No.483739
Was it liberals who took over?
As a… as a not-well-versed-in-Bordiga guy, I always associated him with, like, opposition to the more authoritarian ML "state capitalism" or whatever-you-wanna-call-it branch of socialism which kept the state but added a bunch of public services. I take it Italy was different?
My view… and maybe it's a weird view, but I come from a perspective where Marxism maybe brings this on itself to an extent. There's a major gap, specific to Marx, which creates a lot of room for interpretation in terms of just what will emerge from revolution. Where previous revolutions in Marx's time had failed from not being statey and defensive enough, it seems reasonable that Marx would say "ok, we need to develop a workers' state to protect the gains of the revolution before we get to a stateless communist state," but when that happens and it drags on, it inevitably becomes a betrayal to all those who were on board hoping to get a sort of peaceful post-capitalist anarchy rather than a huge, protracted "workers' state" with a monopoly on force. As soon as that happens once, you inevitably get guys like Bordiga, and even Trotsky (despite him being for a lot of the stuff Bordiga hated) who had a lot of valid points! but really ultimately may not have accomplished much else beyond correctly critiquing MLism as it existed. A big part of why it turned out that way probably is that a straight reading of Marx can produce both "the revolution needs a strong protective state to defend against bourgeois infiltration" and "the revolution will produce a stateless society where workers own the products of their labor."