Blackwell Reference Online

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Amadeo Bordiga was one of the founders and first secretary of the Italian Communist Party. Born in Resina, Bordiga joined the Socialist Party in 1910 and soon, as a student at the engineering faculty, became a leader of the socialist left in Naples, advocating the rejection of electoral alliances with radicals and democrats, to him a source of corruption and misleading of socialists, who should rather act as a working-class and militant force, and reject reformism. The new militant tendencies in social conflicts in 1912–14 were met by Bordiga with reaffirmation of Marxist principles, and he stood strongly against Italy's participation in World War I. The 1917 Russian Revolution provided him with further evidence of Marxist doctrine. He founded and edited Il Soviet , turning it into a national organ of a left-wing fraction of the Socialist Party at the 1919 Bologna Congress, advocating abstention as a means of political and revolutionary propaganda and gained nationwide visibility in the Red Biennium. Bordiga did not engage in social movements like Ordine Nuovo in Turin, but rather stressed working inside the party to strengthen his fraction so that it could turn as soon as possible into an independent Marxist revolutionary party. He went to Russia to attend the Second Congress of the Communist International, but although he stressed the similarity of his program to the Bolsheviks ... log in or subscribe to read full text