Amadeo Bordiga - Murdering the Dead

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Murdering the Dead: The Thread of Time

Capitalism and Other Disasters

Amadeo Bordiga

Antagonism Press

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Community and Communism in Russia

by Jacques Camatte

This text was originally intended to be the introduction to a french language edition of two of

Amadeo Bordiga's texts on Russia : Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory and Economic and

Social Structure of Russia Today. However this proposed edition was the subject of legal action

by the International Communist Party who claimed they held the copyright and was never

published. Camatte's introduction was finally published in Invariance Series II, n. 4, 1974. This

translation by David Brown was published in London in 1978.

Subsequently part of Bordiga's Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today was published

(first by Editions de l'oubli in 1975, later by Spartacus) with a different introduction by Camatte.

Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory itself was finally published by Spartacus in 1978.Publishing Bordiga's texts on Russia and writing an introduction to them was rather repugnant to

us. The Russian revolution and its involution are indeed some of the greatest events of our

century. Thanks to them, a horde of thinkers, writers, and politicians are not unemployed. Among

them is the first gang of speculators which asserts that the USSR is communist, the social

relations there having been transformed. However, over there men live like us, alienation

persists. Transforming the social relations is therefore insufficient. One must change man.

Starting from this discovery, each has 'functioned' enclosed in his specialism and set to work to

produce his sociological, ecological, biological, psychological etc. solution. Another gang turns

the revolution to its account by proving that capitalism can be humanised and adapted to men by

reducing growth and proposing an ethic of abstinence to them, contenting them with intellectual

and aesthetic productions, restraining their material and affective needs. It sets computers to

work to announce the apocalypse if we do not follow the advice of the enlightened capitalist.

Finally there is a superseding gang which declares that there is neither capitalism nor socialism

in the USSR, but a kind of mixture of the two, a Russian cocktail ! Here again the different

sciences are set in motion to place some new goods on the over-saturated market.

That is why throwing Bordiga into this activist whirlpool (and we also put ourselves there)

provoked fear and repulsion. Nevertheless, running the risk of being carried along by this

infamous mercantilism seems necessary because, on one hand, in every case, as Marx

remarked "Can one escape dirt in ordinary bourgeois intercourse or trade ? Precisely there is its

natural abode." (Marx to Freiligrath, 29.2.1860.), and, on the other hand, the myth of Russian

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communism began to be washed fundamentally from the minds of those who searched and

struggled and corrupted them less and less after the movement of May 1968. Bordiga's texts

could be useful because of this, for passing from myth to reality and helping in the understanding

of the coming communist revolution.

The Russian revolution has long been a thing of the past. It is interesting to study it nonetheless

in the historical vibrations and in the questions it could not resolve. Bordiga, who closely followed

all the vicissitudes of this revolution and its many faceted prolongation over the world, died in

1970. But his confrontation with the Russian phenomenon maintains an instructive and

all-embracing character.

One has, then, to envisage the human being who produced the work presented here, because

one must state from which historical global point of view it is that the Russian revolution is

envisaged. Bordiga is especially known through Lenin's judgements he was reproached for his

abstentionism and taxed with anarchism. Also, for many people, Bordiga would only be the leftist

who disappeared from the revolutionary scene around 1928. Superficially this is true, Convinced

that it was the counter-revolution which generated great men, i.e. the clowns that he called

battilocchi[1], he withdrew and disappeared into an anonymity [2]that was justified, but which

is not to say that he abandoned the communist movement. From 1944 to 1970 he participated in

the Internationalist Communist Party, which became the International Communist Party in 1964.

His works appeared in the papers Battaglia comunista and il programma comunista and the

reviews Prometeo and Sul filo del tempo.

Bordiga summed up his position on the Russian revolution at the end of the first part of Russia

and Revolution in Marxist Theory[3], which simultaneously unveiled his fundamental theoretical

[4] attitude, his absolute resistance to doubt, not to heuristic doubt, which is by definition only a

kind of cunning of reason according to Hegel, placing certainty in brackets, but the doubt which is

the penetration of the adversaries' power, invasion by the surrounding ideology, impregnation

with death because of the abandonment of all enthusiasm, and all revolutionary perspective,

which is concretised in the alliance with the existing currents and the acceptance of dominant

formulae.Bordiga wrote a lot on the Russian revolution. His activity was greatly conditioned by the need to

defend it and, on the other hand, in 1951 he declared :

"The analysis of the counter-revolution in Russia and its reduction to formulae is not a central

problem for the strategy of the proletarian movement during the recovery that we await, because

it is not the first counter-revolution and marxism has known a whole series of them." [5]

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All his activity tended to go beyond the Russian revolution to pose the future revolution, while one

can definitely state that he did not succeed in cutting his umbilical cord, the link with this

revolution.

He immediately supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, without at times knowing the totality of the

events and, in certain cases, he foresaw the measures they would take. The revolution was no

surprise for him, it did not make him question marxism, but was an enlightening confirmation.

What fundamentally preoccupied him was the preparation of the party in Italy as well as in the

rest of the West for the accomplishment of the same task as the Bolsheviks' : the seizure of

power. It was from this viewpoint that he carried on the polemic on the creation of soviets. For

him, they were born at the very moment of the revolution. But in Italy, especially in 1917, one had

to aid it, to lead it, and one needed the class organ, the party, for that. Moreover, he stated that

the soviets were most often conceived of through an anarcho-syndicalist vision : the proletariat

creates the organs which are substituted (the capitalist mode of production (CMP) still being in

force) for the capitalist organs : cf. his articles in il Soviet in 1919-20. From 1919 on Bordiga

thought that a great revolutionary opportunity had been lost and that the revolutionary phase had

passed. Therefore one had to strengthen the party and to resist the foreseen offensive from the

right which wanted to destroy the socialist forces. His interventions in the Communist

International were in favour of strengthening the parties, claiming that the adoption of measures

was so that all the parties of the International would have purely marxist positions, hence his role

in the adoption of the 21 conditions, two of which were written under his inspiration. To confront

the struggle on a world scale, one would have to have the correct class positions, flawlessly,

without equivocation.

Later, when the phase of recession was really underway, the Communist International tried to

restart revolutionary activity by going to the masses (united front), then by bolshevizing the

national communist parties. Bordiga stood up against all these formulations, considering them to

be camouflage measures of withdrawal, while being patent manifestations of a new wave of

opportunism. However, he never questioned the proletarian, socialist, character of the Russian

revolution. He thought that it had some peculiarities, but he neither spoke like the KAPD(Communist Workers' Party of Germany), which called it a "bourgeois revolution made by

communists" (The Principle of the Antagonism between the Soviet Government and the

Proletariat) from 1922 on, nor of the duality of the revolution :

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"The Third International is a Russian creation, a creation of the Russian Communist Party. It was

created to support the Russian revolution, that is, a partly proletarian, partly bourgeois,

revolution." [6]

Also, in replying to Korsch, who sent him the Platform of the Left : [7]

"One cannot say that the 'Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution'. The 1917 revolution

was a proletarian revolution, while it would be wrong to generalise its 'tactical' lessons. Today the

question posed is knowing what happens to a proletarian dictatorship in a country when a

revolution does not follow in the others.... It seems that you exclude the possibility of a

Communist Party policy which would not end in the restoration of capitalism. That would be to

revert to justifying Stalin or to supporting the inadmissible policy of 'his dismissal from power'."

(Naples, 28.10.26.) [8]

Put another way, throughout this period he did not take a position on the social nature of the

USSR. What was essential for him (and what few of his critics understood) was the nature of

the Russian state and which class was in power. This was shown by the programme, by the

actions of the party running the state. For Bordiga, the Russian party alone should not have run

the state. That should have been done by the Communist International. That is why the 1926

debate, ending in the victory of the theory of socialism in one country, was crucial for him

because it indicated a capital change of the state which no longer could be defined as proletarian

because it was no longer at the service of the world revolution. But :

"One cannot simply state that Russia is a country tending towards capitalism." [9]

That is why it was only after the transfer of the USSR to the side of the western democracies

that Bordiga stated that, henceforth, the counter-revolution had really triumphed and that

capitalism would be built in the USSR.

If capitalism tended to triumph, how would one characterise the USSR and, on the other hand,

what was the origin of capitalism's development ? Was there a retreat, that is, would there have

been socialism and, from that, the CMP would have been reinstalled in Russia ? Bordiga

maintained his political thesis in this debate which developed very vigorously after 1945. He still

talked of the socialist characteristics of the economy in Soviet Russia from the Revolution toToday [10]. Here he replied to the question : which class is in power in Russia ?

"In fact the class exploiting the Russian proletariat (and which will appear, perhaps, in broad day

light in not too long) is today constituted by two evident historical forms : international capitalism

and the same oligarchy which dominates in the interior and on which the peasants, traders,

enriched speculators and the intellectuals, who swiftly obtain the greatest favours, all depend."

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The whole of the article shows Bordiga's international perspective and the importance he gave to

the political factor, i.e. to the capacity that a proletarian state could have to apply measures in the

direction of the development of the bases of socialism. To return to the ruling class, he

characterised it in other articles as a host of hidden entrepreneurs. This did not stop him from

speaking of bureaucracy too, but he did not make it a determining strata or, as did Chaulieu, a

ruling class. Yet, the difficulties with which he tried to unmask the existence of this class were

always stated. He had to intervene in the debate on the social nature of the USSR in which some

envisaged state capitalism where the state would be all powerful and could run capital, and

others saw bureaucratic capitalism (Chaulieu in Socialisme ou barbarie no. 2), and on the role of

the USSR in the play of international forces. Most 'left' revolutionaries tended to see the USSR as

the centre of the counter-revolution because state capitalism or bureaucratic capitalism was,

according to them, a much more powerful form of domination, a higher stage of capitalism than

the one possible in West Europe or in the USA.

Bordiga began to draft Property and Capital [11] in reply, with really fundamental elements of

explanation, producing a contribution to the clarification of the future of Russian society and that

in the West, bordering on simple leninist repetitions. In the chapter Modern Tendency of the

Enterprise without property, allocations and concessions, he confronted a question that he took

up again later in Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today [12], he stated :

"The modern state has never really had a direct economic activity, but it has always been

delegated by the intermediary of allocations and concessions to capitalist groups." [13]

Here we see the assertion of the positive critique of state capitalism and the bureaucracy-class.

This is explained in the chapter Economic Interventionism and Direction as capital handling the

State :

"It is not a case of the partial subordination of capital to the state, but an ulterior subordination of

the state to capital." [14]

Finally he analysed The Phases of the Transformation of Russia after 1917 where he dealt with

the question of the ruling class in Russia :

"The difficulty in finding a physical group of men who constitute this bourgeoisie which was notformed spontaneously and which, to the extent that it was formed under Tsarism, was destroyed

after 1917, presents a great difficulty due only to the fact of the democratic and petit-bourgeois

mode of thought which the pretended masters of the working class have infected it with for

decades." [15]

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Thus it was a matter of knowing who represented the capitalist economic interests. It is clear

that Bordiga would have to contradict such a bourgeois mode of thought in its archaic (i.e.

democratic) form : everything that exists, which manifests itself, must be represented, there

must be an intermediary between the thing and those who see it, the intermediary is a delegation

of the existence regarding those who must state and study this existence. For Bordiga, a

fundamentally anti-democratic man, the intermediary had no importance. On the other hand, the

bureaucracy was chosen to fill the hiatus by all those who preoccupied themselves with Russia,

Bordiga showed that, on the contrary, the bureaucracy depended on the businessmen :

"...the bourgeoisie, which has never been a caste, but which emerges by defending the right of

'virtual' and total equality, becomes a 'network of spheres of interest which constitute themselves

in the cell of each enterprise', at the rate and to the extent that the bourgeois enterprises become

personnel collectives, anonymity's, and finally 'public'. The personnel of such a cell is extremely

varied. They are no longer owners, bankers or shareholders, but more and more speculators,

economic experts and businessmen. One of the characteristics of the development of the

economy is that the privileged class has an increasingly changing and fluctuating human

material (the oil sheikhs who were bailiffs and will be so again). As in all epochs, such a network

of interests and persons, who are more or less visible, has relations with the state bureaucracy,

but it itself is not the bureaucracy, it has relations with 'circles of politicians', but it is not a political

category. During capitalism above all such a network is 'international' and today there are no

longer national bourgeois classes. There are national states of the world capitalist class.

Today the Russian state is one of them, but with a certain historically unique origin. In fact it is

the only one originating in the unity of two revolutions by the political and insurrectionary victory. It

was the only one that was turned back from the second revolutionary task, but it has still not

exhausted the first : making Russia a region of mercantile economy (with profound

consequences for Asia)." [16]

Concerning the role of Russia on a world scale, Bordiga stated that the centre of the

counter-revolution was the USA and not the USSR. The USA could intervene alone or through

the UN, and in his polemic with Damen [17], he offered this witticism to make himself betterunderstood :

"..let us remove Baffone (i.e. Stalin) from Moscow and, so as not to ridicule anyone, let us

replace him with Alpha (i.e., Bordiga). Truman, who has already thought over these questions,

would arrive five minutes later." [18]

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Bordiga saw the basic victory of the counter-revolution in the fact that the stalinists had sided

with the USA during the 1939-45 war. The USSR had been bought with the US Dollar, He stated

that the same would happen to China at the time of the Korean war.

All this was given in thesis form at the Internationalist Communist Party Naples meeting,

Lessons of counter-revolutions, double revolutions, capitalist revolutionary nature of the Russian

economy (1951). These were partly scandalous for some people how could one continue to use

the adjective revolutionary for the USSR in 1951 ? Now Bordiga restated it in Russia and

Revolution in Marxist Theory for him there had been other revolutions and there are others

(when Bordiga wrote) than the one we have to realise : the communist revolution. Given its

non-appearance and especially the lack of any important precursory sign of its approach, it was

evident (for Bordiga) that the generalisation of the CMP in Russia and Asia was a revolutionary

phenomenon, as Marx had stated in 1848 for the development of capital in Europe.

However, if one considers now that the Russian revolution has, by definition, only been able to

give rise to the CMP, the characteristics of present Russian society must be described again as

well as those of the ruling class. If the questions unfailingly re-emerge, it is because the analysis

had not basically regained the essential point of capital's development and it had not described

the most recent tendencies. That is why Bordiga had to return to Marx so as to describe the

Russian phenomenon.

"True to a vision which has forgotten materialism is the one al lowing itself to go astray when it

does not see the 'person' of the individual capitalist in the front rank. Capital was an impersonal

force from the youngest Marx, Determinism without men is meaningless, that is true, but men

constitute the instrument and not the motor." [19]

The debate, in fact, centred again on a definition of capital. In Murder of the Dead he recalled that

Marx characterised the CMP by the production of surplus-value and the greed for surplus-labour

("The voracious appetite for surplus labour" in Capital Vol., I [20]). He confronted the "novelty of

state capitalism" on this basis :

"Once constant capital is posed as zero, gigantic development of profit occurs. That is the same

as saying that the enterprise profit remains if the disadvantage of maintaining constant capital isremoved from the capitalist.

This hypothesis is only state capitalism's present reality. Transferring capital to the state means

that constant capital equals zero. Nothing of the relationship between entrepreneurs and workers

is changed, since this depends solely on the magnitude of variable capital and surplus-value.

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Are analyses of state capitalism something new ? Without any haughtiness we use what we

knew from 1867 at the latest. It is very short : Cc = O.

Let us not leave Marx without this ardent passage after the cold formula :

"Capital is dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the

more labour it sucks." " [21]

Bordiga developed this theme which he often readopted on the relationship between state

capitalism, business activity and speculative exploitation of natural disasters (defining the Italian

economy as a specialist in the economy of disaster). Here he showed that capitalism is, at its

greatest development, generalised gangsterism universal delinquency and, let us add, madness.

"To exploit living labour, capital must give birth to dead labour. Liking to suck warm young blood,

it kills corpses." [22]

For it is only through the destruction of constant capital, above all the fixed part, that it can free

the new production process where capital can again satisfy its greed for surplus labour.

On the other hand, he replied in Doctrine of possessed by the Devil [23]to the question, what is

the ruling class ? Here again he relied on Marx's analysis in Capital :

"The person of the capitalist no longer matters here, capital exists without him a hundred fold the

same process. The human subject has become useless. A class not comprising of individuals ?

The state not at the service of a social group, but an impalpable power, a work of the Holy Ghost

and the Devil ? Let us refer to the irony of our old Mr. Marx. Here is the promised quote :

"By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product,

and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity,

the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form,

into capital, value which can perform its own valorisation process, an animated monster which

begins to 'work', 'as if possessed by the devil'." " [24]

In 1952 Bordiga replied to Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR with Dialogue

with Stalin [25]where he restated what he had said in previous articles (cf. In the Whirlpool of

mercantile anarchy) the Russian revolution was over. He also refuted the stalinist thesis of the

law of value persisting under socialism, a refutation repeated several times after. Each timeBordiga was obliged to return to Marx's work to resume the integral study of the critique of

political economy.

The statement that the Russian revolution was over left a question undecided. How was it that

the proletariat could perform a bourgeois revolution ? (Bordiga accused Lenin of being the great

bourgeois, Stalin, the romantic revolutionary). October 1917, was it not at all proletarian ? It was

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then that Bordiga drafted a series of articles studying the earliest origins of the Russian

revolution. He insisted on the conclusion already drawn by the KAPD in 1922 : the revolution was

a double, proletarian and bourgeois, revolution. Since the former had been reabsorbed (that had

already been partly affirmed in 1946) and the second had largely flourished. The proletariat has

thus realised the bourgeois revolution :

"With this state of suspense passed by with the very wars lost on the frontiers and the national

humiliation of seeing the Muslim and yellow peoples more advanced in the capitalist methods of

warfare, they had found all the tendencies for the 'romantic' task of the proletariat i.e. how to

resolve the historical puzzle of not taking power itself, but of giving it to its social exploiters. A

whole literature worked for this and by a series of giants from, perhaps, Gogol on, while the

greats, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gorky, had in various ways and to different extents, absorbed

the social postulates of the West : characteristic of romantic and non-marxist thought." [26]

"As there was no bourgeoisie conscious of its own class power, the marxists thus set to work as

'enlighteners', i.e. to repeat the bourgeoisie's thought in its romantic part." [27]

Finally there are eight theses on Russia in The Bear and its Great Novel. [28]They define the

result of the revolutionary process. Thesis five dealt with the ruling class :

"The statement of the present lack of a statistically definable bourgeois class does not contradict

the previous thesis, since this fact was stated and foreseen by marxism well before the

revolution, given that the power of modern capitalism is defined by the forms of production and

not by national groups of individuals."

Then Bordiga thought that he had sufficiently clarified the 'Russian question' and that one could

approach other important ones :

"The comrade (Bordiga) foresaw that this meeting would include a section dedicated to the

problem of America and western capitalist countries in particular, given that a considerable

previous work had sufficiently crystallised in outlines a general definition of our mode of

considering Russia and its social economy. It showed the marxist concept of the double

revolution, one grafted on the other, or impure revolution (giving the term an historical and not a

moral meaning). The Dialogue (with Stalin) and other texts had sufficiently systematised thispart, now we have to study a pure, solely anticapitalist, proletarian, revolution." [29]

But the umbilical cord linking the PCI militants to the Russian revolution was difficult for them to

break and, for them, all these explanations had not clarified enough the 'enigma'. They called for

the subject to be exhausted somehow. After dealing with Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist

Theory and The Agrarian Question [30], which was in fact an introduction to a study of Russia

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(Bordiga insisted on the thesis capitalism = agrarian revolution, and on the fact that the agrarian

problem was the central problem which the Russian revolution had to resolve and the

communist revolution also will have to resolve), he had to return to Russia to begin Russia and

Revolution in Marxist Theory.

Thus the reader can gain an idea of the way in which the work presented was born. One should

note that the majority of the themes were treated in a fragmentary fashion in articles and,

besides, there was a continual exchange between the explanations of Russian society and the

clarification of the critique of political economy. There is the constant theme of the dictatorship of

the proletariat which could have directed the development of the productive forces in immense

Russia. That is why what interested Bordiga was the nature of the state, not only because he did

not delude himself on the fact that the state could avoid being determined by the economic and

social structure. He knew very well that, in Russia, from a certain moment, the social forces

would inevitably have to eliminate the proletarian state unsupported by a revolution in the West.

But he did not go into the economic domain, but into the political field in order to find the

involution of the revolution. It was only when the state had become definitely capitalist that he

really preoccupied himself with the economic and social structure, for now one had to

understand how the forces which will have to struggle for the future communist revolution will be

born and orientate themselves. It is revealing that it was at the time of the Twentieth Congress,

the time that he stated that Russia had confessed to its integration into the capitalist camp, that

he gave his prediction of the communist revolution for 1975. Bordiga's writings on the USSR

after 1957 are not very interesting. They are only an illustration of what he had stated and

explained in earlier texts. Besides, what was virulently repeated was the axiom : one did not

construct communism, one only destroyed the obstacles to its development. He would have had

to have made an exhaustive analysis of the development of the CMP to make a fundamental

contribution. Now this was (in spite of several essential remarks, possibly points of departure for

fruitful research) too 'physiocratic' because it considered the mass of production and its growth

rhythms. In 1964, after the failure of Khruschev's economic measures, his sacking and the

satisfaction of the kolkhozians' demands, Bordiga remarked :"Nevertheless, obviously the road to the full forms of capitalism in Russia will be hard and difficult

and will have again to bring large capital into conflict with small property, which large capital has

not been able to avoid supporting and reinforcing. Thus is buried the heroic and huge effort of the

Bolshevik avant-garde which foresaw the sole possibility for resistance in the wake of the

proletarian world revolution, like a besieged fortress, as refuge in state capitalism controlled by

11


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the proletarian dictatorship, committing the leap to economic socialism to the arms of the future

and inevitable revolutionary wave in the industrialised countries in the West." [31]

Unfortunately this diagnosis was used in an immediate and polemical fashion to show that,

unlike what Khruschev had trumpeted, the USSR could not catch up with the USA. One should

have asked the question : are there not geo-social areas where the CMP cannot develop and, if it

did, would that not be at the cost of immense difficulties so that even the positive side that there

had been in the West would be obliterated in these areas ? But this implied the adoption of a

critical attitude to the Bolsheviks' actions. Now Bordiga was not up to asking such a question. He

always maintained the leninist presuppositions and followed them through to their conclusions.

One can say that, somehow, the Russian revolution ended as a political phenomenon with him,

a phenomenon having to master the economic forces in the direction of developing to socialism.

It is useful to know Bordiga's other works so as really to understand his position on Russia. We

shall summarise them briefly. Bordiga was fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-innovating,

i.e. he fought those who thought that it was necessary and possible to create a new theory or

that one must publish marxism, defined as :

"One uses the expression 'marxism' not to mean a doctrine discovered and introduced by the

individual Karl Marx, but to refer to the doctrine arising with the modern industrial proletariat and

'accompanying' it during the whole course of a social revolution -- and we conserve the name

'marxism' despite all the speculation and exploitation of it by a series of counter-revolutionary

movements." [32]

What is essential is the reference to a class defining itself by the mode of production it aims to

create. The method by which it has to realise this creation is its programme. The fundamental

lines of the programme for the proletarian class were established from 1848. They are : the

proletariat must constitute itself as a class, thus as a party. Then it must make itself the state to

destroy all classes, thus itself, and allow the development of communism (cf. The Fundamentals

of Revolutionary Communism, 1957). The party is thus seen on the one hand as part of the

class, as the prefiguration of communist society, "the projection into the present of the social

man of tomorrow" (cf., The Theory of the Primary Function of the Party, 1959), on the other asan organ of resistance at the moment when the proletarian class has been beaten and finds

itself under the influence of the ruling ideology, and so the party has to maintain the 'class line'.

Marxism, seen not only as the theory of the revolution, but as the theory of the counter-revolution,

can resist, and this consists in maintaining the entire programme of the class. Thus the formal

party to which Bordiga belonged could see itself as the intermediary between the preceding

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phase, when the proletariat was constituted as a class, and the coming phase, when the

revolution would rise anonymously, setting the whole class in motion. Bordiga admitted that the

formal party could disappear, that is, that it could come about that there would no longer be any

revolutionaries defending the class programme after a certain time, but the party must be reborn

after a "distant but enlightening future" by following the dynamic present in capitalist society and

the fact of the absolute necessity of communism for the species.

What therefore is basic in the phase of recession (i.e. of strong counter-revolution which forces

the class to retreat to earlier positions), is the description of communism, the very behaviour of

Marx and Engels, which Bordiga said they took all their lives to describe. So one can maintain

the line of the future in the despicable present, so resisting the counter-revolution by the rejection

of all democratic formulae and all stray impulses to innovate. This implies a structural

anti-activism because one can only intervene in 'periods ripe with history' of humanity. Then one

must throw oneself headlong into the battle and not to give in at the first shock, not abandon the

party as soon as the enemy has gained a certain advantage. This was the meaning of the

reflections on the debate of 1926. One should have resisted, the world proletariat organised by

the Communist International should have faced capitalism while awaiting the opening of the fresh

revolutionary cycle. But once this was abandoned, one had to some extent to pass through

purgatory and then await the counter-revolution to complete its tasks. Bordiga thought that this

was realised in 1956. Hence the proclamation of a new revolutionary cycle culminating in 1975.

One had to restore marxism, negated by the stalinists, one more time during the period of

waiting, without ever losing sight of the immediate movements of the class, in order to see how

far they shake the implacable dictatorship of capital. But this has to be done without illusions.

Thus he stated that there would not be a revolution after the Second World War (the fascist

nations had lost the war, but fascism had won), that the Third World War was not imminent, the

cold war only being a form of peace. Therefore there could not be a revolution after a short

maturation as those who believed in an imminent third conflict inevitably giving rise to a revolution

afterwards held. The Berlin movement (1953) was not the start of a new revolutionary cycle. Nor

too was the 1956 Hungarian uprising, because both were the work of multi-class movementswhile the proletariat could only win by organising autonomously, in struggling for its own ends.

Nevertheless, it is evident that all this belongs to the past and many ask what importance does it

have ? What importance in not flattering Yugoslavia as a new socialist country ? Of not having

repeated the same operation for Cuba, China, or having not stated that the centre of the

13


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revolution was, nonetheless, in the countries of the so-called third world ? In fact, what use is it

when all the world is now convinced of the opposite?

It is because, in fact, he had a foresight of a certain future of society that Bordiga was able to

have a well determined behaviour allowing him to escape the revolutionary masquerade of the

post-war period led by trotskyist and similar groups. His coherence lay there, a theory is not

useful if it does not afford a foresight. Now one cannot foresee without any certainty.

Bordiga disagreed with the Bolsheviks several times over the question of democracy. He was an

abstentionist, rejecting all participation in parliament, all democratic mechanisms. One had to

define tactics rigorously in relation to the conditions of clearly defined struggles in the historical

phases when the proletariat intervened, Similarly he rejected the theory of state capitalism and

considered the theory of imperialism to be completely insufficient etc,. Despite that, we have

already repeated, he never broke with Lenin because he was, for Bordiga, the theoretician of the

dictatorship of the proletariat (coherent with Marx) and that he was capable of applying it in a

huge country. On the other hand, the whole development of the anti-colonial revolutions

reinforced the correctness of the leninist position for him. Hence the birth of the uncritical

apologia for the Bolsheviks and, so doing, he defended the Italian left and himself against

accusations of anarchism, ultraleftism, passivity etc., which led him to maintaining false

judgements on the KAPD, Pannekoek etc., especially where it concerned questions where they

were definitely very close to him.

But this is only a particular aspect of Bordiga's work. What is essential, what characterises him,

makes him entrancing, living, is what was indicated in Bordiga : la passion du communisme his

certainty of the revolution, communism, displayed prophetically. Humanity advanced by

revolutionary leaps up to communism, according to him. This evolution was the work of millions

feeling their way and, sometimes, leaping enlightened by huge revolutionary explosions. He

compared all human history [33]to a huge river bounded by two dykes, on the right that of social

conservatism on which marched a chanting band of priests and police as the cantors of the

official lies of the class, on the left that of reformism on which paraded the men devoted to the

people, the businessmen of opportunism, the progressives. The two bands insult each otherfrom opposite banks, while fully agreed that the river should remain in its channel. But the

immense flood of human history also has its irresistible and menacing swellings and

sometimes, rounding a meander, it floods over the dykes, drowning the miserable bands in the

impulsive and irresistible inundation of the revolution which overthrows all old forms and gives

society a new face.

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Notes:

[1] "Why have we called the theory of the great men the theory of the battilocchio ? The

battilocchio is a person who draws attention and simultaneously shows his complete vacuity." (il

Battilocchio 1953) (Translator's note)

[2] We have discussed this question elsewhere and we have tried to define the historical

importance of Bordiga (cf. La gauche communiste d'Italie et le PCI, Invariance Serie I, n. 9, and

the introduction toBordiga : la passion du communisme (Spartacus, Paris, 1974). A number of

Bordiga's texts have been translated into French in Programme Communiste, Le Fil du Temps

and Invariance. The translations in the first two are often inexact, not purely on the level of

translation, which is often a matter of appreciation, but because the translators often thought that

they had to remove what did not suit them and to add what they wanted to Bordiga's texts. To

avoid many notes, the reader is advised that the themes discussed in this study, often simply

alluded to, have been treated more or less exhaustively in Invariance.

[3]Russia et rivoluzione nella teoria marxista in il programma comunista 1954 no. 21 - 1955 no.

8.

[4] We talk of a theoretical attitude because it is not a question of separating theory from

practice. One must always tend to have a global activity with all human manifestations

integrated. [5]Lezioni della contra-rivoluzione (Naples meeting, September 1951) Edizioni il

programma comunista no. 7, p.3.

[6]Leitsatzen der Kommunistischen Arbeiter-Internationale, in Kommunistiche Arbeiter-Zeitung

(Essner Richtung) 1922 no.1. English edition in Herman Gorter The Communist Workers'

International (London 1977)

[7]The Platform of the Left was adopted at a national conference of the extreme left in Berlin

(2.4.1926.) and was published in the pamphlet Der Weg der Komintern (Berlin, 1926). Partial

English translation in Helmut Gruber Soviet Russia masters the Comintern (New York, 1974).

[8]First published in Prometeo no. 7, October 1928.[9]ibid.

[10]La Russia sovietica dalla rivoluzione all'oggi in Prometeo serie II, no. 1.

[11]Proprieta e capitale in Prometeo serie II 1-4.

[12]Struttura Economica e Sociale della Russia d'Oggi in il programma comunista 1955 no. 10 -

1957 no. 12.

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[13]Prometeo serie II no. 1 p. 22.

[14] ibid, p. 24.

[15] ibid. no. 4, p. 123.

[16]ibid.

[17] Old member of the Italian left, still living. He was a communist deputy before the Second

World War. During that war he actively defended the thesis of the transformation of the

imperialist war into a class war and was one of the main founders of the Internationalist

Communist Party in 1943 (Bordiga did not participate in it, he was not in agreement over the

opportunity of creating such a party). His various disagreements with Bordiga, especially over

the Russian question and the perspectives of the development of the workers' movement after

the war, were one of the reasons for the split of 1952. One part of the party was to become the

International Communist Party (with Bordiga), the other kept the old name (with Damen) and

continues to publish the paper Battaglia comunista and the review Prometeo. Damen has written

a small book Amadeo Bordiga Validita e limiti d'una esperienza (epi, Milan, 1971).

[18] ibid. p. 46 (letter to Damen from Bordiga, 9.7.51.)

[19]Bussole impazzite (Compasses struck with madness) in Battaglia comunista 1951 no. 20

[20]Capital Vol.I (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976) p. 344

[21]Omicidio dei morti in Battaglia comunista 1951 no. 24. The citation is from Capital Vol. I p.

342.

[22]ibid.

[23]La dottrina del diavolo in corpo in Battaglia comunista 1951 no. 20

[24]Cf. Capital Vol. I p. 302. The final citation is from Goethe's Faust and is correctly translated

as "as if its body were by love possessed" (as in Fowkes' edition). We have changed the citation

only to maintain coherence with Bordiga's title and the citation translation of the Italian edition of

Capital.

[25]Dialogato con Stalin (ed. Prometeo, Milan, 1953)

[26]Fiorite primavere del capitale (Flowering spring of capital) in il programma comunista 1953

no. 4[27]Malenkov-Stalin: toppa non tappa (Malenkov-Stalin: patchwork not a stage) in il programma

comunista 1953 no. 6

[28]L'orso e il suo grande romanzo in il programma comunista 1955 no. 3

[29]Meeting at Genoa in il programma comunista 1953 no. 90

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[30]I fattori di razza e nazione nella teoria marxista (Factors of race and nation in marxist theory)

in il programma comunista 1953 nos. 16-20. La questione agraria (The Agrarian Question) in

ibid. 1953-4.

[31]Involuzione Russe 'Terra e liberta' (Russian involutions 'Land and liberty') in il programma


[32]L'invarianza storico di marxismo (The historical invariance of marxism) in Sul filo del tempo

1954 p. 19

[33]Piena e rotta della civilita borghese (Filling and Bursting of bourgeois civilization) in Battaglia


Capitalism and other disasters

Earthquakes in India and El Salvador a ferry sinks off the Greek island of Paros an airlinerbursts into flame at Singapore Airport drought in East Africa a train and its passengers burn in a

tunnel in the Austrian alps a petrol tanker explodes in Nigeria workers die in a factory fire in

South Africa floods in England are hailed as the harbingers of global climatic change. This small

sample of disasters represents just the ones that came to our attention while we were putting

together this text[1].

Capitalism produces disasters almost as quickly as it produces commodities. We could follow a

similar trail of the dead anytime, any place, anywhere. That is why the following texts by Amadeo

Bordiga are, sadly, still relevant forty years or more after they were first written.

Bordiga for beginners

Bordiga (1889-1970) was a leading figure in what became known as the Italian Communist Left.

Active in revolutionary opposition to the First World War, Bordiga went on to become the first

General Secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) upon its foundation in 1921. Although

active in the Bolshevik-led (Third) Communist International, Bordiga was critical of its tactics,

denouncing electoral politics and the policy of working with those very socialist parties that had

supported the bloodbath of 1914-1918 and the subsequent repression of revolutionary

movements in Germany and elsewhere. As a result Bordiga and those who shared his views

were manoeuvred out of the leadership of the CP and ultimately out of the party altogether.

Bordiga did make one last stand at the 1926 Executive Committee of the Comintern, making him

one of the last people to publicly criticise Stalin to his face and survive.

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Bordiga was jailed by Mussolini from 1926 to 1930, while many of his comrades went into exile in

France and Belgium as the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. After the fall of Mussolini,

some militants in Italy established the Internationalist Communist Party (ICP or, in Italian, PCInt

to distinguish it from the Stalinist PCI), with which Bordiga was associated. The articles gathered

here were first published inBattaglia comunista, the ICPs journal, in 1951, and in Il Programma

comunista, the journal of one of two rival ICPs which existed after a split in 1953 (the group

responsible for Il Programma later changed its name to the International Communist Party). At

this point Bordigas influence was minimal, especially outside of Italy, but in the past 30 years

there has been an increasing interest in Bordigas writings on Marx, capitalism and communism,

even amongst those critical of the sectarian party politics of Bordigism and Bordigas own

conception of the party.

A further point we have to acknowledge here is that Bordiga would probably not have approved of

publishing a collection of texts under his name. Bordiga and his comrades opposed the

personality cults of Fascism, Stalinism and Trotskyism and believed that as a collective process

the revolution was essentially anonymous. Bordiga did not therefore sign his articles: it is the

attribute of the bourgeois world that all commodities bear their makers name, all ideas are

followed by their authors signature, every party is defined by its leaders name (Bordiga, Sul filo

del tempo, 1953). We have taken the view that there is little danger of a Bordiga personality cult

30 years after his death, and that his ideas represent a distinctive current that needs to be

named in order to act as a point of reference for discussion [2].

Defining disasters

What do we mean by disasters? We could say that capitalism itself is an ongoing disaster for

humans and the environment, measured not just in death and destruction but in the lost potential

of life subordinated to the rhythms of capital. But to narrow things down a little we could, for the

sake of the argument, define disasters as massacres that take place without deliberate planning.

Even here, qualification is necessary. If, for instance, chemical factories are planned and built in

India with less stringent safety than similar factories owned by the same company in the US, can

we really say it is an accident if thousands end up dead, as happened when chemicals leaked

from the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal in 1984? If cheap buildings are put up in poor areas at

risk of earthquakes, is it just bad luck if they fall down and bury their inhabitants when the earth

moves, as in Istanbul in 1999? If medical treatments are denied to those most in need of them,

as in the case of HIV/AIDS in Africa is it just one of those things?

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The massacres here are unplanned only in the sense that no date was set in advance, or orders

given to shoot. In this sense disasters are different from wars. Yet the possibility of catastrophe

is planned for whenever unnecessary risks are knowingly taken in the planning of new buildings,

industrial processes or machines, or when environmental or biological processes are left to take

their course without intervention that could prevent them or minimise their impact.

Disasters come in different forms. There are slow-motion disasters, an accumulation of deaths

in ones and twos that add up to mass carnage. In the US, more auto workers were killed and

injured each year on the job than soldiers were killed and injured during any year of the Vietnam

war[3]. Then there are sudden accidents resulting in mass casualties caused by technical

failures of machines or buildings, such as train and plane crashes. Finally there are so called

natural disasters featuring environmental factors such as floods and droughts, but often with

social causes.

In the following essays, Bordiga considers a number of disasters from the 1950s and early

1960s. Weird and Wonderful Tales of Modern Social Decadence deals with both the sinking of

the liner Andrea Doria in July 1956, with 51 deaths, and the Ribolla mining disaster, which

claimed 42 victims. The Filling and Bursting of Bourgeois Civilisation and Murder of the Dead

take as their starting point the 1957 flooding of the Po valley, while The Legend of the Piave

deals with another flooding disaster in Italy in 1963.

Profit before safety

Bordiga looks in detail at some of the technical factors in each of these disasters, an approach

that perhaps reflects his interests and knowledge as an engineer, but he is clear that In the

inhuman system of capital, every technical problem boils down to an economic one, that of the

prize to be won by cutting costs and boosting returns. He contrasts this unfavourably with The

old pre-bourgeois societies [that] had some residual time to think about safety and general

interests (The Legend of the Piave).

That capitalism puts profit before safety is perhaps no great revelation, but for Bordiga it is not

simply a question of the sloppy, cost cutting operation of complex machinery. The design of

technology is in itself seen to be shaped by the society that produces it.

In the case of the Andrea Doria which sank after colliding with another ship, The MV Stockholm,

near Nantucket, Massachusetts, Bordiga shows that since the mania of modern technology is

oriented towards economising on the structure, ship design reduces the dimensions of the hull

and dangerously increases that of the superstructure so as to maximise income-generating

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accommodation: more or less vulgar luxury or the safety of the human lives on board, this is the

anti- thesis... Too many saloons, swimming pools, playing areas, too many decks above the

waterline... too much weight and space put into the superstructure, that is that half skyscraper

which stands above the waves, full of windows flooding out light where the luxury class has a

good time. This all at the expense of the quickwork, the part in contact with the water, whose

size and strength provide stability, flotation, course correction after wandering, resistance to

attacks by the sea, collisions with mountains of ice, and those with ships (Weird and

Wonderful Tales of Modern Social Decadence).

A capitalist ship is therefore capitalist not just because it is operated for profit and staffed by

wage slaves, but in its very design. This simple fact continues to have disastrous

consequences, testified to by the dead on the Herald of Free Enterprise at Zeebrugge in 1987, or

in the Greek ferry at Paros in 2000.

Is anybody at the controls?

The attempt by the ruling class to find a scapegoat for disasters - the train driver who fell asleep

or the ships drunken captain - is mirrored by the radical leftist search for a scapegoat from

amongst the ranks of the bourgeoisie, typically the fat cat capitalist. Bordigas prognosis is more

realistic but also more frightening, suggesting that the ruling class is incapable of preventing

disasters even where it might have the will to do so: when the ship goes down, so too do the

first class passengers... The ruling class, for its part incapable of struggling against the devil of

business activity, superproduction and superconstruction for its own skin, thus demonstrates the

end of its control over society, and it is foolish to expect that, in the name of a progress with its

trail indicated by bloodstains, it can produce safer ships than those of the past. (Weird...).

Disasters are shown to arise from the innermost logic of capitalist society, not just from the

negligence or malice of individuals (or individual corporations). Bordiga uses Marxs theory of

rent to explain why capitalism will squeeze the last drop out of less productive mines whatever

the risk to the miners: The lignite seams of Ribolla are among the least productive, while those

of anthracite in Belgium are the most productive, and where there is no differential rent

capitalism can never invest in more expensive installations to increase production and safeguard

miners lives, unlike in the best mines in France, the Netherlands, England, Germany and

America. Fatally, at the same time the theory of rent prohibits leaving the last, the most

dangerous, mine closed (ibid)[4].

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In the case of the Piave floods, where dam building was a major factor in the disaster, Bordiga

blames not just the sacrosanct need for low costs but the modern capitalist superstition of the

division of labour and the most idiotic of modern cults, the cult of specialisation. Not only is it

inhuman to hunt down the scapegoat, but also vain, since one has allowed this stupid productive

society to arise, made of separate sections. No one is guilty because, if someone takes off the

blindfold for a moment, he can say that he gave advice requested by the next section, that he

was the expert, the specialist, the competent person (The Legend...).

Communism will abolish the fragmented, specialist view of social and technological problems:

The science and skill of producing and especially of building will, in the future society which will

kill the monster of economic return, of surplus-value production, be unitary and indivisible. Not a

mans head, but a social brain above ridiculous separated sections will see without those useful

blindfolds the immensity of each problem (ibid).

Capitalist science is criticised for embodying this division of labour, but also for attempting to

apply perennially valid formulae to complex local situations when constructing things fixed to

the Earths crust. The geological problem is not one for the smoking saloon or the test tank. It is

one of lengthy human experience based on the proofs of historical building (ibid).

A positive aspect of these texts is that Bordiga takes disasters as a starting point to advance a

critique of capitalist progress quite at odds with marxist orthodoxy in the period in which he was

writing. He talks of the thousands of Italian corpses carried out to sea by the river Piave having

been sacrificed to the bloodlust of modern bourgeois and patriotic capitalist civilisation and

above all to the adorers of its science and technology. He describes Progress as the lying

myth which makes the poor in spirit and the starved wretches bend their backs to it, ready to

swear loyalty to this Moloch which every so often and a little bit each day crushes them under the

wheels of its obscene carriage (ibid).

Despite (or maybe because of) technological advances since these texts were written, the world

is in many ways a more dangerous place. As Bordiga himself argued: If it is true that the

industrial and economic potential of the capitalist world is increasing and not diminishing, it is

equally true that the more virulent it is, the worse the living conditions of the human mass are inregards to natural and historical cataclysms (The Filling and Bursting...).

Bordigas suggestion that this is partly due to a worldwide decline of technology (Weird and

Wonderful Tales of Modern Social Decadence) does not though seem accurate. Rather as the

situationistEncyclopedia des Nuisances observed after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster: no

doubt one could find other ruling classes in history who, having lost all historical perspective

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beyond that of their own survival, sank into a suicidal irresponsibility but never in the past has a

ruling class been able to press such vast means into the service of such a total contempt for life

[5].

Bordiga shows how capitalist social relations impact on technological developments and on the

wider environment. But to understand disasters it is not enough to advance a critique of capitalist

technology, even if there is a technical element to most disasters. When 58 Chinese refugees

suffocated in the back of a lorry recently while trying to enter Britain, what mattered was not the

technical details such as the lack of ventilation in the vehicle. The real issue is what forces led

them into the lorry: poverty, dispossession and immigration and asylum laws. Similarly most of

those killed or injured in train crashes are making journeys to and from places of work dictated

by the needs of the capitalist economy.

Its not naturalEarthquakes are inevitable, but death in an earthquake is not. Ground tremors do not kill:

collapsing buildings do the killing... People died in El Salvador on January 13 [2000] and Gujarat

on January 26 because modern buildings - even modern hospitals -fell flat, one floor pancaking

on to another as reinforced concrete slabs collapsed like a house of cards. They died because

walls that should have been tied to floors fell outwards, removing all structural support, and

bringing the roof down. They died because tall buildings swayed in resonance and shook

themselves to bits as the ground danced beneath them. People died because they lived on or

near unstable hillsides they died because gas pipes burst, and petrol stations caught fire,

because water supplies failed and sewage flooded their basements (Tim Radford, Lessons

from Past Disasters go Unheaded, Guardian, 29 January 2001).

Today even many believers have stopped believing that disasters like floods and droughts are

simply acts of nature, let alone God. In the aftermath of the Orissa cyclone that killed 10,000

people in eastern Indian in 1999, and the drought in the horn of Africa (2000), the charity

Christian Aid argues that is wrong to call these catastrophes natural now that we are aware of

the creeping menace of global warming which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. [6]

Bordiga is prescient in his understanding of the links between (capitalist) human intervention and

so-called natural disasters, stressing the role of the disastrous deforestation of the mountains

in the flooding of the Po, which forced 100,000 people to flee their homes.

Capitalism cannot save us from disasters because its short term economic interests are what

drives it, not the long term conditions of life on the planet: No capital will be invested for the good

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of our great-grandchildren. So since high growing trees... always require a very long period

before yielding a useful product (100 years or more for oak trees), there is little incentive to plant

them. Likewise today, catastrophic global climatic change in the near future is not a sufficient

reason to reduce carbon emissions and present day profitability.

It is not just because preventing disasters is expensive that capitalism fails to invest. Bordiga

shows that capitalism is driven by the ravenous hunger for catastrophe and ruin, that it needs

destruction. While disasters can destroy capitalist property, The wealth that disappeared was

that of past, ages-old labour. To eliminate the effect of the catastrophe, a huge mass of

present-day, living labour is required (Murder of the Dead).

For Marx, Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the

more, the more labour it sucks. Bordiga goes a step further and shows that To exploit living

labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it

kills corpses. Hence capitalism, oppressor of the living, is the murderer also of the dead (ibid).

This somewhat gothic imagery is used to make a fundamental point. Buildings, bridges, roads,

like consumer goods, are the products of past crystallised labour, dead labour. The big profits

are made when they are built, but they are only built once -unless they are destroyed and need to

be built again. Thus Modern capital... has a great interest in letting the products of dead labour

fall into disuse as soon as possible so as to impose their renewal with living labour, the only type

from which it sucks profit. That is why it is in seventh heaven when war breaks out and that is

why it is so well trained for the practice of disasters (ibid). The principle is the same as with the

built-in obsolescence of consumer goods, a point Bordiga emphasises in relation to the motor

industry: Car production in America is massive, but all, or nearly all, families have a car, so

demand might be exhausted. So then it is better that the cars last only a short time (ibid).

In the case of the Po valley floods, it might have been the case that the maintenance of the Po

embankments for ten kilometres requires human labour costing, let us say, one million a year

but it suits capitalism better to rebuild them all spending one billion. Disasters are good for

business: high incomes thrive where high levels of destruction occur, big business deals being

based on them. It is the working class who lose everything in the disaster, but unfortunately nottheir chains (ibid).

The spectacularisation of disasters

Nothing exposes the reality of class society more than a disaster, yet disasters are frequently the

occasion for the political/media orchestration of a national spectacle of mourning, in which all

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social divisions are supposed to be dissolved in tears. The spectacularisation of disasters has

become more sophisticated in the years since Bordiga wrote, with events immediately framed

as disaster movies, and each new bout of media saturation tending to erase the memory of its

predecessor.

But the basic format remains the same: Commodity society... fogs the issue with enquiries,

funeral masses, the bonds of fraternity in which one can discern only the fraternity of the chain

gang, crocodile tears and promises of legislation and administration to attract others without

reserves to ask to take their places in the funereal lift cages - hats off to technology!

(Weird...).

In the aftermath of the Po floods, It was too late to pull the homeless out of the flooding Po, but

good play was made of MPs and ministers paddling about in their wellies after setting up

cameras and microphones for a world-wide broadcast of their lamentations (Murder of the

Dead). Bordigas description here recalls the antics of modern ambulance chasers, possibly

most disgusting of all Margaret Thatcher in her unwanted hospital visit to the Hillsborough

survivors after the massacre of 95 football fans in Sheffield in 1989, crushed while fenced in by

cages and cops[7].

Like the Italian monarchy, todays rulers are great in knowing to rush not to the dance

(Pordenone), but to where people are dying of cholera (Naples), or to the ruins of Reggio and

Messina, raised to the ground by the earthquakes of 1908 (Murder of the Dead).

Disasters and class struggle

If capitalism is incapable of preventing disasters - and indeed actually produces them - it is

equally unable to clear up the mess afterwards. True, disasters are often the occasion for

military mobilisation, but the first priority of such efforts is always to safeguard public order and

guard private property.

Emma Goldman described the shooting of looters after the San Francisco earthquake in 1906:

A man was instantly shot as he walked out of a saloon with his arms full of champagne bottles,

and another was shot for carrying off a sack of coffee[8]. Similar scenes are replayed whenever

the states infrastructure of control threatens to break down as a result of disaster.

In Luoyang (China) relatives of hundreds of people killed in a recent disco fire blocked traffic and

were promptly charged by police. An official said: The most important thing at present is to

maintain stability and keep social order. There had been no such prompt action to respond to

warnings about conditions in the shopping mall where the party took place, a building declared to

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be one of the most dangerous in Henan province three years previously (Guardian, 29

December 2000).

One aspect which Bordiga does not consider in these articles is that the working class is not

simply the victims of disasters, but is capable of responding to them to advance its own needs.

This neglect is undoubtedly related to Bordigas underestimation of the role of working class

self-activity in general.

Disasters are not just the site of destruction but of class struggle. As Harry Cleaver has shown

for the Mexican earthquake in 1985 the movement of the earth sparked movements of people

using the devastation in property and the cracks opened in the structures of political power to

break through oppressive social relations and to improve their lives.

For instance, When landlords and lawyers arrived on the scene the very day of the quake, the

people in the community quickly realized that the greatest threat to them would come from these

owners trying to take advantage of the situation by tearing down their homes and rebuilding more

expensive, higher rent properties from which the former tenants would be excluded. Anticipating

such actions, thousands of tenants organised themselves against this possibility. [9]

After the earthquake in southern Italy in 1980, it was noted that The main function of the Army

has been conceived and operated as one of social control. Relief came a long way behind, as a

social priority. Radical workers and students linked to the Autonomia movement set up a first

aid centre and canteen in one of the worst hit areas near Conza as well as exposing the

misappropriation of relief funds by a local colonel, for which some of them were arrested and

sent back to Rome accused of causing dissension among the population.[10]

In Bhopal (India), where 200,000 are still living with the chronic effects of the 1984 disaster, there

has been continuing struggle down to the present day at the time of writing women were

blocking traffic in the city, burning effigies and shouting Death to Union Carbide.[11]

There are also plenty of examples of collective action to prevent the risks of disaster, in particular

strikes over health and safety issues. A major recent example was the lengthy strike at the

Hema Chemical Industries plant in Vadodara, Gujerat (India) where workers were suffering the

side effects of working with chromium.[12] Concern over safety has been one of the issues instrikes by London Underground workers in the UK. The struggles to prevent deforestation in

various parts of the world also have a disaster prevention aspect.

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No logo: Capitalism without corporations?

The past few years have seen the emergence of a significant international anti-capitalist

movement, focused particularly on international institutions such as the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund. We have seen mass demonstrations and riots in the City ofLondon, Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Gothenburg, Genoa and elsewhere. Within this movement

there is an awareness of the links between disasters and capitalism, particularly in relation to

climate change. This was most explicit in the actions against the UN Climate Convention in the

Hague, Netherlands (November 2000) which highlighted the floods in Mozambique earlier in the

year.[13]

Within this movement too there is a contradictory and fluctuating mix of those desiring a radically

different society and those asking our rulers to take better charge of the situation. Even within the

former category, there is still confusion about what capitalism actually is. We believe that theother texts by Bordiga collected in this volume - The Spirit of Horse Power and The Doctrine of

the Body Possessed by the Devil - provide some useful pointers.

A good example of some of the misconceptions around capitalism is to be found in Naomi

Kleins influential No Logo.[14]This book includes some very good descriptions of processes at

work in the global economy - the relentless expansion of corporations into all areas of social life,

the disappearance of unmarketed space, branding as spectacular production, the relocation of

work from the west to export processing zones, casualisation and so on.

Using Bordigas (and Marxs) analysis we can say that these features of modern capitalism are

significant but ultimately superficial. We could imagine a world without Nike, Coca Cola or the

Gap where daily life still continued much as before - indeed we need only to look at the former

USSR to see that this is the case.

In the former Soviet Union there was little branding or any of the other trappings of corporate

culture that Klein takes as being characteristic of capitalism. The state, far from being

marginalised, was at the centre of the economy. Did this make it any less capitalist? Bordiga is

clear that the answer is no. He polemicised against those who held that society was radically

different in the USSR because of the states role in the economy. The critique is aimed both at

Stalinists who argued that the social programme is enacted when individual property becomes

state property, when the factory is nationalised (Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil)

and at those who criticised the USSR but saw it as a new form of class society or, like

Trotskyists, as a degenerated workers state.

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The example of the USSR shows that capitalism can survive not only without advertising but

without the individual capitalist or even the corporation. Despite the high-profile Chief Executives

of many modern corporations, the role of the individual capitalist, the top-hatted factory owner of

old socialist propaganda, has been diminishing since the dawn of capitalism: The physical

person of the individual master is thus not required, and bit by bit he disappears into the pores of

share capital, of management boards, of state-run boards, of the political state, which has

become (since a long time ago) entrepreneur and manufacturer, and into the very latest vile form

of the state which pretends to be the workers themselves and thus is able to tie them to the feet

of the sinister steel automatons. (The Spirit of Horse Power).

What characterises capital is its life cycle which consists only in its movement as value

perpetually set in motion so as to multiply itself (Doctrine...). Whether the profit generated in

production is reinvested by shareholders, or is used by the state to expand production, the

process is essentially the same. The same too is the result for the majority of the population -

forced to sell their labour in order to survive and to buy back the products of their and others

labour through the market (even if that market is controlled by the state).

The State

In one of her most revealingly reformist passages Klein argues: Political solutions - accountable

to people and enforceable by their elected representatives - deserve another shot before we

throw in the towel and settle for corporate codes, independent monitors and the privatisation of

our coll

Amadeo Bordiga - Murdering the Dead

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