Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 1 Thirty years after the death of Arrigo Cervetto , we are publishing here the concluding passages of the introduction to his Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) for the series Biblioteca Giovani (“Publications for young people”), soon to be published in Italian. The 1944-45 partisan war in Italy. The political battle within libertarian communism. The Korean War, and the watchword of “neither Washington nor Moscow”. The layoffs at the Ilva and Ansaldo factories, the political battle and trade union defence in the struggles of post-war restructuring. From 1953 onwards, the crisis of Stalinism, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Hungarian uprising, the 1957 Theses and the challenge of theory and strategy vis-à-vis the tendencies of unitary imperialism. The political struggle within Azione Comunista (“Communist Action”) and the Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (“Movement of the Communist Left”). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, t...
Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Special Issue, Page IV From the series Principles of Marxism Marx investigates the very complex relationship between abstractions and social development and concludes that the most general abstractions arise on the whole only with the most profuse concrete development, when one phenomenon is seen to be common to many, common to all . The abstraction of labour , as labour in general , is very ancient, but is just as modern a category as the relations which give rise to this simple abstraction . When the main activity is commerce, labour overlaps with the idea of making money. The physiocratic system, which sees land as the central source of wealth, instead points to agriculture as the form of labour par excellence (productive labour). Only with Adam Smith was there an immense advance , because he discarded any definiteness of the wealth-producing activity — for him it was labour as such...