Amadeo Bordiga was one of the greatest figures of the Third, or Communist, International. His formidable body of writings remains energizing, instructive, and often surprisingly topical today.
The Science and Passion of Communism presents the battles of this brilliant Italian communist in the revolutionary cycle of the post-WWI period, through his writings against reformism and war, for Soviet power and internationalism, and against fascism, on one side, and Stalinism and the degeneration of the International, on the other.
Equally important was his sharp critique of triumphant U.S. capitalism in the post-WWII period, and his original re-presentation of the Marxist critique of political economy, which includes the capital-nature and capital-species relationships, as well as a programme of social transformations for the revolution to come.
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"Pietro Basso has done a great service to the socialist movement by making available this wide-ranging selection of Amadeo Bordiga's work, together with an extensive introduction covering all periods of his activity. Little known to English readers, Bordiga's role as founder and early leader of the Communist Party of Italy, and an independent voice in the Communist International, can now be properly studied and appreciated."
—Marcello Musto, Professor of Sociology at York University, author of The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography
"Amadeo Bordiga, a key founder of the Italian Communist Party, is the least known of the major European revolutionaries from before and after World War I. After he was sidelined by Stalin and Togliatti, he continued to write major theoretical works into the 1960s. This anthology will help to correct the near-anonymity that enveloped him after the mid-1920s. He was a revolutionary and theoretician on the level of Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg."—Loren Goldner, author of Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia
"The fine translations by Giacomo Donis and Patrick Camiller allow non-Italian speakers fresh insight into what Basso charmingly calls the "goldmine" of Bordiga's vast array of research."
—Weekly Worker