Bordiga and Gramsci split over international versus national frames for revolutionary action.

Evidence

In this summer of 1923, the contrast between Bordiga and Gramsci was already a sharp one, despite the considerable overlap between their views. Sharing a common estimate of the crucial importance of defending the party against the “liquidation” which—in their view—was threatened by the Comintern’s tractations with the very centrists against whom the P.C.I. had been formed, Bordiga concluded that the International was degenerating and that it was necessary to organise an international opposition to fight that degeneration; whereas Gramsci concluded in effect that the party should assume fully the task of making the revolution in Italy—if need be despite the International. In a letter written a few months later from Vienna he was to write: “Amadeo approaches things from the viewpoint of an international minority, but we must approach things from the viewpoint of a national majority.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 149

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Gramsci’s national-majority perspective as distinct from Bordiga’s international-minority one — a founding orientation of his thought.
• XREF: Gramsci’s national frame anticipates the ‘national-popular’ and hegemony concerns that later Islamophobia scholarship’s national imaginaries build on.