Italian Left Communism
'Left Communism' redirects here. For other ideologies, including the
Dutch/German variant, see Left Communism (Disambiguation)
"It is not and never has been historically true that the party only emerges in a time of revolutionary assault. On the contrary, it has to be militantly active throughout an entire previous historical period before it can reach its fullness as an organ of leadership and revolutionary action."
Left Communism, also called Italian Left Communism, Ultra Left or Italian Communist Left is an economically far-left, Marxist ideology. It is a form of Communism based off of the ideas and writings of the Italian left-communists, mainly Amadeo Bordiga, Onorato Damen, and Marc Chirik along with the International Communist Party, Internationalist Communist Tendency, and International Communist Current. It is recognized to be the furthest Left Unity ideology on the compass. It opposes democracy, anti-fascism and the concept of a "Popular Front". It is a Leninist ideology that opposes
Marxism–Leninism, believing it to be a bourgeois current. It regards Stalin as a bourgeois opportunist and regards other Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, such as
Fidel Castro,
Che Guevara,
Ho Chi Minh and
Mao Zedong as bourgeois, not proletarian, revolutionaries. While Damen and most Italian left communists considered the Soviet Union to be a bourgeois, capitalist state like any other, Bordiga would go around this thesis and proclaim that the USSR was a state-industrialist state.
This ideology refers specifically to the Italian strain of Left Communism, although other left communist ideologies also exist, namely, Dutch-German leftcoms (Council Communists). These ideologies do have some similarities, the most significant being anti-trade unionism, anti-nationalism/internationalism, and anti-parliamentarism. As well as the belief that true socialism is stateless and classless, and can only be achieved when the capitalist mode of commodity production is completely abolished. Every "socialist" who does not is merely an opportunist capitalist. However, the Italian Left favors vanguardism
.
It is often forgotten that Italian left communists do consider themselves Leninists (generally). Lenin's work "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" criticized left communists in Britain, Germany and Russia who did not consider themselves Leninist.
History
The Italian Left and the formation of the Communist Party of Italy
The Italian Left's origins can be traced back to the struggle of the so-called intransigent revolutionary faction, re-established in 1910 to cure the PSI(Italian Socialist Party) of its reformism. When this faction was revived in July 1917 it was in quite a different context. The 1st World War had been raging for almost three years and the PSI had all but disintegrated under its impact.
The new faction was being resurrected under the impetus of Amadeo Bordiga and the Naples section to which he belonged. At the time, like Luxemburg, Bordiga slowly reached the conclusion that the revolutionisation of Social Democracy was impossible and thus there was a need to forge a communist faction which broke from the Social Democracy of the SPD and the 2nd International.
In 1919 at the PSI Congress in Bologna, the Serrati maximalists obtained a clear majority, but the new Left, which was gathering especially around Bordiga as a Communist Abstentionist Fraction against electoral illusions and for the organisation of the revolutionary conquest of power, took shape more and more clearly. The Left had created the Abstentionist Communist Fraction, proclaiming its theoretical base in Marxism, in complete agreement with the tactical line and strategic objectives of the Third International. The only dissent concerned participation in political elections and revolutionary parliamentarism supported by the Bolsheviks.
In January 1921, at the Congress of Livorno, the Communist Left broke with the old and reformist PSI: on the basis of the "21 Conditions" of Moscow it founded The Communist Party of Italy, section of the Third International, and took over the leadership.
Beliefs
Opposition to Antifa
Bordiga opposed anti-fascism on the grounds that it encouraged a collaboration between the party aligned with the proletariat and the various bourgeois parties. This would do nothing but distract from the proletarian movement. It would also funnel more workers into a purely pro-democracy stance rather than a more concrete socialist stance.
Personality
Italian Left Communism loves to sit in an armchair all day reading Marx, Bordiga, Damen, Camatte, Dauvé, and Chirik among others while complaining about other leftists. He often defends this behavior with "Theory is praxis." He is often depicted as being hypercritical and cynical to such a degree that no ideology will associate with him apart from Marxism.
Stylistic Notes
Will absolutely lose their shit if you call them a Marxism-Leninist or use ML as a synonym for "communism".
How to Draw
The flag comes from the Internationalist Communist Party, a Left Communist party in Italy made by ex-PCI member Onorato Damen.
Drawing Italian Left Communism takes a few steps:
- Draw a ball
- Fill it with red
- Draw 2 intertwined yellow wheat spikes
- Draw a black hammer and sickle
- Draw the eyes and you're done!
Color Name | HEX | RGB | |
---|---|---|---|
Red | #FC0808 | rgb(252, 8, 8) | |
Gold | #EDF734 | rgb(237, 247, 52) | |
Black | #141414 | rgb(20, 20, 20) |
Relations
True Communists
Marxism - I'm the only one that listens to him, smh.
Leninism - We disagree on tactics here and there, but we are both true communists!
(also you aren't actually real)Spartacism - "And today’s murderers will also pass, giving way to new, free, equal people in fraternal bond around the world. In each hour of their lives, finally become a happy life of love, they will be moved to think, in memory and gratitude, of the two great figures whose sacrifice prepared their happiness – Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg."
Totalitarianism &
Centralism - "We are, therefore, not particularly interested in a working class which is statistically defined, and neither are we particularly interested in attempts to work out where the interests of the working class diverge from other classes (there are always more than two). What interests us is the class which has set up its dictatorship, i.e. which has taken power, destroyed the bourgeois State, and set up its own State: that is how Lenin put it, shaming those in the 2nd International who had “forgotten” Marxism. How is it that Class can form the basis of a dictatorial and totalitarian State power, of a new State machine opposed to the old like a victorious army occupying the positions of the defeated enemy?"
Hive-Mind Collectivism -
The Original Content of the Communist Programme is the obliteration of the individual as an economic subject, rights-holder, and agent of human history.
Mixed
Council Communism - "We agree with Lenin's theses at the 2nd Congress".[5]. However, we do recognize that Mattick amongst others were true militants, albeit ones that came to incorrect conclusions on oft faulty logic.
Trotskyism - Early work was incredible, loved it. But you went opportunist later on and have been reduced to an impotent student movement with zero proletarian support.
Bukharinism - "Bukharin is in line not only with Marx but also with Lenin." HOWEVER "Yes, the brave Bukharin shouted: “Enrich yourselves!” But Stalin did much worse and was about to shout: “Make money from the land! Leave us only the industrial State, the armed force!”. He did not understand that whoever has the land has the State. The phrase of Bukharin, which everyone remembers without being able to reconstruct its doctrine (it is difficult to do so from the texts), has this scope: “We open the doors of the land of the State to you; enrich yourselves with capital of the agrarian enterprise, and the moment we expropriate you from what you have accumulated will arrive more quickly, passing also in the countryside to step four: State Capitalism”. For the fifth step, Socialism, one needs neither laws nor Congress debates, but only one force: the World Revolution. Bukharin did not understand it then and this was serious." [6]
Democracy - "The democratic criterion has been for us so far a material and incidental factor in the construction of our internal organization and the formulation of our party statutes; it is not an indispensable platform for them. Therefore we will not raise the organizational formula known as "democratic centralism" to the level of a principle. Democracy cannot be a principle for us. Centralism is indisputably one, since the essential characteristics of party organization must be unity of structure and action. The term centralism is sufficient to express the continuity of party structure in space; in order to introduce the essential idea of continuity in time, the historical continuity of the struggle which, surmounting successive obstacles, always advances towards the same goal, and in order to combine these two essential ideas of unity in the same formula, we would propose that the communist party base its organization on "organic centralism". While preserving as much of the incidental democratic mechanism that can be used, we will eliminate the use of the term "democracy", which is dear to the worst demagogues but tainted with irony for the exploited, oppressed and cheated, abandoning it to the exclusive usage of the bourgeoisie and the champions of liberalism in their diverse guises and sometimes extremist poses."
Bourgeois (Read Marx!)
Liberal Socialism - Stalinism with a human face.
Marxism–Leninism - Fake Marxist. Fake Leninist. Read the first line of Capital.
Gramscianism - Stalinist cretin who fucked over my positions in the PC'di and paved the road for the Bolshevization and Euro"communism" in the party.
Still better than Togliatti...Togliattism - FUCK YOU! KHRUSHCHEVITE DIPSHIT! YOU RUINED EVERYTHING!
Maoism - Romantic revolutionary pretending at communism.
Honestly if you had dropped the aesthetic communism and gone all in on the revolutionary nationalism you'd have arguably as good as Robespierre in the bourgeois revolutionary department, and your proletariat had the most revolutionary potential in the world for quite a while...Dengism - You are Marxism-Leninism modernized.
Anarcho-Communism - Peak petit-bourgeois.
Liberal Democracy - The chief political form of capital, and the logical and practical conclusion is fascism!
Social Democracy - The welfare economy is a failure! You also killed
Luxemburg and Liebknecht!
Capitalist Communism - Aren't you SuccDem again? Also, you are literally antifa, but more honest.
State Capitalism - You're just Deng again.
Anti-Fascism - A palliative that just reaffirms capital and does absolutely nothing productive for communism, always based solely out of some moral grandstanding.
Democratic Socialism &
Libertarian Socialism - "And what have these restless inventors of the latest formula come up with now? In one of the periodicals of the highly eclectic quadrifoglio (a federation of small groups claiming allegiance to the communist left) we see nothing other than the republished writings (from 1880-1890) of Francesco Saverio Merlino, the “libertarian socialist”: early propagator of an ultra-rancid recipe which is still being cooked up today, in an eclectic variety of sauces, by a whole brood of little newspapers who have perched outside Palmiro Togliatti's window to provoke him with their naughty twitterings; but what they have failed to understand, when it comes to this particular recipe, is that good old Palmiro is a masterchef! Compared to him they are just a bunch of scullery boys. And here is the recipe: salvation lies in grafting the values of Socialism onto those of Liberty!"
Autocracy - For dictatorship, NOT a dictator!
You are the proletarian equivalent of cocaine btw.
Nazism &
Fascism - Oh for fuck's sake, I NEVER said the Great and Authentic quote, the only source for it is a pro-German newspaper publishing the words of a fascist spy, stop reciting rubbish!
Capitalism - Die and burn in hell, capitalist pig!
Social Authoritarianism -
Him, but without the mask!
Hoxhaism - You claim to be "against all forms of revisionism" yet you're a Stalinist, curious. 🤔
Reactionary Socialism - Marx destroyed you lmao. Reactionaries are shit.
National Bolshevism - The KAPD was right in expelling Laufenberg and Wolffheim.
Autonomism - Negri, you bourgeois moron, you don't understand the importance of the party and of the strategy for the revolution, you totally misinterpreted Marx and wrote only a confusing work that replaced the proletariat with the social worker.[7]
Titoism &
Market Socialism - "The real danger lies in the existence of the individual enterprise itself, not that it has a boss."
Acid Communism - If “Cobain's death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions”, Fisher's suicide reaffirms the real powerlessness of any perspective of criticism of capitalism that is not based on solid pillars such as criticism of political economy, the materialist conception of history, the experiences of past class struggles and the communist revolutionary programme that derives from them.”[8]
Nationalism - “ We are internationalists precisely because we believe workers have the same interests everywhere in putting an end to production for profit and bringing about a global cooperative commonwealth. Because we believe in the need for an international revolutionary organisation to politically link up all the various struggles of our class around the world. And because we believe national strife represents a barrier to the only thing that can overcome the capitalist system of oppression and exploitation – class solidarity. Every day the problems that humanity is facing – economic crises, pandemics, climate collapse, war – cry out for an international solution. It is still nation vs. class, and we know which side we stand on. Workers have no country, but we have a world to win.”[9]
Necrocracy - You will cease to be scary.
Neo-Enlightenment - FINALLY, WORTHY THEORYPILLED OPPONENT! OUR BATTLE WILL BE LEGENDARY!
Everyone to the right of Bordiga
Further Information
Theory
Amadeo Bordiga
- Party and Class
- The Democratic Principle
- The Lyons Theses
- The Fundamentals for a Marxist Orientation
- Dialogue with Stalin
- The Human Species and Earth's Crust
- Lessons of the Counter-revolutions
- The Balkan War
Jacques Cammette
Communization
- Everything must go!: The abolition of value by Bruno Astarian & Gilles Dauvé
- Endnotes by various authors
- Tiqqun #1 by Tiqqun
Political Parties
Wikipedia
- Left communism
- Bordigism
- International Communist Party
- Communist Workers Party of Germany
- Communization
- Left communism in China
Online Communities
- r/Ultraleft (meme sub)
Gallery
Notes
- ↑ Leftcoms eschew democracy as a principle and view it as a method of organization, nothing more, but this is sometimes exaggerated.
References
- ↑ Chinese Cyber Left/New Left are mostly Maoists actually.
- ↑ https://libcom.org/article/onwards-barbarians
- ↑ https://libcom.org/article/human-species-and-earths-crust-amadeo-bordiga
- ↑ https://libcom.org/article/human-species-and-earths-crust-amadeo-bordiga
- ↑ https://libcom.org/article/letter-amadeo-bordiga-karl-korsch
- ↑ https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1956/12/bukharin.html
- ↑ https://www.leftcom.org/it/articles/2006-10-01/il-libro-di-mauro-stefanini-sulle-dotte-farneticazioni-di-toni-negri
- ↑ https://libcom.org/article/reflections-mark-fishers-essay-capitalist-realism
- ↑ http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2022-03-29/nationalism-and-internationalism