== CWO Introduction

This is the third part of our serialisation of the Onorato Damen’s book Bordiga Beyond the Myth (https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2018-10-02/bordiga-beyond-the-myth). We have already published the main article “Bordiga: Beyond the Myth and the Rhetoric” and “The Outline of the Disagreement” which prefaces these Five Letters.

The latter was published on our website in 2012 and the url is at the bottom of this introduction.

The Outline is historically significant as an explanation of the real causes of the split with Bordiga and his followers which came to a head in 1951. First however we should try to explain the title “Overturning Praxis”. Damen is thinking of the transformation of one situation of accepted theory and practice (praxis) into another. In short we could equate it to the process of revolution. And the title is the key to the debate. Bordiga who never joined the party, never attended a single one of its Congresses (not even the ones where the split was discussed) had concluded by 1950 that capitalism had stabilised and that therefore the task of the party was to return back to the task of study.

Interestingly Damen does not dispute that they are living under the counter-revolution. He even thinks a third world war is likely. What he does insist though is that the proletariat has a permanent need to strive for a revolutionary party. He states elsewhere that the Internationalist Communist Party did not come into existence in 1943-5 just through the will of a “handful of individuals” but because it responded to a specific crisis of capitalism and the needs of a working class ready to struggle. The party grew to several thousand by 1948 but once the post-war boom and Marshall Plan money began to filter through the Italian state was stabilised (with a lot of help from the Italian Communist Party of Togliatti). This led to a decline in membership and Bordiga now began to campaign for a retreat to theoretical work. Damen insisted that the only meaningful theoretical work had to be made in the light of real activity within an organisation rooted in the class, hence his insistence on “praxis”. Theoretical work without being rooted in the real life and struggle of the class is empty and sterile, even politically dangerous. He illustrates this in the Outline by reference to some of Bordiga’s oscillations most notably on abstentionism and on the class nature of Russia. In the letters which follow the Outline of Disagreement Onorio took up the case of the class nature of the USSR again. He was trying to get Bordiga to commit himself to a class position on the USSR by accepting that its mode of production was a variant of capitalism but Bordiga used all kinds of arguments (sometimes attributing to Damen positions he did not hold) and evasions to avoid a definitive statement on the issue. The other factor that should be mentioned (but it can be read in the letters) is that Bordiga had a certain contempt for open discussion in the organs and meetings of the Internationalist Communist Party. He preferred to influence others through letters to this or that person (in particular to Vercesi [Ottorino Perrone] and Bruno Maffi). Damen criticised this modus operandi more than once and made him all the more keen to see the letters between them published. In a further last letter to Bordiga on 23 March 1952 on the question of Congresses of the Party which Bordiga had always opposed Damen added a postscript.

"The first number of the revived Prometeo will come out in a few days with the five letters which we exchanged which clearly shed light on the major reasons for our disagreement on the big issues of the day. The “defunct” Executive Committee has already distributed it but as usual in a partial and biased way. All our press and the internal communications of the party will be regularly sent to you. Greetings."

The “defunct” Executive had already voted to expel the Damen faction in the summer of 1951 thus making the split inevitable. Bordiga’s reply was less than polite. After various personal insults (including that Damen was “stato in una condizione di minorazione” i.e. mentally handicapped) he ended their correspondence for good with the following:

"After this I ignore what you say to judge, criticise or worse, threaten me. Publish what you like: I beg you only not to address anything more to me, neither press nor anything else and to carry on as if you did not know my address."

In writing this Bordiga set the tone for what our comrades call “late Bordigism”. For Bordiga there was no worthwhile discussion to be had with anyone else and the work of the Italian Left after 1928 had contributed nothing. Ironically for a tendency that started by questioning the very existence of a party in a period of counter-revolution the Bordigists then went on to found their own International Communist Party. The Internationalist Communist Party that Damen, Stefanini and others started in 1942-3 was always a work in progress. Being a real (if small) Party it had had different tendencies within it as it came to grips with the new reality after the Second World war. Despite the opposition of Bordiga’s surrogates (like Vercesi) it gradually worked out new positions on the relation of the economic and political struggle (the union question) concluding that the unions were now part of the capitalist state apparatus, it rejected support for national liberation struggles as no longer possible in an age of imperialism, it definitively concluded that one of the great errors of the October Revolution had been that the Party had tried to take on the task of social transformation which could only be carried out by the class as a whole. Finally and this is the main subject of this correspondence the Internationalist Communist Party insisted that the failure of the October Revolution had produced in the Soviet Union a capitalism albeit of a new type. All these principles were rejected by Bordiga and initially by the International Communist Party which itself went on to split several times over precisely their lack of clarity on the questions of the union, and national liberation. Today there are many claiming the title International Communist Party but there is still only one Internationalist Communist Party which has continued to provide a point of reference for internationalists into our own era.

Before going to the letters readers are invited to read Damen’s own introduction to these letters at http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2011-08-27/bordiga-beyond-the-myth.

== (First Letter) Onorio to Alfa – 6 July 1951

I have examined your edited document tracing your reasons for attacking certain theoretical and political positions prevailing in some international groups almost all coming from Trotskyism, and I’ll say straight away that, in certain ways, I preferred your oral exposition in Rome to the written version, for its greater acuteness of analysis and perhaps also for its greater completeness.

I’ll summarise some of my hurried observations for you.

In section 5 of your basic lines of orientation you state that in Russia the economy tends to capitalism and give the reason for it on page 8 where you write that

"The monetary, mercantile, income and ownership character of the predominant Russian economic fabric is not nullified by the statification of the big industries, services, etc."

It looks to me as if you are not making clear here the idea of a soviet economy as a state capitalist structure in a world economy which has reached its highest stage of monopoly.

The tendency to an ever greater intervention of the state, which is characteristic in this economic period of the most highly industrialised countries, finds in the soviet economy it’s most complete, defined and organic expression. Being in the general line of development of monopoly capitalism enabled Russia to miss out more than one stage, thanks to the October Revolution which allowed the most absolute centralisation of the economy within the orbit of the state,. In addition, thanks to the Stalinist counter-revolution, it made use of this enormous centralised economic potential to massively increase the power of the state and open the way to this latest capitalist experience.

The protagonist of this historic period is therefore the state whose economy reproduces, on a wider scale perhaps, the methods and characteristics which really belong to capitalist production and distribution (wage labour, market, surplus value, accumulation etc…).

What is the new class which exercises its dictatorship through the means of this state? The enormous power of the soviet state cannot have failed to concretely resolve the problem of a homogenous and strong ruling class through the consciousness which it has of its own being and of the historic function which it is called upon to carry out.

It doesn’t seem to me that what you write on this is satisfactory or gives clear guidance to the international groups which are so divided and confused on this problem of the definition of the new soviet ruling class. It is not historically possible that the most centralised and iron exercise of power which history has ever recorded can be called a

"…hybrid coalition and fluid association between internal interests of the petty bourgeois, and middle bourgeois, class, duplicitous entrepreneurs and international capitalist interests etc."

Further in section 5 of the basic lines of orientation on the

"conveyance of class forces in every country to the terrain of autonomy in the face of all the states"

You entrust the supreme task to

"Breaking capitalist power in the more advanced industrialised countries of the West who block the road to revolution."

Which leads us to ask: is it only the most advanced industrialised economies of the West which stand in the way of revolution?

Further on, on page 3 still in the same argument you write

"This confused and unfavourable outcome for the proletarian struggle at the same time as the unstoppable increase in highly concentrated capitalist industrialisation, both in its intensity in the countries where it started, as well as in its wider extension throughout the inhabited world, is to the advantage of the advanced countries through which the greatest force in modern imperialism, the American, tends, according to the nature and needs of any great concentration of metropolitan capital, of productive forces, of power, brutally smashing all territorial and social obstacles, to subject the masses of the entire world to its exploitation and oppression."

We have to again ask ourselves: is it really only America, the greatest force of modern imperialism, which tends to subjugate, etc. the masses of the entire world?

In another step in another of your recent writings, which I don’t however have to hand, you speak of a pacifist Russia in the face of a warlike America.

"The leitmotif is therefore always the same: only through an error of soviet diplomacy or through a mistaken calculation by its politicians such as that in the last war with a political strategy – allowing the remnants of the great Communist International to be shamefully dissolved –_ (wasn’t it already rotten to the bone and tied body and soul to imperialism?) _which led to the reinforcement of western imperialist power which the Russian government and state recognised too late as a greater threat than Germany to their now openly national interests."

In short Moscow is seen as the centre of a mistaken, ineffectual policy, even from the point of view of pure national interests, and not as the centre of imperialism on a par with the USA with a Russian perspective for world domination.

The proletariat’s anti-capitalist revolution will not leave out, we would like to think, the soviet regime, and it does not move according to some order of priority of capitalist countries to be overthrown, but strikes at the adversary when and how it can, wherever it appears the weakest. In 1917 for example it struck international capitalism in Tsarist Russia which was certainly not considered ripe for socialism compared to Britain or Germany etc and we know very well why.

For the rest, I would stress the critical analysis which allows us to state the following: that the aversion to Stalinism of all the splits started more from an impulse to defend the individual, and national independence, rather than from the needs of the class and the concern to bring living and active material to the reconstruction of the international party of the proletariat.

== (Second Letter) Alfa to Onorio – 9 July 1951

I certainly appreciated the contribution of your observations to the international appeal proposed by me and I am responding immediately on the principal issues.

I take first your observation relating to page 3. You ask: Is it only America that tends to subject others, etc? – but you yourself have quoted my qualification: according to the nature and necessity of the greatest metropolitan concentration of capital, of forces of production and of power.

Therefore, not just America, but any concentration. Where, and what, do you find in the different historic stages of these concentrations? This is the point. We have to take into account: its territory and its resources, population, development of its industrial machinery, numbers of modern proletarians, colonial possessions as well as raw materials, human reserves, markets, historic continuity of its state power, outcome of the recent wars, progress in the global concentration of forces both in production and in armaments. And then we can conclude that in 1905 six great powers were on the same level or almost, in 1914 it was only Germany and England which competed against each other: today? If we examine all those factors we can see that America is the No. 1 concentration in the sense that, (way beyond the rest and it is beyond doubt that in any future conflict it will win) it can certainly intervene anywhere where an anti-capitalist revolution is victorious. In this historic sense I say that today the revolution, which can only be international, will waste its time if it does not take out the US state in Washington D.C.(1) Does this mean that we are a long way from that? Okay.

We come then to the usual question: the analysis and definition of Russian society today. You know full well that I think that on this point one can and must say as little as possible, and that with circumspection. It is an elaboration carried out by the movement over a long period, it is a new given in history, the first example of a revolution which shrivels and disappears. I will give what contribution I can but I don’t believe in the existence of some high priest who can reply by opening the Talmud and pointing to this or that verse. Naturally I said more about this in Rome and will say more about it in Prometeo in good time. You compare two things which are on different levels: in truth I am somewhat worried by such lack of understanding amongst all, truly all, I am not making a personal argument, who feel driven and predisposed to take on the task of leadership. The appeal has some value in a negative sense (like all the decisive propositions of Marxism which if not really negative are at least “alternative”) it is useful, in establishing demarcations between us and others you like to call “political” since that is an adjective you like. You can read in a few minutes that over several hours in Rome we dealt with problems which were on one side scientific analysis (I would say “research”, “examinations” as I am not keen on “analysis” even if it is fashionable) and on the other of tactical praxis. Both together, for greater force, completeness and detail.

I now come to Russia. I would like those who collaborate in defining the appeal to formulate positively the alternatives which they are proposing. Does the formula of the monopolistic and state capitalist phase appear complete to you? It is extremely indecisive to me. You are applying it to the regime of Mussolini as well as to present day Britain and to Russia. Two different ways to arrive at similar positions? To be sure it is a good propaganda concept but for pity’s sake let’s avoid confusions. In what I say don’t think I am identifying in what you have written the mistakes I am going to indicate, but you must precisely propose your version of the argument; you and any of the others who have made observations, work which I believe will be useful in that it is very different from the “material for the whole organisation”, with its usual this or that is stupid.

It is not accurate to say that the bourgeoisie was the protagonist in one period of capitalism and that the State is the protagonist today. Class and State are different things and ideas are not interchangeable. Before you still had the State, and after you still have the Class. The State is not the leading factor in economic facts but is derived from them: if politics don’t arise from the economy but the economy from politics and the management of power then the Marxist interpretation of history is dead (and those who think that should say it clearly!) and the old theories, which still seem new to imbeciles, that history is created from the desires of the leaders, and the need of those who have wealth to rule, are back in fashion.

The same stupidity is more or less arrived at by those who ask: in the first phase the protagonists in the duel were the bourgeoisie and proletariat, now let’s take a torch and go in search of the third … man. A third class? They won’t find it and so the response is: the State, just as those who were searching for the third man would say: here he is, it is this pair of trousers. Or rather the response is that the bureaucracy is the new class. What the devil does this mean? I don’t know if you have my writings on this: all class regimes have had a bureaucracy: it cannot be “a class”. In our language the bureaucracy is one of the “forms of production” whilst the classes are forces of production, throughout history.

You will know among my texts (it would be useful if you would criticise them and raise objections) those in which it says that state capitalism doesn’t mean the subjection of capital to the state but a further subjection of the state to capital.

Capital – capitalism – capitalist or bourgeois class – capitalist or bourgeois state. We are not mixing things up. We need historic order to make some sense in our heads.

Formerly there was already capital but not yet the rest. This capital began to concentrate forces of production (materials, men, machines) and capitalism started but the State was not yet bourgeois. Then came the bourgeois class, the union of all those who were high up in the new capitalist system of production but were low in the State. This class took power because capitalism needed very different forms from the old ones. We had a new State, with a new bureaucracy, and so on.

Marx (take him or leave him) pointed out that in “post-capitalism” (another stupid fashionable word): the proletariat takes power and ushers in socialism. The bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state oppose it.

What precisely is the class? A collection of people? That’s a bad way to put it. It is instead a “network of interests”. You don’t like my complicated formula of a meeting of interests? I see it as a wise step forward whilst I see little in the confused play on words: capital, State, bureaucracy.

When classes were still castes, and then orders, it coincided with fixed groups of people (of families). After the bourgeois revolution, despite the cardinal right of inheritance it was no longer so. A peer of France was a nobody across the Channel. A capitalist was a someone everywhere.

All these elementary things – which I don’t spell out as an adversary – it is just better to repeat them as you are being difficult – open up in the Russian question. Admittedly we don’t have enough facts (Marx could call on all the material in the British Museum, faithful picture of English capitalism, but we cannot set up in Moscow where we would find only fake documents) on the official definition of the dominant class in Russia. We cannot make a single step forward without the famous “bureaucracy”. I have already done a lot in recognising the existence of a strata of entrepreneurs without property titles to the means of production who benefit in an important way from profits. But the bureaucracy can also be like that in our countries, an instrument of the latter and their big businesses, like a business agent abroad.

The bureaucracy governs and gorges itself for itself alone? But what can this mean? The State personalised in a network of functionaries, the class –State? Nonsense.

To us, it is Monsieur de la Palisse.(2) In state capitalism there are only bureaucrats in the population, even factory workers are functionaries. The Boss-State, an old anarchoid formula. However this is a text that I intend to write and this is not the place to say more on the Russian economic argument.

But you say to me, why are your guns just trained on the West? Anyone would think that the revolution need not take place in Russia. I accept the comment: I am going to say something to avoid this great misunderstanding. Though it is difficult to give the laws of the process for a failed revolution we can say that any further process can be nothing but a new class revolution.

I have never said or written otherwise. But we will also give here, though badly and in a great hurry and ad usum Onorii(3), not “for all the organisation”, a little clarification. You are right that the texts must be done. It is better to do them than to argue.

Neither you nor I have the keys and levers to unleash the revolution in Washington or in Moscow and we cannot choose just what turn history will take. The revolution can begin anywhere, as in 1917. Fine. But was it an act of will or a product of history? What were the circumstances? Feudal regime, military defeat, split between the State and the bourgeois class etc, this is well known. And then we say “the world revolution can begin anywhere”.

Be careful that you too could be a staliniser. It is Stalin who says the Russian proletarian revolution was born, grew and will live here on its own.

The question has therefore to be seen internationally. Just as with the economy, “this network of interests” which is the bourgeois regime, is international. So also in politics, the question of power is international. In the two domains this characteristic has gone on being clarified for a century.

Today the historical issue is this: the Stalinists put all their propaganda into attacking America, and on peace. The proletariat follows them and up to now that has been undeniable. You recognise, or at least concede, that it is important to make clear the danger of opposing them through liberalism, of persons or peoples, and not on a class basis.

We are talking about not just limiting ourselves to accusing Stalinism over its Russian nationalist errors but of basing ourselves on the anti-class nature of its position: 1944 all its forces with America, dissolution [of the Comintern in 1943 – translator] etc – 1951, all against America, in order to say you betrayed us then, and, as you rightly say, a long time before that.

It is already very daring (in the struggle against the terrible ignorance in which the West and East are competing) to “politically” say to the Stalinists: take care, you won’t beat America this way, we the defenders of the class will beat it, it will only be beaten by the world proletariat on a class basis which will equally be autonomous of any relation even with you.

It is a useless bluff just to say: We put you both on the same level, one not a millimetre above the other and then in one go we’ll make you fall like ninepins, both with the same ball.

The Left must defend itself from the stupid accusation of not being able to make sense of history and of mumbling abstract theses: they must prove that it is the others who have not understood history.

After the period of national liberation which settled that any alliance should be pitilessly condemned, the explanation of capitalism’s survival had to be posed, not through the discovery of recipes such as the leading role of the State in the economy, but in the imperial relations of the great industrial apparatuses and in the persistence, not of invasions of territory, not of defeats in wars but of the State apparatus (the representative committee of capitalist interests, as Marx rightly said, whether or not the State manages firms and shops) which is historically the most continuous and persistent.

Undoubtedly the concentration of power in Moscow is also an obstacle barring the way to revolution and it is not only as the capital of proletarian corruption but also as a physical force in itself. But it has only been around for 34 years. Its territory and peoples are a mixture of social and economic types.

Germany and Japan are prostrate, France and Italy have been tremendously shaken. England itself is in a serious crisis.

And this is what makes America key. Another few years and the police of the UN will be effective and only a few minutes from every part of the world

If possible we could drag the Big Moustache from Moscow and put in his place, in order not to offend anyone, Alfa: Truman who is already thinking about it will arrive within five minutes.

Have I explained myself? If that is not the case then this means I myself have become stupid. This is not so serious, from the point of view of my dialectical Marxist convictions and not from voluntarism. I will do that little text, have no doubt.

== (Third Letter) Onorio to Alfa 23 July 1951

I reply, and in the same tone, as you wished.

The first observation which I am compelled to make is on the somewhat … sour tone of your letter which the content, and perhaps the form, of my observations have unwittingly provoked. In writing to you I started from concern about how the international groups, for whom the address is intended, would respond to our way of posing if not resolving, but at least defining the limits of the objective and subjective possibilities, of the problems of the revival of the international revolutionary groups.

Agreed about the “political” sense – are you pleased? – that had led you to give a defined and, in a certain sense negative, value to the address. This is more appropriate if we don’t want to reject those who are coming closer to us and possibly could join us. But I don’t agree with your method of discussion, even if it is polite, which has the need at times to create arguments which are sometimes fictitious and at others, completely arbitrary. You give these opinions your own meaning, and the way you engage in combat gives the impression that your formulations are the real or hidden opinions of those who contradict you. It’s fine to follow the thread of your own argument but take into account sometimes, and in an objective manner, what those you are discussing with are really saying.

I’ll follow the order of your letter of 9 July.

America as Concentration No. 1? The formulation is right on the condition that it is understood that international capitalism taken as a single whole, even if differentiated by unequal development, has in America “the greatest metropolitan concentration of capital, of forces of production and of power.”

But where do we get to when we translate this on to the level of tactics and political strategy? We get to your statement that “America is the No. 1 concentration in the sense that, (way beyond the rest and it is beyond doubt that in any future conflict it will win) [who would be able to stop it, I would add, and to what purpose?!] it can certainly intervene anywhere an anti-capitalist revolution is victorious.

Defeat today would come about like that. But with what result? Should we perhaps for this reason proclaim that revolution in this or that country would be useless until the proletariat has done away with the state in Washington D.C.? We are not joking, even if what you write must be understood historically.

I’ll go back to what I said before on this argument.

"The proletarian revolution strikes its class enemies when and how it can, wherever they appear weakest."

Do I really have to add for your benefit that the revolution, even if it breaks out in Roccacannuccia(4), is always just one moment in the international revolution, yet you feel free to paraphrase just for me what Stalin would have said?

What is interesting though is the theoretical question raised here.

I would put it to you like this. According to theory a revolutionary outbreak has to logically take place in some given concentration of power etc. etc. of the world capitalist order in which the accumulation of economic contradictions and the social antagonisms of capitalist domination have become more intense without the presumption, however, that this has “economically reached the ultimate limits of its development”.

At this point, instead of posing the problem as you do, in my view in a unilateral and static manner, of the suffocating intervention of the UN (and why not also that of the Cominform police who are no less interested in strangling the revolution?), we have to pose the other, historically more lively, problem which rests on the capacity and explosive potential of a first revolutionary outburst to spread in a world which is objectively ripe for socialism. It is the only way for the socialist revolution to concretely pose how to overcome Washington as well: in this sense and only in this sense “the revolution is not its wasting time”. But it surely is a waste if the revolution kicks its heels just waiting messianically for the conquest of power in the United States. The proletariat would certainly miss all the opportunities which the capitalist crisis can offer, no matter where, if it subordinates its international mission to the conquest of power in the United States.

On the basis of the Bolshevik October we know that the dynamic towards the widening of revolutionary struggle inherent in any victorious radical overthrow of power, in part achieved, in part potential, cannot be measured scientifically in advance. It is a type of “atomic” reserve which every revolution carries within it. Does the psychological break widen it? The revolution breaks out, overcoming all obstacles with the world as its objective. In the opposite case the revolution is defeated, dies on its feet and “shrivels” as you say, and disappears. But this is the way, and it is the only way.

And let’s come to the analysis and definition of Russian society today. You will note that on this subject I limit myself to the indirect formulation of questions and objections.

You write

"It is not exact to say that the bourgeoisie was the protagonist in one period of capitalism and that the State is the protagonist today."

Have you fished this inaccuracy from my writing perhaps and then formulated it in such a clumsy manner? Would it not have been more correct and even more useful in clarifying things if you were forced to take in to account even critically the importance of the objection I feel I have to try to put to you. I’ll repeat what I wrote on the “economy and State” discussion.

"The tendency to an ever greater intervention of the state, which is characteristic in this economic period of the most highly industrialised countries, finds in the Soviet economy it’s most complete, defined and organic expression etc. etc."

Further on

"Being in the general line of development of monopoly capitalism enabled Russia to miss out more than one stage, thanks to the October Revolution, which allowed the most absolute centralisation of the economy within the orbit of the state and, thanks to the Stalinist counter-revolution, it made use of this enormous centralised economic potential to massively increase the power of the state and open the way to this latest capitalist experience."

"The protagonist of this historic period is therefore the state whose economy reproduces, on a wider scale perhaps, the methods and characteristics which really belong to capitalist production and distribution (wage labour, market, surplus value, accumulation etc…)."

Forgive the length of the quotation but you compel me to show that no-one has confused and even less mixed up the terms “economy and State” and it is entirely useless to claim, as you do, that the State does not play a leading role in economic activity. It would have been