Chapter Eight
By the end of 1952 there were two sides to Arrigo Cervetto’s reflections on unitary imperialism. His reservations on the ‘Third Front’ had pushed him to investigate in more depth ideas such as a disproportion of forces between the United States and the USSR, and now he began to study in earnest the differences between Europe, Japan and America. On the other hand, his motives for collaborating with Masini were still far more important than any dissension between them: at Pontedecimo, it will be recalled, there had been a declaration of ‘shared acceptance (of the) two imperialisms’ theory as the premise of the ‘Third Front? slogan. The real gain Cervetto had drawn from his investigations of the imperialism issue was the realisation that without this sort of study it was going to be impossible to consolidate militants. By 1952 the results of his analysis were, as he himself acknowleged, impressive but not yet decisive.
However, the fact remains that for the first time how to assess European imperialism was the subject of an open disagreement that had been brought to the attention of GAAP’s organisational structures: the Florence conference in June and the extended National Committee in October. It is worthwhile to look in more detail at the sources Cervetto was using to clarify the issues in that internal debate.
Stalin and ‘The Economic Problems of Socialism’
Between 1951 and 1952 Cervetto was focusing on material that may be grouped along four major lines. We have already referred to Malenkov’s Report and Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism, which occupied international debate during the autumn of 1952. Dealing as it did with the inevitability of war between the capitalist countries
the Stalinist two camps
theory claimed that the single world market
had been broken up, thus limiting outlets for ‘capitalist’ trade and commerce. The balance between the capitalist powers was therefore fated to change:
Let’s take Britain and France first. There can be no doubt that for them cheap raw materials and guaranteed markets for their products are of prime importance. Can me really assume that they will forever tolerate the current situation, in which the Americans are installing themselves in the British and French economies and with the pretext of ‘helping them via the Marshall Plan are seeking to transform them into appendices of the US economy? And in which American capital is seizing the ram materials and the markets of the Anglo-French colonies, thus preparing a catastrophe for the high profits of Anglo-French capitalists? Is it not more accurate to predict that at the end of the day capitalist Britain, and in its make capitalist France, mill be forced to free themselves from America’s grasp and fight to ensure their autonomy, and of course, high profits?.
The same was true of the defeated powers:
Let’s go on to the major defeated countries, West Germany and Japan. Today these countries drag on a miserable existence under the American imperialist boot. Their industry, agriculture and commerce, their domestic and foreign policies, their whole existence is bound by the chains of the American Occupation. But only yesterday these countries mere great imperialist powers that shook the rule of Great Britain, France, and the United States of America to its very roots both in Europe and in Asia. To think that these countries mill never get back on their feet, mill never again threaten American rule and never aim at autonomous development, is like believing in miracles [...]
After the First World War, too, it mas thought that Germany had been definitively knocked out of the fight, as today some comrades believe it has again, and with it Japan. Then, too, the newspapers loudly declared that the United States had reduced Europe to the bare bones, that Germany mould never rise again, that there mould be no more mars between capitalist countries. In spite of all that, 15 to 20 years after defeat Germany rose up, and took its place as a great power again, throwing off its chains and taking up the march towards autonomous development. Significantly, none other than Great Britain and the United States helped Germany to rise again economically and to increase its economic and military potential. Of course, in helping Germany to get back on its feet economically, the United States and Britain aimed to point a resurrected Germany against the Soviet Union, to use it against the socialist countries. But Germany directed its strength against the Anglo-French-American bloc, and when Hitler’s Germany declared mar on the Soviet Union, the Anglo-French-American bloc not only did not ally itself with Hitler’s Germany, but on the contrary mas forced to enter into coalition with the USSR against it. The battle for markets between the capitalist countries and the desire to sink their respective competitors, can therefore, to all practical purposes, be seen to be fiercer than the clashes between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp.
One should ask: what guarantee is there that Germany and Japan will not get back on their feet again, will not try to shake off the American yoke and live independently? I don’t believe any such guarantee exists.
From this, it follows that war between the capitalist countries continues to be inevitables.165
The international debate: ‘Il Mondo’ and Turin’s ‘La Stampa’
Cervetto’s second line of inquiry was the debate on those theories of Stalin’s that dominated both the international and the Italian Press in the autumn of 1952, i.e. just before the extended National Committee met on 26th October. From 1950 on, Cervetto’s articles had contained references to Le Figaro and Le Monde on the clashes over German rearmament and on the neutralist ‘Third Force’ position. As well as reading the French Press in the original, Cervetto followed the Italian Press and the periodical Relazioni Internazionali. In Il Mondo he had a particularly well-documented source on the Europe-America debate. This publication carried a regular column by Antonio Calvi that dealt with the international debate from a Euro-Atlantic position close to that of Raymond Aron in Le Figaro. Other contributors, such as Altiero Spinelli, were more inclined to a Europeanist view, even if in this particular version Europe was the far shore of a Euro-Atlantic line. For Spinelli – a supporter of a federalist Europe – the goal was Europe as a third force
but with the Old Continent cultivating Atlantic ties until achieving the energies and the opportunity to go independent.
The term cold peace
quoted in Cervetto’s 20th October letter to Masini, appeared in Il Mondo on 18th October,166 where it was challenged by Antonio Calvi, who didn’t believe that Moscow’s policy had changed. At this time the Atlantic relations policy mix also led to heated debate between Il Mondo’s Calvi and Luigi Salvatorelli of Turin’s La Stampa. In an editorial on 15th October Salvatorelli demanded mutual respect
within the Atlantic Alliance, on a basis of partnership and equality
. Stalin was excluding condict between the two blocs, sending out messages that he didn’t want war, but at the same time he was sowing discord among the Western powers with his hypothesis that they would clash with America. La Stampa completely excluded a war between the Western powers, but noted that this did not hold good for other areas of tension:
But for the word ‘war’ we should substitute ‘clash’ or ‘dissension’; we should remember that wars are not only military affairs, they can be diplomatic, economic, ideological, and all capable in the long term of causing troubles almost as serious as a real war.167
On 3rd October, La Stampa referred to Washington’s assumptions as to Stalin’s intentions
in relation to the presidential campaign in which Dwight Eisenhower was running for the Republicans. The most obvious interpretation saw encouragement to ‘neutralist’ and pacifist movements in Europe. Other versions held that the stress on Western contradictions heralded a period of playing for time
during which the USSR would return to the isolationism of -
a period during which it had, however, made great efforts to develop commercial trade with the capitalist countries to its maximum level
. With an eye more to its electoral campaign, the Democratic Party pointed out a meeting of interests between Stalin and the Republican isolationist currents that were proclaiming their mistrust of their European allies. According to this line of reasoning, Stalin meant to intimidate those American circles favourable to European unification by casting doubt on the wisdom of the United States contributing to creating a federation of States in Europe that in terms of importance and industrial and commercial power [could] constitute a serious challenge to American interests
.168
On 25th October, Antonio Calvi in Il Mondo argued against the claim for partnership and equality
within the Atlantic Alliance put forward by Salvatorelli:
[...] The Communists have understood our problems better than we ourselves. While many in the West have been talking about the details of Western systems, of counterweights, or worse yet, of the Atlantic Pact as incidental and manipulative and a European Community as permanent and final, the Communists have understood perfectly well that there’s only one game in town: the unity of the Western world.169
Up to this point the debate between Arrigo Cervetto and Pier Carlo Masini had been carried on with reference to sources that were available to both. It’s not certain that Cervetto read Raymond Aron’s Le Figaro articles, although some of his general positions would have been mentioned in Il Mondo, particularly by Calvi.
Economic Problems of Socialism was the subject of ‘Stalin speaks’ which appeared in Le Figaro of 11th-12th October 1952. Aron’s basic position could also be gauged from a previous article ‘Stalin’s Not Afraid’ on a series of discussions between Stalin and the Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni, who at that point was still in thrall to Moscow’s policies. Aron noted how Stalin combined ideology and realism; he would only negotiate if he really had something to fear from the West, just as he had done with Nazi Germany in 1939. The article concluded that Moscow did not look likely either to launch a great war or a true peace
. Aron had already employed this concept of war is improbable, peace is impossible
in February 1949, commenting on the American airlift mobilised against the Berlin blockade, which demonstrated that peace was not «in thrall to incidents»:
The rivalry between the communist world and the free world will continue without resolution and without explosions. People understand that for years to come we will live in a situation we may label as ‘neither peace nor war’.170
Another of Aron’s pieces distinguishes between inter-State conflict and economic clashes, and provides an example of the tenor of the discussions taking place within GAAP in that autumn of 1952. We will recall that Vinazza had put forward Cervetto’s «cold peace» theory, with Europe formally continuing on Atlantic Alliance lines, but progressively diverging from the USA on the economic plane. Aron wrote that:
It’s not a question of stabilising capitalism: it’s a question of conflict between capitalist States. If they are to develop, these conflicts require a long enough period of peace, or at any rate an absence of total war, between the two camps. Is Stalin really counting on a breakdown in relations between Europeans and Americans? If we’re talking about an imminent breakdown, the answer is, probably not: if we’re talking about, for example, increasing tensions between the Japanese and the Americans, the former keen to trade with Communist China, the latter keen to stop them – well, why not? The greater the area of the world that is barred to the international economic system, the greater its difficulties in functioning. To use Stalin’s language, it’s perfectly true that the extension of the Soviet zone, which rejects free trade, aggravates the contradictions of capitalism. Will these aggravated contradictions trigger a new war between capitalist States? This is a completely different question, on which probably Stalin, as a realistic politician, is less convinced than his dogmatic statements would have us believe.171
Aron did not find George Kennan’s containment
theories convincing, concluding that opinion on both sides
was the probable continuation of the «Cold War», i.e. a period during which the two camps would co-exist
without a great war, but also without real peace
.
The article ‘The Cost of Rearmament’ on 22nd October dealt with the incident between head of the French government Antoine Pinay and the United States that was taken, in the debate prior to GAAP’s National Committee meeting at Nervi, as evidence of European autonomy. On 6th October the American embassy had sent Paris a note that was critical of the French government’s military budget. Pinay rejected the note publicly and spectacularly. Aron’s version of the reasons for the Paris-Washington friction involved some contention on payment for arms France had commissioned from America. The conclusion was that France was unable to keep up both its rearmament programme and the cost of the war in Indochina.
The Amadeo Bordiga – Onorato Damen confrontation
Stalin declared that the theory of relative market stability
formulated in the 1930s was no longer valid, nor was Lenin’s theory on imperialist development
, according to which the parasitism of the imperialist phase did not prevent capitalism from growing at a pace incomparably more rapid than before
.
Stalin’s arguments were useful to the ideology of a world divided into two camps
. The contraposition of the ‘Cold War’ had consolidated ties in a new market
centred around the USSR, China and Eastern Europe, resulting in a high pace of development
that would soon lead to the need to export production surpluses
. This would reduce the available markets for the big capitalist powers, exacerbating the contraction of their industrial production: this would lead to the disintegration of the world market [...] the deepening of the general crisis of the capitalist world system
.
Stalin displayed a remarkable ability to manipulate and divert Marxist categories and concepts into sophistry. It is to be noted that his concept of general crisis and pace of accumulation are inseparable from the social nature of the USSR as State capitalism, and from the independence of the former colonies, which was transforming them into young capitalist powers. By separating the world market into two camps
under the pretext of a new market
(socialist) that linked Russia’s State capitalism with developing areas like China, he contrived to foresee crisis in the imperialist camp
when faced with the high pace of development of the so-called socialist camp
.
On the other side was the link between the scientific concept of the world market as unitary imperialism, the nature of the USSR as State capitalism and the struggles in the former colonies as bourgeois revolutions. This theoretical and analytical structure meant that at one and the same time it was possible to oppose the social-imperialist «two camps» theory that was imprisoning the world proletariat in the lie of Yalta, and to grasp all the implications of imperialist development and its pace of accumulation, including an analysis of uneven development and the dynamic produced by the changes in the relative strengths of the powers.
Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Tokyo, Bonn and Rome were all capitals of unitary imperialism: China, India, Indonesia, Algeria and Egypt were all new developing powers: the whole of unitary imperialism’s world market was being dragged along in a long cycle of development, in which however its destructive wars and crises would remain both partial and local.
Outside Stalinist manipulation was the real course of imperialism, with its tangle of contradictions that would have to be ironed out in an autonomous politics, starting with the concept of strategic internationalism. All the Trotskyist, Third World or Maoist variants that misunderstood or later confused the signs of the times – the nature of the USSR and imperialist development – would in one way or another contribute to the Stalinist sophistry that was annihilating working-class autonomy.
These reflections would become the firm principles of the ‘1957 Theses’, which rejected the division of the world economy into «two camps», revealed the USSR as State capitalism, understood the workings of capitalism in the underdeveloped areas of the world, and based the strategic estimate for working-class action on the long times of world capitalist development.
On the scientific journey Cervetto was just beginning – a journey full of practical political implications for the reconstruction of the working-class party – it’s easy to understand his interest in the third line of sources in 1952: Amadeo Bordiga’s theoretical clash with Onorato Damen, which had led to the split in their organisation.
Cervetto had heard hints of internal tensions in PCI, Bordiga’s party, in 1950, and then of crisis in the autumn of 1951, during his stay in Argentina. Since the exchange of letters between Bordiga and Damen was not published until April 1952, Cervetto was only able to study the issue on his return from Argentina. As we have seen, one of the nine points in his ‘Theoretical Notes’ on uneven development is taken from Damen.172
In order to analyse the disproportion of forces between Washington and Moscow, Cervetto had been working on the notion of imperialist uneven development
and its strategic and political effects, starting from the common imperialist nature of the USA and the USSR within unitary imperialism. This was the main theme he raised in the spring of 1952 and at GAAP’s Florence National Conference in June. But the correspondence between ‘Onorio’ (Damen) and ‘Alfa’ (Bordiga) dealt only indirectly with the tensions between Europe and America that continued to be the prevalent theme for GAAP’s extended National Committee in the autumn of 1952 (the exception being the point Cervetto borrowed from Damen for his ‘Notes’). America, wrote Bordiga was the No. 1 concentration
and capable of crushing any revolution. Japan and Germany are at rock bottom, France and Italy have been severely shaken [...] Britain itself is in serious crisis
.173 On the ‘No. 1 concentration’ Damen specified:
The formula is correct, if it is understood in the sense that international capitalism, considered in its unitary reality albeit with differences of scale due to its uneven development has in America ‘its biggest metropolitan concentration of capital, production and power’.174
Our highlighting delineates the statement Cervetto borrowed. To discover the initial moments of Cervetto’s thinking on this we must take a step back, to the books and notes of his time in Argentina.
‘Los Tres Grandes’
This is the fourth, and final fine of contribution to Cervetto’s thinking in 1952. In a sense it is the first, since it is here, among the books and notes he deconstructed in Buenos Aires, that we find his autonomous and original reflections on the issues debated the following year: the relationship between the USA and the USSR and the contradictions between America and Europe.
While Cervetto was in Argentina, Vinazza was sending him packages of newspaper cuttings plus material he had typed out with the help of comrades at Sestri Ponente.175 A note written towards the end of 1951 and entitled ‘History of USA-USSR relations’ concerns an Il Mondo review on 10th November of a book by George Kennan, American Diplomacy:
The complete history of relations between the USA and the USSR could constitute the main chapter in the history of modern imperialism and indirectly contribute to a) historically document the theory of ‘imperialism as a unitary phenomenon of the capitalist erd’ b) provide a picture of current development as it has determined the division of the world into two antagonistic blocs c) demonstrate how imperialism’s contradictions inevitably produced the two-bloc system (practically speaking the USA has created the Soviet bloc as an organic and spontaneous product of its own imperialist actions) as a temporary solution to the imperialist crisis. This we can verify in world political and economic history, thus demonstrating that our exact definition of the Soviet phenomenon is correct. So there’s no need to look for an interpretation of this phenomenon in the degeneration of the workers’ State, as the Trotskyists are doing, but in the very history of imperialism itself d) define Soviet diplomacy e) define USA diplomacy f) help to define the social nature of the USSR, its economic structure, etc. h) provide documentation for anti-imperialist propaganda, which is the more effective the more it shows up the ‘unitary’ and common sides of the two blocs, and above all their ‘conspiracy’ – i) how the USA and the USSR are ‘unitary counter-revolution’.
The study of USA-USSR relations is practically useful to revolutionary politics. It should therefore be used extensively and systematically as propaganda.
We have highlighted that the USSR is a spontaneous product
of American action; it records that as early as 1951, in Argentina, Cervetto was considering the relative strengths of the USA and USSR, and it contains one element of the interpretation of Yalta that would reach its completion in 1968, in the theory of the true partition
.
Arrigo Cervetto, a note on David Dallin’s book Los Très Grandes, written on a Buenos Aires wholesale textile merchant’s pad.
Among the books Cervetto read and made notes on while in Argentina was Los Tres Grandes, a Spanish translation of David Dallin’s book The Big Three: the United States, Britain and Russia, published in the USA in 1945. Born in 1889, Dallin had been a Menshevik leader and a member of the Moscow Soviet between 1918 and 1921. Exiled from Russia in 1921, he took refuge first in Germany and then in the USA, where his writings found an audience in the American academic and political world via Yale University. Yale University Press had also published a previous work, Russia and Postwar Europe, in 1943; in Spanish translation, this too was among Cervetto’s Argentina reading material.
Los Tres Grandes may be described as one of those books written by a European in order to explain world politics to Americans, and in this sense it is also a sort of guide to the realist school of foreign policy. There is a general acknowledgement of uneven economic and political development, seen in the light of the outcomes of the Second World War. The overall view is influenced by geopolitical theory; contention for control over the continental heart
of Europe is set against the sea power
of Great Britain and the USA.
For Dallin, the crucial outcome of the war was the passing, after four centuries, of sea power
from Great Britain to America. The concern was how Washington would understand its enormous new global responsibilities: whether it would underestimate the revival of the Russian menace, as in the 1930s it had underestimated the Nazis. Dallin’s political aims would become clearer in the course of the 1950s, when he supported German rearmament and John Foster Dulles’ roll back
rhetoric – assertive pressure on the USSR to withdraw from Eastern Europe.
We cannot here reproduce Dallin’s theories in their entirety; we will mention however two significant strands that were known to Cervetto before his return to Italy. The first is the realistic recognition of power relations that opens the book, alongside the concept of uneven development. What is required is:
A realistic appraisal of the new world which is now emerging of the dynamic forces which are active in it, of the dangers which threaten at each turn. (...) There is no greater crime against peace than wilful short-sightedness in international affairs.176
In the dynamics of power, wrote Dallin, wars and crises are defining moments, but no order lasts forever. Rise and fall are in the very nature of international relations:
«Great Powers have been born in wars: they have matured in wars: and they have died in wars. War lays naked to the world the developments and evolution within individual nations which were too gradual to have been observed in normal times; international crises reveal their strengths and their weaknesses. Within the past few centuries once great powers – Portugal, Sweden, Holland, Spain, Turkey – became minor powers following a war. The minor powers of yesterday – the United States, Japan – have grown to be great. [...] Who will be the masters of tomorrow? Will the powers defeated in this war be eliminated forever? Will the victors retain their combined dominance over the world?»
Until the beginning of the 20th century, big power status was reserved to European nations. There were five major powers – Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Prussia-Germany – and two minor – Italy and Spain. The great revolution in power relations came «around 1900»:
Europe’s total dominance was at an end. An American and an Asiatic nation were rapidly acquiring wealth, military strength and influence in international affairs. The growth of these two nations brought unfamiliar problems and created new hotbeds of tension. The Far East, secondary or even third-rate in world affairs a few decades before, was becoming a new battlefield both in war and in peace. Its emergence created an upheaval in the international position of a number of nations, Russia among them. It would be too much to say that the centre of gravity had shifted away from Europe. Rather there was now more than one centre of gravity, and the importance of the new ones grew with every decade of the twentieth century.177
During his studies in Argentina Cervetto had gone back to Lenin’s Imperialism. Dallin’s position was exactly socio-imperialist
and favoured the USA: his analysis contained serious weaknesses – he overestimated how long Great Britain’s strength would last, and underestimated China, his hypothesis being that it would end up divided. Nevertheless, it would be hard to miss the echoes of Lenin’s uneven economic and political development: the challenge posed by the USA and Japan to the old European order, the 1905 war that shook Tsarist Russia, the entrance of Asia onto the world scene. In this sense, the book was a good starting-point for updating the picture of the imperialist powers at the end of two world wars.
Those who fell from their positions of power, or found those positions to be lower than before included Austria-Hungary in 1918; Italy in 1943; France in 1940; Germany and Japan in 1945. As far as Dallin was concerned, only the United States, Great Britain and Russia survived the lethal epidemics of the twentieth century
. These three were the only nations interested in both the old European theatre of affairs and the new one in the Far East
.
It is useful to reproduce in full Dallin’s summary of the Second World War, for the multiplicity of conflicts it identifies. In this war:
a multitude of wars were merged into one great war: the outcome of that war must answer a multitude of questions. China’s war against Japan and against foreign privileges; Britain’s war against the hegemony of any other nation in Europe and the Far East; Poland’s centuries-long war for independence against Germany and Russia; the American war against domination in the Pacific and the Far East of any other power and for a stable Europe; Russia’s war of self-defence; the Soviet war for a worldwide Union; the French war against the ‘hereditary enemy’ (Germany); the wars of the Balkan States for territories and predominance; Romania’s war for Transylvania; Australia’s war for security and for Oceania; Germany’s war for half the world; Japan’s war for the other half.178
This concept of a multitude of wars
» partially brings to the surface and partially obscures the two wars
in Europe and Asia that encompass the whole conflict, and the undifferentiated catalogue of tensions and conflicts does not make clear – as Lenin had made clear in 1914 – the overriding nature of the conflict as an imperialist war. Nevertheless, it is understandable that this wide, even global view could give Cervetto the advantage in facing the situation in Italy, where the horizon had been shut down by bipolarism, and which was imprisoned in the crushing notion of America’s mighty dollar
.
In spite of Cervetto’s ties with European immigrants and refugees, Buenos Aires was a different strategic chessboard. From Argentina he saw the world from a different angle, a view from the American hemisphere, and this also explains how works dealing with American foreign policy were so readily available in Spanish. For all that Dallin was imbued with European culture, there was a sense in which from New York the Atlantic and the Pacific were both equally present, and then, the history of Russia was the history of both Europe and Asia: in the 1905 war Japan had knocked at the very doors of the Tsar.
The second strand is that of uneven development as seen not in the rise of new powers but in the re-emergence of the old. Dallin deduced that the preeminence of the Big Three
, Washington, Moscow and London, which had come victorious out of the war, could not be durable
. The military meeting of interests, like all wartime coalitions, was destined to end swiftly with the war’s end:
A number of other nations will gradually climb the stairs to the big-power throne, and then new groupings, combinations and coalitions will emerge.179
Dallin forecast that Germany, France and Japan would recover economically, but also due to political and strategic factors. In the dynamics of power, the central position of France would be important for European equilibrium, and similarly the central position of Japan for the balance of Asia.
The real issue in Europe was still Germany. Dallin argued that although Germany had come out of the war «crushed, partitioned, powerless», deprived of any military strength and without a voice in European affairs, this is not her first defeat
. Germany’s main strength lay in her economy
and in her geographical position: Europe needs German industry
. The restoration of Germany’s railways was an urgent necessity for her neighbours [...] her machines will be needed for the restoration of the economy all over the continent
. His conclusion was that:
A degree of influence in European politics will be reacquired by Germany after a certain time, by economic means. After 1918 the military force of Germany was negligible and remained so until 1933. However, by the middle 20s Germany did play a role in international relations, and it was her rapidly restored economy that was the basis of her rise. Difficult as will be the resurrection of German industry after 1945, the process will essentially be the same, though at first special efforts will be taken to prevent it. New leaders will arise, new political ideas will take shape in Germany, but Germany – a Germany of quite another type – has not been struck out as a political factor in the future.
The end point of this theory sees Germany as a postwar ally. In default of this, the rivalries of the other powers could create space for Germany, as had happened with France after 1815: Even Hitlers rise would have been impossible had it not been for the antagonisms between Germany’s east and west, and between Britain and Franse
. The theory of Germany’s inevitable revival suggested that the United States should help this along, in order to balance the USSR’s return to power. Dallin put forward the same considerations for Japan:
Though defeated and ousted from the Asiatic continent, Japan will remain a great economic organism. Her abilities in the economic field are suprising. Her achievements all over the East are spectacular. In Asia and Oceania her trade has equalled that of the United States. Manchuria has developed, under Japan, at an amazing rate. This source of influence on international affairs will remain with Japan. In addition, her geographical location at the very knot of Far Eastern troubles can soon make her either an important buffer State among the big powers or even an ally – with all the privileges of a ‘favourite’ of a big power. An end will be set, of course, to her dream of predominance over the continent of Asia and the Pacific, but Japanese influence in her own part of the world will not be eliminated altogether.
Finally, for Dallin «France will rise again to the status of a great power, although she will probably never be as great as she was in past centuries». It would take years for Paris to rebuild her power, but with or without foreign help France would once again have a strong army under a traditionally excellent military leadership
. Paradoxically, Paris would gain advantage from the fact that her demographic losses in the war had been minimal. She would not have a first-class navy, nor a determining influence outside Europe, but in Europe she would emerge on a political plane as «the first power, after Russia». In European affairs, her voice would once again be «at least as important as Britain’s.
There is a striking conceptual resemblance here to Stalin’s theories as voiced in the autumn of 1952 – obviously with a difference in strategic perspective. For Cervetto, the debate on the prospects for European autonomy from the USA was nothing new; for at least a year he had had access to good quality material on the subject.
Methodology: a plurality of bourgeois sources
The overlap between Stalin and Dallin on such issues as the dynamics of uneven development and the revival of Germany and Japan as world powers, gives us an insight into Arrigo Cervetto’s methodology. If we consider the sources to which he had access for his 1952 analysis – leaving aside Lenin’s Imperialism and a few points from Bordiga – we note that they are key ruling class lines of thought, albeit in dispute with each other.
La Stampa, which argued for European autonomy on a basis of partnership and equality
within the Atlantic Alliance, was nevertheless tied to Fiat of Turin, a major big business group of Italian imperialism. Il Mondo reflected influential sections of the Euro-Atlantic consensus. Stalin was at the head of Russian imperialism. Le Figaro and Le Monde were typical expressions of French imperialism’s political élites. David Dallin had his own particular history, sharing the fate of many Mensheviks who had taken refuge in the USA, who would have liked to be the infantry of the revolution and instead found themselves soldiers of the Cold War
.180 Nevertheless, his work was worth some attention as an expression of the debate between the various currents of American imperialism on postwar prospects.
These were, therefore, ruling class sources, imperialist sources, whether Russian, European or American, right down to a Menshevik enlisted in the ‘Cold War’, and Stalin himself. Maximalist psychology would have rejected a method that so carefully compared ‘bourgeois’ texts. But the scientific value of that analytical method was precisely that it turned to the currents and the schools of thought of the ruling class, gathering them from the best available sources and comparing them.
This was the science of Capital concretely applied to political analysis: the groups and fractions of the bourgeoisie, the powers and the political forces they make use of, are in continual struggle among themselves. The clash between their political expressions is the breach that opens for the science-party, allowing it to know the real strength of its class enemy, and understand its contradictions for the purposes of the revolutionary struggle.