Conclusions

Chapter Eleven

At the end of 1981, General Jaruzelski’s coup d’état in Poland had suddenly conjured up the spectre of Yalta in European and world politics. That new and dramatic freeze was the background to an outline in ‘Notebooks’ written between 1981 and 1982, a combination of political biography and record of a stage in the party’s history. Cervetto was marking the stage of his scientific achievement, the ‘true partition’ theory, and the Warsaw crisis was confirming, at the expense of the Polish proletariat, all the dishonour of Yalta, which only a minority had bitterly opposed, thanks to that same strategic vision.

An entire library, commented Cervetto in Lotta Comunista, had been written about Yalta: it had taken only a day to show up the truth more clearly than years of research. Then followed a page that laid bare more clearly than any other why Yalta had been such a disgrace for the international proletariat:

The truth about unitary imperialism is that modern-day Europe is the fruit of a division into spheres of influence made by robber-barons after the defeat of Nazi Germany, which had attempted to unify and rule the whole continent by blood and iron.

Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to divide up what Hitler had not united and, waving the banners and brandishing the illusions of democracy and socialism, they brought the infernal dynamic of the European war to completion. Yalta marks the historic defeat of Germany, Britain and France. Unable to unify itself, European imperialism destroyed itself in two huge wars and gave birth to all sorts of monsters, from genocide to Nazism. The revolutionary Marxists, heirs of the progressive destiny of the human race, sought to break free from such self-destructive barbarism by raising the banner of the October Revolution’s internationalism. They did not succeed, but the history of the human race will remember them, one day, as the unfortunate precursors of a universal value that wipes out classes and races.

Without proletarian internationalism, the division of self-destroyed European imperialism at the hands of America and Russia mould not encounter any obstacles. It mas not the first time that the victors had shared the spoils, but it mas the first time that one of the most brutal imperialist robberies and the biggest in absolute terms had spawned a huge mass ideology that justified and exalted it. The international proletariat paid a high price – moral servitude – for its loss of theoretical, political and organisational autonomy. It is paying it and will go on paying it as long as State capitalism continues to oppress the marking class in the name of communism.

Yalta mas imposed by force and mas accepted with propagandised and organised consensus. The fem internationalists that did not accept the pax of unitary imperialism mere physically eliminated. In the credit and debit of the revolutionary movement, in the double-entry accounting of history, the final reckoning still has to be made.

Yalta is the nadir of internationalism. This is why its spectre and its ideology are reappearing today».²⁰¹

Yalta was the nadir, the unfinished business with those who had dragged the international proletariat into that abyss. In that December of 1981, solidarity for the Polish workers came from a Genoa march organised by Lotta Comunista’s Workers’ Clubs, the only internationalist voice in the city that was Italy’s leading city of State capitalism, and was still, though not for much longer, the organisational stronghold of the PCI. In a few more years, all that would be swept away by the collapse of the USSR and by the restructuring brought about by the world cycle of liberist imperialism. The big State groups of Italian imperialism would be ground down by the strictures of Europe: the Moscow line would collapse along with the USSR, and so would the PCI, which had shuttled between Moscow and Genoa, the city that was the Italian exemplar of State capitalism.

That was thirty years since Genoa Pontedecimo, and today it’s sixty years since this story began. The final reckoning will take place only when imperialism’s crisis and the breakdown of order among the powers calls us to once more raise the banner of 1917. In the meantime, the harbingers of things to come consist not only of the disaster the Russian party has suffered in Italy, but also of the patient reconstruction of an internationalist vision rooted in the new generations, and in the development of a strategy that guarantees its ability to move today against European imperialism and the divisions of a ‘new strategic phase’. This would not exist if in 1951 that group of young workers had decided to resign themselves to defeat. Instead, they chose to start again.

For now we will close this history at 1952, at those first ten years of the group that founded the party. Soon a new stage would begin. As Stalinism went into crisis the large maximalist current of Azione Comunista broke away from the PCI. Cervetto was sceptical, while bowing to the dictates of organisational discipline: as far as he was concerned, the attempt to stick together the Communist Left Movement was a botch-up: «an attempt to unite dissident communist groups while anticipating a return to the Ten Points of Livorno».^*202

The first public meeting of the Communist Left took place on 16^th December 1956, in the Dante Cinema in Milan. Here we record only a brief preliminary assessment. Apart from Bruno Fortichiari, for long a link with the PCd’I of 1921, the speakers were Onorato Damen, Livio Maitan, and Pier Carlo Masini. Theoretically and politically, Cervetto had argued with them all. In one sense the same was true of another participant, Amadeo Bordiga, who accurately and sarcastically attached the label four-leaved clover to this meeting of Maitan’s Trotskyists, Damen’s Battaglia Comunista, the libertarian communists of Masini and Cervetto, and Giulio Seniga’s and Fortechiari’s Azione Comunista.

At the close of the 1940s, Cervetto had drawn from Bordiga’s work a crucial link with Marxist theory on the social nature of the USSR and on world imperialism, even if he had at once – instinctively before theoretically – been perplexed by the liquidationist consequences of that conceptual structure, in which the superpower of the mighty dollar seemed to wipe out any possibility of action for the length of an entire cycle. The real issue, «Bordiga’s virtual withdrawal»²⁰³, could not be resolved. It was no accident that the attempts to link up were most successful with Onorato Damen – who had also picked up this contradiction at the time of the painful split in 1952 – starting with collaboration on producing the periodical Prometeo.

We have seen how important Masini’s comradeship was initially for Cervetto, but also how after 1950 the dialectic within GAAP led to increasingly marked divergences. Masini himself acknowledged this in his parting letter, in 1958:

Dissent between us already existed at the time of GAAP. Subsequently positions became radicalised. Dissent became open, unbridgeable. But this evolution took place on both sides. Ultimately we merged with Azione Comunista in order to extinguish our contradictions in a greater contradiction.²⁰⁴

Fundamental differences with Maitan regarding the USSR as State capitalism could not be avoided, and as early as the afternoon of 16^th December Cervetto raised the issue in a core group meeting of the Communist Left.

Bordiga’s ironies on the four-leaved clover were simultaneously right and wrong. He had seen the clearly disparate nature of that meeting as far as the fundamental issues – strategic view of imperialism, social nature of the USSR – went, but he had no solution to offer, since neither was his paralysing monster, the mighty dollar an adequate response to the revolutionary passions that were mobilising in that cinema hall in Milan.

In the ‘Notebooks’ account of 1982 we may find both these contradictory elements: the liberating nature of the event for those who had previously been isolated and the strategic inadequacy of the concepts that had brought them together. Significantly, for Cervetto 1956 concluded the first stage of the road to the party, the stage of the struggle for internationalism. What bound these organisations together was the call of the ideal of internationalism, which since 1950 had been what had animated the ‘Front’ of an opposition to war. But even that simple unity around a principle was precarious, because of the lack of strategic unity.

And strategic unity wasn’t just an option, it was indispensable for the attempt that meeting of organisations was initiating. Subsequent events were to confirm that strategy depends on theoretical clarity, and that only strategy can guarantee political independence in the face of the forces and the ideologies that influence the working class. That was particularly true in 1956, when the postwar order was being shaken by winds of change, in an Italy at the crossroads between American, Russian and European parties.

The battle for strategy would be the next stage.

^* This refers to the ten-point programme adopted at Livorno on 21^st January 1921, at a meeting considered to be the founding of the Communist Party of Italy, and inserted into the first article of its statute.