THE SPECTRAL FIGURE OF AMADEO BORDIGA A Case Study in the Decline of Marxism in the West, 1912-26 John E. Chiaradia Submitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Science in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at New York University October, 1972 PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company Dissertation Abstract John E. Chiaradia Dr. Edward R. Tannenbaum THE SPECTRAL FIGURE OF AMADEO BORDIGA A Case Study in the Decline of Marxism in the West, 1912-26 This is a studv of the ideological and political activities of the founder of Italian Communism, Amadeo Bordiga, during the years between 1912-26, when he played a major role first within the Italian Socialist party and later in the leadership of the Italian Communist party. Following the victorv of the Socialist left wins: in 1912, Bordiga emerged as one of a number of ideologues seeking to make the party take more seriously its revolutionary goals. Well before 1914 he showed that he understood the conflict leading to war, and in 1915 he became the spokesman for the antiwar Socialist base, Bordiga came to the fore of Socialist politics again in 1919, when the journal with, which he was associated, 11 Soviet, urged the Socialists to abstain from the national election and turn their energies to building soviets, Bordiga then led the left wing in abandoning the Socialist party to form the Communist party in 1921, A majority of the Communist membership continued to adhere to left-Communist P. 2 views, until the ranks were purged and dismembered by a faction formed in 1924 in the leadership of the party by Antonio Gramsci upon his return from Moscow, The narrative is divided into seven chapters. The first reviews the contradictory appraisals of Bordiga found in various historiographies; emphasis is placed on the revival of interest in him appearing in Italian leftwing writings. Subsequent chapters look into the political background influencing the views of the young Bordiga, the policies pursued by the Communist party at the time of the Sinistra, that is, left, leadership, the conflicts between that leadership and the Third International, and the means used by Gramsci to break the resistance of the Sinistra base, thus neutralising the loyalty to Bordiga. In the course of presenting Italian Communism in a new light, two findings are claimed: 1) that the contributions of Gramsci to the origins of Italian Communism were minor, and 2) that Bordiga was the outstanding Italian Marxist P. 3 during the years under review. The political eclipse of Bordiga was a ma.ior event in the decline of Marxism in the 'West, and was accompanied by the abandonment of a revolutionary perspective by the new Communist leadership headed by Palmiro Togliatti. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE N O . INTRODUCTION................. 1 CHAPTER I: THE IMAGE OF AMADEO BORDIGA IN HISTORIOGRAPHY.... .................. 7 CHAPTER II: THE MAKING OF AN IDEOLOGUE............ 51 CHAPTER III: THE BIRTH OF THE PCI.................. 118 CHAPTER IV: THE BORDIGAN PARTY, 1921-22........... 176 CHAPTER V: THE CONFLICT WITH THE INTERNATIONAL........................... 2 20 CHAPTER VI: THE AGONY OF THE SINISTRA............. 269 CHAPTER VII: CONCLUSIONS AND A VIEW TO THE FUTURE.,.,............................... 343 APPENDIX................................................. 381 INTRODUCTION In the years after 1945 it was still possible to find oneself in New York talking to Italian anti-Fascists, men of an older generation though largely of working-class background; some had been members of the young Italian Communist movement, of the Partito communista d 1Italia as it was known in the 1920's and 1930's. A few had even participated in the tumult­ uous Red Week of June, 1914, These men never mentioned Amadeo Bordiga and rarely spoke of Antonio Gramsci; they directed most of their remarks to politics of Palmiro Togliatti, indicat­ ing a deep disagreement with the tactics being used by the latter to bring Italy to socialism. Their scepticism was puzzling and could be shrugged off as old thinking. Against a background of Soviet behavior marked by cruel and bizarre purges, the postwar political postures and speeches of Togliatti, with their careful analyses and reasoned pleas for immediate reform, were closely listened to in Italy and dutifully reported in The New York Times. Togliatti seemed the very embodiment of reason. It is not easy in the early 1970’s to fully convey the moral stature of Togliatti in 1945, and the power of his appeal to worker and intellectual, Communist and non-Communist. Now if Western man had been guided by the easy ration** ality of Second International Marxism, Togliatti would have 2 been a smashing success, and Western history a progression such as envisioned by mid-twentieth century American liberal­ ism, A widely read commentator on Italian Fascism, Angelo Tasca, once summarized this optimistic, old fashioned Marxism as follows: "The masses more and more conscientious, the bourgeoisie more and more enlightened; the former patient, the latter resigned to the inevitable: joint executors to a world 1 whose ends were desired and accepted," With these words Tasca characterized the Marxist Weltanschauung of Filippo Turati, leader of the reformist wing of the Italian Socialist party before the rise of Fascism. With time Togliatti sounded incongruously like an elder statesman of this earlier socialism. Now for Togliatti to mouth the platitudes of an adolescent socialism raised questions, since the communist movement of this century had developed as a reaction to the bankruptcy of these earlier beliefs. The problem deepened when Marxist considerations were introduced, for Marxism was an attempt to understand human history by centering attention on the paramount influence exercised by factors underlying class conflict, while justify­ ing the need to break institutional obstacles, an act usually attended by violence and indicative of a new consciousness. * (Angelo Tasca^ Angelo Rossi, The Rise of Italian Fascism (London: Methuen and Co., 1938), p. 72. 3 The Russian Revolution and Leninist thought had, initially at least, emphasized both the inevitability and desirability of revolutionary violence. For Togliatti to sound like a reformist was a paradox. The inconsistencies of Italian Communism grew with the passing of the postwar years; there was the heavy reliance on electoral politics, the reluctance to press for a realistic analysis of Soviet and East European reality even after the magic baton of Soviet primacy had been snapped by the revela­ tions of the 20th Party Congress, and its torpor and immobilism in the face of the crisis induced by increasing American inter­ vention against revolution in the Third World. The party's conduct posed dilemmas only if posited against the assumption that Italian Communism in 1945 represented a revolutionary force. One easy way out of the problem was to conclude that Italian Communism had simply adjusted to the "soft living" of the postwar republic. This study in the origins of the Italian Communist party soon revealed that my earlier views about the reasons for the party’s behavior were not just simplistic but alto­ gether wrong. Something more fundamental had been involved. As the findings began to indicate the outlines of a political drama, one recalled the scepticism of the old Communists, Possibly they had been bordighisti, followers of Amadeo Bordiga; more certainly they were former members of the old 4 "extreme left," the Sinistra. Since this is one of the key terminological referents in the ensuing narrative, the meaning must be made clear. Sinistra designates the political current that gathered in the left wing of the pre-1914 Italian Socialist party becoming, after the schism of Livorno in 1921, the leader- 2 ship and rank-and-file of the Italian Communist movement. A probe into the studies of Italian Communism brought to light a very obvious but little commented anomaly: in the already substantial bibliography on this subject no monograph dealt with the circumstances surrounding the rise and fall from leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the founder of Italian Communism, This gap rendered the historigraphy incomplete, at best; at worst, the historiography might suffer from a serious defect in perspective, A concentration on the activities of Bordiga was called for. Then another finding came into view, Bordiga's activities in politics before 1926 had earned him a place in history; now his place in historiography was bringing him back as a factor in politics. This development is discussed in the first chapter. This Sinistra should not be confused with the middle- class political elites coming to ministerial leadership of Italy after the 1876 election. 5 In the subsequent narrative there are some questions about Bordiga which I did not discuss. One of these concerns his analysis of Fascism. A proper evaluation of his views would have required a setting of those opinions within the context of the nineteen twenties, when Fascism was a new phenomenon, and a review of the thoughts of the other Communist leaders: Gramsci, Togliatti, Gregory Zinoviev, Angelo Tasca, and so forth. For example, in March 1924, Gramsci wrote, "The Fascist Government can only maintain power in so far as it renders life impossible to other organizations which are not Fascist. Mussolini bases his power on the petty bourgeoisie, which (since they have no function in the productive life and hence do not feel the antagonisms and the contradictions resulting from it) in fact believe the class struggle to be the diabolical invention of socialists and communists. The entire so-called hierarchical conception of Fascism is dependent upon that 3 fact." One can accept what Gramsci seems to be saying, namely that the focus of Fascist power was in the lower middle classes of Italy, but for a Marxist to take that view is to raise immediate dilemmas.