The Italian left is just Leninist. Full stop. While it later split on the question of unions (into 'Bordigists' and 'Damenists', though both would reject such personalising/idolizing titles in the spirit of communist anonymity and rigor), it completely remained Leninist, and at the onset of Lenin's critique of the communist left (LWC: An Infantile Disorder) not only was the Italian left spared of any critique, one of the leading figures, Amadeo Bordiga, even wrote a text admiring it (sinistra.net/lib/upt/comlef/ren/renegadeae.html). Where the early Italian left (until the '50s, where it actually matters w.r.t. disagreements in Comintern policy) actually disagreed was on the question of unions, frontism (class collaboration as a strategy against 'common enemies') and parliamentarism. The Italian left was the first and largest mass communist movement in the country in the early Comintern period (until Stalin's Third Period era started, at which point any Party contesting its demands was culled and 'Stalinized', that is, moulded into the vision of the Third Period). An important thing to note is also that the Italian left not only otherwise mostly agreed with the (early; Lenin's) Comintern, but that it also opposed virtually all other 'lefts', and in its language used 'ultra-left' as a derogatory term. This is why the 'ultra-leftist' is a confusing term that should be avoided unless properly understood in all its contexts and perspective. What do you think of the fact that, for Bordiga, Mao was an 'ultra-leftist', and in what sense do you think he meant it?
The Dutch-German left was also Leninist, up until the mid-'30s, at which point it theoretically shifted towards an anti-party stance. The fact that it was Leninist before should be evident to anyone reading early texts, though it was actually oppositional to many early Leninist Comintern's policies, especially w.r.t parliamentarism). 'Council communism' is a term that only surfaced post-hoc to the theoretical shift in the left there, and a significant amount of communists one would qualify as such did not identify with the term at all. 'Councilism' is also not a shorthand for 'council communism'; it's a derogatory term communists used to disparage the council communists as fetishists of spontaneity. A commonly held belief is that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were left communists, but the communist left in fact arose in opposition to them within the KPD, disagreeing with positions such as 'peace without annexations' on how communists should proceed in the Great War, and they accused the 'right' of the KPD of being theoretically weak for its underconsumptionism (the belief that the primary cause of crisis in capitalism lies in the fact that commodities are overproduced and cannot be sold, rather than that competition for valorization leads to a downward spiral of the law of value, and that labour ceases to be sufficiently valorizable).
I've hit on probably the biggest misconceptions, which you can all easily verify by just reading left communist texts, though there's way more to go into. While it's conflicting because I just made an attempt to explain and clarify left communism, don't, for the love of Marx, substitute random internet users' posts for actually going out there and reading texts yourself. In fact if you want to understand left communism at all before living on talking about it with cognitive bias, go and read left communist texts right now to see if I'm talking shit or not.
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