What's your opinion of Amadeo Bordiga?
Gramsci himself best articulated the issues with Bordiga and the practical impotence of his political thoughts:
āComrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesnāt say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesnāt convince me; I fear it falls into opportunism, there are insufficient guarantees against this, etc.āHis position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the āLeftā is purely negative; they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their point of view, their solutions. They end by spreading doubt and distrust, without constructing anything.
āConcerning his disagreement with Lenin, Comrade Bordiga remains skillfully on the general, while not being specific.ā
āComrade Bordiga not only fails to draw the logical consequences of his negations, he above all fails to counter-propose new directives to the criticized directives in a clear and complete form.ā
- Antonio Gramsci, āSterile and Negative Criticismā, LāUnitĆ September 30, 1925.
In other words, Bordigaās hyper-vigilance against opportunism made him ineffective in practice. One feature of his writings that we find correct is organic centralism since it grasped the necessary relationship between the party and the base without the pretence of party democracy. He managed to reproduce the basis of the stereotypical interpretation of Stalinism, arguing favourably of a more authoritarian society beyond what Lenin or Stalin believed in. This in turn has been turned into a meme of sorts among left-communists, which is expected from all euro-amerikan centred ideologies which amount to nothing in practice beyond debate echo chambers.
Bordiga also displayed a principled stance when denouncing opponents of decolonisation as āracistsā (as what happened with Onorato Damen) while pointing out that the ādemocraticā struggles in core countries inevitably led to fascism as without the aim towards socialism bourgeois dictatorship takes over.
Beyond the errors mentioned above one we would also add Bordigaās failure at assessing the threat posed by fascism, and his āanti-anti-fascistā view was disastrous as later demonstrated by how quickly Italyās post-war political system was undermined by the machinations of U.S. imperialism to maintain the status quo through supporting successive reactionary governments, and the terrorism carried out through GLADIO and the mafia.
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