Anti-democratic principles

"The Democratic Principle" is an anonymous text attributed to Amadeo Bordiga, the first leader of the Communist Party of Italy (which was founded in 1921 at Leghorn). Bordiga was later dethroned and expelled from the Italian Communist Party (his replacement was the famous Antonio Gramsci), and resurfaced after World War II as the leader of a small group called the International Communist Party. Today, several different "Bordigist" groups exists, mostly in Italy. They are frequently indistinguishable from each other, at least to outsiders.

"The Democratic Principle", first published in 1922, belongs to the same genre as Leon Trotsky´s "Terrorism and Communism" or Nahuel Moreno´s "The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat". In other words, anti-Stalinist Communists (or "Communists") freely admitting that they, too, aren´t exactly friends of freedom. Trotsky´s and Bordiga´s texts are particularly interesting, being written during the "revolutionary" and "internationalist" period of Bolshevism, before Joe Stalin became top dog of the Moscow operation. This is how the Communists sounded like during their "good" period, when they were sure of the victory of the revolutionary wave that engulfed parts of Europe after World War I. 

What perhaps makes "The Democratic Principle" even more interesting is its strongly theoretical character, and also its non-sensationalism. There are no obviously bizarre formulations (in contrast to Trotsky´s book), and no obsession, per se, with terror and violence (in contrast to some of Bordiga´s epigones). The anonymous text explains in an almost boring manner why Communists, of course, oppose democracy or "the democratic principle", although they can of course use democratic methods of decision-making for purely practical purposes, or as a tactic against the class enemy. 

Bordiga begins by making a distinction between organizations where everyone is roughly equal (such as a labor union and its working class membership) and a society marked by inequality. He takes it as obvious that "one person - one vote" in the latter situation is meaningless. Indeed, it seems to be meaningless on a quite "deep" level. To Bordiga, the human race has been marked by inequality almost since the dawn of time. The family was the first hierarchy, and the Stone Age bands had a division of labor based on gender, with the men being hunters, while the women stayed home with the kids. In a class society, inequality is even more obvious, but I get the impression that Bordiga actually believes that *everyone* is unequal to everyone else in any society (except the classless communism of the future), surely a somewhat harder proposition!

The author mocks the liberal conception of democracy as just another form of metaphysics, similar in kind to the "spiritualist" idea that the king or the aristocracy had a "divine right to rule". In the liberal scenario, something (could it still be divine providence?) mysteriously bestows on every "sovereign individual" the "right" and even the capacity to make sound judgements about matters of state, completely unsullied by his material surroundings or social context. Such a conception is possible to "defend" only on metaphysical or religious grounds, as if each voter was possessed by an immortal soul created by God. (Bordiga doesn´t mention it, but the US Declaration of Independence is pretty explicit on this point.) 

Judging by the above, it would seem that Bordiga would at least be for democracy in "unitary organs", such as labor unions comprised by workers whose station in life is relatively uniform. However, it soon turns out that the Communist leader isn´t particularly happy about workers´ democracy either! After all, workers are on different levels of consciousness. This makes a revolutionary leadership necessary, and since no revolution is possible without centralization and swift action, many decisions during a revolutionary struggle (including the struggles after the taking of power) will not be made by democratic consultation, but by special commissions appointed by the party. 

A large portion of the text analyzes the early Soviet Russian constitution, which was "undemocratic" on a number of points. For instance, it gave preferential treatment to workers at the expense of peasants (since the workers originally supported the Bolsheviks, while the peasants never did). Instead of national elections, higher soviets were appointed by lower ones, with only the lowest soviets being directly elected by the people. Also, the soviets were both legislative and executive at the same time. (This section of the text is quite confusing, or perhaps badly translated.) Nor does it particularly matter to Bordiga whether the soviets are elected on the basis of territory, place of work or profession. They are "empirical" and are created according to the tactical situation. The deeper point is that a constitutional theory is meaningless. *Any* constitutional form would do, as long as it advances the cause of the Communist revolution. As already noted, inequality and hierarchy will disappear only in the distant future, when classless society has been established all over the world, but the author (perhaps wisely) declines to speculate about the details...  

But what about the Communist party itself? Bordiga explicitly (and notoriously) rejects democratic centralism in favor of something he calls "organic centralism". The decisions of the party majority aren´t necesserily the best ones. Just like the revolutionary state power, the party needs to act in a disciplined and centralized way to advance the class struggle. Democratic forms aren´t always the best in such situations. Bordiga doesn´t propose any alternative system to democratic centralism, however, simply pointing out that while centralism is a principle, democracy cannot be, not even in internal party matters. 

The irony of the anti-democratic Bordiga later being expelled by the "Stalinists" is not lost on his critics, but Bordiga himself might very well have responded that this simply shows that majority decisions aren´t always correct! The "Stalinists" transformed the Russian Communist Party after Lenin´s death through the so-called Lenin Levy, recruiting half a million new members, who - no surprise - supported the Triumvirs rather than the Trotskys or the Myasnikovs. Presumably, the Italian Communist majority supported Gramsci. Something tells me these facts, salient perhaps to a Bordigist, don´t particularly impress said critics...

In later Bordigism, organic centralism seems to have been connected to the weird idea of the Communist program being "invariant since 1848", any doctrinal changes being verboten, but this could be a sectarian-metaphysical distortion of Bordiga´s original point, where democratic forms are problematic for exactly the opposite reason, standing in the way of tactical emergencies. But sure, I could be wrong here.

The publication history of "The Democratic Principle" is a curious one. Mostly, it has been reprinted by Bordiga´s latter day disciples. However, a Swedish edition (no longer extant) was actually published by a kookish Trotskyist groupuscule which probably couldn´t tell Bordiga from a tea-spoon, but there you go.