Originally published: Prometeo, no. 23, second quarter 1975.
English translation: in Bordiga Beyond the Myth, 2016, pp. 99-104.
Transcription/Markup: Micah Muer, 2019.
This article follows the previous one (referring to it on the first line) [Axioms of Revolutionary Theory and Practice – MIA]. Here Damen’s main target is not Bordiga, nor even his International Communist Party, but the first split in “late Bordigism” which occurred even before Bordiga’s death. Led by Jacques Camatte, the splitters formed the group Invariance in 1966. It took some of Bordiga’s ambiguities to new and ridiculous extremes ending by denying the revolutionary role for the working class and ultimately excusing their own failings by the discovery that all political organisations were “rackets”. We suggest readers glance at footnote 81 [Footnote 2 below – MIA] before reading this document (Translator’s note).
Our critical examination of certain formulations in Bordiga’s invariance (in Prometeo No 21/22, 1974) on the nature, role and structure of the revolutionary party, did not arise from some nagging desire for controversy, but concerned the clarification of a problem, like the party, which is always open to debate and theoretical development. This is especially true when so many schools of thought, inspired by the outstanding contribution of Bordiga on this subject are involved in this debate, even if his contribution was sometimes contradictory. This frequent vivisection has ended up deforming and distorting what in Bordiga was but a simple intuition or fondness for paradoxes. We should remember here that Bordiga’s usual response to our criticism of this way of approaching issues, which resulted in a distortion of Marxist method was that even a paradox may contain some element of truth, even if small and veiled. And he was right, but this intellectual “taste” could excuse, or rather offer a cover, as it has, to those who formulate theoretical speculations and look for any peg on which to hang their dissatisfaction and sometimes, their opportunism.
Our question is this: how far can we blame Bordiga, consciously or not, for having provided too many reasons for criticism for both comrades and opponents of the party? (Bordiga said he didn’t give a damn and brazenly expressed a disturbing attitude with uncompromising brutality that made further explanation superfluous). This criticism has often been directed beyond the person of Bordiga to the entire “Italian Left” which has a very precise position in the international communist movement, rich in both ideas and potential.
It’s not the first time that we have had to denounce one of the most heinous methods employed by the Communist International’s bureaucracy, in which the bolshevised central organs of various communist parties immediately conformed in their fight against the opposition of the Left. This involved combating any current through a personal attack on one or other of its representatives, as happened with Bordiga himself. We had already struggled against these methods as a current in the Committee of Entente (1925).[01]
This kind of personal attack on individuals, and not against the complex forces that struggle on the class terrain, is totally anti-Marxist. If this initially motivated and consolidated our rebellion (in 1925 – translator), today it is even more reprehensible and must be rejected with contempt. Of course Bordiga, like anyone else, can be blamed for mistakes, indecision and personal rigidity which go beyond and against the very current which owes most of its theoretical contribution and development on an international level to Bordiga. But the communist left have to judge to what extent Bordiga’s temperament and his way of putting things was responsible for this, and conversely, what in this complex debate became part of the heritage of the communist left in a thorough, inevitable selection process that flowed from the class struggle.
We have to recognise that, even when he was wrong, Bordiga always had a class perspective which envisaged the catastrophic end of the system through proletarian revolution. However the same cannot be said of all those who struggled alongside him, and who, in the name of a Bordigan “invariance”, try to complete his work based on some of his inevitably incomplete theories, thus ending up outside Marxism. In the long history of the labour movement this is not new, but as a contemporary, even though marginal, phenomena we have to examine it. We mean here the tendency that has been called, with intellectual affectation, Invariance[02], although it has actually ended up as anything but. We want to know how and when this current, which has grown under the tender care of Programma Comunista before subsequently coming out of it to take on a more Bordigist posture than Bordiga himself, began to work out its orientation based on the premise that Bordiga’s work “is only the starting point for further research that has not yet been developed.”
We just wonder, how is it possible that within an organisation[03] that claims to be from the Italian Left, which in the 60’s included Bordiga, could produce elements and groups that, by replacing materialist dialectics and class revolution with a poorly digested humanism taken from Marx, argue that “the communist revolution tends to affirm the human being, the true Gemeinwesen of man.”
The Gemeinwesen (community) is a leitmotif in the work of the young Marx and represents that point in human history where individuality begins to be overcome. Let us clarify this with Marx’s own words:
Exchange of human activity within production itself, and also of human products with each other is equivalent to ... social activity and social enjoyment. Since human nature is the real Gemeinwesen of men they create and produce their Gemeinwesen, by their natural action; they produce their social being, which is no abstract universal power over and against specific individuals but the nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own enjoyment and his own wealth. It emerges as an intermediary of the needs of individuals, i.e. it is a direct product of the activity of their existence. It is not dependent on man if this Gemeinwesen exists or not, but as long as man does not recognise himself as a man and has not organised the world in a human way, this Gemeinwesen appears in the form of alienation (Entfremdung) ... (from Marx’s notes to the work of James Mill)[04]
And in his 1844 Manuscripts:
Above all we must avoid postulating "society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not different, however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.[05]
These are brief, potted notes by Marx in which it is clear that several arguments run together with a tendency towards generalisation. They recall the Hegelian method Marx had not yet escaped from. This we know. But to refer today to the Marxism of the "Manuscripts” (1844) is to ignore the scientific Marxism of “Capital” and “historical materialism” and use the writings of the formative phase of the young Marx as a cover to promote one’s own idealism.
The vision of a general and metaphysical return from the individual to the universal, that is, to this original and undifferentiated “community”, the renewed Gemeinwesen, has more to do with Hegel’s idealist dialectic than Marx’s materialist dialectic. We find a clear manifestation of this method when examining the issue of how the revolutionary party was developed and what this meant in practical terms, which is central to our argument.
Below is a definition of the party, one of the last that Bordiga gave. It has resonated widely in the publications of this current:
If the individual is in danger, and indeed this is no more than a lengthy period of wandering in the shadows that separates men from their history as a species, the way to combat it lies only in the qualitative universal unity of the party in which revolutionary concentration is achieved, beyond the limits of locality, nationality, employment status, the enterprise-prison of wage earners; it anticipates the future society without classes and exchange.
The party, which we are sure will resurface in a bright future, will consist of a vigorous minority of proletarians and anonymous revolutionaries who will have different functions, like the organs of a living being. However they will be linked from top to bottom through inflexible rules binding for all in respect of theory; by continuity and rigour in organisation; by a precise method of strategic action from which can be drawn a range of possible eventualities, all of which are subject to veto, based on the terrible historic lessons of the devastation wrought by opportunism. In such a party, which at the end of the day is impersonal, no one can abuse power, precisely because of the inimitable characteristic that defines it, which follows a continuous thread whose origin lies in 1848. This feature is that the party and its members are not hesitant to affirm that their exclusive function is the conquest of political power and its centralised exercise without ever hiding this goal, until all capitalist parties and their petty bourgeois lackeys have been eliminated (Excerpt from Il Programma Comunista no 22, 1958).
We do not believe it necessary to emphasise the universal character and mystical tendencies of this supposedly historic party that never existed except in the imagination of poets and the utopian aspirations of humanitarian pre-Marxist socialism. It will never exist, at least in the terms posed by Bordiga. Like us and sometimes more so, he suffered the anxiety, unmitigated by success, that arose from the difficulty of creating day by day, stone by stone, the first structures of the party which, the next day, would be dissolved by reaction and therefore had to be built again with other means and other human material, which are not always suited to the harsh discipline imposed by the construction of the party. So many difficulties and disappointments, including poisonous attacks from those who were comrades in name only, ready to surrender and more frequently to betray; that’s the party we’ve known, the real party from Livorno to the Exceptional Laws[06], formed by heroes but also opportunists, full of sacrifices, prison, blood, but also corruption. Therefore, this is neither the time nor the place to make up stories about the perfect historic party; revolutionaries have always preferred to leave that to congenitally inept and visionary philosophers.
Bordiga had previously outlined that idea of the universal party, perfect in its structure and functions, as demanded by his mathematical mind and perhaps as a way to calm, with a perfectly idealist abstraction, the anxiety and dissatisfaction of a tormented life as a revolutionary. In practice, this idea of the perfect party served as a model to which the party should aspire and which was to inspire him to slowly and laboriously build an organ, the revolutionary party, composed of people with many differences, with the flaws and limits that entails.
But this tendency to abstraction offered possible sources of support to those who go in search of theoretical niceties such as "Invariance”. This trend, which has emerged and developed within the latest phase of Bordigism leads the party at full speed into the unknown, the ideal model, the precursor of the future society. It writes thus:
The party represents the future society. It is not defined by bureaucratic rules, but by its own being, and this being is its programme: it is the prefiguration of communist society of the free and conscious human species.
As a corollary the revolution is not an organisational problem. It depends on the programme. However it is obvious that the party form is the most suitable to represent the programme and defend it. And there are no organisational rules borrowed from bourgeois society, they derive from the vision of the future society. From this follows a major feature of the party. As the prefiguration of Man and of communist society, it is the intermediary of all knowledge for the proletariat, that is, for those who reject the bourgeois Gemeinwesen and accept that of the proletariat, struggling to impose it and therefore to impose the human being. The party’s consciousness integrates that of all past centuries (religion, art, philosophy).
And to end this triumphant and uplifting phase of the party that – allegedly – never disappears, we quote, again following Invariance, the last part of a letter from Marx to Freiligrath:
I have tried to dispel that misconception according to which by "party” I understand a “League” which has already been dead for eight years, or a journal that disappeared twelve years ago. By “party” I understand the party in its broader historical sense.
This means (as explained immediately afterwards by Invariance with that finesse and logic that Marx lacked ...) as foreshadowing the future society, the future Man, the Human being that is the true human Gemeinwesen. The philosophy by which Invariance seeks to exalt the historical role of the party is based on the constant tiresome repetition of a phrase. In conclusion, it says:
The continuity of our Being, the statement of our programme manifests itself both in periods of revolution and counterrevolution: the Party ‘in its broadest historical sense’.
It is a poor Marxist “historical sense” which ends up in the grip of a philosophy as old as it is opportunist and whose only value lies in the use, or rather abuse of capital letters! This brings us to the second and final phase of this current, which has led it to positions which are completely the opposite of its previous ones, mired as it is in a frenzied rush towards its own dissolution.
Is this some kind of political disease or is it simply a sign of inadequacy and confusion when trying to make sense of key ideas such as class, party, the dialectical relationship with the antagonistic class, etc..., which paradoxically becomes ever tenser until it snaps? Or is it more a matter of hangovers, of ideological and political frustrations that have particularly afflicted the younger generation of intellectuals with left Marxist tendencies that emerged from the Parisian events of May 1968? Probably a bit of both at the same time, and to see it gives us a pang of bitterness and regret, as this type of torment always leaves deep trauma, and also because, at the end of the day, the dispersal of young intellectual and human forces always weakens the revolutionary cause.
Now this pro-Bordigist experience has come to an end (in a fairly bad way it has to be said), this current has failed to draw the appropriate lessons. Instead it is submerged in events that are too large for its theoretical strength and seriousness and its political insignificance. This entire metamorphosis has occurred in less than a decade. Even in the May 1968 revolt Invariance took part randomly and was marginalised and it has not been able to extract from these events elements to strengthen itself, but only the grounds for its self-liquidation from ranks of revolutionaries who claim to be Marxist.
[01]. See footnotes [2] and [9] [in the book Bordiga: Beyond the Myth – MIA].
[02]. The group Invariance led by Jacques Camatte split from Il Programma Comunista in 1966 (4 years before Bordiga died). It took its title from one of Bordiga’s first documents after the split with the Internationalist Communist Party, a set of 26 theses published in September 1952 as “The Historical Invariance of Marxism”. See https://libcom.org/library/historical-invariance-marxism-amadeo-bordiga. As in so many issues Damen does not take issue with Bordiga, even if he finds his formulations vague, but with his followers – “the epigones” – who take Bordiga’s ideas and then distort them into ridiculous positions. Camatte here was a classic. After splitting with Bordiga and Il Programma Comunista, Camatte maintained that “What is invariant, is the desire to rediscover the lost community” – by which he meant “primitive communities [where] human beings rule technology” as in the gemeinwesen of primitive communism which Marx talked about in the 1844 Manuscripts (see footnote 84 [footnote 5 below – MIA]). But he did not stop there, and in the end he concluded that Marx too was wrong and that the “despotism of capital” actually produces a “collection of slaves of capital,” rather than contending classes. The “invariance of Marxism” thus became the obliteration of its central tenet.
[03]. Damen is referring here to the original International Communist Party founded by Bordiga and which publishes Il Programma Comunista.
[04]. This translation is based on the version of “On James Mill” in David McLellan’s “Karl Marx: Selected Writings” p. 115, except that we have retained the original German terms where Damen had used them although they were omitted by McLellan.
[05]. This translation from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm.
[06]. See footnote 75 [footnote 4 in Axioms of Revolutionary Theory and Practice – MIA].