In Bordiga's absence

Left Communism, the Communist Left or (usually disparagingly) the ultraleft is a relatively unknown Marxist current. It's certainly less known than, say, Maoism or Trotskyism. It's also somewhat heterogeneous.

Some of the Left Communists left the Communist International already before Lenin's death and the subsequent ascent of Stalinism. This was the case of the German KAPD and the Dutch group around Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter. This current eventually developed in an anarchistic/libertarian socialist direction, sometimes referred to as Council Communism. Paul Mattick and Otto Rühle were other representatives of this variety of Left Communism.

By contrast, the Italian Left Communists decided to stay inside the Comintern, criticizing Lenin and later fighting Stalin. This is hardly surprising since the Italian Left was the dominant group in the Communist Party of Italy. Its main spokesperson, Amadeo Bordiga, was simultaneously the leader of the Italian party. In 1926, the game was up as the Soviet leadership around Stalin and Bukharin moved to expel the Bordigists, replacing Bordiga with the legendary Antonio Gramsci. In contrast to the German and Dutch ultralefts, the Italian Left wasn't anarchistic, but rather the exact opposite. It upheld and even strengthened Lenin's concept of a centralized vanguard party, thereby becoming "more Leninist than Lenin".

After 1926, however, the expelled "Italian Left Faction in Exile" drifted away from Bordiga's super-Leninism, instead developing positions somewhere in between Council Communism and Bordigism. Today, at least two Left Communist groups lay claim to the heritage of the Faction, without necessarily having identical positions with it: Battaglia Comunista (founded in 1945 and often considered a direct continuation of the Italian Faction) and the International Communist Current (ICC), founded in 1975 by an old ex-militant of the Faction who had refused to join Battaglia.

The book "The Italian Communist Left 1926-45" is published by the ICC and is an extensive history of the Italian Faction in Exile, although it also mentions the Bordigist background and the later emergence of Battaglia Comunista (or, to use its full name, Partito Comunista Internazionalista). The book further deals with groups in Belgium, Mexico and the United States which had contacts with the Italian Left.

"The Italian Communist Left 1926-45" is "boring" and very political, and is probably useful only to people with a very strong, non-causal interest in Left Communism. However, it seems to be the only book of its kind, and I therefore give it four stars.