6 Quotes & Sayings By Amadeo Bordiga

Amadeo Bordiga was a revolutionary communist theoretician and leader of the Italian Communist Party. He is well-remembered for his contributions to Marxism, his theoretical work on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and his uncompromising struggle against revisionism. The Italian Communist Party was one of the few parties in Europe to consistently uphold its revolutionary position, which was based on the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. It faced fierce repression from the capitalist class ruling Italy, which initiated a series of trials to discredit the party Read more

Bordiga was one of its leaders accused of being a traitor. After years in prison he was finally acquitted in 1951, but he could not return to political life as long as the revisionists were allowed to operate freely. As a result, until his death in 1970 he lived in exile in France.

1
The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh. Amadeo Bordiga
2
The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revo­lution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones. Amadeo Bordiga
3
The whole discussion now underway on revolutionary forms in Russia and in China boils down to the judgement to be made of the historical phenomenon of the "appearance" of industrialism and mechanisation in huge areas of the world previously dominated by landed and precapitalist forms of production. Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and "national" plans are made. This is the mistaken thesis. Amadeo Bordiga
4
To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses. Amadeo Bordiga
5
There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre. Amadeo Bordiga