Is Bordigism hip?

[jondwhite]

A recent discussion from Revleft

Has Bordigism become a hipster tendency on this site?

"… We started getting into Bordiga and quoting him way back in April, before it was cool. We also dropped Bordiga just as he bizarrely started become popular among a small subset of users. We're hipsters like that. …"

[Young Master Smeet]

For those not in the know:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordiga

Wikipedia wrote:

Amadeo Bordiga (13 June 1889 – 23 July 1970) was an Italian Marxist, a contributor to Communist theory, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy, a leader of the Communist International and, after World War II, a leading figure of the International Communist Party. (…)Bordiga proudly defined himself as "anti-democratic" and believed himself at one with Marx and Engels on this. Bordiga's hostility toward democracy had nothing to do with Stalinist idealism. Indeed, he saw fascism and Stalinism as the culmination of bourgeois democracy. Democracy to Bordiga meant above all the manipulation of society as a formless mass. To this he counterposed the "dictatorship of the proletariat", implemented by the communist party founded in 1847, based on the principles and program enunciated in the manifesto. He often referred to the spirit of Engels' remark that "on the eve of the revolution all the forces of reaction will be against us under the banner of 'pure democracy". (As, indeed, every factional opponent of the Bolsheviks in 1921 from the monarchists to the anarchists called for "soviets without Bolsheviks"–or soviet workers councils not dominated by Bolsheviks.) Bordiga opposed the idea of revolutionary content being the product of a democratic process of pluralist views; whatever its problems, in light of the history of the past 70 years, this perspective has the merit of underscoring the fact that communism (like all social formations) is above all about programmatic content expressed through forms. It underscores the fact that for Marx, communism is not an ideal to be achieved but a "real movement" born from the old society with a set of programmatic tasks.(…)On communismFor Bordiga, both stages of socialist or communist society (sometimes distinguished as "socialism" and "communism") were characterised by the (gradual) absence of money, the market, and so on, the difference between them being that earlier in the first stage a system of 'rationing' would be used to allocate goods to people, while in communism this could be abandoned in favour of full free access. This view distinguished Bordiga from other Leninists, and especially the Trotskyists, who tended (and still tend) to telescope the first two stages and so have money and the other exchange categories surviving into "socialism". Bordiga would have none of this. For him no society in which money, buying and selling and the rest survived could be regarded as either socialist or communist; these exchange categories would die out before the socialist rather than the communist stage was reached.

So, as Hip as Zeitgeist…

[ALB]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

So, as Hip as Zeitgeist…

Truer than might be thought. He was a bit of a Technocrat himself (perhaps more so than Zeitgeist) as this extract from this article shows:

Quote:

Scientific Administration of Social AffairsBordiga saw the relationship between the party and the working class under capitalism as analogous with that of the brain to the other parts of a biological organism. Similarly, he envisaged the relationship between the scientifically organised central administration and the rest of socialist society in much the same terms.(…)Thus the scientifically organised central administration in socialism would be, in a very real sense for Bordiga – who was a firm partisan of the view that human society is best understood as being a kind of organism – the 'social brain', a specialised social organ charged with managing the general affairs of society. Though it would be acting in the interest of the social organism as a whole, it would not be elected by the individual members of socialist society, any more than the human brain is elected by the individual cells of the human body.Quite apart from accepting this biological metaphor, Bordiga took the view that it would not be appropriate in socialism to have recourse to elections to fill administrative posts, nor to take social decisions by 'the counting of heads'. For him, administrative posts were best filled by those most capable of doing the job, not by the most popular; similarly, what was the best solution to a particular problem was something to be determined scientifically by experts in the field and not a matter of majority opinion to be settled by a vote.What was important for Bordiga was not so much the personnel who would perform socialist administrative functions as the fact that there would need to be an administrative organ in socialism functioning as a social brain and that this organ would be organised on a 'scientific' rather than a 'democratic' basis.Bordiga's conception of socialism was 'non-democratic' rather than 'undemocratic'. He was in effect defining socialism as not 'the democratic social control of the means of production by and in the interest of society as a whole', but simply as 'the social control of the means of production in the interest of society as a whole'.

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