36 Facts About Amadeo Bordiga

1.

Amadeo Bordiga was an Italian Marxist theorist, revolutionary socialist, founder of the Communist Party of Italy, member of the Communist International and later a leading figure of the International Communist Party.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,590
2.

Amadeo Bordiga was originally associated with the PCI, but he was expelled in 1930 after being accused of Trotskyism.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,591
3.

Amadeo Bordiga is viewed as one of the most notable representatives of Left communism in Europe.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,592
4.

Amadeo Bordiga was born at Resina in the province of Naples in 1889.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,593
5.

Amadeo Bordiga's father, Oreste Bordiga, was an esteemed scholar of agricultural science, whose authority was especially recognized in regard to the centuries-old agricultural problems of Southern Italy.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,594
6.

Amadeo Bordiga's mother, Zaira degli Amadei, was descended from an ancient Florentine family and his maternal grandfather Count Michele Amadei was a conspirator in the struggles of the Risorgimento.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,595
7.

Amadeo Bordiga's paternal uncle, Giovanni Bordiga, another militant of the Risorgimento, was a mathematician and professor at the University of Padua.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,596
8.

Amadeo Bordiga's upbringing, while being thoroughly radical, was of a highly scientific nature.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,597
9.

An opponent of the Italian colonial war in Libya, Amadeo Bordiga was introduced to the Italian Socialist Party by his high-school physics teacher in 1910.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,598
10.

Amadeo Bordiga eventually founded the Karl Marx Circle in 1912, where he would meet his first wife, Ortensia De Meo.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,599
11.

Amadeo Bordiga graduated with a degree in engineering from University of Naples Federico II in 1912.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,600
12.

Ortensia died in 1955, and Amadeo Bordiga married Ortensia's sister, Antonietta De Meo ten years later in 1965.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,601
13.

However, Amadeo Bordiga was deeply opposed to representative democracy which he associated with bourgeois electoralism:.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,602
14.

Therefore, Amadeo Bordiga opposed the parliamentary faction of the PSI being autonomous from central control.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,603
15.

In common with most socialists in Latin countries, Amadeo Bordiga campaigned against Freemasonry which he identified as a non-secular group.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,604
16.

Amadeo Bordiga identified with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the party and argued that establishing its own dictatorship should be the party's immediate and direct aim.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,605
17.

Amadeo Bordiga regarded this as a reversion to the failed tactics which the pre-war social democrats had adopted and which had led to them becoming reformist.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,606
18.

On his acquittal later that year, Amadeo Bordiga decided not to reclaim it, therefore implicitly accepting that he was now an oppositionist.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,607
19.

In December 1926, Amadeo Bordiga was again arrested by Mussolini and sent to prison in Ustica, an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, where he met with Gramsci and they renewed their friendship and worked alongside each other despite their political differences.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,608
20.

Amadeo Bordiga was concerned about Gramsci's ill health, but nothing came of a plan to help him escape the island.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,609
21.

In 1928, Amadeo Bordiga was moved to the Isle of Ponza, where he built several houses, returning after his detention in 1929 to finish them.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,610
22.

Amadeo Bordiga remained with the ICP until his death at Formia in 1970.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,611
23.

Bordigism is a variant of left communism espoused by Amadeo Bordiga, who was a founder of the Communist Party of Italy and a prominent figure in the International Communist Party.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,612
24.

Amadeo Bordiga felt that the Marxist–Leninist states that came into existence after 1945 were extending the bourgeois nature of prior revolutions that degenerated as all had in common a policy of expropriation and agrarian and productive development which he considered negations of previous conditions and not the genuine construction of socialism.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,613
25.

Amadeo Bordiga defined himself as anti-democratic, believing himself to be following the tradition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,614
26.

Amadeo Bordiga often referred to the spirit of Engels' remark that "on the eve of the revolution all the forces of reaction will be against us under the banner of 'pure democracy'" .

FactSnippet No. 1,033,615
27.

Amadeo Bordiga resolutely opposed the Comintern's turn to the right in 1921.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,616
28.

Amadeo Bordiga refused to fuse the newly formed party, dominated by Bordigism, with the left-wing of the Italian Socialist Party from which it had just broken away.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,617
29.

Amadeo Bordiga had a completely different view of the party from the Comintern which was adapting to the revolutionary ebb that was announced in 1921 by the Anglo-Russian trade agreement, the Kronstadt rebellion, the implementation of the New Economic Policy, the banning of factions and the defeat of the March Action in Germany.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,618
30.

Amadeo Bordiga, the Western European communist parties' strategy of fighting this ebb by absorbing a mass of left-wing social democrats through the united front was a complete capitulation to the period of counter-revolutionary ebb he saw setting in.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,619
31.

Amadeo Bordiga's analysis provided a way of seeing a fundamental degeneration in the world communist movement in 1921 without simply calling for more democracy.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,620
32.

Amadeo Bordiga did not see socialism as a separate mode of production from communism, but rather just as how communism looks as it emerges from capitalism before it has "developed on its own foundations".

FactSnippet No. 1,033,621
33.

Amadeo Bordiga used the term socialism to mean what Marx called the lower-phase communism.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,622
34.

Camatte's early work very much reads in line with the Bordigist current, and Amadeo Bordiga frequently contributed to Camatte's journal Invariance near the end of his life.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,623
35.

Amadeo Bordiga influenced Gilles Dauve, and had great influence over the Ultra-leftist currents of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,624
36.

Amadeo Bordiga Foundation was established in 1998 in Formia, in the house where Bordiga spent the last several months of his life.

FactSnippet No. 1,033,625