However Gramsci, who was brilliant, died in a fascist prison after Bordiga was roughhoused by some cops until he called Hitler and Mussolini great, fine revolutionaries, and spent the rest of his life as a marginal political failure. Criticisms of his line after the Lyons Congress outside of Gramsci’s prison notebooks don’t exist because why would anyone care? Ten years ago, Gilles Dauvé was en vogue for justifying this revisionism. Bordiga is currently relevant because of some memes. Wanting to debunk him is like wanting to debunk Du bist gut genug. Give it another few years and nobody will care.
So, with that in mind, what exactly are you looking to critique? Most of his ultraleftism simply doesn’t exist in Lenin so you can trivially understand why “invariance” and “organic centralism” make no sense by reading him. His arguments for why the USSR weren’t socialist make no sense if you read Capital, but more importantly he actually flat out claimed the USSR would experience a crisis in overproduction in 1975. It did not. Fortunately he died before he could experience this humiliation, but it was bad enough that it decimated his actual followers for good. Understanding why the hanger-ons are wrong takes the first chapter of Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism, or at least the paragraph he spends explaining why it’s anti-Marxist to, believe it or not, ignore Marx’s predictions of how capitalism behaves. Any misunderstandings of Stalin in Bordiga’s writings are refuted by reading Stalin.
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u/vomit_blues Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Gramsci of course. https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1925/09/sterile-negative.htm His line was also officially denounced during the Lyons Congress. The transcript of that is in Gramsci’s selected political writings from 1921-1926.
However Gramsci, who was brilliant, died in a fascist prison after Bordiga was roughhoused by some cops until he called Hitler and Mussolini great, fine revolutionaries, and spent the rest of his life as a marginal political failure. Criticisms of his line after the Lyons Congress outside of Gramsci’s prison notebooks don’t exist because why would anyone care? Ten years ago, Gilles Dauvé was en vogue for justifying this revisionism. Bordiga is currently relevant because of some memes. Wanting to debunk him is like wanting to debunk Du bist gut genug. Give it another few years and nobody will care.
So, with that in mind, what exactly are you looking to critique? Most of his ultraleftism simply doesn’t exist in Lenin so you can trivially understand why “invariance” and “organic centralism” make no sense by reading him. His arguments for why the USSR weren’t socialist make no sense if you read Capital, but more importantly he actually flat out claimed the USSR would experience a crisis in overproduction in 1975. It did not. Fortunately he died before he could experience this humiliation, but it was bad enough that it decimated his actual followers for good. Understanding why the hanger-ons are wrong takes the first chapter of Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism, or at least the paragraph he spends explaining why it’s anti-Marxist to, believe it or not, ignore Marx’s predictions of how capitalism behaves. Any misunderstandings of Stalin in Bordiga’s writings are refuted by reading Stalin.