PONTEDECIMO, GENOA, 1951

Chapter Four

 

The conference at Pontedecimo, Genoa, established the original group which in the early 1960s would go on to found Lotta Comunista. It was a working-class group, most of whom had been drawn into politics in the course of the partisan struggle: a small group, a hand-picked unit. The first thing to be done was to acknowledge the failure of everything that had gone before, in the catastrophe of the Second World War, the second to maximise the few forces available by ‘100% organisation’. Then to reaffirm internationalism, against both Washington and Moscow. On the issue of the State and imperialism, some of this group continued to follow the anarchist line: for Cervetto, it was a case of restoring the theories of Marx and Lenin. These were the first few steps towards a consistent theory and strategy.

In the division of labour to prepare for the conference that would establish GAAP, Arrigo Cervetto was assigned to draft the theory on the elimination of the State as a tool of the ruling class.

From the correspondence with Masini, it can be seen that Cervetto was reluctant to undertake this. As he wrote at the end of December, passing the whole thing on to Masini, it was not so much that he was uncertain as to his own abilities: he had fundamental reservations as to the possibility of formulating a credible theory cut off from both the anarchist tradition and Leninism.

Doubts on the theory of the State

Masini labelled it a two-pronged formulation and maintained that it had all been clarified. Cervetto’s grave doubts reflected the debate that had been going on for months:

I’ve started to collect material [...] But I have to tell you honestly that this task may be beyond my capacities. To be able to estimate (and not under or overestimate) one’s personal capacities is an iron rule for every revolutionary. Some theories are a bit of a stumbling block. For example, the withering away of the State as a classless society is established – you have to admit that this is one of the weakest points of ‘our’ ideology. We’ve never really studied it systematically. You’ll say that this is the inevitable outcome of all our work, that only solutions to immediate problems can provide firm indicators of future problems. Okay, but just think, Lenin wrote State and Revolution in 1917. And with our limited experience we can’t just snap our fingers and get beyond him theoretically – not and be sure that what we produce will have any validity. And now the political exigencies are different: unfortunately, this may push us into going back over most, if not all, of the old anarchist ground.⁶⁴

Back in March Cervetto, with youthful rashness, had set himself to go beyond Lenin on the knotty issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By December, with time running out and the conference approaching, he was realising the difficulty of a solution, other than that outlined in State and Revolution, that wouldn’t be merely verbal sophistry:

We really must get past the same old anarchist critique. Personally, I think we have to put forward the theory of ‘direct revolutionary rule’ as a provisional phase of the revolution. ‘Direct revolutionary rule’ is a form of State very close to the Commune-State. The phrase doesn’t convey the precise and politically appropriate differentiation, but with anything else we would fall back into the anarchist critique that has never succeeded in resolving the problem.⁶⁵

February 1951: Pontedecimo

There exist four direct sources that record the conference that gave birth to GAAP in 1951: two internal reports by Cervetto, an account in his ‘Notebooks’, and Parodi’s speech at the public commemoration of the conference 25 years later.

Speaking at a Lotta Comunista national conference in the summer of 1971, Cervetto described «the struggle for internationalism» as the essence of the «first stage» of the party’s development, up to 1956. An overview of the «objective situation» in the immediate post-war period had to begin from the new balance of power that had come out of that conflict:

I) The imperialist order after the Second World War: defeat of German and Italian imperialism in Europe, weakening of British and French imperialism, the rise of Russian imperialism.

In Asia: defeat of Japanese imperialism and weakening of British, Dutch and French imperialism.

An imperialist order that is witnessing the hegemony of US imperialism in the world, and the rise of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe.

II)  The position of Italian imperialism. In the division of spheres of influence, the Italian bourgeoisie is in the American sphere.

The reconstruction of Italian capitalism will take place within this international framework».⁶⁶

From 1943 to 1947 this reconstruction took place in a context of collaboration between the American party and the «Russian party». This coalition’s ideology was anti-German, anti-Fascist, national reconstruction. Bidding to unify all strata of society, it was a new form of the nationalist ideology of the Fascist 1920s. The evidence demonstrates that this type of ideology «succeeds in producing collaboration between classes: a fact we should never forget», notes Cervetto.

In this situation class struggle, generated by the conditions into which the crisis of Italian imperialism has flung the working class, does not disappear: the «Stalinist ideology» – the myth of the USSR – works to seamlessly join together class struggle and class collaboration with the Stalinist party, the PCI, plctying a fundamental role.

After 1947, there was a degree of change in international relations:

Between 1947 and 1956 capitalist reconstruction was completed against an international background that witnessed the break-up of the USA-USSR alliance, and the so-called Cold War.

Why did this alliance come to an end? Because, while the division of Europe remained unchanged, the struggle began for the division of spheres of influence in Asia. In 1949 Mao’s bourgeois-democratic revolution unified the Chinese State and made a short-lived alliance with the USSR.

While US imperialism had shared spheres of influence in Europe with the USSR, in Asia it ruled supreme and was not disposed to surrender any part of it (either to the USSR or to China). This was what led to the brief USSR-China alliance.

The international picture also determined what was happening in Italy. The period which saw a meeting of interests between Washington and Moscow corresponded to the phase of national collaboration within Italy, which ended when the Washington-Moscow tension began:

After the USA-USSR break (which involved Asia, not Europe) collaboration in Italy broke down in 1947.

The ‘American’ party in Italy (the central government) was united in prioritising a twofold increase in capital.

Once reconstruction had been completed, this doubling of capital was achieved by:

1. 1)  massive unemployment (2 million)
2. 2)  massive underemployment (4 million – caused by overpopulation of the agricultural areas – 40% of the active population
3. 3)  a wages squeeze
4. 4)  repression (political sackings, police brutality: 150 dead)

The opposition was represented by Stalinism (the PCI) which in this period reached its full strength.

In such a situation, wrote Cervetto, a revolutionary party – even a hand-picked unit – could assert itself only by adopting four conditions:

First: by rejecting all nationalist and class collaborationist positions

Second: by reaffirming proletarian internationalism

Third: by analysing imperialist reality and its features as diplayed by the two imperialist blocs

Fourth: by rejecting the ideology of a leading socialist State and instead carrying out a scientific analysis of the nature of USSR society (theory of State capitalism).

Note that all four of these conditions start off from an international view of the Italian situation. The PCI could not distinguish itself merely by taking part in the maximalist political contests of postwar reconstruction, but had to rely on its position as the (social-imperialist) Russian party.

Hence, the internationalist struggle had to have its own concept of imperialism – unitary imperialism – that could denounce the USSR as an imperialist power, and its own concept of the social nature of the USSR – the theory of State capitalism – that could unmask its oppression of the working class.

Arrigo Cervetto, ‘The Stages in the Struggle for the Development of the Leninist Party in Italy’, August 1971.

In this FIRST STAGE of the PARTY’S STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT, it must struggle to differentiate itself from the following currents:

anarchist – spontaneity (rejection of PARTY STRUCTURES)

Bordiga – (inevitable collapse of capitalism theory)

Trotskyism – (theory of Russia as a degenerated Workers’ State

and

ENTRYISM)

ALL THESE ‘ANTI-STALINIST’ CURRENTS ARE RIDDLED WITH VARYING GRADATIONS OF THE FOLLOWING:

• 1)  Theory of the USA as the SUPERIMPERIALISM

(BORDIGA = theory of THE DOLLAR AS SUPREME TROTSKYISTS = since the USSR is a degenerated Workers State, THE USA IS THE ONLY IMPERIALISM IN THE WORLD)

• 2)  A WAIT-AND-SEE, LIQUIDATIONIST POSITION

(BORDIGUIST) = theory of the TOTALITARIAN STATE no point WORKING IN THE TRADE UNIONS WAITING FOR 1975

TROTSKYISTS = ENTRYISM)

• 3)  THEORY THAT A 3^rd IMPERIALIST WORLD WAR IS IMMINENT

(BORDIGUIST

PABLO / MANDEL = ‘La guerre qui vient’)

These positions reflect the 1947 backlash.

TO THE CREDIT OF OUR GROUP. WE HAVE OPPOSED LIQUI-DATIONISM AND ACCURATELY ANALYSED THE DEVELOPING TRENDS.

If consolidating the revolutionary party meant opposing the ideology of the Yalta division – a world split into two camps in which the USSR was socialism’s lead State, it also required a struggle to differentiate the party from other anti-Stalinist currents. It had to differentiate itself from anarchist spontaneity and its rejection of party structures: from Bordiga’s ‘inevitable collapse of capitalism’ theory: and from the Trotskyists, with their view of the USSR as degenerated Workers’ State and their entry ist tactics in relation to the PCI. In varying versions, and to different degrees, all these currents were influenced by ideologies of ‘superimperialism’. For Bordiga, this was the USA – the dollar ruling supreme: for the Trotskyists, their view of the USSR as a socialist, albeit degenerated state, left the USA as the only imperialist power. The anarchists took the opposite position: that the USSR was the real totalitarian oppressor.

Cervetto further noted that all these currents took a liquidationist ‘wait-and-see’ attitude to party work. For the Trotskyists this involved their entryist tactics; for the followers of Bordiga it was composed of the paralysing notion of a totalitarian State and a rejection of work within the trade unions while awaiting the final crisis that would lead to revolution.

For the anarchists, individualism, anti-organisation, and anti-centrism were the important positions. Finally, all these currents were influenced by the theory that a Third Imperialist World War was imminent, but this was also to influence the GAAP groups up until 1952/3.

Do we understand the historical meaning of the party’s actions?

A 1976 presentation, on the 25^th anniversary of the meeting at Pontedecimo, provides a more detailed treatment of the theories and policies of that conference. It was addressed to the generation recruited between the 1960s and 70s, brought into politics by the economic 1905 – the cycle that had just ended of working-class wage struggles and crisis in the educational system – and was an attempt to pass on to them the historic meaning of the political struggle in which they were engaged:

Marxism is the science of socio-economic formations, the science of the laws that govern the movements of societies.

It’s the science of history, of the long times in which biological generation succeeds generation, in fixed or given social relations of production.

The dynamic of these social relations, the evolution and crises of their cycles, is a history that takes place over long times.

One of the most difficult Marxist tasks is to define the contingent actions of each generation, the party’s actions within the cycle of history, in the long times of the history of class struggle.

It’s difficult to have a historical understanding of contingent political action: it’s not so much that the concept is hard to understand, it’s more the difficulty of defining it scientifically within the cycles of history, the long times.

Difficult, but not impossible.

One would have to take a few points of reference along this long trek and in the light of these find analogies and differences in the general conditions of the party’s actions».⁶⁷

Two issues are common to every generation that becomes involved in revolutionary militancy:

1) Do we understand the historical meaning of the party’s practical and daily actions? (Since the great majority of militants come to the party from a specific cycle of working-class struggles, it could be said that this historical meaning has yet to be assimilated.)

2) Can we define the nature of our current party actions within the long times?.

The points of reference taken were the 1907 crisis when repression and reaction after the 1905 revolution almost succeeded in politically killing off the Bolshevik party: the 1930s crisis when counter-revolution and strategic inadequacy led to the loss of an entire generation in terms of the continuity of the working-class party: and the 1950s crisis when it became urgent to restore that continuity. 1907 and the 1930s could be examined as history and theory: for the leaders of Lotta Comunista, the crisis of the 1950s was a direct personal experience. Cervetto notes that the value of the 1951 Pontedecimo Conference lies in that kind of practical experience.

During those years we became fully aware that we were only paying for the party’s 1930s theoretical and organisational crisis.

If there was any credit to be taken, it lay in having recognised implacably and without self-pity just how serious this crisis was: maybe one can only do this sort of thing at a particular age and stage of one’s revolutionary career when hard facts drive one to chose between political passion and passivity. The choice, added Cervetto, lay between militant action and accepting one of the many forms of opportunism: it was a choice between life, in all its richness and pain, and pure and simple biological vegetation.

To live, or merely to exist: to pour all one’s energies into political passion or to allow a society well versed in the art of corruption to dissipate every intense feeling.

Theories on the State

The discussions that took place at Pontedecimo regarding theories on the State and on imperialism were later summarised by Cervetto in a list of key concepts, in which he also indicated where these agreed with or diverged from the views of Pier Carlo Masini. The original list is reproduced below, with numeration added by the publishers for ease of reference.

• 1)  Cervetto rejected the «anarchist theory of the State.
• 2)  In the discussions at Pontedecimo, both Cervetto and Masini «accepted Bordiga’s views on the State». Cervetto notes that «in reality, as I discovered later, these were the views of Bukharin» which had also been accepted by Lenin in State and Revolution. The difference, as Cervetto was further to discover, «lay in Lenin’s critique of absolutisation» which was part of Bukharin’s theories on imperialism and State capitalism.
• 3)  We disagreed as to the period of transition. We both – mistakenly – accepted that revolution and dissolution of the State would take place simultaneously.
• 4)  We both rejected Bordiga’s «party dictatorship.
• 5)  «We both rejected Bordiga’s liquidationism and his theory on proletariat / working-class aristocracy.
• 6)  «We both rejected Bordiga’s superimperialism» – our shared theory, the basis of our political tendency and our strategy, is one of unitary imperialism and two superimperialisms.
• 7)  «We reached a common solution on Gramsci, as providing further elaboration of the Bukharin-Bordiga-Lenin position on the totalitarian State.

Cervetto concludes by noting that the solution put forward at Pontedecimo was that the concept of Party should be «traditional» but that organisationally it should develop along lines running between Lenin and Gramsci.

Here the 1950 correspondence referred to earlier helps to clarify the situation.

There could be no strategy-party in 1951: the analysis of the international forces of imperialism was still inadequate, and the idea that the party should be rooted in the tradition of Italy’s working-class movement (and particularly the anarchist movement) was a step in the wrong direction. In fact, a decade later this particular conundrum was finally resolved against the idea of a traditional party. This opposite direction – the attempt to establish the Bolshevik party model in a mature imperialist metropolis – was unprecedented, and particularly so in Italy, where it clashed with the traditionally maximalist nature of the Italian working-class movement.

We have previously referred to the role played by Gramsci in all of the above. It is interesting to note that his theories were used as a basis for attempting to go beyond the concept of Bukharin and Bordiga’s «totalitarian State» – a concept that in 1951 was wrongly also attributed to Lenin. (Lenin accepted the stress laid by Bukharin on the need to break up the machinery of the bourgeois State, but rejected Bukharin’s absolutistic concept of a single State-capital concentration leading to a completely militarised society: the conceptual forerunner of «totalitarianism» theory. Bukharin’s «New Leviathan»⁶⁸ in which all distinctions between big capital, social forces and public power would be annulled, raised all the theoretical issues regarding the nature of the State and of imperialism.

Two of these issues, unitary imperialism and «two super-imperialisms» will be dealt with in subsequent chapters. Here we note only that even at the point of formulating that common solution in the late summer of 1950, there continued to be some difference of emphasis between Cervetto and Masini. By 1996 Masini would lay claim to «the theories on the elimination of the State, but was to add that even the theories on unitary imperialism had two different interpretations».⁶⁹ There is a temptation to see in the Masini via Bordiga position an echo of Bukharin’s theory, along with its deficiencies of dialectical method. But the extant correspondence suggests a difference of emphasis and not two structurally different interpretations, indicating that undoubtedly unitary imperialism and two super-power blocs were the theoretical basis of 1951s «common» solution.

Arrigo Corvetto, ‘The Historic Experience of the Leninist Party Crises’, 28 February 1976.

E.g.: until recently, I THOUGHT WE WERE MORE THEORETICALLY CONFUSED than in fact we are.

FOR US, BORDIGA DEVELOPS Lenin (which differs from ANARCHIST THEORY only in the issue of a PROVISIONAL DICTATORSHIP).

PCM: BORDIGA’S CRITIQUE of the STATE is TAKEN FROM and DEVELOPED from ANARCHIST THEORY- except that the ANARCHIST MOVEMENT was unable to develop it. We must REINTEGRATE this into the NEW MOVEMENT WE WILL BUILD. In fact, he was not completely wrong about the BUKHARIN – VERCESI – BORDIGA  THEORY, which among other things (then, in 1950!) was characterised by TOTALITARIANISM / FASCISTIZZAZ^*.

• TO SUM UP, THEREFORE:
• WE BOTH REJECT the ANARCHIST THEORY of the STATE.
• WE BOTH ACCEPT BORDIGA’S CRITIQUE of the STATE (as I initially thought, also BUKHARINs, and accepted by Lenin in his preface to ‘Stale and Revolution’. (The DIFFERENCE, as I saw later, lay in Lenin’S CRITIQUE of ABSOLUTISATION).
• We DISAGREED as to the PERIOD of TRANSITION (WE BOTH – MISTAKENLY— accepted that REVOLUTION AND DISSOLUTION OF THE STA TE WOULD TAKE PLACE SIMULTANEOUSLY).
• WE BOTH REJECT BORDIGAS SOLUTION OF‘ PARTY DICTATORSHIP.
• WE BOTH REJECT BORDIGA’S LIQUIDATIONISM and his theory on PROLETARIAT/WORKING-CLASS ARISTOCRACY.
• WE BOTH REJECT BORDIGA’S ‘SUPER-IMPERIALISM (OUR SHARED THEORY, the basis of OUR POLITICAL CURRENT and OUR STRATEGY, is UNITARY IMPERIALISM and 2 IMPERIALIST SUPER-POWERS).
• WE AGREE TO SEE GRAMSCI (AS DEVELOPING THE (BUKHARIN)-BORDIGA TOTALITARIAN STATE)-Lenin.
• RESOLUTION: A PARTY BASED ON Lenin/GRAMSCI TRADITION.

^* Fascistizzazione: An Italian word meaning ‘to develop elements of Fascism’.

In his 1976 speech, two observations of Cervetto’s cut to the essence of the ‘State’ issue and clarify the crossover with the ‘imperialism’ issue. For Cervetto Bordiga’s theory was a development of Lenin’s. It differed from anarchist theory only in the transitory party dictatorship element. For Masini Bordiga’s critique of the State was taken and developed from anarchist theory, a development which the anarchist movement had shown itself unable to complete. That critique, according to Masini, was to be reintegrated into the new movement we will build.

Cervetto notes overleaf that Masini was not completely wrong in seeing a connection between Bukharin’s theory and that of Vercesi-Bordiga, The latter was characterised, since in 1950 by the thesis of a trend towards «totalitarianism» and fascisisation. In terms of revolutionary attitude towards the State, the only difference between Lenin and the anarchists was the dictatorship of the proletariat: from now on, Cervetto was to remain convinced that this was the point to stress. This can be traced in State and Revolution, where Lenin accepts this emphasis of Bukharin’s, having previously sharply rejected it in bitter clashes with Jurij Pjatakov, Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch Left^** over the nation issue and on the use of self-determination of the people in the crisis of imperialism.

In the 1950 correspondence, it appears that Masini, in seeking via Bordiga a reconciliation with anarchist theory, is attempting to avoid or neutralise Lenin – with a perhaps unintended outcome. The totalitarian theories, and the line that from Bukharin’s New Leviathan ran through Bordiga on to the crushing and all-pervading power of the dollar as ‘supreme’ led to a paralysing dead end, which Cervetto was instinctively to reject in the spring of 1950.

Instead, working through Lenin, what remained of the anarchists’ revolutionary attitude towards the State, because it drew on Marxist theory, was brought together in a politically vital synthesis – the unequivocal distinction of the provisional dictatorship of the «Commune-State», which the Paris Commune had been able to grasp as the at last discovered political form of revolutionary power. A distinction that Lenin had initially found to be inadequately stressed in Bukharin’s theories.

^** Or ‘German-Dutch Left’, whose frames of reference were the Dutch communists H. Gorter and A. Pannekoek, theoreticians of commune communism, to whom Lenin replied in ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

A workers’ group

We will postpone a complete unravelling of this complex issue to a future time. Here we will conclude our account of the 1951 conference, where the group who would become Lotta Comunista came together. Lorenzo Parodi’s speech to the 25^th anniversary meeting in February 1976 provides some information as to who they were. It was a young group. The average age – raised by Roman labourer Ugo Scattoni, the only one aged over 40 – was 28: Cervetto was 24, Parodi and Vinazza 25, and Masini 28. In 1971 Cervetto noted that when the group came together its members had between six and eight years’ experience of politics. This, as Parodi observed in his speech, meant that the youthful delegates had not been involved in the disintegration of the revolutionary working-class movement that had taken place between the two world wars and that most of them were part of the new working-class, anti-fascist generation that had emerged from the experiences of 1945. Many had undergone their political baptism of fire in 1943/44, with strikes, the underground Resistance movement and the partisan struggle. Along with their class origins, these experiences marked their political history:

The social mix of the delegates confirms this: one-third were engineering or steel workers, in the best tradition of the organised and disciplined working-class vanguard located in capitalism’s most important industry: another third were wage-earners from other sectors and the rest were students, with only one academic.⁷⁰

Among their workplaces were Ansaldo Fossati (Genoa Sestri), Ansaldo Meccanico (Genoa Sampierdarena), Ilva (Savona), Galileo (Florence), and Fiat (Turin). And there were delegates from the Leghorn and Rome branches of the FIOM trade union:

The political starting-point of the delegates, too, reflected the ideological travail of a generation that had lived through a break in history, and which had seen what it had thought a revolutionary opportunity go down in flames in the space of a few months. At the point of working-class recovery, 60% had fallen back on the anarchist movement in the hope of finding there something of a revolutionary nature, and [...] to separate themselves from the patriotic movement represented by the political parties of national unity. They were the younger elements of that current of anarchism which had maintained the working-class and organisational tradition of the ‘red’ period following the First World War.

Another 35% were former members of the PCI, having broken with that party either at the time of the underground resistance movement, or after coming to understand the significance of the ‘Salerno turnaround in terms of its step by step historic compromise with the bourgeoisie.⁷¹

What emerges very clearly from the 1949/1950 records is the paradox of these first steps: with so many of the delegates coming from a politically libertarian background, much energy was siphoned off by fighting, within the anarchist movement, against the ‘individualistic’ and anti-organisation currents represented by the Italian Anarchist Federation, yet this was only a secondary battle front. It took up a great deal of Masini’s time and energy, but as early as 1949 Cervetto was beginning to see this particular struggle as a dead end: the real issue was to confront the PCI and the influence of its Stalinist ideology. It was on this main front that in the long term the staying power of their small but organised core of workers would be measured.

As Lorenzo Parodi wrote, this working-class base was decisive in getting over the initial weaknesses on the theoretical and political front:

If that conference had been organised by intellectuals, the internal dialectic would have unfolded amid a tolerance of political differences, with any dissent reduced to purely ideological speculation. This would have led to a very real deformation of the organisation that was taking shape – the consequence of theoretical eclecticism would have been organisational inconsistency.

Instead, our enterprise immediately sought consistency. In spite of all the background differences that for a long time to come were to influence our theoretical formation and our organisational development, we had understood that it was only by achieving consistency in both these areas that we could open a way towards rebuilding a working-class party in Italy».⁷²

«Organising ourselves 100%»

Among Cervetto’s 1971 record are two paragraphs from L’Impulso that accurately exemplify the ‘moral factor’ which his working-class group chose as emblematic of their reconstruction. The notice of the conference, in December 1950, appealed to delegates to set aside personal pet positions, and to avoid splitting hairs since these represent:

the typical indicators of a chronic inability to follow events, to interpret, confront and manage them: a tendency to withdraw to the margins, to play at politics, when what we should be doing is advancing.

In the face of an enemy world that is arming against us, we have decided to speed up our own ‘rearmament’.

This is why we are calling on all comrades to rearm on the ideological level and overcome certain crucial problems that the superficiality of some and the nihilism of others have buried in rhetoric and party mysticism: to rearm on the ORGANISATIONAL level [...] employing rigorous selection criteria and an enormous mobilisation of new energies [...]

Today’s password is Organising ourselves 100%.⁷³

Theoretical and organisational «rearmament» demanded dedication from militant revolutionaries:

[...] if we want to survive and live through the fires of this crisis we have to throw in all our resources, the last lira in our pockets, the last minute of the day, all our intelligence: everything has to be thrown into the balance. We all of us have to lead a life of austerity, eliminating at birth all vanity, egoism, pretension, every personal bad habit.⁷⁴

We have already mentioned Cervetto’s ‘Notebooks’ reference to the conference at Pontedecimo, his sketch of Ugo Scattoni, and the practical lesson on the professional revolutionary that in 1951 Cervetto drew from this comrade’s personality and lifestyle: the image of the militant worker who chose to work part-time and to have less to spend on food, in order to dedicate himself to political struggle.

This is the fourth source of our reconstruction. Through it we can follow Cervetto as he writes of his passion for politics – a decisive factor in that year of 1951: of his tendency «to get to the heart of every concrete situation», to grasp the essence of a given opportunity:

«P.C.M. [Pier Cario Masini] was right: it was possible to start again. We had to go against the current, but we were capable of doing that. We needed to be serious and methodical to get past the superficial maximalism that’s traditional to Italy. We made the attempt. In the long night of counter-revolution we lit a small light that tried to pierce the darkness.

After some months of struggle, I was on the point of being sacked from Ilva. I had seen the damage Stalinism could do to the workers’ struggles, using them against the Marshall Plan and for the benefit of the USSR. It was easy to slip into nihilism, or just sit on the fence. This was why I always fought for the workers to take part in these struggles, why I was always active within the trade union, even although I was part of a very small minority.

My experiences of war, which had matured me, came in useful at that time. I had thought it an experience of limited value, devoid of meaning but it turned out to be extremely important after all, because it prepared me to face reality and ignore appearances. It’s this part of my personality formation that has often helped me to get to the heart of every concrete situation.

I can make mistakes in identifying the correlations, and this can affect the information I possess on the correlations themselves, and on the order in which I have arranged them in memory and mental logic. Im less likely to make a mistake in identifying the essence of a given situation. Im not saying this out of conceit: there’s evidence for it. Conceit means thinking you’ve already found the solution. For me it’s a case of identifying the essential aspects of the problem, knowing that right there I have to begin a lengthy piece of work, of which every result must be continually debated and continually tested out, but without ever losing the end of the skein. But action demands immediate choices, and these choices cannot be based on empiricism, which would render the action null and void. Choices must have a point of reference: the totality of the choices faced and taken over time, along with further work on the original points of reference, allows a provisional balance to be made at any stage, and makes possible correction of both reference points and choices.

You have to start somewhere. It’s not a question of intelligence, but of character, and ultimately, of temperament and passion.

By the time I got to Pontedecimo I had plenty of both. Giorgio Amendola once wrote of his move from liberalism to Stalinism as a life choice. For me, my own choice was not so much a life choice as choosing life itself. Every individual is defined by his or her own nature, and by the interdependence between that subjectivity and the objective external situation. Engels speaks of chance and necessity. As far as I’m concerned, interdependence is chance. Many factors that combine in the life of an individual do so by chance, within the context of an overall necessity. Only the consciousness of this necessity makes us free, but to be conscious of necessity is to be conscious also of chance. Often our individualistic conceit rebels against being reduced to the vagaries of chance: to accept it looks like fatalism, but it’s not: fatalism is not being conscious of necessity. To be conscious of chance is to be truly free: if you have full consciousness, you are as free as you can be to make your decisions.

Could I have done anything other than become a part of what happened at Pontedecimo? If my disillusion had left me with any other choice, I wouldn’t have lived through difficult years of struggle and study. If you’re not disillusioned you’re not driven to years of questioning. You shut off a stage of your life and that’s it finished. What drives you to questioning to study, is the ardour for the struggle, and you either have that ardour or you don’t. It was this ardour that had been disillusioned: it wasn’t about the choices I had made. Ardour, passion, lead you to choose life, and chance. Ardour and passion can suffer disillusion, but you can’t choose to feel them, in the same way that you can’t choose to be born.

In the small conference room at Pontedecimo there was plenty of disillusion about the years that had just gone by, but above all there was enthusiasm for the future.

During the break, just before getting back to the work of the conference, it had started to drizzle. Carlo Lizzani was shooting some scenes from ‘Achtung banditi’ a film financed by a co-operative of partisans. One scene, set in a little square, involved Fascists shouldering their way through some people who were passing in front of a bar. Lizzani and his assistants asked if, as unpaid extras, we would be those passers-by – but we wouldn’t be able to shelter from the rain, because that wasn’t in the script. We were amused rather than irritated by the request, and played the part to give them a hand. If anything lasting comes out of the story of that day, it won’t be that roll of film that was probably thrown away long ago».⁷⁵

The «heart of the matter», «the essence» of that political period, of 1951, was the clear-eyed acknowledgement that the working-class movement had gone down to defeat in the 1930s. And the idea that in the internationalist battle against imperialism, against Washington and Moscow, it was possible to start again.