Amadeo Bordiga and the Myth of Antonio Gramsci

AMADEO BORDIGA AND THE MYTH OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI John Chiaradia PREFACE A fruitful contribution to the renaissance of Marxism requires a purely historical treatment of the twenties as a period of the revolutionary working class movement which is now entirely closed. This is the only way to make its experiences and lessons properly relevant to the essentially new phase of the present. Gyorgy Lukács, 1967 Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. Leszek Kolakowski When I began this commentary, both the USSR and the PCI (the Italian Communist Party) had disappeared. Basing myself on earlier archival work and supplementary readings, I set out to show that the change signified by the rise of Antonio Gramsci to leadership (1924-1926) had, contrary to nearly all extant commentary on that event, a profoundly negative impact on Italian Communism. As a result and in time, the very essence of the party was drained, and it was derailed from its original intent, namely, that of class revolution. As a consequence of these changes, the party would play an altogether different role from the one it had been intended for. By way of evidence, my intention was to establish two points and draw the connecting straight line. They were: one, developments in the Soviet party; two, the tandem echo in the Italian party led by Gramsci, with the connecting line being the ideology and practices associated at the time with Stalin, which I label Center communism. Hence, from the time of Gramsci’s return from the USSR in 1924, there had been a parental relationship between the two parties. Discussion accompanies the origin and rise of this dependency. One cannot fully understand the history of the PCI, the influence it exerted on Italian politics, and its undramatic and quiet demise without knowledge of this early period. The dissolution of the USSR surprised me, although it should not have. In contrast, the disappearance of the Italian party, if unexpected, was fully in keeping with the changes alluded to below and its subsequent history. Many years ago in the conclusion of an early study of Italian communism, I had written, “When a Western Stalinist party finally breaks down — the PCI in Italy — it remains on the right, never moving to the left, thus disclosing again the nature of its genesis.”[1] One of the most astounding aspects of this story is not the transformation undergone in the mid-1920s, but that in the English- speaking world the change has remained unknown. One may surmise that when faced with the beginning of the total collapse of the “socialist camp” at the end of the 1980s, the Communist leadership found itself confronted by a stark dilemma: either go to the left—a step it could not undertake because of its very nature — and assert its intention of remaining a party of socialism, bringing into play a reconsideration of past policies and history going back to Gramsci and earlier with all the destabilization that might arise as had already happened in the Soviet party, or move “to the right and to the front” and declare its fealty to the 1 bourgeois order, thereby closing off that past and openly acknowledge its own non-socialist allegiance. The leadership chose the latter, and the largest communist party in the West disappeared in the twinkling of an eye. In reality, as in the USSR, programmatically and ideologically the reconciliation with capitalism had been building within the party for decades. Meanwhile, I had to react to the appearance of a number of new studies and a conference on Gramsci at Columbia University. The first of the new titles, a work by Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, the Western European Left in the 20th Century,[2] was brought to my attention by a friend to whom I had given an early manuscript for critical comment. When it became clear that Sassoon knew absolutely nothing about the origins of Italian communism yet continued to repeat the old disinformation about the early years, I found his history the perfect foil for my views. The same may be said for the conference. My knowledge of what transpired there was due also to friends who attended, did not agree with the views expressed, and brought me papers distributed by the discussants. The only speaker who actually centered his comments on “Gramsci and modernity,” the stated theme of the deliberations, was Giancarlo Corsini; that said, I believe that the annual American Halloween fad celebrating vampires does not necessarily imply a significant social influence going back to Bram Stoker’s lively and imaginative writing. My treatment of the conference will clarify this point. As the second millennium approached its own fin de siecle, a cascade of new analytical studies emerged in Italy centering on the political activities of the two major figures of early Italian communism, Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci.[3] The significance of these new titles to this writing is that they provided additional reinforcement of my own archival findings from the early 1970s, and further confirmed the assessments already laid down in this commentary. I made liberal use of their new data. To fully understand my argument, let me explain further what I mean by the key term Center communism. I intend a movement that aspires to socialism and comes to power either from a delegation of authority, as happened in Eastern Europe, or after a long, difficult revolutionary struggle, the case with Russia, Yugoslavia, China and other lands of East Asia. More tellingly, these regimes introduced economies based on state-capitalism, transformed the ruling party into an elitist formation served by power and special privileges, and excluded the working population from meaningful empowerment, even as they laid claim to building an existing socialism. By meaningful, I mean the ability to raise, consider, and carry through command decisions by the working class itself. By state-capitalism, I mean the elimination of private ownership of all aspects of productive resources, without the socialist corollary: the laboring class involvement as an expression of mastery in all aspects of the change, and the steps toward the elimination of commodity production. Most importantly of all, that class continued to experience degradation and exploitive alienation, labored and lived in social relations not dissimilar from those of capitalism, and never matured — never was permitted to mature — politically and intellectually into a “ruling class” endowed with the decisive voice, authority and understanding to implement, qua working class, the change of relationships and the assumption of responsibilities that would transform and move itself and society onto a new stage — that of socialism. The absence of private ownership became the fiction concealing the invariant continuity in social relations. Such an undertaking would have to be preceded by an enormous educational effort by the party, a party capable of both leading and following, motivated by a different vision of its role and acceptance of its limits; one that understands socialism to be the handiwork of the many million- numbered working and allied classes, not of the short-lived exiguous party, and responds to the ever changing realities of the class to the point of knowing when its very existence is no longer needed. 2 Therefore, a party not only of democratic incorporation but dedicated also to revolutionary transformation. With the change enacted, both the doctrine and the organization have no further role. Instead, the arrival and formation of a command economy give notice that the socialist transformation has been derailed. In this age of triumphant capitalist elitism one can both not imagine and find unreal the thought of working and lower-class millions involved in the actual common effort of devising and laying out the social relations of a new society; of the common working people bearing up and delivering themselves from the deforming heritage of the old society as they face, in concert with peers, the daunting responsibility of sacrifice, power, decision-making, and error; venturing into social relations never conceived of before; of what this will do to them and to their society, a transformed social surrounding that must come to exclude all relations and transactions of a commercial or monetary nature, including wages, wealth, titles and inheritance. In summary, this would involve the conscious and deliberate construction of an entirely new social order, that, in the end, would be of a sight and scale — internationally, that is — more awing, inspiring, and astonishing than the building of pyramids in that early dawn of antiquity. One might paraphrase and quote here those magnificent lines from Lenin’s State and Revolution, often dismissed as mere utopian babble by the hard, practical men of class society and class restoration. Discussing the Paris Commune and how the society it had briefly given life to was something “qualitatively” different, a democracy “transformed from capitalist democracy into proletarian democracy,” and the state “into something which is no longer the state in the accepted sense of the word,” Lenin continued with the dismantling of the old regime: “The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population[the dictatorship of the proletariat], and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom, and wage slavery. And since the majority of people itself suppresses its oppressors, a 'special force' for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state begins to wither away... [T]he more the discharge of state power devolves upon the people generally, the less need is there for the existence of this power.”[4] In Lenin's lifetime such an implementation was nigh impossible. Never did the opportunity arise during the decades when the “socialist camp” towered on the world scene.

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