PDF-Version: On the Thread of Time – “Racial” Pressure of the Peasantry, Class Pressure of Coloured Peoples

Norms of Marxist Work



Since our object is not aesthetic or literary production and criticism, comrades and readers need not linger to appreciate the passage, page or text we publish, but must always bear in mind the link between the different parts of the work accomplished by our little movement in its effort to redraw according to a unitary plan all the lines of the Marxist edifice.[1]

We have not undertaken a dictation of a will. What guides our work in reality, therefore, is not a method of systematic exposure, but the need to face up to the ruptures and faults that have weakened the revolutionary movement in the various fields. However, in each of our interventions, we always keep in mind its connection within the unique framework to which all previous interventions are attached.

After the reading of a text, there is no question of organising “free elections” in one’s heart of hearts, of summoning the legislature, and then going to the polls. On the contrary, the reader should make every effort to “place” the analysed facts in the orderly system of our programme. He should not pass judgments, but should perform his own share of the work.

It is not individuals, theorists or professors who are speaking here, it is the facts; we confront, we collide the past facts with the present and future facts, thus experimentally confirming the results of analogous confrontations that have been taking place for about a century.

In a letter to one of those who believes in the Cartesian duty of criticism (a respectable instrument that we admire in the hands of the bourgeoisie: with it, it has been able to forge more than five centuries of the history of human society; but we have already grasped other tools), a comrade wrote the following: “The present situation, characterised by the transitory absence of an autonomous movement of the proletariat, forces us – in the field of our practical activity – to vindicate the integrity of our classical texts, to fight against any adulteration, to know how to wait for the inevitable upheaval of situations to once again pose the problem of the practical connection between the programme and the proletarian struggles, not to substitute our intellect for these struggles to solve problems that a hundred and one times out of a hundred are insinuated to us by the bourgeoisie”.

Two points to be established

It seems the time has come to draw attention to two points of Marxism, which we have certainly not failed to address and which are closely linked: the agrarian question, and the national-colonial question. This will be done in future written elaborations and work meetings, with of course interruptions, parentheses and hangups: we are not a ministry that distributes portfolios under the clownish pretext of particular competences.

We will do so naturally by promising not to invent or disseminate anything new, but always by reconnecting with to the solid historical material at our disposal: and not in order to submit to democratic opinions, but to show that when all the facts in their materiality are nailed down in their place, Madame Opinion has almost as much freedom as the image that is formed on the screen according to the laws of optical propagation and light sensitivity.

In previous years, we have dealt with Marxist economics mainly in terms of the scientific description of the society characterised by associated labour, and the programme that is dialectically inseparable from it. This part of the Marxist critique “assumes” a fully developed capitalist society for two reasons. First, because the enemy school maintains that all the social disadvantages and all the causes of imbalance would disappear if all the economic relations of society were of a mercantile and wage nature. Secondly, because, if we want to define communist society scientifically, in its opposite and antithetical characteristics to those of capitalist society, as the end point of historical development and not as a cold and static picture, we can only start from a fully developed pre-communist society, and thus from a supposedly complete capitalism. As we have shown, Marx chose England to draw data from, but he knows well that it was, and is, only in part, purely capitalist, and he ignores the non-capitalist parts that remain. We have shown in another text that Marx himself affirms this, and that he insists on all the social forms present in England (although to a lesser degree than elsewhere) and foreign to the three forms on which he bases his demonstration of the inevitability of the crisis: industrial enterprise, land ownership, wage labour.

However, in the historical part – we could even say geographical, social geography – of his work, which he develops in parallel with this “master” theory of the pure capitalist economy, all the “impure” zones and phases are considered and analysed in depth. And account is taken of the often leading and most important role played by the surviving classes associated with pre-capitalism (peasants, craftsmen, small traders, etc.), as well as the historical development of countries that have not yet entered the capitalist phase, and in particular of non-white races that are still not only feudal, but even still under the thrall of slavery and barbarity.

Historical and “philosophical” part

Marx thus devoted much of his work to establishing the entities and laws that govern the economy of capitalism and to defining the conditions of the communist demands. Today, as in Lenin’s time, most of the correct theses have been forgotten and distorted, even though current historical data gives them even greater force. However, we have not overlooked the “geography of the areas of class struggle and revolution” and the changes in the limits of these areas as pure industrial forms become dominant in the advanced countries and as production and the capitalist market spread over the backward countries.

At the basis of the Marxist doctrine is the confrontation between a completed capitalist form and a proletariat covering all sectors of productive labour; the aim of the revolutionary organisation is to weave a complete international network to wage a struggle that takes place on a world scale. This being so, it would be pure nonsense to claim that mixed situations must simply be ignored, and that the weight of social forces and state bodies related to them cannot be influential and even decisive for the task and action proper to the modern working class.

In developing the economic and social theory of capitalism and its culmination in communism, with many references to the history and geography of the impure phases, we have also developed what is commonly called the “philosophical” part of Marxism, that is, our theory of historical dynamics, causes and laws that govern historical facts, giving the solution to the famous problems of conscience, will and action that are at the origin of so many false orientations. We have shown that Marx’s economic determinism, Marx’s historical and dialectical materialism, which so many people deny (we are more than ever ready to fight them), can only mean the negation of the idea that the action of the individual is preceded by conscience and will, and that through this action he could influence the history of communities. We have therefore examined once again, in a manner immutably and textually consistent with the first statements of the Marxist method, the nature and function of the class party. It is only in the class party, which is an impersonal organ, that we can speak of a praxis based on theoretical knowledge and voluntary decision; these do not depend on free arbitrary choices but on previously fixed orientations and the fulfilment of certain given conditions, which can be studied, discovered, experimented with, but never provoked by recipes, expedients, stratagems or manoeuvres.

Directly related to this problem is that of tactics, that is to say, methods of action appropriate to the different phases and conditions of historical development. Here too, without ever being able to say that our work is complete, we have gathered a useful and solid material, resorting at almost every step to the indispensable clarifications of principle in order to avoid the errors that are always possible.

One of the most considerable errors is the assertion – so often wrongly attributed to the communist “left”, in order to get rid of its criticisms, raised in 1920 and confirmed by history with brilliance – that we should only deal with a situation “with two characters”, the wage-earning proletarians against the capitalist entrepreneurs, and that the movement and the party of the proletarians have nothing to see, nothing to say, nothing to do when a third character enters the scene. It is therefore useful to dissect once again the peasant question and the question of nationalities, for the time being we will be satisfied with a quick documentary synthesis showing that the Left, far from ignoring them, has always given them its full attention.

Yesterday

Before Lenin

In more detailed presentations, it will be necessary first of all to recall the results established by Marx on these two great questions; the agrarian and the national question.

For the first, the presentation of Book III of Capital on ground rent provides fundamental elements. In order to show that in the hypothetical pure capitalist society, as long as the power of capital has not yet got rid of landowners by nationalising land and buildings (which would not yet be socialism, far from it), ground rent is formed as part of the surplus value, Marx has given us, according to the method of economic determinism, the theory and the “models” of pre-capitalist types of society where the agrarian economy predominates in non-bourgeois forms. And just as he pits his “model” of modern industrial production against those of classical and vulgar economists, so he pits his models and patterns of pre-industrial economies against those of physiocratic or mercantilist economists.

On the other hand, in the texts of Marx, and also of Engels, on class struggles in France and Germany, we find countless historical applications, as well as all the elements of the doctrine that Lenin later had to restore against the crude 2nd International revisionism of the conservative monks who had put themselves at the head of the urban proletariat.

As for the question of nationalities, Marx did not pay less attention to it, as evidenced not only by the historical part of his economic works, but also by the texts of the International and numerous letters of his incessant correspondence. It is indisputable that Marx was not only interested in the struggles for national liberation, but also gave support to the proletarians and communists, for example, in the struggle of Poland against Russia, and in that of backward and agricultural Ireland against modern and industrial England. No less fundamental is the interest accorded by Engels (as we have recalled in another text) to the wars of national constitution in continental Europe before the war of 1870-71.

Dialectical Overlaps

The meaning of all this is that in given geographical areas and in given historical phases, which are clearly defined within the framework of the general Marxist theory of the historical course (and which cannot emerge at any moment like a devil out of a box), it often happens that the struggle of a mass of small peasants against the landowners accelerates the bourgeois revolution and the liberation of the modern productive forces from the hindrance of the traditional relations of production; this liberation is the indispensable premise for the struggle and for the subsequent proletarian demands. In the same way, it often happens that the liberation of forces compressed by old relations can only take place following a war of national independence, or a war linked to an irredentist demand. Not only must these situations be recognised and provided for in doctrine, but if there are already mature proletarian class forces, they can only support those movements which open the way for modern productive forces. Consequently, in the areas and phases mentioned above (from which we must resolutely exclude bourgeois Europe after 1871), proletarians will support these movements, for which it is indisputable that the most radical bourgeois strata and forces are essentially fighting.

In these areas and in these times, the error and defeatism do not lie in the alliance with movements – insurrectional movements – with an agrarian or national basis, but precisely in the ignorance of the fact that these movements have a democratic and capitalist goal. Around 1860, Marx urged the workers to fight for the Warsaw insurgents, but at the same time he attacked in the most ruthless manner the radical liberal, patriotic and democratic ideology of the leaders of these movements. What would be dangerous, on the other hand, would be to sacrifice, in order to pass through this critical phase, a proletarian force already developed on an autonomous class level, letting it adopt the doctrine and policy of national freedom as an end in itself, and admitting that it can be a patrimony, a common platform for bourgeois and proletarians from all eternity. When Lenin said that it was inevitable to favour a bourgeois form, he called it bourgeois in full, and not proletarian as the renegade communists still do today (cf. the brothel of the partisan liberations). It is therefore a question of understanding the dialectic, and one cannot make up for it by denying the facts and historical necessities; even the son of God could not remove a certain chalice from his lips. But it happens to every revolutionary who has not yet assimilated the dialectic, but who believes that he is reasoning with complete freedom and conscience, to unconsciously presuppose that his ego, placed outside the world and against the world, possesses a little bit of divinity. So it is not a question of proposing to proletarians and militants to put on chastity belts, but of grasping the historical meaning of the event, which constitutes a double negation: Warsaw workers, going forward alongside the bourgeois to deny tsarist power, because you have to pass through that to deny bourgeois power. Try, however difficult it may be, to give the bourgeois a hand, but without thinking with their heads for all that. Determinism is the interplay of myriads of units and forces acting on a world scale, not the result of an artificial harmonisation of each individual’s action with his will, conscience and thought…

The Congress of the Communist International

We reserve the right to come back in more detail to the Marxist texts which fully confirm the above, and from which we have already drawn much inspiration, let us come to the positions taken at the constitution of the Moscow International, in particular at the World Congress of 1920, where it is known that the theses on the agrarian question and on the national and colonial question were written and presented by Lenin himself. At this congress, which preceded the constitution of the Communist Party of Italy, the Left expressed clear differences wherever they arose; they intervened above all on the question of parliamentarianism, clashing with Lenin himself, on the question of the splitting of the Italian Socialist Party (in agreement with Lenin), and on the question of the conditions of admission, aimed particularly at the German and French Right, putting forward proposals which Lenin accepted and introduced into the text (the famous 21st condition).

The question of parliamentarianism led to that of tactics, and the divergence on this question appeared more clearly in 1921, 1922, 1924, 1926 in the interventions of the Italian delegations belonging to the left of the Communist Party of Italy, of which this current represented until 1924 the enormous majority.[2]

If the Italian left had had the slightest objection to opposing the theses on the agrarian question and on the colonial question, it would not have failed to express it openly. However, when we go through the minutes and the reports, we find no trace of them. On the other hand, one finds in texts on these questions unequivocal statements of position on Marxist theses, in perfect accord with the profound meaning of Lenin’s doctrinal and historical restoration.

On the contrary, it was the right-wing elements, Serrati and Graziadei, who strongly opposed these theses (as we have recalled in the article entitled “Orient”[3]). These texts are well known and it should therefore be clear that from 1920 to 1953, nothing in our analysis of these problems changed, contrary to what some comrades seemed to believe about the Genoa Conference[4], which painted a vast historical panorama of impure revolutions, but then dealt more directly with a fully capitalist economy, that of the United States.

Going back to 1920, it is clear why the 2nd International considered as fundamental certain points that Western socialism had practically forgotten. The Second International, up to its neck in union and parliamentary reformism, paid attention only to the urban and metropolitan population, because it was there that voters were recruited. But the formidable preparation of the Russian party, Bolshevik and Marxist, could not neglect forces which, in Russia, were quantitatively much more important than those of the industrial proletariat and which already participated in the open struggle against the tsarist power: on the one hand the peasants oppressed by the big landowners and by the Church, and on the other hand the peoples of all nationalities enslaved by the Great Russian State. These forces had to converge in the Russian revolution (and they did not fail to do so); they had to be correctly evaluated and used, while at the same time giving the revolution a working-class and socialist character.

If the Russian revolution had remained at the stage of a struggle for the liberation of small nationalities and oppressed races and the emancipation of enslaved peasants, it would not only have remained well below a socialist revolution led by the Russian proletariat and the World International, but would even have remained historically below a revolution giving birth to a fully capitalist society and accelerated industrial development in the cities as well as in the countryside.

The Russian Marxists could therefore not fail to face a problem which is, whether we like it or not, always present for countries of prime demographic importance such as India and China (not to mention others): that of the attitude of the Marxist revolutionaries in a society where feudalism, patriarchal lordship, foreign capital, the national bourgeoisie, poor peasantry, artisans and finally a very few and sparse wage-earning proletariat coexist.

What the theses of the 2nd Congress said

(a) On the agrarian question

A brochure on the agrarian question by the Italian communists, reprinted since[5], explained the precise meaning of the theses of the International, in response to those who claimed that the communists promoted peasant revolutions and wanted to establish a society based on the defence of small farming. By showing the difference between ownership (legal criterion) and exploitation (technical and economic criterion), it is established that the communists are always in favour of large-scale exploitation, both in the agricultural and in the industrial field; but the conditions for this are not met simply because there are large areas of land belonging to a single owner (latifundia). One may find huge properties divided into myriad small holdings (entrusted to peasants or sharecroppers), just as one might find the opposite case if a large industrial holding leased several small adjoining properties. Socially, the small farm always ends up with a negative balance sheet and a deficit: it is the antithesis of the socialism we want to achieve, it is the basis of the most reactionary ideology. The theses of the Second Congress say nothing else. We shall confine ourselves to quoting a passage from Meyer’s speech:

“When is it permissible to divide up big landed property? A division can only come into question when it is leased to small peasants, that is to say when this big landed property is not farmed as a unit. In this case the division does not at all mean relinquishing large-scale operation. Further, this division is possible when the big property is scattered in small peasant settlements. Here land hunger is so great that under certain conditions it has to be satisfied for the security of the revolution… The most important thing in any case is that the landowners should not be left on their estates, that they must be driven out…”[6].

He goes on to say that the Commission deleted the paragraph which said that it would be a mistake not to divide the land, and replaced it with an amendment stating that the principle of large-scale farming must be maintained.

Graziadei and Serrati’s objections related mainly to the tactic to be used in relation to petty peasant owners. In the case of Serrati, a competent and resolute organiser of urban workers, it was a real misunderstanding of the details of the problem. But what the theses say about the conflict of interests between these small peasants and the capitalist state in relation to taxes, mortgages, usurious capital, can be found word for word in Marx’s texts about France. As for Graziadei, although he was very firm on the issue, he was mistaken about the notion of common strikes and common organisations between agricultural workers (who are proletarians at their purest) and the small proprietors. In reality, Lenin had only spoken of semi-proletarians, that is, peasants who own a piece of land but cannot make a living from it and have to work elsewhere with their families. In this sense, their interests are therefore completely parallel to those of landless day labourers, and they are perfectly capable of striking to improve their wage conditions.

(b) On the national and colonial question

In our article “Orient”, we recalled what was said in the national and colonial theses of the 2nd Congress. Lenin made a brief speech to justify the substitution of the term “national revolutionary movements” in backward countries for “bourgeois democratic movements”. The former referred to an armed indigenous insurgency against the white imperialist occupiers, while the latter could suggest a legalitarian bloc with fractions of the local bourgeoisie aping Western parliamentarism. Lenin’s whole construction was based on a fact of undeniable historical weight, which today takes on even greater significance because, due to the defeatism of the Stalinists, the movements in the colonies and the semi-colonies give Western imperialism more trouble than those of the proletarians of the metropoles, and today those tremendously static institutions, such as the landed and theocratic ones in the East, are fearfully collapsing in a sea of civil wars.

The Hindu communist Roy presented additional theses, which were accepted by Lenin. The sixth of these theses, incontestable from the Marxist point of view, said:

“The foreign imperialism which weighs on the peoples of the East has undoubtedly hindered their economic and social development, and prevented them from reaching the degree of development reached in Europe and in America.

Thanks to the imperialist policy that obstructs the industrial development of the colonies, it is only recently that the indigenous proletariat began to exist. The scattered local domestic industry had to give way to the concentrated industry of the imperialist countries; the vast majority of the population was thus forced into agricultural work, producing raw materials for abroad.

Furthermore, there is a very rapid concentration of land ownership in the hands of landowners, capitalists and the State, which contributes to increasing the number of landless peasants. We quote this passage mainly to show the link between agrarian and national and colonial issues. The vast majority of the population in these settlements is under terrible oppression.

As a result of this policy, the spirit of revolt remains latent in the popular masses and is expressed only in the few layers of the cultivated middle classes. [Let us not forget that it is a Hindu who speaks to us and that, like the Chinese, he has behind him more millennia of “civilisation” and “culture” than Europe can offer America.]

Foreign domination constantly hinders the free development of social life; that is why the first step of the revolution must be the elimination of this foreign domination. Supporting the struggle for the overthrow of foreign domination in the colonies therefore does not mean adhering to the national aspirations of the indigenous bourgeoisie, but smoothing the way for its emancipation from the proletariat of the colonies”[7].

The image was already blazing in 1920. But today the situation in much of Asia and Africa is at the height of tension. It is not an intellectual nose curl that allows one to ignore such gigantic forces in motion.

Today

The position of the Left

At the Congress of Rome of 1922, the national question was not dealt with in particular; on the contrary, the agrarian question was dealt with in theses in conformity with the analysis we mentioned above.

At the congress of Lyon in 1926, the last numerically important manifestation of the Left (which still had the majority in the Communist Party of Italy, although this does not count for much), the Left proposed a complete system of theses, which were subsequently presented to the enlarged Moscow executive, as an organic manifestation of opposition to the collapse of the whole Comintern, which we know today was to lead to total bankruptcy. There are paragraphs on the agrarian question and on the national question. [8]

The paragraph on the agrarian question not only takes up the positions mentioned above, but admits to a large extent the possibility of using the very small agricultural proprietor in the revolutionary struggle, while at the same time demonstrating with Lenin the many dangers of this tactic.

The paragraph on the national question is also based on Lenin’s fundamental clarification:

“While the internal economic development or expansion of foreign capitalism has not yet provided the basis for modern class struggle in these countries, the satisfaction of demands there requires an insurrectionary struggle and the defeat of world imperialism. At the time of the struggle for proletarian revolution in the metropoles, the complete realisation of these two conditions allows the unleashing in these countries of a struggle which, however, will locally take the form of a conflict not of classes but of races and nationalities”.

So the line is unbroken and no one should be surprised. To come to more recent works, the “Elements of Marxist orientation” say, although not expressly dealing in this passage with the colonial question:

“The workers of all countries cannot fail to fight alongside the bourgeoisie for the overthrow of feudal institutions…. Even in the struggles of the young capitalist regimes to repel reactionary restorations, the proletariat cannot refuse its support to the bourgeoisie”.[9]

This obviously applies to the France of 1793 or Germany of 1848. But it would be inconsistent to deny its application to the Chinese revolutionaries of 1953, who, moreover, defeat the most advanced capitalist imperialism. There remains, of course, the problem of the right balance between the ruthless struggle against this imperialism in the colonies and the struggle in the metropoles. The Stalinists have replaced Lenin’s perspective with the shameful alliance with the French, English and Americans, and it is their defeatism which is responsible for the ineffectiveness of the desperate struggles of the exploited and oppressed of colour, which they have betrayed and condemned to silence.

In the “Theses of the Left” (or Party Platform) published in 1947, we naturally put at the forefront the condition, already found in Lenin’s theses, of the reconstitution of the unitary party of the international revolution which is lacking today.[10] There we criticised, therefore, as in all our polemics of 1920-26, the abusive transposition of tactics valid in pre-1917 Russia to the countries of advanced capitalism, and even to non-European and colonial countries, noting that with the Second World War the unitary character of the enemy’s force increased further throughout the world.

The problem is precisely historical and not tactical. Support for the democratic and independence movements taking up insurrectionary positions was logical in Europe in the first half of the 19th century. It remains fully valid today for the East, as it was for Russia before 1917: we have recalled this fundamental Marxist position in the theses mentioned above. What we fought against, however, was the pretension of applying disastrous tactical recipes such as the united front, entryism, organisation in cells, functionalism, etc., indiscriminately to the parties working, say, in Asia, or America, or England, with the promise of miraculous results; the fact that this tactic has led to the destruction of all revolutionary energy can no longer hidden today.

No theoretical freedom, no tactical freedom

We must agree on this fundamental principle of the Left. The substantial and organic unity of the party, which is diametrically opposed to the formal and hierarchical unity of the Stalinists, is a necessity in matters of doctrine, in matters of programme, and also in matters of so-called tactics. If by tactics we understand the means of action, these can only be determined by the same research that has allowed us, based on the data of past history, to formulate the demands of our final and integral programme.

These means cannot be chosen or varied at will according to the successive eras, or worse still, the diverse groups, without also modifying the programmatic goals and the whole course that leads to them.

It is obvious that the means are not chosen for their intrinsic qualities – beauty or ugliness, gentleness or harshness, suppleness or hardness. But their succession must have been broadly planned by the party and be part of its common armament, instead of being left to the chance of day-to-day “situations”. Such has always been the meaning of the struggle of the left. This is also what we mean at the organisational level when we say that the “base” is obliged to carry out the tactical directives of the centre, insofar as the centre itself is bound by a “range” of possible tactics, already anticipated, and corresponding to eventualities that have also been anticipated. It is only through this dialectical link that we can overcome a problem, and it is stupid to try to solve it by means of consultative democracy, the absurdity of which we have demonstrated several times. All of them do indeed claim it, but all of them are also ready to offer, in large or small, the spectacle of astonishing coups de force and incredible organisational coups de théâtre.

Therefore, from the point of view of theory, no militant of the reconstituted communist party will be able to dispense with understanding that the alignment of classes and the balance of forces in a country like, for example, China, are different from what they are in the Western capitalist countries, and that we must expect a different process and development of struggles, within the framework of a modern world that is becoming more and more unified every day through the interplay of its economic base. He cannot fail to understand that the utilisation of the anti-imperialist impulses of the coloured peoples also influences the balance of power between the imperialist blocs in latent conflict, and that the supremacy of one bloc or the other must have very different consequences.

From the tactical point of view, he cannot help but understand that the exaltation of the colonial movements against Europe or America becomes abusive when it is separated, as the Fourth International still does, from the primordial condition always put forward by Marxism, namely the unity of method of the world proletarian class and its communist party, destroyed precisely by the freedom of tactics and by the mania of manoeuvres, expedients, stratagems and other discoveries.

He will then be able to understand that in addition to the two typical forces of the “scheme” that are useful to us in theory to demonstrate with mathematical certainty the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism, there are immense forces on the world scene: in the metropole countries the non-proletarian lower classes, and in the rest of the planet the “backward” races and peoples (an adjective that the Second Congress did not know how to define).

This documentation on the “antecedents” of the problem is only an introduction to the more in-depth work that will have to come later.

It must be realised that in modern countries there are still nuclei of small peasants who are still outside the sphere of mercantilism and who pass on to themselves ancient characteristics which the modern age has erased from all city dwellers, from billionaires and beggars alike. As Marx said, they constitute a true race of barbarians in an advanced country – advanced in the sense of its horrible civilisation. However, even these barbarians could become, against this civilisation, one of the munitions of the revolution which must overwhelm it.

It must be realised that in the overseas countries there are huge communities of yellow, black and olive-coloured people, who, awakened by the clash of capitalist machinery, seem to be opening the cycle of a patriotic struggle for independence and national liberation like that which would have intoxicated our grandparents, but in fact represent a considerable factor in the class struggle which today’s society carries within it, and which will break out tomorrow with all the more violence the longer it has been stifled.

Source: “Il Programma Comunista”, No. 14, 1953.

[1] “Pressuree “razziale” del contadiname, pressuree classista dei popoli colorati”, “Il programma comunista” n° 14/1953, 23 July 1953.

[2] The reader interested in the positions and struggle of the “Italian” Left in the Communist International can refer in particular to the second volume of the “Storia della Sinistra comunista” (History of the Communist Left), Milan, 1972, whose chapter on “The Second Congress of the Communist International” has been translated into French in issues 59 and 60 of the journal “Programme Communiste”, as well as to articles and subsequent series of the same journal: “In memory of Amadeo Bordiga” (n°50 to 56), which reproduces a certain number of his most striking articles and interventions; “Intervention by A. Bordiga to the Sixth Extended Executive of the Communist International, February-March 1926” (p. 60-70).

[3] See the article “Orient”.

[4] Meeting held in Genoa on 26 April 1953, where the report on “Multiple Revolutions” was developed.

[5] A.Bordiga, ‘La questione agraria’ (elementi marxisti del problema), published in series in ‘Il Comunista’, June-July 1920, then in brochure form, Libreria editrice del PC d’Italia, 1921 (reprint Feltrinelli).

[6] “Protokoll des II Weltkongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale, Hamburg, 1921, p. 549.

[7] “Protokoll des II Weltkongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale”, Hamburg, 1921, pp. 147-148.

[8] The draft theses prepared by Bordiga for the 3rd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy (“The Lyon Theses“, 1926).

[9] “Tracciato d’impostazione”, Prometeo n°1, July 1946, translated into English under the title “The Fundamentals for a Marxist Orientation“.

[10] The “Theses of the Left” were published in 1946-47 as a series of texts in various issues of the journal “Prometeo”; among these texts, were translated into French “Les trois phases du capitalisme”, “Guerres et crises opportunistes”, brochure Ed. Programme Communiste, Paris, 1972; and in English: “Nature, Function and Tactics of the Revolutionary Party of the Working Class“.