Amadeo Bordiga

After the October Revolution Bordiga organised the Communist Abstentionist Faction inside the Italian Socialist Party. The name came from its refusal to take part in bourgeois elections. At the 1919 Bologna congress he proposed renaming the party the Communist Party and expelling Filippo Turati's reformists. The Socialist Party voted that year to join the Comintern but did not remove its reformist wing. At the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 Bordiga had two points added to the membership conditions Lenin proposed. The same year Lenin criticised his parliamentary abstentionism in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

At the Livorno congress in January 1921 the Comintern's envoys agreed that the reformists had to go but were divided over whether to keep working with Giacinto Menotti Serrati. Bordiga argued for an immediate break with both Turati and Serrati and carried it against the opposition of the chief Comintern envoy, Paul Levi. In the new Communist Party of Italy he was one of five members of the executive but in practice directed all party activity. When the Comintern adopted the united front with reformist organisations that year, Bordiga saw it as a return to the failed tactics of pre-war social democracy. He and his comrades accepted the decision out of discipline, but their position grew steadily harder.

When Mussolini's government arrested him on a fabricated charge in February 1923, he gave up his seat on the Central Committee. He was acquitted that year but did not reclaim it, in effect accepting the place of an oppositionist. At the Fifth Comintern Congress in June–July 1924 he was the only voice against any cooperation with socialist parties, calling for "a united front from below, not from above". He described the rise of Mussolini and fascism as merely "a change in the governing personnel of the bourgeois class". That year control of the party passed to Gramsci's pro-Moscow group, and Gramsci became general secretary in June. In March 1925 Bordiga refused to go to Moscow for a plenum of the Comintern executive and in his absence was accused of a hostile position towards the Comintern by declaring complete solidarity with Trotsky. At the Lyon congress in January 1926 the left was reduced to a minority. He then attended the Sixth Enlarged Executive of the Comintern.

In December 1926 he was arrested again and sent to Ustica, where he met Gramsci and the two lived and worked side by side despite their political differences. He was moved to Ponza in 1928 and released in 1929. He did not return to party work and in March 1930 was expelled, accused of having "supported, defended and endorsed the positions of the Trotskyist opposition". He then stayed out of political activity until 1943.

For Bordiga, the party was not Lenin's vanguard but an organic expression of the class: not an elite injecting consciousness from outside, but the class's own historical movement taking organizational form. From this standpoint he championed an 'invariant revolutionary program': communism was not an ideal to be realized but a real movement arising within capitalism, and the party's task was to preserve this program without compromise. He identified 1921, not 1927, as the decisive turning point. When the Comintern adopted the united front tactic and the NEP, Bordiga judged this a capitulation to the revolutionary ebb. While Lenin and Trotsky sought to absorb left social democrats, Bordiga countered: 'The program is everything; a gate-receipt notion of numbers is nothing.' For Bordiga, the party's role in periods of ebb was not to chase ephemeral popularity but to preserve the program until the next revolutionary tide. This fundamentally separated him from the Trotskyist tradition, which located degeneration in 1927 with Trotsky's defeat. His position isolated him from the Comintern but left a deep imprint on later ultra-left and left-communist currents.