THE TRUE PARTITION: A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

Chapter Nine

 

In August 1968 Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, supported by other Warsaw Pact forces. The action confirmed the difficulty the USSR was experiencing in maintaining its hold over Eastern Europe: after the 1953 Berlin strikes had been crushed, after the Warsaw crisis and the Budapest massacres in 1956, now military means would have to be used to bring Prague to heel.

One page of Cervetto’s work is central to understanding how Marxist analysis faced that historic turning-point, scientifically returning full circle to the 1950s initial formulation of the unitary imperialism theory. In Cervetto’s writings from 1968 on we find the real foundations of his final vision of the Marxist theory and strategy of international relations.

Imperialism and the balance of power: a correction to the theory

1968 has gone down in history above all for the events of May in Paris. Cervetto analysed the French crisis primarily with regards to the power relations between France and Germany. But the true scientific outcome lay in the overall evaluation of the balance of power in Europe:

«Then came 1968. I analysed it on two occasions. ‘The International Dimension of the French Crisis’ focused on the events of May. I maintained that these had no theoretical significance from Marxism’s point of view: they simply confirmed Marxist theory on class struggle, the State, counter-revolution, and the party. All they demonstrated was the relative weakness of France in comparison with Germany.

I saw the invasion of Prague as a manifestation of the ‘true partition of the world. My analysis rejected the established theory that the world was split between the USA and the USSR. I reflected on the concept employed by Marx and Engels of ‘equilibrium – balance of power’ and this led me to hold that the Yalta agreement had been the application of America’s strategy for balance in Europe. By yielding Eastern Europe to the USSR, the United States had mortgaged the future of European imperialism.

1968 was a great opportunity for me to study, reflect and work things out. I had the tools to do it, and this prevented me from being sidetracked by marginal, secondary considerations. My practical training and my past experiences once again proved vital: without them I would have been more influenced by surface appearances. But like a burnt child, I had learnt to recognise fire. For a long time now black shirts, white shirts, red, green or yellow had been only old rags as far as I was concerned.

It was no accident that 1968 provided me with the chance to analyse unitary imperialism at a deeper level. Events favoured my methodology, allowing me to finally see the practical implications of the dynamics of unitary imperialism, which I had previous fl mainly conceptualised as an abstraction. In the 1950s I had seen imperialism as a single worldwide mechanism taking concrete form in a two-bloc division. I had followed the failure of the Bandung attempt to create a third bloc centred round India and China. The creation of the Common Market led me to the idea of ‘Three Imperialist Blocs’. The dynamic of ’68 allowed me to see how this mechanism – how world imperialist blocs formed, survived and balanced – worked in practice. It wasn’t difficult for me to correct my previous – and too abstract – definition of unitary imperialism, even though that initial definition was what had encouraged me to carry on with scientific analysis. Ultimately, pride is an obstacle to scientific work, because it prevents you identifying the errors you inevitable make. Fortunately, Nature has been kind to me: she’s given me plenty of other defects, but not that one. I can feel pride of the heart – for my militancy and my choices – but not pride for my brainpower or what it may produce. I do my best to be a scientist of the revolution, and I know that science is unending research: its error seeking truth, truth seeking out error.

I maintain that ‘the true partition of the world was a discovery. Certainly, it was extremely useful in the years to come. Even if the French crisis caused me to overestimate the relative weakness of France, ’68 was a fruitful year for me. In all my journeyings, I’d have to go back to 1956 to find a year like it. The rest was seconday, even if it came across as more striking».¹⁸¹

This discovery, this fruitful year, came about because an analysis of the international political facts of 1968 had allowed Cervetto to «correct» the theory of unitary imperialism, which had been too much of an abstraction when conceived of as a single dynamic between two economic blocs. Cervetto did not mean so much that the two imperialisms version – two blocs led respectively by the USA and the USSR – was inadequate to describe imperialism’s plurality of forces. He had realised that limitation back in the 1950s and the early 1960s, with his analysis of the crises on the margins of Asia’s development, and of the Common Market as unitary imperialism’s ‘third bloc’. The ‘1957 Theses’ had already moved away from two imperialisms: like ‘68, 1957 had been a fruitful year.

Cervetto had proceeded with the methodological tools of science: analysing real information, formulating hypotheses, verifying the results, highlighting his errors, perfecting the theoretical instruments of the Marxist laboratory. He was not an intellectual cut off from the realities of society, but a revolutionary scientist and the leader of a fighting unit. It was the crises and historical turning-points of the imperialist conflict, and the political struggles to which they called the party, which led to the need for an analysis that would help consolidate militants, and that analytical task had forced on both the verification and the perfection of theory.

In 1956 the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the birth of the Common Market and the political battle centred around the crisis of Stalinism had led to the fruitful year of the ‘1957 Theses’. Twelve years later, the invasion of Prague cut across a USSR in crisis and the growing strength of Germany and Europe at the ‘economic miracle’ stage of the cycle: the French and Italian crises – the latter of an imbalance between the economy and State capacity – were the consequences. The battle for political direction needed the scientific discovery of the true partition: the fruitful year of 1968 was the result, and not on any rhetorical level: in the battle to establish the party there was no separating the three sources – theoretical, political, organisational.

To go back to the theoretical correction: the scientific victory involved the Marxist theory of international relations; the discovery that the economic strength of the different sectors of imperialism translates into a political struggle that must be analysed specifically in terms of balance of power. As we anticipated at the start of this historical reconstruction, the true partition theory revealed that the relative clash between European, Russian and American economic forces moved in terms of a political dynamic of balance, a balance of power that was not a simple translation of the respective industrial and economic strengths of the contenders.

When in 1980 Cervetto wrote that it was time to reconsider the whole issue in terms of the system of States this came out of the discovery and correction of 1968, although the correction did not apply so much to the initial steps in 1951 as to the three blocs theory formulated between 1957 and 1962. Via the Common Market, the ‘European bloc’ was moving forward with its economic plan, but the system of States arising out of the true partition meant that the parallel political process was destined to be a torturous one.

In Arrigo Cervetto’s laboratory

To leaf through the paperwork on which the true partition was worked out is like walking into Arrigo Cervetto’s scientific laboratory. It’s no easy matter: this goes for all the unpublished material we have used up to now – letters, memoirs, file cards, notes, drafts. The material shows us the conceptual passages on which the theory was based from its moment of birth, and thus highlights the continuity of thinking from 1951 on, but no single body of work speaks for itself. To examine, select, link up, and comment on these notes for publication involves a serious political responsibility.

Take for example the material concerning Marx and Engels on equilibrium theory, the national question and revolutionary strategy. They form the three or four main lines of investigation, but primarily they are the original core of Cervetto’s formulations on strategy as treated by Marx, Engels and Lenin: material that was to be integrated and developed in the party’s many conferences and political education meetings on strategy in the early 1970s.

Up to a few days before his death, Cervetto felt it important to stress that he had personally prepared his work for publication. This cost him much effort, but he would have been quick to dismiss any hypothesis based on material that had not been carefully gone over. Indirectly, this threw a veil over unpublished material. Was the intention that this material should never be published, that it should remain in the party archives?

We first dealt with this issue when we published the material on the Resistance and on the history of Savona. This was a precise decision, taken with caution and an acceptance of the political responsibility involved. We followed the guidelines of Cervetto himself, who had anticipated publishing some of it, but only after having integrated the material and prepared the necessary notes. This particular material was in the nature of historical reconstruction, and as such it presented a few thorny problems. At the time the Resistance material was written it had been with a view to a writing competition, and the focus was on the political psychology of maximalism: later writings developed Cervetto’s formulations on the nature of Fascism and Stalinism and on the Yalta division.

We have responded to these difficulties by deciding that when publication of a specific set of materials has been assessed as politically useful, we will produce alongside it a specific analysis of those aspects that are thought to require in-depth consideration.

We had no doubts about publishing the notes on strategy and equilibrium theory in Marx, Engels and Lenin: we need only think – as Cervetto himself observed – of how central these areas are for scientific analysis of international relations, and their importance for the present account of the history of our party. In relation to this material, it would be important to bear in mind six distinct levels of our general political assessment:

• a)  We have considered how Marx views historical events and how he makes use of them in the various models of strategy derived from 1789 and from the general outline of permanent revolution.
• b)  We have assessed how Cervetto’s notes reconstruct, in a ‘genetic’ sense, Marx’s strategy, with particular attention to those points that Lenin would review in the light of 1917.
• c)  Attention has been given to Cervetto’s reconstruction of Marx’s strategy as explained orally, at conferences or political education meetings.
• d)  We have also considered how much of the material has already been published either in our newspapers or in the texts of our editorial house. For example, The Difficult Question of Times is composed largely of material already used in political education meetings. We have not commented on aspects on which Cervetto himself has elaborated in his notes, and aspects extensively treated in already published versions have been given limited mention. Again, other aspects were only treated orally, without ever appearing in notes or published texts. We have also had to take account of the fact that many of Cervetto’s theories, when they appear in note form, were still at the stage of hypothesis and scientific research. We have used what has already been critically evaluated and published to provide us with a sense of direction and the relative importance of still unpublished material.
• e)  We have evaluated levels of historical information of the post Marx/Engels/Lenin period.
• f)  Ultimately, we will require to consider historical research subsequent to Cervetto’s work, at a time when both the archives and new studies will have tackled current problems and led to the production of fresh documentation.

The important point is the political meaning of the true partition formula, which although it makes high-level use of historical material, is not a piece of history. The dovetailing lies in the initial notes on Marx and Engels, from Franz Mehring’s Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, from Pierre Renouvin’s 19^th century work on the politics of power balances, on Russian politics and David Dallin’s 1945 book: how all this feeds into the article on the «true partition»: and how all of it was then used in material for political education meetings.

In all this 1968 material lies the heart, the basis of political education on strategy, and the party’s theoretical balance which, at the beginning of the 1970s, was being transmitted to a new generation. It was not a case of delivering a history lesson, but of giving these new recruits the historic sense of their own militancy, as a part of the process of building the strategy-party.

1951 texts: a re-examination

With the above explanations, we can re-examine the writings on the true partition a relatively easy task, since we have the definitive version of Cervetto’s theory in the article published in Lotta Comunista in September-October 1968¹⁸². We also have Cervetto’s own comments on the above, his notes on how the «concepts on equilibrium and balance of power employed by Marx and Engels had led him to hold that» the Yalta agreement had been the application of America’s strategy for balance in Europe. By yielding Eastern Europe to the USSR, the United States had mortgaged the future of European imperialism¹⁸³.

It should be noted that the true partition discovery conceptually ends the quest begun in 1951-52 by answering three questions Cervetto had raised but to which he had not found a definitive reply. The theory explains the Yalta division starting from the disproportion of strength between the USA and the USSR: Washington conceded Eastern Europe to the USSR. The war that was considered imminent in 1951 never took place because in reality Washington and Moscow were allied in keeping Germany and Europe divided. It was understandable that development had determined the objective strength of European imperialism as a third bloc, but could not determine a corresponding political unity because the power balance prevented it.

Curiously, one of the main contributors to the end of the quest was David Dallin, with two books translated into Spanish, Los Tres Grandes as we have already seen, and Rusia y la Europa. The original American edition, Russia and Postwar Europe, is dated 1943, but successive editions were updated to take account of the postwar era.

In 1952 Cervetto was observing the rise of forces in Europe and Asia that contradicted the ‘two imperialisms’ pattern – hence the notes taken from Dallin’s ‘The Big Three’ on how Germany, Japan and France were returning to their past condition of great powers.

In 1968, he was focusing more on those parts of Dallin’s text that dealt with the balance of power in Europe. The Prague crisis was a fresh sign of Moscow’s difficulties in maintaining its hold on Eastern Europe. More relevant than Dallin were the assessments Marx and Engels had made on Russia, Panslavism, the German question and Palmerston’s foreign policy in relation to the Tsar. Other contributions came from Pierre Renouvin’s (French liberal-realist school) review of international relations in Europe, and François Fejtő’s A History of the People’s Democracies. Fejtő noted that Yalta didn’t require to be a formal or explicit partition agreement: for Washington, it was enough to informally ‘let Moscow get on with it’.

In Rusia y la Europa Dallin summed up British equilibrium policy on the Continent, where Great Britain has always obstructed the rise of a single great power that could dominate Europe and gives his version of the «Eastern Question», which Cervetto noted and summarised.

One of the most insoluble problems of European equilibrium is the status of the band of territories that runs from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. Between 1870 and 1914 stability was guaranteed because France and Germany balanced each other out to the West, while in the East Russia was counterbalanced by the two Germanic monarchies, Prussia and Austria-Hungary.

While maintaining good relations with Moscow, Berlin balanced Western Europe, while Austria resisted any Russian push into Eastern Europe. The multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire was a strange State organism, a sort of relic of the Middle Ages that had survived into the modern world but it played a fundamental role in that band of east-central Europe as a barrier to Russian pressure. When in 1917 Russia ceased to be a real menace, Austria-Hungary ceased to have any function, and collapsed: London did not oppose its fragmentation into a number of small States.

The situation changed in the 1930s and 40s. The USSR became a great military power again, but where previously there had been the two old Germanic monarchies, now there was Hitler’s Germany: a synthesis of Germany and Austria, the Third Reich faced both East and West. With the destruction of the Third Reich, Russia came out of the Second World War (unlike after the First) strengthened, and without Austria-Hungary to act as balance. Cervetto noted that: Britain’s counterweight policy has been rendered futile.

At this point Cervetto challenged two of David Dallin’s theories. In a 1945 work E. H. Carr had maintained that with the fading of its naval power and its economic supremacy, Great Britain will be obliged to abandon its policy of balance of power. Dallin disagreed: with Germany defeated, London would pursue its balance policy, unless Great Britain were reduced to a second or third rate power¹⁸⁴. Cervetto notes: History seems to have proved Garr right.

In ‘The Big Three’ Dallin had taken account of uneven development in his forecast that Germany, France and Japan would return to big power status. Cervetto felt that this was inadequate: he considered Dallin had overestimated Great Britain, working from a simplistic sociology of powers and had not adequately linked the long timescales inherent in a power balance change to economic development. 25 years after the war, said Cervetto, London’s reduction to secondary status was a fact, therefore: Britain was no longera ‘third power’ but merely a permanent ally of the USA.

Cervetto’s second criticism of Dallin regarded the strategic lines adopted in Europe by Washington and London while they were wartime allies. True, «a European nation-State that united the industries and the navies of France, Italy and Germany», possibly extended to include Great Britain, and with a total population of 300-400 million, would have been a serious threat to the existence of the USA. Dallin was right to maintain that the interests of Washington, London and Moscow converged against a power that aimed to dominate Europe, but for different reasons. However, Dallin only touches on this issue when he cites the different reasons for the USA such as the problems of the Far East and future economic relations with Russia.

The USA was not as interested as were Russia and Great Britain, because the USA had to operate across all continents, observed Cervetto, and went so far as to add that for Washington Europe isn’t vital. If this observation is taken literally, it contradicts the basis of the true partition theory. In fact, it does not appear in the article published in the September-October 1968 issue of Lotta Comunista, in which, on the contrary, we read of the vital interests of a United States that would be threatened by the birth, whether in Europe or in Asia, of a pole power with an industrial base. It’s one of those cases in which the final text helps us to evaluate the importance of the sources. In the notes he made on Dallin, Cervetto listed the different reasons that had brought Washington, London and Moscow together in a wartime alliance that was nevertheless not an indication of identical interests. The United States was also involved in Asia; the allusion is to the two wars in Europe and in Asia that combined to form the Second World War. Russia, which was neither an island nor a maritime power, but a European continental power could not, like Great Britain, limit itself purely to maintaining equilibrium because it was itself a factor in the equilibrium. Moscow’s natural enemy was not the strongest European power, but the European power whose principal role was played out in Eastern Europe.

The significance of these observations on the USA and Europe was that while it was in the American interest to prevent a European bloc developing, Washington had no direct vital interests in the Old Continent: allowing Moscow to take over Eastern Europe and keep Germany divided was sufficient to prevent European unification. In the 1968 article Cervetto wrote that the USA ceded Eastern Europe and the Balkans to the USSR. In so doing, the Americans surrendered a market that wasn’t theirs, but actually belonged to European imperialism, and kept all the other world markets for themselves. This, we can say, was the difference between the power of Washington and the power of London. Cervetto notes that at the end of the war among the Big Three, [...] London was fundamentally under the influence of the politics of equilibrium: of the three powers, London had everything to lose and not much to gain.

The «true partition» theory is born

The issue of Great Britain is the preamble to the true partition theory. London, in decline, was constricted by its permanent alliance with the USA the ‘special relationship’, and was no longer able to play the role of «third big power»:

«Could it recover this role in a political balance between the Common Market and Russia? Possibly, but that would mean separating from the USA. It would be difficult for Great Britain to become an integral part of a European power, because by doing so it would definitively bind its destiny to Europe – which historically it had survived by never doing.

Unless the European power could play a ‘third power’ role between the USA and the USSR, thus taking on, at Continental level, the principle that had ruled British international policy.

It may be that Britain’s role will be determined as a 5^th European power. But the fact is that any dissension between the USA and the USSR isn’t so important as to permit the existence of a European power that would play the third-power role historically so central to British foreign policy»¹⁸⁵.

Our highlighting above marks the birth of the true partition theory. The USA and the USSR were not equal in strength, and this had led to a USA-USSR alliance to brake the development of a European power. Europe was completely blocked from operating any policy of equilibrium, and was forced into an alliance with the USA within an over-arching framework of the de facto alliance between the USA and the USSR. Europe could only institute a policy of equilibrium if new powers entered the field. As Cervetto notes: Japan and Asia.

A new season of conflict could be glimpsed on the horizon; it could now be faced with an evolved theoretical tool that would root the strategic autonomy and the political action of the party in even more solid terrain. We read this in the final lines of the article on the «true partition»:

«The inter-imperialist order that came out of 1945 is creaking badly. The imperialist system is brewing up one of its most enormous crises, for which, as always, the working class will pay. Today it is ever more necessary for the international proletariat to prepare itself to fight the imperialist groups if it does not want to be swept away, or become a tool of the insane competition that is shaking the whole imperialist system. Those who are not against world imperialism, against American, Russian, European imperialism, are tools in the hands of competing imperialist groups and cannot be communists, cannot be revolutionaries.

The whole of the revolutionary struggle must be directed towards bringing down all the centres of the imperialist divisions throughout the world; it must be against the Yalta division, but must also prevent other, further divisions by striking at the existing imperialist robber-barons, and the aspiring robber-barons of tomorrow, in all their metropolises».¹⁸⁶

Marx and equilibrium theory

‘Strategy-party’ meant not allowing oneself to be used, as had happened in the ignominy of Yalta. For Cervetto, those who had suffered the tragic circumstances of that dishonour had names and faces: the comrades who had fallen in the partisan struggle, convinced they were fighting for communism: the libertarian communist comrades who had lost their way in the disorientation of the postwar era. If the party could help it, there would be no repetition either of Yalta or of the fresh partitions claimed by European imperialism.

But strategic consciousness did not just mean escaping the influence of ruling class forces: it meant identifying trends and movements, in order to understand and exploit the enemy’s contradictions. This may be seen in a second thread of the 1968 material. In working to get to the basics of Marx and Engels’ strategy, Cervetto was seeking both the concept and the uses of the politics of equilibrium.

The preliminary work was Pierre Renouvin’s review of power politics in the Europe of the 1800s. 1848 had shaken the balance of power ratified in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna:

Russia, Great Britain, France – none of them wanted the Austrian Empire to collapse: it was impossible to calculate what the consequences for the balance of power in Europe would be¹⁸⁷.

Cervetto noted: Hence, they did not support Hungary – one of the reasons why the Hungarian independence movement failed while the Italian movement succeeded because it was an offshoot of the competition between France and Britain. Hungary, unlike Italy, was the subject of agreements between the powers that made up the Concert of Europe, the Yalta of the time. France and Great Britain feared that if Vienna collapsed it would open up the Danube area to Russia; in addition, an Austria without Hungary would be absorbed by Germany. Russia wanted Austria to continue as a counterweight to Prussia, and wanted to avoid a Hungarian success that might encourage Poland. Scientific intuition leaps out of three lines of Cervetto’s: two question marks signal that here the concept is being formulated for the first time:

Note: can we say that bourgeois revolutions (and if so, why not proletariat revolutions?) such as 1848 depend on the counterbalances of the powers?¹⁸⁸

In subsequent years Cervetto was to resolve this issue by concluding that revolutionary strategy should be based on the Marxist study of international relations: it is impossibile for imperialism to maintain equilibrium in power relations, and this creates openings for working-class action. When equilibrium goes into crisis, in the breakdown of order when uneven development leads old and new powers to clash over new power relations and fresh division of spoils – there lies the faultline, the breach where revolutionary strategy can enter.

In 1968, this intuition blended theoretical reflection and direct experience. Regardless of all the rhetoric over the ‘Prague Spring’ the West had stood looking on while Russian tanks invaded Wenceslas Square. The same thing had happened in Budapest, with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and with the Berlin strikes in 1953. Such were the chains with which Yalta had bound the proletariat; why the Hungarian Revolution had remained a heroic but isolated assault, a flash of light in the long night of the counter-revolutionary phase. But the same thing had happened in 1849 in Hungary, at the time of its democratic revolution, crushed by the troops of the Tsar at the request of Vienna and with the backing, tacit or otherwise, of London, Paris and Berlin.

This last precedent takes us back to Marx and Engels and their political battle. Studying their concept of strategy and their use of equilibrium theory was no historical digression: it meant fully utilising the party’s experiences. In Cervetto’s 1968 file on the true partition is a lengthy note commenting on the Eastern Question.

The knot of tensions between the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire and the declining Ottoman Empire had marked the whole of the 19^th century, and the Crimean War (1853-1856) had been the first conflict between the powers that had defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s France.

Defeating Napoleon, the «victorious anti-French powers» had also defeated the first great bourgeois project of a single European State or empire or United States of Europe. That socially diverse alliance between Russia, Austria and Britain had quickly turned to strife, but within the equilibrium established at the Congress of Vienna each power sought to prevent the strengthening of any other power. Britain found allies in anti-bourgeois fractions in Austria and Russia who were opposed to the formation of nation-States, but it also worked to prevent Moscow and Vienna becoming more powerful.

Hence, London tried to avoid the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, which would have strengthened Russia and threatened Britain’s position. In the course of this struggle new forces appeared that had not been part of the order established at Vienna: France rose again and Germany was heading towards unification. Cervetto noted that Britain’s Turkish policy would be dominated by this dialectic. This is the sense of Marx’s theory of an ‘alliance’ between Great Britain and Russia and his pro-Turkish, anti-Russian position, sustained in fierce diatribe against Lord Palmerston’s policies:

«Essentially Marx’s theory was based on the formation on the Rhine of an industrial (not agricultural) non-Prussian Germany capable of fighting on two fronts:

• 1)  against the British super-power that alongside the reactionary Holy Alliance was checking Europe’s capitalist (and therefore proletarian) development.

Arrigo Cervetto, notes on Pierre Renouvin’s Introduction to the History of International Relations, handwritten 1968.

The CZECHS did not support HUNGARY.

It was easy for AUSTRIA to put down the revolts in HUNGARY.

ALL THIS DEMONSTRATES THE WEAKNESS OF THESE 1848 NATIONALISMS; THEIR BOURGEOISIES WERE WEAK, AND THIS FACILITATED AUSTRIA’S COUNTER-REVOLUTION.

HUNGARY had the only advanced bourgeoisie, but found itself opposed by the SLAVS (CROATS and CZECHS) plus the ROMANIANS.

These historical conclusions are drawn from Marx, who considered that it would take more than a few years to change these deep-seated trends.

THEN THERE WERE THE ITALIAN AND GERMAN BOURGEOISIES.

But the DIET OF FRANKFURT (MADE UP OF THE SOUTH AND WEST GERMAN BOURGEOISIES) which met on 28^th May 1848 and constituted a Provisional Government, gave way to Prussia: following the events of June, when the backlash to the revolution began in Paris, and after a split between liberals and democrats, it discarded the Republican solution and supported a FEDERAL EMPIRE with a LITTLE GERMANY based on the Prussian monarchy (that excluded AUSTRIA, the centre of counter-revolution).

THE GREATER GERMANY PLAN would have included 70 million of a population i.e. a GREAT POWER that could have been JACOBIN.

THIS WAS THE BACKGROUND AGAINST WHICH AUSTRIA ASKED RUSSIA TO INTERVENE (100,000 troops) against Hungary.

• p . 237 «RUSSIA, GR. BRIT, FRANCE, none of them wanted the AUSTRIAN EMPIRE to collapse: it was impossible to calculate what the consequences for the balance of power in Europe would be.

HENCE THEY DID NOT SUPPORT HUNGARY: one of the reasons why the Hungarian independence movement failed while the ITALIAN movement succeeded – the latter being an offshoot of the COMPETITION BETWEEN FRANCE AND BRITAIN but not RUSSIA. But with HUNGARY, all were in agreement,

• •  FRANCE = feared that if VIENNA collapsed it would open up the DANUBE AREA TO RUSSIA.

IN ADDITION AN AUSTRIA WITHOUT HUNGARY WOULD BE ABSORBED BY GERMANY. MARX thought this?

• •  GR. BRIT = essentially same motives as France.

• •  RUSSIA = wanted AUSTRIA to continue as a counterweight to PRUSSIA, and wanted to avoid a HUNGARIAN success that might encourage POLAND.

NB = CAN WE SAY THAT THE COURSE OF THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS (and if so, why not PROLETARIAN revolutions?) such as 1848 DEPENDS ON THE COUNTERBALANCES OF THE POWERS??

• 2)  against the counter-revolutionary super-power Russia and its attempts to federalise under its leadership Eastern Europe and its minor ethnic nationalities».¹⁸⁹

The politics of equilibrium was to be used towards specific ends within revolutionary strategy. It put together class struggle with the struggles of the States during that period when the international order was shaken by the drive towards nationalism:

«Only the development of this strategy could have driven forward the revolutionary process in Europe, a process frozen by the counter-revolutionary alliance between the British bourgeoisie and the big landowners of East and Central Europe (Prussian, Austrian, Bohemian, Hungarian, Polish).

Our interpretation is that for Marx, slowing down the Ottoman crisis essentially meant helping on the explosion of contradictions that would trigger the revolutionary process in Europe, i.e. preventing the growth of Russia’s power and supporting the development of Germany.

Conversely, the Ottoman crisis could be speeded up by supporting the claims to nationality of remnants of peoples that if successful would never be more than small States, federated and led by a Panslavist Russia. It was no accident that Russia encouraged anti-German revolts.

For Marx and Engels, the nationalist struggles in Italy, Hungary and parts of Poland were a very different matter: they were struggles of bourgeois development that would break up an agricultural and counter-revolutionary power like Austria, or like Russia in the case of Poland: they could not be federated in a counter-revolutionary way. The words our interpretation reveal these notes as the original reflection on Marx’s thinking on strategy and on the Marxist use of equilibrium policy.

Education on strategy: the big push

It’s now clear why Cervetto felt that 1968 had been a fruitful year. The unitary imperialism theory had become a solid body of work, firmly linked to the historical formulations of the Marxist school. It had taken twenty-five years, the timescale of a generation, to shake off the curse of Yalta. The internationalist struggle had taken off at Pontedecimo in 1951: the 1957 Theses had provided an overall strategical vision. Now there was a theoretical body of work armoured against any combination of imperialism’s forces. Closing the accounts with Yalta would allow the party to set a new generation on the right road.

This was the genesis of the big push for the political education meetings on strategy of 1972 and 1973. Cervetto had prepared a large part of the structural material during 1969: the ‘genetic’ reconstruction of strategy in Marx, Engels and Lenin, with a plurality of objectives and a conclusion for the new generation to whom it would be addressed. The various strategy outlines of Marx and Engels, starting with the Jacobin model and the strategy of permanent revolution were viewed as a progression and highlighted the parts Lenin had taken up in 1917. The strategic view of the support given to bourgeois democracy and to German unification facilitated rejection of Stalinism’s falsifications about Marx and the struggle for democracy, and the return to the fundamentals of the Marxist theory of the State was a valuable inoculation against the ideologies of bourgeois democracy in all its variants. The «genetic» view of strategy in Marx and Engels, with its succession of hypotheses, endeavours and errors in the course of a series of political battles helped to shake off schematic and rigid versions based on sluggish, never-varying repetitions of a single strategy.

But above all this was how the scientific achievement of the science-party – already laid out in 1964 in Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party and now developed into the theoretical system discovered with the true partition could be transmitted to a new generation. It was the outcome of the political battles fought by Cervetto’s generation in 1951, 1956 and 1968, but it had also been the knot Marx and Engels had attempted to disentangle, bit by bit, between 1848 and the 1890s, and which Lenin had finally managed to untie in 1917.

In his notes, Cervetto calls the true partition theory a scientific discovery because it untied the crucial knot on the nature and dynamic of unitary imperialism, and identified the specific dynamic of the balance of power, which is not the same as a simple expression of relations of economic strength. At one and the same time this discovery restored and developed the Marxist theory of international relations: a discovery that was bound up with recognising that Britain’s policy of balance and the Anglo-Russian alliance of the 1800s had obvious analogies with the Yalta balance, with the USA-USSR alliance of the second half of the 1900s, and with the invasion of Prague, the crisis that provided him with the opportunity for these reflections. In the solutions Marx and Engels had found to fight the Yalta of their era, and in the use Lenin then made of these solutions, Cervetto sought the conceptual tools to confront Yalta and all future partitions.

These basic concepts, worked out in 1968, became the core of the formulation on strategy during 1969 and the first years of 1970. In this sense, they loop back to 1951, when the theory of unitary imperialism was the premise for the revolutionary party’s strategic autonomy; and back to 1848, 1853, 1859, 1866, and 1870 – to all the successive formulations in which Marx and Engels sought to make strategy into action matched against balance.

What emerges from the educational material is no simple intellectual inquiry, but a deliberation on the strategy-party condensed out of political battles to establish an autonomous working-class party: battles from which have been carved out analogies, patterns, theoretical and political precedents that can be compared and contrasted.

Helpful examples may be drawn from the material used for political education meetings in 1973¹⁹⁰. Here Cervetto writes that in 1847-1848 Marx and Engels had tried to bring the theory of the Manifesto into an already existing party. The attempt failed in 1850, and both left the Communist League: analysing the cycle of a new, unprecedented industrial prosperity they held that the revolutionary wave of 1848 had run out.

This cool estimation of the situation, however, was regarded as heresy among many persons (...) Suffice it to say that the reserve maintained by us was not to the mind of these people; one was to enter into the game of making revolutions. We most decidedly refused to do so.

(F. Engels, On the History of the Communist League, 1885)

For which reason we were excommunicated as traitors to the revolution.

(F. Engels, Introduction to Class Struggles in France, 1895)

While we were saying to the workers: you will have to endure 15, 20, 50 years of civil war and wars between nations, not only to change current relations but to change yourselves and become capable of wielding political power, you were saying the opposite – we must take power immediately or go back to sleep.

(K. Marx, Speech on his Resignation from the Communist League, 15^th September 1850: Session of the Communist League Central Committee)

Here is the problem of psychological time so characteristic of Italian maximalism. There is also an analogy with the situation Cervetto and Parodi found themselves in when they presented the ‘1957 Theses’. Their forecast of a long cycle of imperialist development, and of a counter-revolutionary phase lasting at least twenty years proved to be unacceptable to the expectations of the diverse left-wing political groups that had come together in Azione Comunista.

A second example, this time in terms of party theory: in England, Marx and Engels tried for years to repeat what they had achieved in 1847 – bringing the Manifesto into an already formed party, in that case the Chartist Party. In 1858 this ended in disaster, with the Chartists opting for an alliance with radical and liberal currents. The study of Britain’s foreign policy – Marx’s pamphlet opposing Lord Palmerston – was part of that struggle: Marx and Engels wanted to give the Chartists ammunition to check the influence of the liberal Left. As he had never publicly opposed Lasalle’s General Association in Germany, so Marx did not oppose the Chartist Party, holding that both were working-class parties.

Cervetto summarises this position:

It’s important for the working class to have a party of its own. Once we’ve consolidated the party, then we can fight over what its programme is to be.¹⁹¹

This was the GAAP tactic, or at any rate the debate that went on intermittently between Cervetto and Masini from 1949 to 1951 around the idea of a focused and federated movement. It also formed part of the issue that surfaced in 1956, when Cervetto opposed Unking up with the diverse groupings gathered around Azione Comunista. Had Cervetto already taken from his experiences in GAAP that the only way forward was a slow work of organisation centred round autonomous policies and strategy?

Such was the experience of the 1950s, seen in the light of What Is to Be Done? and Lenin’s party. Amid all the possible tactical variations, one thing is certain: by the end of that experience, Cervetto was convinced that strategy was the mandatory distinguishing factor: only strategic clarity makes a revolutionary party possible. This statement appears in the editorials written in the early 1970s: ‘Strategy is What Develops the Leninist Party’ ‘The Leninist Party Is Shaped by Clarity’. This is why that watershed was the subject of a tough, unceasing, even bitter political battle, as with Lenin and the «Zimmerwald Left» in 1916, and no fixation as even such as Ugo Scattone, a committed and generous militant, labelled it at the end of the 1952 clash.