The Italian left tends to follow Bordigism and considers itself to be Leninist, but denounces Marxism–Leninism as a form of bourgeois opportunism materialized in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Proponents of left communism have included Herman Gorter, Antonie Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Karl Korsch, Amadeo Bordiga and Paul Mattick.
[2] Other proponents of left communism have included Onorato Damen, Jacques Camatte, and Sylvia Pankhurst.
Its essential features were a stress on the need to build a communist party or workers' council entirely separate from the reformist and centrist elements who "betrayed the proletariat", opposition to all but the most restricted participation in elections and an emphasis on militancy.
Only the Italians accepted the need for electoral work at all for a very short period of time which they later vehemently opposed, attracting criticism from Vladimir Lenin in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
[10] Left Bolshevism emerged in 1907 as the Vpered group challenged Vladimir Lenin's perceived authoritarianism and parliamentarianism.
The group included Alexander Bogdanov, Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Grigory Aleksinsky, Stanislav Volski and Martyn Liadov.
This development was mirrored in the Netherlands and on a smaller scale in Bulgaria, where the left communist movement was to mimic that of Germany.
In fact, they controlled the first body formed by the Comintern to coordinate its activities in Western Europe, the Amsterdam Bureau.
Many of the Dutch–German tradition adopted Rosa Luxemburg's criticism as outlined in her posthumously published essay entitled The Russian Revolution.
To a considerable degree, Lenin's well known polemic Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder[10] is an attack on the ideas of the emerging left communist currents.
As the Kronstadt rebellion occurred at a time when the debate on tactics was still raging within the Comintern, it has been wrongly seen as being left communist by some commentators.
In later years, the German–Dutch tradition in particular would come to see the suppression of the revolt as the historic turning point in the evolution of the Russian state after October 1917.
The former centrist group led by Henk Sneevliet (the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, RSAP) transformed itself into the Marx–Lenin–Luxemburg Front.
The strike at FIAT in October 1942 had a huge impact on the Italian fraction, which was deepened by the fall of Mussolini's regime in July 1943.
However, in May 1945 the Italian fraction, many of whose members had already returned to Italy, voted to dissolve itself so that its militants could integrate themselves as individuals into the Internationalist Communist Party.
Best known as the Revolutionary Communist Organisation, these young militants were exiles from Nazism living in France at the start of World War II and were members of the Trotskyist movement but they had opposed the formation of the Fourth International in 1938 on the grounds that it was premature.
They were refused full delegates' credentials and only admitted to the founding conference of the Youth International on the following day.
With the beginning of the war, they took the name Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD) and came to define Russia as state capitalist in agreement with Ante Ciliga's book The Russian Enigma.
At this point, they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a degenerated workers' state).
[citation needed] Left communists entered a period of almost constant decline from this point onwards, although they were somewhat rejuvenated by the events of 1968.
[citation needed] Examples of left communism ideological currents existed in China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR).
[25] In addition to the left communist groups in the direct lineage of the Italian and Dutch traditions, a number of groups with similar positions have flourished since 1968, such as the workerist and autonomist movements in Italy; Kolinko, Kurasje, Wildcat;[26] Subversion and Aufheben in England; Théorie Communiste, Echanges et Mouvements and Démocratie Communiste in France; TPTG[27] and Blaumachen[28] in Greece; Kamunist Kranti in India; and Collective Action Notes and Loren Goldner in the United States.