik conception, which is
determined by his concern of maintenance of revolutionary continuity. This is where his
essential contradiction arises: on the one hand, he asserts repeatedly that theory,
principles, tactics, are indissolubly linked and, on the other hand, when he faces the
question of the CI he speaks of the tactical errors of the Bolsheviks while exalting their
"restoration of principles" (cf. for example The Danger of Opportunism and the
International - 1925; Nature, Function, Tactics of the Revolutionary Party of the Working
Class, The Naples Theses - 1965). Similarly, he always affirms that the revolution is not a
problem of organizational forms, while delimiting himself from the Bolsheviks only on
the question of tactics and organization, considering that the errors in these two fields
led to the defeat. Here again the contradiction is found in all the post-1923 work.

The necessity of the historical delimitation of A. Bordiga's work - which would

require the publication of a more substantial work than these few notes - derives not
only from a theoretical reflection but from the practice itself. The movement of May 68,
by putting an end to the counter-revolution, by being emergence of the revolution, was
the active criticism of the ambiguity; by making a practical criticism of all the
groupuscules that it rejected in their pastist exhibition, it posed, obviously still in a not
positive way, what will be the future movement of the proletariat that cannot recognize
itself in any of these rackets. Moreover, the grandiose riots of Poland 1970 come to
remind that the counter-revolution is finished and that inexorably the new cycle is in its
becoming. Poland 1920: stop of the revolution in front of Warsaw; Poland 1970:
carrying out of the radical criticism that most of the groupuscules hesitate to consider:
the destruction of the communist party, as a moment of the revolution, as well as, for
the West, that of all the unions. From then on the anticipatory elements (in particular
the affirmation of the anonymous revolution) of the work of A.Bordiga appear
luminously, so much it is true as says K. Marx says that it is only from the superior form
that one can understand the inferior one. What, on the other hand, gives partially right
to Vercesi saying that it was necessary to wait for the maturation of the situation to
theorize the real foundations of it. It also allows us to give due importance to all sorts of
theoretical attempts, such as that of Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Situationist
International, which often individualized the great questions of the moment. The
producers of these magazines, like P.J. Proudhon in the last century, are sensitive to the
novelties that the society of their time presents, but since they have not adopted the
theoretical behavior of K. Marx of considering everything immediate as a product of
mediations, they do not manage to integrate these facts into the whole of historical
development. They are inclined to see only the extraordinary, magical and almost
scandalous aspect.

All this implies that to carry out this task of delimitation it is necessary by
integrating the work of A. Bordiga to accomplish the work defined in Transition (cf.
Invariance, n°8). The material force of the counter-revolution and all its ideology has
bogged down the proletarian movement in the past; the thought that wants to be
revolutionary delays enormously on the reality of the economic-social development.
And this, paradoxically, because it has been separated from the theory, due to its
negation at the end of the last century. From the beginning, the theory solved the
essential problem: the suppression of the proletariat. Now, this is the actual practical
task of the revolutionary movement.

To affirm the invariance of the theory is to reappropriate it. It is of the

reappropriation by the proletarian movement rather than of its restoration that it will
be a question in the following works[9].

***
"... socialist criticism [...] represents the happiest and surest method of employing
human reason; it is only when it identifies itself with the cause of those who have
nothing and are dominated, outside and against the reigns of dogma and authority, that
it is free of all influences and all prejudices"

A. BORDIGA, The Russian Revolution, 1917

[1] At that time there was only a party in Italy. It was only in 1963 that it surreptitiously
appeared in France; with n°25, Programme Communiste suddenly became the journal of
the internationalist communist party (communist program). The subsequent change of
name of the party was not due, as it is written in the n°30 of the same review, to the
sudden discovery of another PCI in France, but Trotskyist, and therefore of the equally
sudden fear of the confusion between the two organizations, but to an event in Italy
itself: the separation of a certain number of comrades that claimed to be the
internationalist communist party and published Rivoluzione comunista. From then on,
the party was called the International Communist Party; the same thing had to be done
in France.

[2] Regarding the currents opposed to the positions of the Italian left, there was also, in
France, a group publishing the newspaper "Le prolétaire" which defined itself as anti-
bordigist!

[3] This was already done by A. Vega in Socialisme ou barbarie n°11, November-
December 1952.

[4] Economic and social structure of today's Russia. This was published in anonymous
form in the newspaper "il programma comunista" from n°10, 1955 to n°12, 1957, and
was actually written by Bordiga helped by other comrades especially in what concerns
the historical and statistical documentation.

[5] This work of restoration will be accomplished above all in the series of articles in the
section "Sul filo del tempo" (from which the magazine Le fil du temps takes its name).
Thus, the various questions addressed in the Elements of Orientation and in the Theses
will be treated in a separate and detailed way, as well as various questions more closely
related to current events, such as the aggression to Europe by the USA.

[6] In this regard, it is necessary to rectify the error of theoretical characterization made
in thesis 1.5.1. in n°6 of Invariance: it was not a question of state capitalism conceived as
an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism.
[7] In the sense that we give it in n°8, cf. Transition.

[8] It is about the events: crisis of the International, "manifestation in Italy and in other
countries of new totalitarian and dictatorial forms of bourgeois domination", the second
world war and the alignment of the socialist and communist parties on the war
propaganda of the capitalist democracies, the military disaster of the Italian State -
Preamble to The Theses of the Left 1945 (Note of 2009)

[9] Regarding the "Historical invariance of Marxism" article from which the name of the
present review was taken, cf. Invariance, n°3, pp. 1-6.