Chapter One
Knowing your enemy is half the battle.
This was the Bolsheviks’ motto as they studied imperialism, just before the dark night of Stalinism swallowed up the extraordinary endeavour that was the October Revolution: a study carried forward not in centres of academic learning, but in the theoretical and political battle that every generation of revolutionaries has had to face. For Marx, the task was to understand the moves of the rising English, French and German bourgeoisies, and how a reactionary Tsarist Russia was attempting to oppose them. For Lenin, the task was to interpret the struggle between the imperialist powers at the historical crossroads of 1914, at the outbreak of the first imperialist world war. In the crisis of the 1930s, struck down by the Stalinist counter-revolution, the next generation was unable to carry forward the task. The result was the abyss of the Second World War, a poisoned chalice that the world proletariat was forced to drink to the dregs without being able to resist either that appalling massacre or becoming enslaved by the ideologies of Yalta.
When the war ended, it all had to be done over again. For the new generation, the task was to reconstruct the basic principles of internationalism, to build an organisation, and to embark on a difficult apprenticeship in order to reclaim the analytical and strategic method that would enable it to confront the multiple powers of the class enemy: American, Russian, Italian and European imperialism.
One ought to know with whom one is dealing
. Thus wrote Marx to Engels in November 1853. It wasn’t by chance that Marx, seventy years before the Bolsheviks, was posing himself the same problem. The political battle against the Palmerston government, and the attempt to provide the Chartist movement with a theory of revolution, had caused him to go back to the study of foreign policy. For the vanguard of the English working-class movement, penetrating the mysteries of international politics meant defending the movement’s autonomy, shunning the siren voices of liberal policies, and unmasking the plots the Liberals were hatching in Europe.
Marx took the strategy-party one step further along its path. In the London of 1853, knowing with whom one was dealing meant guarding one’s autonomy from the forces of the English bourgeoisie; in Germany, in dispute with Ferdinand Lassalle, it meant defending that autonomy from Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian statism; in France, from the myth of Louis Napoleon, «liberator of peoples.
In the First World War, imperialism’s first global conflict, it was Lenin’s task to go onwards and upwards, in search of a strategy that would be equal to the new era. The theory outlined in Imperialism, and the principle of autonomy from all the warring powers, formed the basis of the internationalist strategy adopted by the revolutionary Left at the Zimmerwald Conference, and the tactic of revolutionary defeatism opened the way to October 1917.
In the 1950s, knowing with whom one was dealing was a hard-won achievement that we can follow throughout the single political battles. But it is most productive to begin with the conclusion drawn by Arrigo Cervetto fifteen years after the struggle started, when he finalised his formulation on the «true partition» between the USA and the USSR, and on the balance of power involved in the Yalta partition. Cervetto’s 1968 conclusion started from an explicit critical revision of the theories that between 1947 and 1953 forecast war between America and Russia:
[...] the prospect of a US-USSR war formulated by a number of groups from 1947 to - was an ideological abstraction and not the result of a Marxist analysis. Without the application of Marxist science, there could not be a strategy that would illustrate the prospects for the revolutionary struggle and guide the tactical behaviour of the revolutionary proletariat.
Without a clear strategic vision, a truly revolutionary party could not exist, since the definition of ‘revolutionary party’ can only be attributed to a political body that operates objectively in the process of the laws of movement of society since it is consciously aware of its development, follows its evolution, anticipates its outcome, and regulates all its tactical actions according to a specific coordination or, rather, according to prospective coordinates. [...]
The United States and Russia did not, and do not, have serious disagreements in Europe. They had and still have them in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, but not in Europe. Those who conceived and conceive of such disagreements in Europe cannot be Marxists, since they imagined and imagine that a historical, social and political reality – European imperialism – has disappeared.4
The balance-of-power theory
Two articles, in March and April 1980 – ‘Europe, Too, Aims at the Persian Gulf’ and ‘Marx and Engels on the Question of Inter-State Relations’* – take up the thread of the true partition
. These articles can now be found in The World Contention and the introduction to Unitary Imperialism.
The division that came out of the Second World War is set within the framework of the Marxist use of equilibrium theory:
Amadeo Bordiga held that Yalta signalled the triumph of US imperialism and the financial conquest of the so-called socialist markets by the USA. At Yalta, the ‘mighty dollar’ lent US imperialism an air of supremacy that made it appear a super-imperialism, which could not be seriously challenged even were the European imperialisms to achieve their eagerly sought-for recovery.5
Cervetto takes up the issue of post-war imperialist competition with Bordiga as being one of method even before being one of analysis:
In our opinion, relationships between imperialist powers cannot be deduced exclusively from financial relations, since these, which are based on economic power, represent a series of concrete relations. But ultimately, relations between economic powers become relations between States, giving rise to a system of checks and balances. The concept of equilibrium, widely employed by Marx and Engels in analysing the international relations of last century**, is useful in representing the action of multiple economic powers acting via a multiplicity of States that objectively exist within a system of reciprocal relations. The action of economic powers on the world market brings about shifts and movements within politisai superstructures; such movements cannot take place directly, but only through the political super-structures themselves. In the field of world politics, this means through States.6
The article continues by discussing global equilibrium
, a concept arising from the consideration that a relationship between only two economic powers, between only two States
would not require a concept of balance
for the purposes of analysis, nor would it be of specific interest to Marxist science in considering international relations
. What is actually under consideration is the relationship between multiple economic powers and between a multiplicity of States
, and to the complexity of economic analysis is added the complexity of an analysis which must of necessity focus specifically on effects such movements have on the system of States
.
The Yalta partition was an example. Uneven capitalist development
had halved the importance of the USA in relation to Japan, Germany and France, and it became necessary to clarify how much real substance remained to «the power relations formally established at Yalta»:
In reality, from the economic-power-relations point of view, the answer is: not much. Bordiga’s criterion, set according to financial power relations, is not much help in understanding the actual evolution of relations between powers. In order to extricate ourselves from this tangle of contradictions, we need to reset the focus onto the system of States and take up the issue in terms of the balance between powers.7
Only the concepts of the balance of power or ‘politics of equilibrium’ could explain that contradictory dynamic, and subsequently Cervetto sketched in bold the concepts expressed twelve years previously in his analysis of the «true partition»: the American power was supporting the relative weakness of the USSR, with the aim of keeping Germany and Europe divided.
Inter-State uneven development and balance of power – a specifically Marxist use of equilibrium theory – were key concepts in the formulation Cervetto developed of unitary imperialism. They are echoed in an April 1980 article, which was later to form the first part of the introduction to the book Unitary Imperialism. In the concluding section of this introduction, Cervetto rejects that there is any contradiction between the Marxist theory of imperialism and the balance-of-power theory. He also rejects the theory that the trend is towards organised bipolarism:
The State system can no longer be described in terms of balance, since there is no longer any chaos of powers to balance: the States are grouped around two poles, America and Russia. The world is no longer disorganised into a plurality of powers, but organised into two direct blocs by two superpowers, each with an atomic arsenal and forced to observe joint, agreed-upon rules in inter-State relations.8
* A. Cervetto. Unitary Imperialism – Vol 1. Reproduced in English édition Science Marxiste 2014.
Theory and the ‘strategy-party’
Cervetto was referring to theories typical of the ‘bipolar’ debate of the 1970s, but theories and ideologies closely associated with this had existed from the very beginnings of bipolarism. As we shall see, such theories heavily influenced the diverse meanings that clustered around the concept of unitary imperialism in GAAP’s internal debates on the issue during the early 1950s. Cervetto’s theory linked theory of imperialism, law of uneven development and equilibrium theory:
This kind of analysis, as we have summed it up, corresponds neither to the reality of the world system on the one hand, nor to the Marxist theory of imperialism on the other. The latter deserves the credit of having identified the law of the uneven development of capitalism which is expressed in the impossibility of the stable duration of two blocs frozen by two superpowers, amidst the decline of some powers and the rise of others.
The uneven development of capitalism leads to a dynamic of plurality of powers that in turn leads to a plurality of poles.9
In 1980 Cervetto’s conclusion was that, our analysis of the imperialism of the past decades
had demonstrated that uneven development
had not strengthened bipolarism, but multipolarism
. As a consequence of the increasing complexity of competition, analysis of international relations required a coherent scientifically based development
of equilibrium theory.
1980 was the start of the new contention
that would do away with the Yalta balance. The new season was announced by the invasion of Afghanistan, the challenge created by the euromissile rearmament, and tensions in Eastern Europe and around the Euro-Russian gas pipelines. It is worth noting that Cervetto wrote of «development» of equilibrium theory – hence of deepening and widening this theory – and not merely a revision of it.
Every crisis, every war, every moment of definition in imperialist relations and hence in Marxism’s strategic vision, required such an effort. To study the genesis of the result of this theory, to link it with fifty years of Marxist analysis of international relations, to see the practical and immediate implications for the party’s establishment and for its political autonomy, means retracing the stages of the organisation’s development in the light of the history of the strategy it has formulated.