The national question according to Bordigist legend

Preamble

On 29 August 1953 (remember this date) in Trieste, Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) presented a report to the inter-regional meeting of his group, which had just split from the Internationalist Communist Party (PCIste) and was temporarily retaining the same name. The minutes of this meeting, which would later be published under the title Facteurs de race et de nation dans la théorie marxiste (Factors of race and nation in marxist theory), include an enthusiastic passage about the Congress of the Peoples of the East, which was held in Baku in September 1920, shortly after the Second Congress of the Communist International: “It was the president of the Proletarian International, Zinoviev (whose appearance was, however, anything but warlike), who read the final manifesto of the Congress; and the coloured men responded to his call with a single cry, brandishing their swords and sabres. The Communist International invites the peoples of the East to overthrow the Western oppressors by force of arms; it cries out to them: 'Brothers! We call you to holy war, to holy war first of all against English imperialism!'[1]”

Seven years later, on 12 November 1960, a new general meeting of the same political group, which had now taken the name International Communist Party (ICP), opened in Bologna, a meeting that fully confirmed this orientation on colonial movements. The minutes of this meeting, pompously entitled “The incandescent awakening of coloured peoples in the Marxist vision”, read as follows: “From a Marxist perspective, colonial movements occupy a position other than that of passive, mechanical agents of proletarian recovery. Depending on the historical period and the concrete balance of forces, proletarian strategy can allow the proletariat of the metropoles to take the initiative in the worldwide movement right from the start of the crisis, or it can allow the action of the masses in the 'backward' countries to launch the agitation of the proletariat in the 'developed countries'. But, in both cases, what is important is the link that must be made, and this is where the difficulty lies.”[2]

After a first congress, which had represented a huge step forward, the second congress of the Communist International was marked by a series of programmatic regressions. The Congress of the Peoples of the East confirmed the opportunist drift into which the International had entered. Isolated following the failure of the first attempt at revolution in Germany, surrounded by White armies supported by strong contingents from all the most developed bourgeois nations, the Russian Revolution was in a dangerous situation. The Russian proletariat needed a lifeline. What Lenin initially saw as confusion over the national question, which had given rise to a whole debate within the workers' movement - in particular with Rosa Luxemburg - became a strong opportunist stance among the Bolsheviks in 1920, caused by the isolation of the Russian revolution. It is the nature of opportunism to look for a shortcut, an illusory solution to a fundamental political problem. From this point of view, the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, with its call for a "holy war", is the symbol of a worsening of the process of degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

Subsequent events proved the catastrophic nature of support for national liberation struggles. In Finland, Turkey, Ukraine, China, the Baltic countries and the Caucasus, everywhere the Bolsheviks' calls for national self-determination led to the fostering of nationalism, the strengthening of the local bourgeoisie and the massacre of communist minorities[3].

As we can see, this position was taken up by the Bordigist current when it was founded in the 1950s. The search for a shortcut here is a product of impatience, one of the main factors of opportunism. In the midst of a period of counter-revolution - we were in a period of reconstruction after the Second World War - the Bordigists believed they could find a trigger for the world proletarian revolution in the armed struggles on the periphery of capitalism. They confused decolonisation and the resulting confrontations between the two imperialist blocs of East and West with the national bourgeois revolutions of the period of capitalism's ascendancy. They then plunged into the worst ambiguities, such as the defence of democratic rights, and the worst aberrations, such as the apology for the massacres perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, considered a manifestation of "Jacobin radicalism", or like their participation in the Stalinist and Trotskyist choirs of the Mandel variant to salute Che Guevara, the living symbol of the "democratic anti-imperialist revolution", cowardly murdered by "Yankee imperialism and its pro-American lackeys"[4].

Blinded by opportunism, awaiting this difficult "transition", the Bordigists purely and simply ignored the historical revival of the class struggle at the end of the 1960s and continued to focus on the so-called anti-imperialist struggles. Consequentially, they failed to realise that all their militant recruits from the peripheral countries were in fact adhering to the nationalist positions of Maoism. This powder keg exploded in 1982 and reduced the PCInt from being the main force numerically of the Communist Left internationally to a tiny nucleus of a few militants.

Why the ICP’s position is divisive within the working class

The ICP made a brief response to our article dealing with the catastrophic application of the Bordigist position on national liberation struggles to the dramatic situation existing in Palestine; an article that appeared in Révolution Internationale no. 501 (May-August 2024)[5]. Indeed, we read in Le Prolétaire No. 553 (May-July 2024) that “the ICC [defends a] bookish conception of a pure revolution pitting only bourgeois and proletarians”. It is quite true that we try to remain faithful to marxist principles and to all the works in which these principles are defended by communist militants. It is also true that we defend the fundamental framework of the confrontation between the two historical classes of society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, on which the future of humanity depends. We have just seen that this is not quite the case with the Bordigists, for whom the world is no longer essentially divided into classes but into colours, from which an “incandescent awakening” is expected.

Wearing the coloured and distorting glasses of national oppression, the ICP is fascinated by the desperate revolt of the Palestinians crushed for decades by imperialism. It believes it can find a subversive force, an example for workers' struggles around the world, or even a path to proletarianisation for the mass of the jobless, reduced to misery by a capitalism that has become senile. In doing so, it loses sight of the internationalist basic position of the communists who call for the fraternisation of the workers enlisted in the imperialist war. It rejects the only means of achieving this fraternisation, this union of Israeli and Palestinian proletarians: the break with the prison of nationalism. It even encourages this nationalism by demanding the "Right to self-determination”: "Calling for the union of Palestinian and Israeli (Jewish) proletarians under these conditions without taking into account the national oppression of the former can only sound like an empty phrase: this union will never be possible as long as Israeli proletarians do not disassociate themselves from the national oppression exercised in their name by 'their' state, as long as they do not recognise the Palestinians' right to self-determination.”

The result of this strategy of the ICP is not the radicalisation of the struggle or the unity of the proletariat, but rather their division. All over the world, the bourgeoisie is taking advantage of this windfall and is eager to widen the division between proletarians who declare themselves pro-Palestinian and those who declare themselves anti-Palestinian, to exacerbate the nationalism that feeds on each other, in a context where the global working class does not yet have the strength to directly oppose today's regional imperialist wars but rather suffers their negative impact with a feeling of astonishment, powerlessness and fatalism.

The damage caused by this policy among politicised elements, particularly those from peripheral countries, has been enormous. For example, at a ICP meeting in the 1980s, one of its supporters responded to our intervention defending the principle of internationalism: “If we are given weapons, it would be very stupid to refuse them!” This clearly shows a terrible ignorance of the nature of imperialism, which can only lead to disaster. And this was the case in the face of all the major events of the post-war period. In 1949 in China and in 1962 in Algeria [6], the policy of the ICP encouraged the enlisting of inexperienced proletarians into the armed struggle behind a faction of the local bourgeoisie which, in order to crush its rival factions, was forced to ally itself with one or other of the bourgeoisies of the major Western or Soviet countries. All these military conflicts and guerrilla wars, by their imperialist nature, led to the crushing of the young proletariat in these regions.

Immediately after the Second World War, particularly during decolonisation, the leaders of the two imperialist blocs, the USSR [7] and the United States, claiming never to have colonised any country, were intent on imposing their order after dividing the world between them, while the United States assigned the role of policeman in their former colonies to their second-string players. To break this bloody spiral, only the expansion of the struggle of the proletariat of the central countries was able to weaken the pressure of imperialism on the proletariat of the peripheral countries. With the return of the economic crisis at the end of the 1960s, imperialist competition between the two blocs became even more bloody. The disappearance of the two blocs did not put an end to this imperialist competition between nations large and small; on the contrary, it took an even more barbaric turn, with the implementation of a scorched earth policy and the systematic massacre of the civilian population everywhere. The communists, for their part, must prepare the ground for the future union of the proletarians of the whole world by calling for a break with imperialist war and with nationalism, as Lenin did in the face of the social-chauvinists in 1914.

It is quite true that the ICP does not have a "bookish conception of revolution", but it does in the sense that it wipes its feet on the works of marxism. For example, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which reads: “The workers have no country. One cannot take from them what they have not got.”

 

We have engaged in numerous polemics with the ICP, on a theoretical level by examining the marxist approach to the national question[8], or on a historical level by dissecting the lessons of proletarian defeats[9]. In this article, we propose to examine how the trajectory of the ICP explains how it allowed itself to be trapped by a position on the national question that has become obsolete. The trap was set in two stages: in 1943 and 1944-1945 with the opportunist formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista[10] from which the ICP emerged, and in 1952 with the liquidation of the legacy of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left during the constitution of the ICP

1943, break with the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy

Bordiga took the first step towards abandoning the work of the fraction by withdrawing from political life when the Left had just lost the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy. At the end of 1926, after having seen his house ransacked by the fascists, he was arrested and sentenced to three years of exile, first in Ustica and then in Ponza. There are some traces of his political activity in prison, when he spoke out with a minority of communist prisoners against the anti-Trotsky campaign. In March 1930, he was expelled by the Stalinist leadership of the CP, which had taken refuge in Paris. He then withdrew from political life to devote himself to his profession as an architectural engineer. He declared in a conversation in 1936: “I am happy to live outside the petty and insignificant events of militant politics, news in brief, everyday events. None of this interests me”[11]. He did not reappear until 1944, more than 15 years later, in southern Italy, in a Fraction of Italian socialists and communists.

In doing so, he severed ties with other left-wing militants who, hunted down by the police of Mussolini and Stalin, mostly went into exile, mainly in France and Belgium[12]. They were determined to continue the fight against the opportunistic drift of the Communist International. In 1928, they formed the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy. Their great strength was to clarify and explore two essential questions: the retreat and defeat of the revolutionary wave, that is to say the opening of a period of counter-revolution that paved the way for a new world war, and the nature of the tasks of revolutionary organisations in such a situation, that is to say the work of a fraction as Marx and Lenin had carried out against opportunism in other unfavourable periods of the workers' movement.

The main task of the Fraction was to draw lessons from the revolutionary wave of the 1920s, to determine which positions had been validated by historical experience and which had been mistakes or had lost their validity with the evolution of capitalism. Unlike Trotsky's Left Opposition, which fully supported the first four congresses of the CI, the Italian Left rejected some of the positions adopted at the 3rd and 4th congresses, particularly the tactic of the "United Front’. If the party, after the break-up of the International, continued on its degenerating course and ended up moving over to the side of the bourgeoisie, this did not mean that the situation was ripe for the emergence of a new party. The Fraction had to continue its work to create the conditions for the future party, and this could only re-emerge under two conditions: that the Fraction had completed its work of assessment by drawing up a new programmatic framework corresponding to the new situation, and that a situation would arise not only of a break with the counter-revolution, but of a new period leading towards revolution, as had already been established in the Theses of Rome (1922)[13].

Throughout this period, the Fraction carried out a remarkable programme of work and, together with a number of Dutch left-wing communists, it was the only organisation that maintained an uncompromising class position in the face of the Spanish Civil War, which had been a dress rehearsal for the Second world war. However, the weight of the counter-revolution grew heavier with time and the Fraction itself entered a period of degeneration. Under the leadership of Vercesi, its main theoretician and organiser, it began to develop a new theory according to which local wars no longer represented preparations for a new world slaughter but were intended to prevent, through the massacre of workers, the growing proletarian threat. The world was therefore, for Vercesi, on the eve of a new revolutionary wave. Despite the struggle of a minority against this new orientation, the Fraction found itself completely disoriented at the outbreak of the Second World War. It was in total disarray, apart from the minority that managed to reconstitute the Fraction in 1941, mainly in Marseille.

When major workers' strikes broke out in northern Italy in 1942-43[14], leading to the fall of Mussolini, the reconstituted Fraction believed that, in accordance with its long-standing position, “the course of the transformation of the Fraction into a party in Italy is open” (Conference of August 1943). However, at the Conference of May 1945, having learnt of the constitution in Italy of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista with the prestigious figures of Onorato Damen and Amadeo Bordiga, the Fraction decided on its own dissolution and the individual entry of its members into the PCIste. It was the final blow. The weakened Fraction collapsed despite the warnings of Marc Chirik[15], who asked the Fraction to first verify the programmatic basis of this new party, about which it had no documentation.

The formation of the PCIste in 1943 was justified by the resurgence of class struggles in Northern Italy and was based on the mistaken idea that these were were the first of a new revolutionary wave that would emerge from the war as was the case during the First World War. As soon as it became clear that this prospect would not materialise, the PCIint should have retreated to work as a Fraction, continuing the work of the Italian Left in exile and preparing to work against the tide in the hostile environment of counter-revolution[16]. However, the PCIint did the complete opposite and embarked on an opportunist shift, recruiting from Trotskyite and Stalinist circles, without being too particular, to justify, against all odds, the formation of the party. Everything was done to adapt to the growing illusions of a declining working class.

For example, the PCInt had been very clear from the start about the resistance as a moment in the imperialist war and as a nationalist trap. But it soon moved towards the work of agitation aimed at partisan groups with the illusion of transforming them “into organs of proletarian self-defence, ready to intervene in the revolutionary struggle for power” (Manifesto distributed in June 1944). It even went so far as to take part in the elections in 1946, after having previously considered itself a member of the Abstentionist Fraction. This opportunist policy of the PCInt is even more blatant with regard to the groups in the south of Italy. The "Fraction of the left of the communists and socialists" formed in Naples around Bordiga and Pistone practised entryism into the Stalinist PCI until the beginning of 1945, and was particularly vague on the question of the political nature of the USSR. The PCIint opened its doors to it, blinded by the presence of Bordiga, as well as to elements of the POC (Parti ouvrier communiste) which had for a time constituted the Italian section of the Trotskyist Fourth International. All this without verification, without in-depth discussion with these elements, without critical examination.

The PCInt had in its ranks a number of militants from the Fraction who had returned to Italy at the beginning of the war. It had therefore been influenced by the Fraction's positions, as the first issues of Prometeo show. But at the Turin Conference at the end of 1945, the PCInt adopted the draft programme that Bordiga - who was still not a member of the party - had just sent to it, a programme that totally ignored these positions. This was symbolic of the break with the organisational framework developed by the Fraction in exile. Maintaining party work in a counter-revolutionary period meant opening the doors wide to opportunism, it meant making lucidity impossible when the dominant ideology penetrated the organisation. This is the common point that unites on the one hand the Damen current and, on the other hand, the Bordigism that would emerge a few years later.

1952, a break with the programmatic framework formulated by the Left Fraction

Such a disparate gathering could not last. The split occurred as early as 1952, a split that marked the birth of the Bordigist current. After having been one of the initiators of the break with the framework of the work of Fraction, Bordiga took a further step, that of breaking with the programmatic framework itself formulated by the Fraction of the Italian Left in exile. In the new party, which soon took the name of International Communist Party (ICP), the three years 1951, 1952 and 1953 were years of revisionist fever. The aim is clear: "It was no longer just a question of reconnecting the scattered threads of a Marxist opposition to Stalinism, but of rebuilding it from scratch, starting again, on all fronts, from zero[17].’ That is to say, by sweeping away all the contributions of the three Internationals and the Communist Left of the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore:

1. Bordiga first of all began by rejecting the theory of decadence defended by the Third International. Capitalism was constantly expanding and it became possible to discover some youthful capitalisms here and there.

2. Bordiga discovered that the proletariat is incapable of developing its consciousness before the seizure of power. Until then, it is only within the party that consciousness is an active factor, which he called "turning praxis on its head". It was to throw in the bin yet another fundamental work of Marxism, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution[18].

3. Of course, the negation of consciousness within the proletariat made it possible to transfer to the party - and only to the party - the revolutionary tasks incumbent upon the mass of the proletariat organised in the workers' councils. According to this substitutionist vision, the Party organises and technically directs the entire class. It is monolithic, unique and hierarchical, like a pyramid with the party's central committee at the top[19].

4. Together with the Party, the State became the revolutionary organ par excellence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It bases its power on red terror[20]. On these two issues, Bordiga scuttled two of the main advances made by the Left Fraction of the PCI. It was not only the continuity with the programmatic work of the Left that was broken, but the entire continuity of the marxist movement. It was a rejection of the method of analysing the main experiences of the proletariat as inaugurated by Marx and Engels, for example at the time of the Paris Commune, which had enabled them to conclude: "The least that can be said is that the state is an evil inherited by the victorious proletariat after its struggle for class supremacy whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once, as much as possible until such a time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state onto the scrap heap"[21].

5. To cap it all, Bordiga decreed the invariance of marxism at a meeting in Milan in September 1952 (a fateful year for the PCInt!). While the communist programme and the marxist theory that underpins it are a cumulative process, learning lessons from revolutions and counter-revolutions, with the proletariat gaining experience and the communists deepening their theoretical understanding of them, Bordiga turns it into a dead dogma, a catechism. This is how Bordiga claims to fight against revisionists and modernisers, by donning both costumes himself, that of the revisionist and that of the priest: "Although the theoretical heritage of the revolutionary working class is no longer a revelation, a myth, an idealistic ideology as was the case for previous classes, but a positive “science”, it nevertheless needs a stable formulation of its principles and rules of action, which plays the role and has the decisive effectiveness that dogmas, catechisms, tables, constitutions, guidebooks such as the Vedas, the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran or the Declaration of Human Rights have had in the past.[22]’

Once this work of systematically destroying the heritage of the working class was completed[23], the ICP was forced to bitterly note that the ICC remains today the sole heir to the programmatic positions developed by the Italian Fraction in the 1930s. It was forced to recognise this publicly in an article devoted - very belatedly - to the history of the ‘Left Fraction Abroad’, as it calls it, and even goes so far as to recognise a break in the theoretical continuity of the Italian Left: "On the question of war, on the question of the global crisis of capitalism, on the colonial question, on all these issues, the Fraction from 1935 onwards began to move towards positions which, we are sorry to say, are those professed today by the International Communist Current. […] We must indeed say openly, without the slightest intention of suing the comrades - as is part of our tradition - that the Party that was born in 1952 does not relate to the theoretical heritage of the Fraction[24].”

An orphan of the workers' movement and caught up in an idealistic, even mystical, spiral, the PCInt attempted to restore a kind of political continuity based on individual continuity, i.e. on the concept of the "brilliant leader”, a concept already criticised by the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) in 1947[25]. This idealistic concept is still in force in today's ICP as the following illustration shows. In the same article that we have just quoted, it explains learnedly to us the causes of the split of 1952. In order to constitute the true Party, the "brilliant leader" had to finish reflecting: “In that period, which in Italy was the year 1952 - it is of course possible to wonder whether it could have come about in 1950 rather than in 1952, but in reality it is of no importance - the reconstitution of the party was possible, because then and only then was it possible to take stock. Amadeo [Bordiga] himself could not have accomplished this work ten years earlier. We were able to show that in Amadeo's thinking some things were not yet clear in 1945, but had become so by 1952.”[26]

The Communist Left and the national question

But let us return to our starting point, the national question, by explaining the method of the Communist Left. Through this quote from Bilan, the organ of the Italian Fraction, we can easily measure the gulf that separates it from the ossified method of the Bordigist current:

“Our era is dominated by a past of revolutionary growth and by the dark defeats that the proletariat has just suffered throughout the world. Marxist thought, which gravitates around these two axes, finds it difficult to reject useless trappings and outdated formulas, to free itself from the 'hold of the dead', in order to progress in the elaboration of the new material necessary for the battles of tomorrow. The revolutionary ebb rather determines a reduction of thought, a return to images of a past 'where we have conquered’; and thus the proletariat, the class of the future, is transformed into a class without hope that consoles its weakness with declamations, a mysticism of empty formulas, while the grip of capitalist repression tightens ever more.

It must be proclaimed once again that the essence of Marxism is not the adulation of proletarian leaders or formulas, but a living and constantly progressing exploration, just as capitalist society progresses ever further in the direction of imprisoning the revolt of the forces of production. Not to complete the doctrinal contribution of the earlier phases of the proletarian struggle is to render the workers powerless in the face of the new weapons of capitalism. But this contribution is certainly not given by the sum of contingent positions, of isolated phrases, of all the writings and speeches of those whose genius expressed the degree reached by the consciousness of the masses in a given historical period, but rather by the substance of their work which was fertilised by the painful experience of the workers. If in each historical period the proletariat climbs a new rung, if this progression is recorded in the fundamental writings of our masters, it is no less true that the sum of the hypotheses, diagrams and probabilities put forward in the face of still embryonic problems must be subjected to the most severe criticism by those who, seeing these same phenomena unfold, can build theories not on the ‘probable’ but on the cement of new experiences. Moreover, each period has its limitations, a kind of domain of hypotheses which, to be valid, must still be verified by events. But even when social phenomena present themselves before our eyes, Marxists sometimes want to borrow arguments for their interventions from the old arsenal of historical facts.

But Marxism is not a bible, it is a dialectical method; its strength lies in its dynamism, in its permanent tendency towards an elevation of the formulations acquired by the proletariat marching towards revolution. When revolutionary turmoil ruthlessly sweeps away reminiscences, when it brings about profound contrasts between proletarian positions and the course of events, the marxist does not implore history to adopt its outdated formulas, to regress: he understands that positions of principle previously elaborated must be taken further, that the past must be left to the dead. And it is Marx rejecting his 1848 formulas on the progressive role of the bourgeoisie, it is Lenin trampling underfoot, in October 1917, his September hypotheses on the peaceful course of the revolution, on the expropriation with buyout of the banks; both to go well beyond these positions: to face the real tasks of their time. [...]

As far as we are concerned, we will have no fear of demonstrating that Lenin's formulation, with regard to the problem of national minorities, has been overtaken by events and that his position applied in the post-war period has proved to be in contradiction with the fundamental elements that its author had given it: to help the world revolution to blossom.

From a general point of view, Lenin was perfectly right during the war to highlight the need to weaken the main capitalist states by all means, as their fall would certainly have accelerated the course of the world revolution. Supporting the oppressed peoples meant, for him, determining movements of bourgeois revolt from which the workers could have benefited. All this would have been perfect on one condition: that the overall situation of capitalism, the era of imperialism, still allowed for progressive national wars, common struggles of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As for the second aspect of the problem raised by Lenin, the right of self-determination of peoples, the Russian revolution proved that if the proletarian revolution does not coincide with its proclamation, it represents only a means of channelling revolutionary effervescence, a weapon of repression that all imperialisms knew how to wield in 1919, from Wilson to the representatives of French, Italian and English imperialism.”[27]

The limits of the self-criticism of 1989

Throughout the process that led to the formation of the ICC in 1975, it was essential to take up the legacy of the Communist Left that had been abandoned as a result of the organic break. It was the ICC's main task to re-establish this political continuity after the break in the link between successive communist organisations. Thanks to the militant action and comments of the French Communist Left and Internacionalismo, and the revival of the class at the end of the 1960s, it became possible to synthesise the contributions of the different currents of the Communist Left into a coherent whole based on the framework of decadence. In this work, the contribution of the Italian Left was central and, as we have seen above, the ICP recognises with an honesty that does it credit that the main lessons of the revolutionary wave and the counter-revolution elaborated by the Fraction that published Bilan in French are defended today by the ICC. On the other hand, the ICP is very timidly trying to learn the lessons of its internal crisis caused by this opportunist position defended on the national question.

Starting with Prolétaire no. 401 of May-June 1989, i.e. 7 years after its devastating internal crisis, the ICP recognises that "the complexity of the situation and the evolution of the Palestinian Resistance caused a certain amount of uncertainty and false positions within the party; This was the case, for example, with the hope that the nuclei of the future proletarian vanguard in the region would emerge from organisations on the left of the PLO. The crisis that struck the party from the early 1980s onwards was triggered precisely by the 'Palestinian question'. Among these false positions, it cites the demand for a “mini-Palestinian state that would be a ghetto for Palestinian proletarians” and goes so far as to proclaim - what sacrilege! - “Palestine will not win; it is the proletarian revolution that will win!”

But we soon have to face the facts, the limits of this self-criticism quickly become apparent. We learn, for example, that "the 'the factor of Arab nationalism' has since the Second World War exhausted all potential for historical progress in the vast area stretching from the Middle East to the Atlantic and covering North Africa”. This means that the PCInt remains a prisoner of its theory of geo-historical areas, that is to say, of the idea that there are areas here and there in the world where capitalism is still in its infancy, despite the work of R. Luxemburg and Lenin on imperialism showing the completion of the world market since 1914. From that moment on, capitalism has been in a senile state throughout the world and the task of the proletariat is the same everywhere: to destroy capitalism and establish new relations of production. This is where this ambiguity about geo-historical areas leads, reintroducing national interests into the struggle of the proletariat: “According to Marxism, the correct approach, especially for areas where the bourgeois revolution is no longer on the agenda (where there can therefore no longer be dual revolutions), but where the national question has not been resolved, is to include the latter and the national struggle in the revolutionary class struggle. The objective of the revolutionary class struggle is to conquer political power, not to establish a national state, but the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the instrument of the international proletarian revolution.” The moral of the story: the revolutionary class struggle can be waged by incorporating the national question into its method and objectives, which means necessarily making concessions to the national question!

The grand statements about "the international proletarian revolution” cannot save the ICP’s position on the national question. In order to remain coherent, it is constantly obliged to reintroduce the struggle for democratic rights and the demand for national self-determination. In doing so, it provokes a chauvinistic defensive reaction among Israeli proletarians while stunning Palestinian proletarians with speeches tinged with nationalism (opportunism again): “To break with their bourgeoisie, Jewish Israeli proletarians must disassociate themselves from the national oppression of the Palestinians. There is no worse misfortune for a people than to subjugate another, said Marx about English oppression of Ireland. To escape their situation, which is unfortunate from the point of view of the class struggle, Israeli Jewish proletarians will have to take up the dual ground of the struggle against discrimination against Palestinian and Arab proletarians in their living and working conditions (i.e. against the confessionalism of the Israeli state), and the defence of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, i.e. the right of all Palestinians to establish their state in Palestine .”[28]

Thus the ICP still does not see that our period is not the same as Marx's. It will never be able to clarify its problem until it recognises that in the era of imperialism (or capitalist decadence) the old bourgeois democratic programme was buried along with the national programme, that the nation can no longer serve as a framework for the development of the productive forces. As Rosa Luxemburg said: "Certainly, the national phrase has remained, but its real content and function have been transformed into their opposite. It now only serves to mask imperialist aspirations as best it can, unless it is used as a battle cry in imperialist conflicts, the only and ultimate ideological means of winning over the masses and getting them to play their role as cannon fodder in imperialist wars."[29]

When the proletariat embarks on a new course towards revolution, it will still be confronted for some time with the pitfalls of democratism and nationalism. At that point, the presence of a Communist Party, which will have long since proven its clarity of programme on these two questions, will be decisive in orienting the proletariat towards insurrection. But the political framework at the basis of the PCInt platform is obsolete on the national question and on many other points. The reason for this is to be found in the break made in the continuity of the work of the Communist Left of Italy. Having broken this continuity with the past, the PCInt is no longer in a position to build the future, that is to say to contribute to the formation of the future world party, a party that is non-sectarian, non-hierarchical, non-monolithic, non-substitutionist, but a leading party, not in the sense of a technical leadership of the class but of a political leadership, of an orientation militantly defended within the class, an orientation based on the final communist goal and on a complete analysis of the historical situation.

The significance of the variations on the national question among the Bordigist groups

The PCI, whose positions we have just examined, is only one of the expressions of the current Bordigist diaspora. After the explosion of 1982, the few surviving French militants approached those in Italy who published Il Comunista to reconstitute a new PCI claiming to continue the work of the previous one. It would be tedious to count the number of PCIs scattered across several continents, all claiming to be followers of Bordigism as developed from 1952 onwards. We will only mention the other branch that had remained in Italy around Bruno Maffi (1909-2003) and which publishes Il Programa Comunista in Italian and the Cahiers Internationalistes in French.

Among all these groups, including their splits and their exclusions, several have questioned the validity of the original position of the PCI concerning the national question which seems to be invalidated by the facts. They then rediscovered that "the workers have no country’ and that the task of the proletariat was the same everywhere, to overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize power. But the reasons for this change of position had to be explained. All the PCIs then had a ready-made answer up their sleeve: "The end of the cycle of anti-colonial bourgeois revolutions in Asia and Africa", as proclaimed in a leaflet from September 2024 by the Madrid group El Comunista.

But this proclamation changed nothing in substance. We saw what happened to the self-criticism of 1989. The struggle against national oppression was an untouchable dogma. There had already been a long series of general meetings of the PCI at the end of the 1970s which was to establish “The end of the bourgeois revolutionary phase in the 'Third World',” as was announced by the title of the article in Programme communiste No. 83 (1980). This was the premise of the false self-criticism of 1989, as there is no questioning of fundamental aspects such as the so-called bourgeois nature of the Chinese 'revolution’ of 1949 and the Algerian 'revolution' of 1962, nor of the alleged 'double revolution' of 1917 in Russia. This article asserts that the end of bourgeois revolutions came in 1975, that is to say 61 years after the real beginning of the period of capitalism's decline, as was emphasised by the First Congress of the Communist International. This change in the historical situation was said to be due to the withdrawal of the Americans from Vietnam and the end of the revolutionary period of the Chinese bourgeoisie, which, as we know, preferred to ally itself with the 'great American Satan'. A hell of a discovery when you consider that the Chinese Maoist bourgeoisie had long been the spearhead of the Stalinist counter-revolution!

The attitude of the PCInt is reminiscent of the strategy of the most skillful bourgeois factions in history: "Change everything so that nothing changes.” Judge for yourself: “It is now a question of broadly identifying the phase in which the proletariat, which already links the realisation of these reforms, which are more favourable to the masses, to its own revolution, finds itself practically alone in advancing history and thus becomes the heir to the bourgeois tasks not yet realised”[30]. Chased out the door, the bourgeois revolution comes back in through the window. This is why the Cahiers internationalistes can calmly assert once again that the expropriation of Palestinian peasants since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 evokes the period of primitive accumulation of capitalism: “The history of this dispossession resembles that of the English peasants of which Marx spoke: 'the history of this dispossession is written in the annals of humanity in letters of fire and blood'”.

The introduction of the theory of geo-historical areas by the PCI is in total contradiction with marxism. For the latter, reality must be approached in its entirety, in its totality. And it is from this totality that its different parts can be analysed. The same is true of the capitalist mode of production. Starting from the point of view of total capital is the dialectical method that Marx claimed a thousand times in his work. Let's take just one example from Theories on Surplus Value: “It is only foreign trade, the transformation of the market into a world market, that turns money into world money and abstract labour into social labour. Abstract wealth, value, money - and hence abstract labour - develop to the extent that concrete labour evolves in the direction of a totality of different modes of labour that encompasses the world market. Capitalist production is based on value, that is to say on the development as social labour of the labour contained in the product. But this only takes place on the basis of foreign trade and the world market. It is therefore both the condition and the result of capitalist production”.[31]

A real clarification of the national question, which gives the PCInt so much trouble, means that the following questions in particular should be addressed:

– The emergence of a highly developed capitalism is one of the material conditions indispensable to the realisation of communism. But, first of all, its own specific contradictions make it impossible to extend such a capitalist development to the whole world. Furthermore, capitalism remains an economy of scarcity because it is a paralysed system due to the wage relationship and competition. It creates the seeds of communism, but not communism itself. In this way, the economic measures that the proletariat can take will have to be oriented towards communism but will remain limited, at first, until the international power of the workers' councils is assured. This is all the more so since the decomposition of capitalism will have led to much destruction, including during the revolutionary civil war. This limitation is inevitable, both in developed countries and in countries on the periphery of capitalism, and has nothing to do with bourgeois demands as the PCInt claims.

Marx and Engels were the first to challenge the notion of "permanent revolution" defended in the Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League of March 1850[32]. It is 1848 and no longer 1789, the proletarian threat has completely cooled the revolutionary pretensions of the bourgeoisie. The hypothesis of the "permanent revolution"[33], also proved to be wrong, and that of the "dual revolution" invented by the Bordigists a caricature.[34] As the magazine Bilan quoted above shows, the Italian Fraction had perfectly understood that the historical tasks of one class cannot be assumed by another class, but the Bordigists did not.

– There are no anti-imperialist struggles, as the Maoists claim, there are only inter-imperialist conflicts. The anti-colonial struggles ended with decolonisation. Colonial subjugation has been transformed into imperialist subjugation, which the most developed bourgeois powers impose on weaker countries in their bloody competition for control of the planet's strategic zones. All this in a context where imperialism, militarisation, state capitalism, chaos and war have become the way of life for all nations, large or small.

The tasks of the proletariat are now the same everywhere: to take power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat through its struggle as a class, its international unification and the generalisation of the revolution. This dynamic, in which the World Communist Party is called upon to play a decisive role, relies on the ability of the proletariat to draw behind it,

 

---

[1] Bordiga's study, Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/Texts/53FaRNen.htm, was published in 1979 by the ICP. The quote can be found on page 165.

[2] . This report was published in Il Programma Comunista, issues 1, 2 and 3 (1961) and then in Le Fil du temps, issue 12 (1975). The quote comes from the latter magazine, p. 216.

[3] See our historical study of the phenomenon in the International Review issues 66, 68 and 69 (1991-1992), ‘Balance sheet of

[4] Programme Communiste, no. 75 (1977), p. 51.

[5] ‘War in the Middle East: The obsolete theoretical framework of the Bordigist groups’, ICConline, January 2024.

[6] All these new nations, far from being the expression of an expanding capitalism, were a pure product of imperialism. They immediately reveal their true nature by crushing their own proletarians and declaring war on their neighbours.

[7]  Even today, Russia still invokes its anti-colonial purity with African countries.

[8] See in particular our pamphlet Nation or Class.

[9] See the International Review, no. 32 (1983), ‘The International Communist Party (Communist Programme) at a turning point in its history’; no. 64 (1991), ‘The proletarian political milieu faced with the Gulf War’; no. 72 (1993), ‘How not to understand the development of chaos and imperialist conflicts’; nos. 77 and 78, ‘The rejection of the notion of decadence leads to the demobilisation of the proletariat faced with war’.

[10] The first issue of Prometeo was published in November 1943. Thanks to the strike movement, the Party developed rapidly in working-class circles and by the end of 1944 it had formed several federations, the most important of which were in Turin, Milan and Parma. It published a programme outline that same year. It held a first conference of the whole Party in Turin in December 1945 and January 1946.

[11] The Italian Communist Left, ICC book

[12] For this part, we summarise certain passages from our article ‘The origins of the ICC and the IBRP’, published in International Review nos 90 and 91 (1997). Part one: ‘The Italian Fraction and the French Communist Left’; part two: ‘The formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista’.

[13] Defence of the Continuity of the Communist Programme, Éditions Programme Communiste, 1972, pp. 43 and 44.

[14] Among them were the last internationalist militants who had been expelled in 1934 from the PCI for betraying the cause of the proletariat. They included Onorato Damen in particular and others who continued their clandestine militant activity in Mussolini's prisons.

[15] Marc Chirik (1907-1990), a militant of the Italian Fraction, was one of the founders of the Noyau Francais de la Gauche Communiste (NFGC) in 1942, which became the Fraction Francais de la Gauche Communiste  (FFGC) in 1944 and then the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) in 1945. He was also one of the founders of the Internacionalismo group in 1964, the Révolution Internationale group in 1968 and the International Communist Current in 1975.

[16] After the end of the social unrest in Italy and the loss of half of the militants, the possibility of resuming the work of a fraction was raised at the second PCIste congress in 1948. However, Damen cut short any discussion by taking up the classic Trotskyist position: the death of the old party immediately created the conditions for the emergence of the new. See the article in Internationalisme (GCF) No. 36 (1948), ‘The second congress of the Internationalist Communist Party’, republished in International Review No. 36, (1984).

[17] ‘La portée de la scission de 1952 dans le Partito comunista internazionalista’, Programme communiste no. 93 (March 1993), p. 64.

[18] The ‘reversal of praxis’ is explained in Programme Communiste no. 56 (1972). A diagram of constantly expanding capitalism can also be found on p. 58.

[19] The diagram of this pyramid can be found in Programme Communiste no. 63 (1974), p. 35. It is a report of a party meeting on 1st September 1951 in Naples.

[20] The demand for ‘red terror’ is once again a sign of the confusion between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution among the Bordigists. As for the role of the state in the revolution, apart from organising the armed struggle against the resistance of the fallen class, it turns out not to play any dynamic revolutionary role, already in the bourgeois revolution, as shown in our study, ‘State and the dictatorship of the proletariat’ in International Review no. 11 (1977).

[21] F. Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France, Paris, Éditions sociales, 1969, p. 25.

[22] ‘L’‘invariance’ historique du marxisme’, Programme communiste no. 53-54 (1971-1972), p. 3.

[23]  Profoundly marked by opportunism, the ICP nevertheless remains one of the currents of the Communist Left, that is to say a proletarian political group, because it generally maintains an internationalist position in the face of imperialist war. The demand for self-determination for the Palestinian nation is indeed a considerable weakness, but it is of a different nature to the leftist position (Trotskyists, Maoists, some anarchists) which calls for a ‘Workers’ and Peasants‘ Republic of the Middle East’ for the Palestinians. Let us remember that opportunism is a disease within the workers' movement, which is constantly confronted with the danger of the penetration of the dominant ideology within it. It is only in exceptional historical periods (war, revolution) that opportunism passes into the camp of the bourgeoisie, even before the betrayal of the party. In this case, it is generally the majority of the leadership that contributes, in collaboration with the other forces of bourgeois democracy, to the transformation of the party into a force at the service of capitalism. We are certain that for the moment the bourgeoisie, even if it keeps a close eye on all revolutionary groups, has no intention of putting the PCI at its service, the panoply of bourgeois groups claiming to be part of the proletarian revolution (leftism) being sufficiently varied as it is today.

[24]  ‘Éléments de l'histoire de la Fraction de gauche à l'étranger (de 1928 à 1935)’ in Programme Communiste, nos. 97 (September 2000), 98 (March 2003), 100 (December 2009) and 104 (March 2017).

[25] ‘Against the concept of the "brilliant leader"’, Internationalisme no. 25, August 1947, published in International Review no. 33 (1983).

[26] ‘Éléments de l'histoire de la Fraction de gauche à l'étranger (de 1928 à 1935) (4)’, Programme communiste no. 104 (2017), p. 49.

[27] ‘Le problème des minorités nationales’, Bilan no. 14 (December 1934-January 1935).

[28] All these quotations are taken from the ICP pamphlet, Le marxisme et la question palestinienne.

[29] R. Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, ‘Invasion and class struggle’.

[30] ‘La fin de la phase révolutionnaire bourgeoise dans le “Tiers Monde”’, Programme communiste no. 83 (1980), p. 40.

[31] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. III, Paris, Éditions sociales, 1976, p. 297.

[32]  See the Prefaces to the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Preface to Marx's book, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, in which Engels explains why “history has proved us and all who thought similarly wrong”. The clearest explanation, that the historical tasks of one class cannot be assumed by another class, is given by Marx in Revelations on the Cologne Communists Trial (Basel, 1853)

[33] "When Lenin wrote the April Theses in 1917, he rejected all outdated notions of a stage halfway between proletarian revolution and bourgeois revolution, all vestiges of purely national conceptions of revolutionary change. In fact, the Theses rendered the ambiguous concept of permanent revolution superfluous and affirmed that the revolution of the working class is communist and international, or it is nothing." (Communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity – ‘The revolutions of 1848: the communist perspective becomes clearer’. International Review 73.

[34] It did not correspond at all to Lenin's vision, for whom ‘The whole of this revolution (of 1917) can only be conceived as a link in the chain of proletarian socialist revolutions provoked by the imperialist war’ (‘Preface to the State and Revolution', 1917.). Also read: ‘The Russian Revolution and the Bordigist Current: Serious Errors...’, 'Russia 1917: The Greatest Revolutionary Experience of the Working Class', International Review 131.