It emerged from the Italian left-communist tradition associated with Amadeo Bordiga and it originally bore the subtitle "Invariance of the theory of the proletariat", indicating Bordiga's notion of the unchanging nature of communist theory. Invariance was instrumental in bringing unknown and obscure texts of the Communist Left (Bordiga and the Italian Left, Gorter and Pannekoek from the Dutch-German Left, as well as many others, including Lukacs and Sylvia Pankhurst to the attention of the '68 generation. It also played a major -albeit largely unknown- role in the 1970's crises and dissolution of councilist organisations such as ICO in France and Solidarity in the UK. However, around 1972-75 it broke with many of the tenets of Bordigism and Marxism per se, arguing that in the aftermath of May '68 there was no longer any potential for the working class to escape the domination of capital through revolution. Instead it began to take the line that humanity itself had become "domesticated" by the rule of capital and the only solution was to "leave this world", a view which came to influence Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan and others in their development of Anarcho-primitivism. It was this radical shift in orientation which caused many of its critics to observe: "nothing varies more than Invariance ".
Invariance is now in its fifth series and appears sporadically. Every cover features the same image of a tree (held to represent that "all is life"), and on the back the phrase: "Time is the invention of men incapable of love".
Publications
La gauche allemande: Textes du KAPD, de L'AAUD, de L'AAUE et de la KAI (1920-1922)
Amadeo Bordiga was an Italian Marxist theorist, revolutionary socialist, founder of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), member of the Communist International (Comintern) and later a leading figure of the International Communist Party. Bordiga was originally associated with the PCI, but he was expelled in 1930 after being accused of Trotskyism.
The Italian Communist Party was a communist and democratic socialist political party in Italy. It was founded in Livorno as the Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921, when it seceded from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, Antonio Gramsci, and Nicola Bombacci. Outlawed during the Italian fascist regime, the party continued to operate underground and played a major role in the Italian resistance movement. The party's peaceful and national road to socialism, or the "Italian Road to Socialism", the realisation of the communist project through democracy, repudiating the use of violence and applying the Constitution of Italy in all its parts, a strategy inaugurated under Palmiro Togliatti but that some date back to Gramsci, would become the leitmotiv of the party's history.
La Vieille Taupe is a publishing house and bookshop in Paris, France. The establishment went through two distinct phases in its history. Between 1965 and 1972, it had a politically ultra-left slant. In 1980 a project with the same name was launched by one of La Vieille Taupe's previous participants and became renowned for publishing antisemitic and Holocaust denial literature.
In Marxism, ultra-leftism encompasses a broad spectrum of revolutionary communist currents that are generally Marxist and frequently anti-Leninist in perspective. Ultra-leftism distinguishes itself from other left-wing currents through its rejection of electoralism, trade unionism, and national liberation. The term is sometimes used as a synonym of left communism. "Ultra-left" is also commonly used as a pejorative by Marxist–Leninists and Trotskyists to refer to extreme or uncompromising Marxist sects.
The Communist Workers' Party of Germany was an anti-parliamentarian and left communist party that was active in Germany during the Weimar Republic. It was founded in 1920 in Heidelberg as a split from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Originally the party remained a sympathising member of Communist International. In 1922, the KAPD split into two factions, both of whom kept the name, but are referred to as the KAPD Essen Faction and the KAPD Berlin Faction.
The International Communist Party (ICP) is a left communist international political party.
Jacques Camatte is a French writer and former Marxist theoretician and member of the International Communist Party, a primarily Italian left communist organisation under the influence of Amadeo Bordiga. After Bordiga's death and the events of May 68, his beliefs began to fall closer to the tendencies of anarcho-primitivism and communization, and would later influence accelerationism.
Communization theory refers to a tendency on the ultra-left that understands communism as a process that, in a social revolution, immediately begins to replace all capitalist social relations with communist ones. Thus it rejects the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it sees as reproducing capitalism. There exist two broad trends within communization theory: a ‘Marxist’ one and an ‘anarchist’ one.
Gilles Dauvé is a French ultra-left political theorist, school teacher, and translator, associated with the development of communization theory.
The Internationalist Communist Party is a left communist party in Italy and an affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party.
Onorato Damen, was an Italian left communist revolutionary who was first active in the Italian Socialist Party and then the Communist Party of Italy. After being expelled, he worked with the organized Italian left, became one of the leaders of the Internationalist Communist Party, commonly known by their paper Battaglia Comunista.
Marck Chirik, also known as Marc Laverne or simply MC, was a communist revolutionary and one of the founding militants of the International Communist Current.
Organic centralism is a method of political organisation advocated by party-orientated left communists, in particular the Italian Left. It was a concept advanced in The Lyons Theses (1926) in the context of the Third International:
Count Antonio Graziadei, also known as Tonio, was an Italian academic and politician. One of the co-founders of the Italian Communist Party, he was Professor of Political Economy at the Universities of Cagliari and Parma and a member of the Italian Parliament from 1910 to 1926. In 1928 he went on a self-imposed exile to France to escape fascism. After the war he began his teaching activity at the University of Rome.
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they regard as more authentically Marxist than the views of Marxism–Leninism espoused by the Communist International after its Bolshevization by Joseph Stalin and during its second congress.
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie is an unfinished manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx. The series of seven notebooks was rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, during the winter of 1857–8. Left aside by Marx in 1858, it remained unpublished until 1939.
Roger Dangeville was a left communist activist most noted for his translation of Karl Marx's Grundrisse and his work with Jacques Camatte.
Lotta Comunista or Gruppi Leninisti della Sinistra Comunista is a political party born in Italy that does not recognize parliamentary dynamics for the party's strategy in the current historical period, and thus describes itself as extra-parliamentary. It is a revolutionary and internationalist party founded by Arrigo Cervetto and Lorenzo Parodi in 1965 and inspired by the theory and practice of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
"Auschwitz or the great alibi" is a 1960 article published in Programme communiste, the French magazine of the International Communist Party (ICP), later reedited in the form of a brochure. The authorship of this text has been attributed to both Amadeo Bordiga and Martin Axelrad. However, the Programme communiste was a Bordigist revue, publishing its texts anonymously in order to emphasize its character of a collective work.
The I Congress of the Communist Party of Italy was held in Livorno on 21 January 1921, following the split of the communist fraction at the end of the XVII Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).
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