The Italian Left and Bordiga from le roman de nos origines - La Banquise No. 2 (1983) Following the example of the other currents of the communist left, that known for simplicity as the Italian Left showed that the proletarian was more than just a producer who fights to end his poverty ( the thesis of the left ) or to end his exploitation ( the thesis of leftism ). It could recognise in Marx's work « a description of the character of communist society » ( Bordiga ). It affirmed the anti-market and anti-wage content of the revolution. And it got back in touch with utopia. « We are the only ones to base our action on the future. » Bordiga made an implicit critique of the division between science and utopia that Engels had established in the Anti-Dühring, which he said, rested on « a false basis ». He defined revolutionaries as « explorers of the future ». For him, utopia was not prediction but the perspective of the future. He restored to the revolution its human dimension and even approached what, twenty years later, would be called ecology. But he conceived of the revolution as the application of a programme by « the party », not as a dynamic uniting men as they communise the world. However, one can foresee that a movement of communisation, that destroys the State, undermines the social base of the enemy, and spreads under the effect of the irresistible appeal arousing the birth of new social relations between men, will bond together the revolutionary camp far better than any power which, while waiting to conquer the world before communising it, would behave no differently than... a State. A series of basic measures and backlashes will permit an enormous saving of material means, and will multiply resourcefulness tenfold. Communism will bring about the abandonment of many sorts of production, which result from « economies of scale » imposed by the needs of profitability. Valorisation, which imposes concentration, pushes capitalism towards gigantism, ( megalopolises, a bulimia of energy ) and obliges it to disregard all non-profitable forces of production. Communism by contrast will be able to decentralise, to use local resources, and not because humanity centralised in a party will have decided on this, but because the needs which arise from people's activity will impel them to live differently on this earth. Then the conflict of « space against concrete » which Bordiga spoke about will cease. The Italian left, especially after 1945, put forward communism without grasping it as a movement of human activity with the tendency to liberate itself. After 1917, the proletariat had struggled without attacking the foundations of society, and as a result radical groups had the greatest difficulty in intellectually grasping the foundations of social life and hence of the revolution. Moreover, Bordiga did not draw out all the implications of his vision of communism. Instead of defining the « dictatorship of the proletariat » beginning from communisation, he confined it to a political dictatorship, which from the start made it a question of power. The German left had had the intuition that communism dwells in the nature of being proletarian, without grasping the true nature of communism. By contrast the Italian left understood the nature of communism but deprived the proletariat of a role in implementing it in order to entrust this to a party, guardian of principle, charged with imposing it by force. Certainly, Bordiga made a justifiably strong critique of democracy. People often reproached democracy for separating proletarians, who were united in action, through the vote, and instead they recommended « true democracy » or « workers democracy », where decisions would be taken by everyone in general assemblies, etc. However Bordiga showed that democracy brings about this separation in decision making because it separates out the moment of decision itself. To make believe that one can suspend everything for a privileged moment in order to know what one will decide and who will carry it out, and to create for this purpose a process of deliberation and decision making : here is the democratic illusion ! Human activity is only driven to isolate the moment of decision making if this activity is itself contradictory, if it is already traversed by conflicts and if antagonistic powers are already established. The structure for the encounter of different opinions is nothing but a façade masking the real decision, imposed by the prior play of forces. Democracy establishes a break in time, makes it as if one were setting out again from scratch. One could apply to the democratic ritual the analysis which Mircea Eliade makes of religion, where periodically one replays the passage from chaos to order, placing oneself out of time for a brief instant as if everything had again become possible. Democracy has been erected in principle in societies where the masters have to meet to share out power by complying with the rules of a game, even if it means resorting to dictatorship ( a permissible form of government in ancient Greece ) as soon as play is obstructed. While demonstrating very well that the democratic principle is alien to the bases of revolutionary action and of human life, Bordiga was incapable of imagining the interaction of the subversive activities of proletarians, and he could conceive no other solution than dictatorship ( of the party ). The German left had fallen into the democratic error through fetishism of the workers councils. Having failed to seize the subversive capacities of the proletariat and their ability to centralise their actions, the Italian left ran up against the false alternative which it had itself denounced, and pronounced itself in favour of dictatorship, even of implementing a monolithic discipline when necessary. Deeply contradictory, Bordiga implicitly criticised Lenin, social democracy and marxism -- but only halfway. Returning to Lenin's theses he went so far as to write a long eulogy to « Left Wing Communism - an infantile disorder », which misled a large part of the generation of revolutionaries that appeared after 1968, who would only see bordigism as a variant of leninism. For the German left the unitary rank and file organisations of the workers represented the class. For the Italian left unions represented the class. The fact that workers found themselves in unions seemed more important than what they did there. « The union even when it is corrupted, is always a workers centre » ( Bordiga 1921 ). From this point of view the union always contained the potential for revolutionary action. In both cases, the form -- the organisation of workers -- was put before its content -- the function of this organisation. Bordiga's fundamental error was to maintain the division between politics and the economy inherited from the Second International, and which the Third International did not call into question. The revolutionary offensive of 1917-21 had rejected this separation in practise but it had not gone far enough to impose it within the thought of the whole of the communist left. « Proletarian consciousness can reappear insofar as the partial economic struggles develop themselves until they reach the higher political phase which poses the question of power » ( Communisme, No. 1, april 1937 ). No. It is necessary that the seeds of a social critique already exists, as much in the initial phases of a movement as in the later, ( how to discover it, to help it mature, everything depends on this... ), a critique which calls into question both economy and politics through a refusal of realism ( of demands compatible with the life of the business enterprise ), and of mediation ( sharing power, placing any confidence in organisations between labour and capital ). Bordiga's weakness arose from his inability to comprehend that communism emerges from the needs and practises created by the concrete condition of the proletariat. Bordiga posed the question of the TRANSITION from workers economic struggles to politics. He inadequately distinguished the revolutionary process. He knew that communism is not built, that the revolution is satisfied to leap over the obstacles to a life for which most of the elements already exist « in the entrails » ( Marx ) of capitalism. But for him the revolution remained the action of a political power which modified the economy. He did not see that communisation and the struggle against the State are necessarily simultaneous. Speculation over the different forms of organisation ( council, party, workers mass organisations ) and the separation in theory between politics and economy testified that the proletariat, which before 1914 had lost the sense of its unity, had hardly recovered it after 1917. The organisation came to fill the vacuum left by the absence of revolutionary action by proletarians. When social contradictions don't bring about a subversive movement, a theoretical master-key is sought. Bordiga found it in the economic movement of the workers, which was supposed to generate revolutionary action thanks to the assistance of the party. This initial assumption replaced the vision of the totality. Invariance, which took up Bordiga's theses, had begun to appear before 1968. At the bookshop La Vieille Taupe, Pierre Guillaume had insisted on the importance of this review to friends and customers. The principle merit of Invariance was to have attracted attention to the richest aspects of Bordiga's theories, at a time when the International Communist Party , which particularly undertook the management of the bordigist heritage, said little about them, even concealing the identity of Bordiga in the name of party anonymity, and preferring to stress the refusals of the Italian left : the fight against antifascism, or against educationism, etc. Bordiga had seen in Marx's work a description of communism. From its first issue, written by Camatte and Dangeville, Invariance affirmed that « Marx and Engels derived the characteristics of the party form from the description of communist society ». But Invariance remained a prisoner of the metaphysics of the party. During the period 1917-1937 -- and even less with the apogee of the counter-revolution that marked the war and the post-war reconstruction -- the proletariat had not imposed itself for what it is -- the result of the practices and needs arising from its fundamental condition. To resist the counter-revolution, the Italian Left constructed a metaphysics of the proletariat, an entity which took the place of the absent real movement, and its reference to the party was used to preserve a revolutionary perspective, just as its distrust of « anarchism » ( a term which was used to include the councillism of the German Left ) served as a defence against the risk of deviation towards democracy.