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.

Biography

Early life

Bordiga was born at Resina, in the province of Naples.

In the Italian Socialist Party

An opponent of the Italian colonial war in Libya, he was active in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), founding the Karl Marx Circle in 1912. He rejected a pedagogical approach to political work and developed a "theory of the Party", whereby the organization was meant to display non-immediate goals, as a rally of similarly minded people, and not a necessary body of the working class. He was, however, deeply opposed to representative democracy, which he associated with bourgeois electoralism:

Therefore, he opposed the parliamentary faction of the Socialist Party being autonomous from central control. In common with most Socialists in Latin countries, Bordiga campaigned against Freemasonry, which he identified as a non-secular group.