The Fundamentals for a Marxist Orientation and Other Writings on Marxist Theory

by Amadeo Bordiga

Genres: Nonfiction

376 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2020

About the author

Amadeo Bordiga was an Italian Marxist, a contributor to Communist theory, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy, a leader of the Communist International and, after World War II, leading figure of the International Communist Party.

Reviews

[Hinch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really thought people were probably giving Bordiga too much shit when they said he was an 'armchair communist'.

Having read most of this before putting it down in annoyance, I can confirm that's a basically correct analysis.

Bordiga says that fighting in the Spanish Civil War was opportunist and a 'betrayal of the working class' because the communist side wasn't heterogeneous, he says resistance movements to Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were opportunist and a 'betrayal of the working class' because they ended up being replaced with liberal democracies. These are clownish takes.

Bordiga also repeatedly asserts that no new analyses of society are needed, that any more theorizing is unnecessary because Marx, Engels and Lenin have already given us everything we need. This is.. naive. Marx doesn't address racial or gender based issues and their intersection with capitalism, for instance, let alone the huge changes within capitalism with the rise of, for example, the digital space. He treats Marx like a saint and Marxism like a religion, complete with religious phraseology on occasion!

The reason I give this two stars instead of one is that the basic rundown of Marxist thought which Bordiga gives in the first section of this book is a not bad introduction to Marxism.

[Nathan Levin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a while but I did it.

[Blandinus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me convinced about the Leninist position.

[BOB · Rating 2 out of 5]

For every bit that is an original defense of Marxism there's two that are absurdly stupid and dogmatic. See for example: dismissing any kind of United front against fascism

[Eric Arnold · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never fully understood the "leftcoms are armchair communists" meme until I read this.

[Sam Whitehill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bordiga was a leading communist figure during the worst decades of the 20th century. Throughout that time he maintained an admirably uncompromising commitment to socialist revolution. He is sometimes seen as a left communist for his anti-parliamentary stance and critique of Soviet “state capitalism”; however, he was in many ways a traditional Marxist- Leninist in a time when Stalin (to say nothing of Mussolini) was making it very difficult to maintain such a perspective.

In these writings, all dating from his post-war time in the International Communist Party, he spends just as much time defending the communist party form from left communist attacks as he does castigating the Stalinist perversion of it. Bordiga’s main thesis, in true Leninist fashion, is that the impersonally lead and “organically centralized” communist party is essential to lead the working class to communist revolution. Communists can and should work within the unions and other worker organizations, but ultimately revolution is a party affair.