While you were doing activism, I studied the blade…

Why, so you can save bourgeois democracy from fascism? Only a worldview that views fascism as an autonomous form of politics falls into this trap. Fascism came at the rescue of capital; that's why it was welcomed and bourgeois opposition to it was merely so symbolic.

The struggle should always remain against capitalism; against the bourgeois society that has democracy when it is permited and fascism when it is not. Everywhere around the world, do you think communists who refused to join united fronts (fronts manned with both communist and non-communist parties) or join anti-fascist alliances just did nothing? I mean there's the epic meme that left communists did nothing and obviously Bordiga was far from perfect in his assessments, but the Bordigists all fought the fascist black shirts and cops of bourgeois democracy alike in the streets when it came down to it: archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.49874/2015.49874.The-Rise-Of-Italian-Fascism#page/n1/mode/2up. Long before fascism even rose, the Italian police and even the state military all frequently clashed with the communists. Never did these organs lift even a pinkie at Mussolini's black shirts and the PNF. Same story in Germany with Hitler and the NSDAP.

Holy fuck I think I need the Bordiga-Pill…

Leftcom reading list plz?

Are you serious about it?

If you are, left communism started without consensus, because it was just a general opposition faction within the Comintern, and still doesn't have one because it's still at best just a denominator for various tendencies that do have consensus.

I recommend PDF related which basically summarizes what left communism stands for and advocates for today, which more precisely falls under the (French) ultra-left now that the term "left communism" really doesn't have much of a function anymore. It also chronicles the origins of left communism, the ultra-left and glosses over the biggest and most influential Dutch-German and Italian left communist tendencies and what they were about.

I guess Mussolini was LARPing as well then, and world politics is just a giant roleplaying session.

Certainly not all the people who got killed because of it. Nor Bordiga, who ended up as an irrelevant footnote from being the leader of the largest communist party outside of Russia.

Suit yourself
marxists.org/subject/left-wing/
edensauvage.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/reading-list-for-aspiring-ultra-lefts/
reddit.com/r/leftcommunism/wiki/recommended_reading sorry

Dead or Alive

>edensauvage.wordpress.com
Eh. This blog's written some of the most pretentious dreck out there. I mean critiquing activism is necessary, and not just ultras will agree with that, but shit like this is just cringeworthy: edensauvage.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/the-poverty-of-left-wing-activism/.

The reading list looks alright though, from what I'm seeing.

Well, yes. It is all spooks, you know.

Egoists are even more retarded than leftcoms.

What exactly do leftcoms want to do, then? Just pray to god that revolution starts on its own?

Pretty much. That's why leftcoms on here are mostly NEETs.

I'd tell you to take a proper look at history and tell me what the common trend has been leading up to moments of revolution and how it has never been the result of a lot of people just being made angry, but the left communist theoretical principle for this is just an extension of Marx's: that conditions precipitate themselves until at a point action against capitalism no longer becomes a lifestyle some of us can choose from, but a forced choice to make: revolt or suffer real and tangible consequences of an unbearable capitalism. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't do nothing whatsoever. I'm an ultra-leftist but I'm syndicated, for example, and that's because I think it's worth doing.

So fight for reforms, sure, but make it reforms through emancipatory movements; movements that press bourgeois society to adapt itself to working class demand under pressure instead of just voting for a social democrat to do it for us.

Bordiga himself organized massive nation-wide strikes through the PCd'I (with the aim to reform, in part) and yet he went on to write critiques of activism. This is because in politics activism, especially in the sense Bordiga used it, means something specific and not just the use of energy in general.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=EAjRLLa5YFE

Can't be sectarian if you aren't an activist.

what a great strategy.

truly a resounding victory for leftcommunism.

read it faggots

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/

Have you actually read that? Most people mention and/or post it without reading much of it. I was a generic Leninist and if anything, reading it is actually what piqued me to dive into left communism and ultimately made me one, or at least identify with it a lot.

It's been a few years since I read it, but something interesting to note is that he had completely changed his mind about communists working in reactionary trade unions barely a year later, with the founding of the Red International of Labour Unions.

As usual with Lenin, this work gets taken completely out of historical context. Trots go as far as bending it to justify entryism, while Maoists cite it despite the fact that it goes entirely against Maoist politics of peasant emancipation. They don't even understand the title, because most of the time they haven't read it, much less understood it.

In the end I've come to accept most of what it says, and so did Bordiga: quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/left_wing_communism_00.htm.

Gorter (Dutch-German communist, which I otherwise do not agree much with) wrote a response to it in his time which is actually pretty decent too to check out: marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter/. Of course he was closer to the councilist line, which had overlap with Luxemburg, and many of the points he raises here are similarly raised by Luxemburg in her exchanges with Lenin. LWC ultimately reveals itself to be more against the sponteneous council communists than the Bordigists in this way, but eh.

What are you even trying to say here? This guy is right. Bourgeois democracy is fine with fascism. Our opposition to it makes us a problem. If we weren't a problem they wouldn't waste resources on us because they're stingy to a fault.

if you've read and believed in it, then how come you're not involved in parliamentary politics, hmm?

Lenin also told Bordiga to cooperative with the syndicalists in Italy against the fascists, including the Arditi del populo, and yet he refused, passed up the moment to kill fascism in the cradle, and doomed his party to irrelevancy along with allowing Italy to go under fascist control.

I ultimately have much more respect for the luxemborgists and council communists, as at the very least they can say they are opposed to cliques and parties in general having sole control of the state. Bordigists on the other hand just want to try the same old same old vanguard tactics which failed all across the communist bloc. If there's any issue we DO need to part with Lenin on, it is the position of the party, the most blatant failure of leninism and "marxist leninism".

Because relevant communist parties today don't exist? Bordiga involved the PCd'I in the Italian parliament, but only used it as a tribune. It became one of the largest parties in Italy by doing just that with parliament but actually organizing strikes and attempting to build Soviets in the country (ultimately thwarted by the PSI, as you may know).

None of this is in LWC. All of that was envoy communication between the Comintern and Bordiga after LWC was published, LWC largely being a text critiquing the general left communist faction's rejection or attitude towards bourgeois parliamentarism and their theoretical principles.

I don't agree with much in there (documents that describe the correspondence between Comintern and Italian communist members) at all, especially after I've read accounts of the rise of Italian fascism ( ) and of what happened with popular fronts in Spain or even before that with the first popular front in the Paris Commune (arguably what ended up being fatal to them).

Lol, is that you again? The dude who made like three threads on this topic? At the end of which it was basically "well, what if collaborating with non-communists stopped this one particular representative of fascism?" whataboutism, completely ignoring what allegiance to class war versus anti-fascism really entails in practice? Idk why you still sperg out over this. I'd tell you to look at what such operations looked like in Spain for the communists and anarchists, but I doubt you're interested in more than whataboutism since you keep bringing this up.

In general though, the strangest of all things is the idea that the Bordigists just sad idly bad while Mussolini and the PNF inserted themselves into power. The PCd'I and later the PCI with the Bordigists all led militant communists to fight not just black shirts in the street, but cops of bourgeois democracy too. Here the best argument one can make is "well, what if they coordinated their efforts in alliance instead of both supposedly just doing the same thing (facing fascists, while of course the communists also faced bourgeois cops)", which is flimsy at best. The AdP attempted many things but because the Italian state offered virtually no actual resistance to militant fascists, there was quite literally no way to win against them in numbers. The insurrection was dead the moment fascism really had parliamentary footing around 23, and thinking the assassination of Mussolini for example could have prevented fascism is very naive because it pictures fascism as a one man project (ignoring all other fascist figureheads like Bombacci), and an assassination attempt by the AdP actually happened and failed pitifully. Outside of this literally every form of bourgeois politics was either not lifting a finger against fascism or embraced it or even actively supported it, including the PM of the largest bourgeois party personally.

Btw if anyone is interested in the general left communist view on fascism versus antifascism and why it left communsits are anti-antifascist in the immediate sense (of course communists are opposed to fascism), check out: libcom.org/library/fascism-anti-fascism-gilles-dauve-jean-barrot. It basically sums up our position on things entirely so just read that to save yourself the time retroactively having us spoonfeed its exact content in replies.

and you think doing nothing is going to change that?

I never claimed it was.

after doing my own reading on the topic, is seems painfully obvious that Bordiga had an opportunity to do a serious blow to fascism and failed to take it because of his autism about party.

As for me, I only made one thread on this topic. I only jumped in when other people, you included brought up the topic elsewhere. Don't expect me to just let leftcom propaganda go unchallenged.

The way I remember it, you were completely unfamiliar with the facts of the italian communist reposnse to anti-facism and the roles of different figures. had not the bordigist tendency been one of constant impotence and obscurity, I believe we would have seen even more such cases of inaction in history leading to catastrophic results.

as far as the spanish civil war is concerned, communists and anarchists did more working together than they could have done working against each other. imo, the war was an authentic tragedy, a result just as much of Stalin's sectarianism and failure to support the workers, as it was of the ruling classes power and the commitment of hitler to prop up Franco and destroy the revolution.

the ADP did attempt many things, and we should be reminded that their core group was of hardened military veterans, a fighting force that would have been extremely useful in any conflict. yes, they were destroyed by the italian state, but they could have survived and dealt back ten fold if they actually had the support of a major party. accuse me of "whataboutism" all you like, but you cannot deny that as far as strategy and tactics go, not seeking an alliance with them was only putting the communists at a further disadvantage.

here's some reading about how leftcoms and their failure to fight fascism, and by extension capitalism
isj.org.uk/lenins-left-wing-communism-an-infantile-disorder-revisited/

The what now

I love how Bordiga is both impotent and obscure but simultaneously held the key to defeating fascism. The reality of the situation was that the fascists were handed power by the very democracy the antifascists sought to preserve. The PCd'I entering into the united front wouldn't have made much of a difference.

LEFTCOMS

TO THE BATTLECHAIRS

Bordiga was impotent and obscured by choice. He could have made a difference if he so choose. He did however lead to the dissolution of the PCd'I after letting it atrophy for years.

I don't dispute that.

Choosing to align themselves with the syndicalist and anarchist elements in Italy, as COMINTERN suggested they do, probably would have.

...

kek

Yes, like it has before. Also

You alluded to agreeing to LWC's content, not Comintern policies separate of LWC's content published later under much more than just Lenin's authorship.

Agreed. Bourgeois democracy had long decided that spending even a fraction of the effort it had spent thwarting communism would not be spent on fascism. Not sure how this fits into whataboutist narratives, though.

You jumped on the first after getting unsettled by texts critiquing "socialist" Yugoslavia and market "socialism". You made at least a second in the wake of that iirc.

Stumped tbh. Make sure those revisionists get told.

All references I used were the same as in this thread's: Angelo Tasca's "The Rise of Italian Fascism", written by an Italian who him and his father experienced Italian fascism first hand, and the various other sources used in Dauvé's "When Insurrections Die".

Nice, more whataboutism and ignoring the Bordigists' historic tendency of being among the first to challenge the PNF in the streets long before it even had significant parliamentary footing.

You're forgetting another amazing ally: the Spanish Republic.

Biggest exporter of the united front strategy, as per Comintern excellence btw.

Pray tell, what was the PNF's and with what funding?

Instead of whataboutism, I raise you a theoretical critique of antifascism's principles based on a Marxist analysis of class struggle.

Can you give us more than whataboutism this time?

If you have to get to the battlechair you've already lost.

Nice, the same merry folk who think suppressing revolutionary workers straying from the Comintern line in the 20s and especially Kronstadt were wonderful things and a necessary struggle in the name of anti-revisionism.

Schrödinger's ultra: doing nothing while at the same time actively ruining everything.

To be fair, with enough power the liberals would gladly throw him in prison too.

Holla Forums is gay.

They tried. The PCd'I's attempts to form the Soviets in Italy was halted by the PSI also on the threat of it being illegal.

If anything, he'd have been jailed by the late, ever-more (literally) dementing Lenin's Comintern, and definitely under Stalin's or Trotsky's if we entertain whataboutisms for the sake of it.

To recap: Bordiga resolutely opposed the Comintern's turn to the right in 1921; as General Secretary of the PCI, he refused to implement the "United Front" strategy of the Third Congress. He refused, in other words, to fuse the newly formed PCI, dominated by "Bordigism", with the left wing of the PSI (self-titled "liberal socialists" i.e. rebranded social democrats) from which it had just broken away. Bordiga had a completely different view of the party from the Comintern, which was adapting to the revolutionary ebb announced, in 1921, by the Anglo-Russian trade agreement, suppression of anything proletarian in Russia not towing the line (culminating in what was most famously Kronstadt), the implementation of the NEP, the banning of factions and the defeat of the March Action in Germany. For Bordiga, the Western European CPs' strategy of fighting this ebb by absorbing a mass of left-wing Social Democrats through the "United Front" was a complete capitulation to the period of counter-revolutionary ebb he saw setting in. This was the nub of his critique of democracy. For it was in the name of "conquering the masses" that the Comintern seemed to be making all kinds of programmatic concessions to left-wing Social Democrats. For Bordiga, program was everything, a gate-receipt notion of numbers was nothing. The role of the party in the period of ebb was to preserve the program and to carry on the propaganda work possible until the next turn of the tide, not to dilute it while chasing ephemeral popularity. So sure, most of the Comintern affiliates in the vicinity of Russia survived fascism (the ones that weren't culled by the Comintern itself that is), and the result was the formation of Stalinism and the death of all proper internationalist communist perspectives.

This all famously resulted in Stalin ousting basically everyone not towing the holy ML line from the Comintern in the late 20s and Bordiga calling Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution.

This. See: Catalonia.

doing nothing does nothing. if you refuse to be a historical actor, then don't claim other people's successes for your own.

I agreed with both. And parliamentarianism is still an issue, considering leftcoms refuse to lift a finger to build party organization, or any organization for that matter.

Well, case settled then.

I don't know what thread you're talking about. But I'll take Yugoslavia and Market Socialism any day over an authoritarian bordigist party that gives the people no power either in politics or in the workplace!

When we began you had no idea of Lenin's positions on these issues, including on the Arditi.

I'm not even accusing you of hypocrisy. I'm telling you Bordiga and his positions were fucking retarded.
refusing concrete tactical benefits because of muh party autism is perfectly in line with the leftcom line.

Wrong. See Orwell, Chomsky and Bookchin. The stalinist authoritarianism demoralized the spanish peasants and they did everything they could to undermine the syndicalists.

I hardly see how that's relevant to the point.

Ah yes! Those pesky proletarian and peasant anarchists/syndicalists! I had forgotten the oldest trick in the leftcom bag, just call anyone who disagrees with you of not representing the working class. Your sectarianism is naked, as per usual.

also
grow the fuck up.