36 Facts About Amadeo Bordiga

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amadeo Bordiga advocated an immediate break with both Serrati and Turati, and hence with the majority of the PSI, and prevailed against the opposition of the leading Comintern representative Paul Levi but with the backing of others, including Matyas Rakosi, the future Stalinist dictator of Hungary.

Amadeo Bordiga was one of five members of the executive but was "the actual director of all party activity".

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.

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 reformists.

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

In March 1925, Amadeo Bordiga refused to go to Moscow to attend a plenum of Comintern's executive, and in his absence was accused of taking up a "hostile position against Comintern by declaring his complete solidarity with Trotsky".

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.

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

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.

Amadeo Bordiga criticised Joseph Stalin for allying with the western Allies against the Axis in April 1943.

Amadeo Bordiga supported the 'proletarian' partisan movements, as well as the anti-fascist Warsaw uprisings of 1943 and 1944.

When this grouping was dissolved into the Internationalist Communist Party, Amadeo Bordiga did not initially join; despite this, he contributed anonymously to its press, primarily Battaglia Comunista and Prometeo, in keeping with his conviction that revolutionary work was collective in nature and his opposition to any form of even incipient personality cult.

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

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

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

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

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-Soviet 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.

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.

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".

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

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.

Amadeo Bordiga influenced Gilles Dauve, and had great influence over the ultra-leftist currents of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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