Chapter Three
LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM
An examination of the debate within the groups that were to create GAAP (Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action) gives a vivid picture of the problems that between 1948 and 1951 had to be slowly and painfully faced. Three major confrontations, progressively more serious, took place between Cervetto and Masini in the autumn of 1949 and again in the spring and autumn of 1950. As preparations were being made for the National Conference at Pontedecimo – from which GAAP would be born – debate on the nature of the organisation and on theories of the State and imperialism began to define the characteristics of the new political group, but also revealed the differences. The first step had been to look for ‘a different kind’ of communism in anarchism. Along this road Cervetto, with an ever-surer grasp, would raise the issue that had been first posed by Marx and Lenin: our militants need a theoretical base, and it’s to Marxism that we must turn: we need an organisation of cadres and we must study the State and imperialism: Leninism should be the base from which we start again.
Cervetto’s first letter to Masini is undated, but can be placed as written in the second half of 1948. It’s the letter of a young man introducing himself to the editor of Umanità Nova – probably urged on by Marzocchi: alongside the political themes there are allusions to literary interests. It’s worth reproducing Cervetto’s description of himself, since this is the start of a rapidly-evolving relationship and because the letter is unusual in itself:
I’m young and I’m always looking for something. I hope you can help me. I suppose I should tell you something about myself. I’m twenty-one years old, I work and I read. What does that matter? There’s plenty like me. You have to imagine a boy who goes to school, finishes primary, studies at technical college for two or three years, then starts work at fourteen, fifteen, because his family needs the money. Follow this boy as he works, through a stormy adolescence full of doubts, as he does stupid things and asks silly questions and takes his first steps into young adulthood. Around him is a world he doesn’t really understand, an ‘adult’ world full of pain. How can you understand the world, when you’re seventeen?
And anyway, at the time the world was all Fascism, war, uniforms, songs. To go back to this boy – he plays, he’s got his interests, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he thinks. His strongest feeling is for class struggle, for politics. It’ll be a hatchet in his hand through the jungle of life.
Some books – Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Maxim Gorky’s The Spy and The Mother, Cronin’s The Stars Look Down – you read as soon as you learn to, they’re books that shape you
.
So this boy reads, he finds support for his aspirations, he understands that these aspirations are towards freedom, progress. He takes to the hills, becomes a partisan, suffers hunger and cold, shoots and is wounded, experiences danger, comes close to death. In that moment he’d like to pray to some god, but he can’t, he doesn’t know who to pray to, almost he prays to himself, because he’s alone with the responsibility of being himself. It’s not some kind of Odyssey, it’s just the story of a youth. It could even be my story. I was eighteen when I came home after a year as a partisan. Over the whole of Savona, across the red of the flags, of the headscarves and rosettes, enthusiasm for communism was spreading. It seemed like the start of a new era, all those hopes rewarded. We talked and drank together, we felt we were ‘comrades’. I joined the Communist Party, I went to all the meetings – the cell meetings and the secction meetings. I began to read Lenin, Marx, Engels, as well as I could. “This is the truth”, I thought. But it wasn’t enough, so I began to read Vittorini and the Politecnico. The passion for literature, still a passion with me today, began to take shape. My thinking was like a set of scales. The more I read, the more I felt my transient beliefs fall away. So I took up anarchism, more through emotion than through any ideological maturity.
Revulsion with the PCI had brought Cervetto to feel hostility towards any form of organisation
– an understandable paradox. Now he was over that fixation
and was convinced of the need for an active movement [...] armed for the struggle
.
Reckoning with Bordiga
It took only a few months for the contact with Masini to become a working relationship. Masini urged Cervetto to read Bordiga, who had taken up a number of undeveloped anarchist theories; it had become a basic tenet of Masini’s – which can be found in his theses on the State at Pontedecimo in 1951 – that this part of Bordiga’s work could provide a core for a vanguard anarchism
:
I’m sending you under separate cover some material drawn from Bordiga. In my opinion this school of thought doesn’t have any firm basis, but the ideas here go beyond Marx, beyond Lenin; they’re very modern ideas, with which we have to reckon. On the one hand, they identify elements which, borrowed from anarchism and correctly reassembled into theory, can be reintegrated into an anarchism for the vanguard: on the other, they’re free of all the authoritarian Jacobin-style inconsistencies and basic abstractions of Bordiga’s thoughts.26
In April 1949 the Italian Anarchists Federation held their national conference at Livorno. Cervetto found it a disillusioning experience: if anarchism goes on the way it did at Livorno, the day of its death won’t be far off, and personally I’m not going to its funeral
. He asked for guidance: direct me to the work that needs to be done.27 It was the first sign of differences, although Masini was also strongly critical of traditional anarchism:
MILAN: a disaster. In Lombardy (and above all in Milan) anarchism is a back to front anti-capitalist reaction. The movement has not mastered the information on capitalist civilisation (dimensions, organisation, division of labour) nor on the unsuccessful revolutions against it (socialism, trade unionism, communism) – in a word, it has not reacted going forwards. In general, anarchist comrades religiously damn capitalism and the whole of the modern world. Or else they’re bourgeois who’ve taken up anarchism as a sort of society game.28
Cervetto was searching for a rigorously class-based
concept: the anarchist movement, he wrote, must be the political movement of the proletariat
or it perishes from its own contradictions:
Many of my comrades take me for a Marxist, though instead of distancing themselves they seem to draw nearer to my concepts. I’m happy about that, since for me Marxism is an inexhaustible fount of ideological riches. I could almost identify myself as a Marxist-anarchist. But Im not sure about this yet: I still have a great deal to read, study, weigh up and critique before I can adopt firm patterns of thought.29
The Kronstadt article
On 12th June 1949 Umanità Nova carried an article by Cervetto commemorating the Kronstadt rebellion*, put down by the Bolshevik government in 1921. Cervetto had discussed the article with Masini, who had suggested outlines and material and subsequently wrote suggesting corrections and additions. It’s unfortunate that the original draft is not available, because the published version reveals the co-existence of two theories that clearly emanate from two different authors. In the first part it is stated that State capitalism
won because the revolution couldn’t or wouldn’t let go of the State
and thus remained completely dominated by it. Stalinism didn’t begin with Stalin «but with Lenin, who believed that the State would ‘wither away’»: Stalin was the automatic consequence of the Bolshevik counter-revolution; he was the final product of the repudiation and the annexation of revolutionary power by the State
.
Later, however, the article contains an acknowledgement that much energy and many anti-conformists were active within the State and within Bolshevism in ways that had revolutionary consequences
in the conviction that «the State, if it could be liberated from bureaucracy, was the most appropriate means by which the best people, those who had distinguished themselves by their integrity (Lenin among others), could take a lead role»:
In short, a State that would be the political expression of the local Soviets and co-ordinate their economy, that would reflect and stabilise all the forms of freedom that had been conquered by the rank and file. This, plus the existence of an omnipresent anarchist vanguard, was why in - there continued to be a constant and intransigent revolutionary pressure aimed at restraining the power of the State: not, as official Stalinist historiography later asserted, in order to overthrow it, but in order to free up a space for creative capacities and their further development.
It wasn’t in vain that Lenin had launched the motto emblazoned on the banners of the October Revolution: ‘All power to the Soviets’.30
These two theories are worth keeping in mind, since already they embody the difference of opinion between the dictatorship of the proletariat
and the claim that revolution and the dissolution of the State is a ‘simultaneous’ process: a formula that Masini was to borrow from the platform of the libertarian communism formulated in 1920s Paris by Peter Arshinov.
I’m not an anarchist. Do I have to say it again?
The differences soon came out into the open, hastened on by Masini having to resign from Umanità Nova in the summer of 1949. «I can’t see myself as an anarchist», wrote Cervetto, and not as a Bolshevik, either [...] I’m isolated
. And later:
I’m not an anarchist (at least while anarchism is officially understood in a particular way). Do I have to say it again? I’m just somebody who got interested in anarchism one day (I was twenty years old) and got carried away by it. After which I started to study and my enthusiasm subsided.31
Two weeks later, we get a nod in the direction of Lenin, more than to Karl Marx:
I never thought that Marxism, and above all Leninism, could be such a powerful weapon. Every day I find in it more food for thought, for my ideas and my studies. You emerge from it either as a fanatic or as a revolutionary.
The idea was that Masini and Cervetto could bring together two distinct contributions, in a new anarchism that would have won the battle against «bourgeois individualism»:
I’m getting close to it, helped on by Marxist and Leninist concepts (I mean, by examining and filching the historical instruments that these concepts represent): you by extracting, lifting from and breathing life into Malatesta. I don’t doubt that the point at which we meet will be fruitful and constructive.32
An initial confrontation
That was in the summer of 1949. In late autumn came the first spark, lit by a continuing discussion begun six months before, after the anarchists’ conference at Livorno. On 13th November, Masini’s attempt to organise a demonstration at the Spanish Consulate in Genoa against Franco’s dictatorship led to the arrest of a number of anarchist sympathisers. Lorenzo Parodi noted in his memoirs that the drive for ‘propaganda by action’ in Genoa
had a lot to do with the tension evident in the subsequent meeting at Cervetto’s house in Savona. We can guess at an animated debate which left Masini in the minority, and ill at ease. «Next time we’ll talk in a cafè», he wrote three days later, «not in Cervetto’s room or in his kitchen, where the oppressive silence, the cold, the emptiness and the domestic environment won’t confuse me».33
The first lines of this letter read as if Masini wanted to use irony, even against himself, to dilute a too-stormy confrontation. He describes himself in the cold of the Turin train sitting in the corner of a third-class compartment
with his head in his hands and his pencil in his hair, almost as if mimicking the debate of a few evenings before:
In three days I’ve declared war on you ten times, then ten times I’ve asked you for a truce.
There were recriminations about what had been said. For Cervetto anarchism is the petty-bourgeois ideology of the working class: anarchism is finished. Masini wasn’t an anarchist anyway and Cervetto was for a working-class State and for an authoratitive party
. Eventually Masini proposed they come to an agreement, since Cervetto must stay in the movement
.
It seems to me that on the ideological level we could agree to declare the failure of traditional social democracy, Bolshevism, trade unionism, anarchism. We’ll save anarchism to save ourselves. After that we won’t need it any more. Because right now it’s a clean banner and a blank page on which plenty can be written. Here’s how I see the future:
- a) We declare the failure of the past (even ours).
- b) We move on to form a new (anarchist) movement.
- This timescale – years.
- Then we have the historical perspective – decades.
- c) We form a working-class movement.
- Natura non facit saltus.
The debate went on for months along these lines, with Cervetto taking up precise ‘Leninist’ positions, while Masini seemed to be trying to retrieve as many of the youths as possible from the anarchist movement. The real theoretical dissent still centred on the interim State
i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat; a year later, during the preparations for the Pontedecimo Conference, nothing had changed:
On the ideological plane, our positions correspond. We’re agreed on abstentionism. On the ‘party issue’ no one wants a traditional working-class party, nor the social democrats’ electoral agency, nor the Stalinists’ association of Italo-Soviet friendship, but something different, a type of meta-party.
There’s still the problem of the interim State. In theory, Cervetto agrees with my opposition to it. In practice, I doubt this.
But think about this, Cervetto: if we assume that the dissolution of the State in a revolutionary phase specifically requires the formation of revolutionary cadres, then in terms of their training it’s useless, counter-productive, to talk to them in the language of ‘dictatorship’, of ‘hegemony’ and ‘takeover of power’. This would constitute an immediate surrender to the idea of the State, a falling passively and sluggishly back onto positions of renunciation, of merely preventing counter-revolution. We need to aim decisively at non-State, concentrating all our forces on the revolutionary period, without exceptions, without postponing facing the problems.
In terms of what was to be done, Masini asked Cervetto not to take up a rigid position: the anarchist movement would be based on organisation, the best brains of Russian anarchism joined the Bolsheviks, but that was when Bolshevism wasn’t yet full-blown Stalinism, and at a time when the anarchist movement didn’t have the young members it has today, nor the ideas that are exciting them now
.
At times historical analogy caused Masini to lose his sense of proportion: above, he seems to be saying that the anarchists wouldn’t have joined Lenin if GAAP had been around at the time. In any case, the new organisation was to be based on the inter-regional Tuscany-Lazio section, to be extended into Liguria and Piedmont as the Italian Anarchist Federation collapsed. Cervetto could have an important role in this
and thinking about the ideological base could incorporate what he wanted in terms of clarifying the State-party-parliament problem, alongside a critique of traditional social democracy, Bolshevism, trade unionism and anarchism
.
The tone of Cervetto’s reply was friendly without abandoning his point of view. He rejected the idea that his ties with the movement were loosening, but confirmed his position on a workers’ State
and an authoritative party
. He would remain in the movement to help the young, to prevent vital energies going to waste. We’ll stay, he stated, until we find a working possibility, and:
Masini could be one. Masini could be the non-anarchist who wants to be an anarchist, just as there are anarchists who want to do non-anarchist things. The thing is, Masini wants to take action, and in taking action he forgets this fact. And is he really so sure that anarchism is a clean banner, and the surest anchor for our salvation? For us anarchism is something more and something less. Understood historically, it’s an experience that can provide pointers, but that has to be rejected in its entirety. And in this it may be that we can come to a more solid agreement.34
On the issue of revolutionary power, the solution proposed was critical examination of the problem of the ‘State’
. From anarchism, Masini had taken its properly political part, «the anti-State», wanting it to be a tenet for the Movement, but Cervetto saw no reason why this shouldn’t be at least open to debate. The tactic was to consider all possibilities, theory should be armoured, ready for anything
.
The Arshinov platform
This explicit conflict, the first of a series that would define the relationship between Cervetto and Masini, deserves further consideration. The terms of their discussion on the theory of the State were those of the Arshinov platform. In December Masini circulated a typed translation: to his disappointment Cervetto found it inconclusive
. A number of passages, which were to surface again as the conceptual base of the Theses on the State approved at Pontedecimo in 1951, confirm that this was the core of the clash:
Communists think that in their hands the State can become a powerful tool in the proletariats struggle. Anarchism believes that to be a fatal theory [...] in Russia itself we have seen how the State, albeit in the hands of the Bolsheviks, ended by taking an independent role and pursuing its own aims, how it became a base for privileged groups, restoring subjection and exploitation by force.
While communists think that the working masses possess only a destructive power, and entrust the constructive part to the State, anarchists believe that within the working masses lies enormous potential that should not be obstructed, and for this reason the State must immediately disappear [...] to be replaced by a productive network of workers’ organisations based on anarchist ideas.
Anarchists don’t want to take political power, they don’t want the dictatorship that leads to the rebirth of the State [...] but they don’t want to go backwards either [...] instead, the masses have to be helped to take the road to revolution and stay on it [...] this is why we need the leadership of the UAG (General Union of Anarchists).
In any ‘transitional period’ there would still be State coercion, wages, etc. Anarchists reject this line.35
Only a year had gone by since the first contact between Cervetto and Masini, yet already one can see how their relationship was changing. One factor was undoubtedly Cervetto’s personal maturation and his studies, in which he explicitly sought solutions in Marx, Lenin and Gramsci. But another factor, not to be ignored, was that Cervetto was no longer the youth trying to find his way in life, and Masini was no longer editor of Umanità Nova, looking for fresh talent. Somehow their relationship had become a completed and political one, with an organisational history.
Having broken with the Italian Anarchist Federation, which meant leaving the newspaper, Masini still had his project for the organisational development of the Tuscany-Lazio committee, and a bulletin, L’Impulso, which he had begun to publish from September 1949. But Cervetto in Savona also had his own group, albeit limited to six or seven comrades. When he had his discussion with Masini in the emptiness
of his kitchen, Cervetto had brought along a young worker from Ilva. When Masini had explained his plan, which anticipated Cervetto as part of and important
in an extended organisation in Liguria and Piedmont, he had a card in hand, but had to reckon with the fact that he was no longer addressing only an individual. True, he had ended on a firm note: That’s life, comrades. Think about it
. But Cervetto could come back at him with the need for critical examination of the problem of the State, and in the plural: That’s life. Well, we can say that too
.
The «little group» phobia
That discussion in Savona was the first step towards resolving the issue. But the picture, at the end of 1949, would be incomplete without taking account of a specific preoccupation of Masini’s, which he himself defined as a phobia about little groups
. Below he writes for the first time about this concern of his, the implications of which will gradually become clearer:
I’ve got a worry that I need to get off my chest: I have a terrible fear of ‘little groups’. Ours is perhaps not such a little group, and in certain areas it has strong ties to a prominent and widespread movement. But this isn’t enough. We must remember that selection will open up big gaps in the movement.
There are 100 of us in the whole of Italy, and there’s a risk that it’ll stay that way. So we have to work on the organisational level [...] You have to take on not just an ideological identity, but also organisational strength . The province of Savona has 220 thousand inhabitants, the province of Imperia* 162 thousand.
That’s 382,000 inhabitants, and the recent census shows an increase to a total of 400,000. Until there’s at least 400 of us in these two provinces we’re just a laughing stock.36
We have already attempted to draw up a statistical balance sheet for the lifetime of GAAP. Here Masini’s hypothesis is an organised presence of one per thousand of the population, but he seems not to have taken cognisance of the difference between districts with a working-class population and the rest of the territory, nor does he explain how one would distinguish between an active core and a wider sphere of influence. It’s also important to be precise about the nature of Masini’s phobia
. History and culture, as Cervetto notes, meant that Masini did not underestimate how much a «little group» could achieve – one example were those followers of Garibaldi who had strengthened the First International in Italy. Nevertheless, Masini was anxious that the movement avoid becoming isolated and turning into the typical little group
an enclosed Marxist sect.
Between Gramsci and Lenin
Meanwhile, the issue of historical references to Marxism was still at the core of Cervetto’s studies. During the first half of 1950, studying Gramsci was central to the differences, but also to the developing collaboration, between Masini and Cervetto. A page from the ‘Notebook’ on the party’s history throws some light on this. Cervetto wrote that much of Gramsci’s work was unconvincing but nonetheless helpful since it set boundaries round and ordered themes, and sent me back to writers and texts such as B. Croce, A. Labriola and L. Einaudi, which I would then read in a more systematic way
.
Even the notes on Americanism led me to read about American society in a systematic way, which had not been the case with my previous jumbled reading of American articles and fiction. Gramsci was a linguist and a philosopher even in the prison that became his grave. He taught me a method of study without my even realising it, in the world of public passions in which I lived and continue to live, in this beautiful county of sunshine and irrational emotions. During those years there were many who referred to Gramsci, but in fact there were few who really read him seriously, as I was doing. I really needed to do that: if I hadn’t, I would have been like all the rest. Some of Gramsci’s quotes sent me back to read – in some cases re-read – the classics of Marxism. In this way I was better able to understand Bordiga – albeit distorted by his ostentatious Rabelaisian style that irritated me as Ive always been irritated by gratuitous vulgarity – as well as Trotsky’s My Life and 1905, and Plekhanov’s Problems of Marxism.
When I had got my ideas clear I abandoned Gramsci. I met PCM [Masini] and lent him Gramsci’s work in exchange for the text books he had for the Political Sciences exam. My head was full of Machiavelli anyway, with having studied Gramsci – PCM’s exam text books couldn’t be any more difficult. PCM wrote an interesting tract highlighting Gramsci’s theory of a historical bloc between structure and superstructure. One day he brought me a history book belonging to one of his colleagues. I’d never have imagined that thirty years later Giovanni Spadolini would become Prime Minister.
The allusion to a historical bloc between structure and superstructure
is worth remembering, since it was involved in Cervetto’s interpretation of the idea of socio-economic formation
which he stressed during the early 1960s. For the moment, his study of Gramsci was part of his research on Marxist method in those first months of 1950:
One can synthesise: G. the philosopher + G. the historian + G. the politician + G. the sociologist (a new sort of sociology, nothing commonly understood by that word). In fact, rather than sociology Gramsci’s is a philosophy of praxis as applied to economic analysis, history, folklore, culture and morals – the city and the countryside, issues such as the South, Americanism, Fordism. Unlike the laws of the positivist sociologists, Gramsci uncovers the nature, the hidden corners of a society, a class, a country. He identifies the features of modern civilisation, traditions, ‘common sense’. In short, like a Gramsci plus a Lenin: the theoretical precision, intelligent research, ideological ability and method of study of the one plus the tactical and organisational genius, the severity, the politicisation of revolutionary will of the other. If we could purge Gramsci of some tendencies he shares with Croce, if we could disconnect him from a nationalist interpretation (which he inherited from Marx and Labriola, right up to Stalin as ‘theoretician of the national question’) we would have the revolutionary thinker, the new thinker of modern collective civilisation.37
Working towards a new Leninism
Many of these assessments would be reviewed in the years to come: paradoxically, the Gramsci of the debate on Italy would prove the most useful in drawing out the various threads of national political thought and in reconstructing the Italian ‘moral factor’. In Gramsci, Cervetto appeared to be seeking the tools for understanding the characteristics of change and modernisation, though already he also seemed aware that Gramsci’s eclecticism, while widely useful in a variety of areas, could not provide a solution in terms of revolutionary practice. Conversely, in Lenin Cervetto sought the theory for a party equal to an era of imperialism, a coherent system that could not be used by the enemies of the working class:
Lenin was something else entirely. He was Political Man par excellence, power was the whole goal of his life, he formulated action out of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Lenin was the creator of Marxism for the age of imperialism. Take that away and there’s nothing left of Lenin. Gramsci’s work is fragmented, anybody can plagiarise it (even the haute bourgeoisie applaud his Letters at the Viareggio prize-giving*); he writes for everybody, his researches are for everybody, at times you might almost say that he lays the basis of a Marxist humanism. Lenin doesn’t do that: Lenin works for Leninism. I’ve often asked myself, if you took away parts of Lenin’s work, what would remain? The fragments of the Leninist machine wouldn’t be good for anything.38
It’s no coincidence that Masini’s reply involved a precise statement that points up his differences with Cervetto:
You say “use Gramsci”. I say “integrate Gramsci” [...] I believe that the working-class movement should take in all practical and theoretical experience, not to make some kind of concentrate of them (Gramsci and Malatesta, Lenin and Luxemburg, Gorter and Trotsky) but to take account of them in formulating our platform today.39
It’s almost superfluous to note that this debate on theoretical sources was another facet of the differences driving Cervetto and Masini apart. The issue raised its head again in relation to an article of Masini’s for Piccola Enciclopedia Anarchica (the Anarchist’s Little Encyclopedia) which focused on the theory that without organisation and leadership the working class is defeated. As far as Cervetto was concerned, anarchism had failed and the thing was to work towards a «neo-Leninism»:
But don’t you think that the further we go in this examination of history, nothing is left of anarchism? Historically anarchism, even when it was a class movement, represented the instinctive rebellion of the working class. I believe that our reason for existence is to be a neo-Leninism with alternative objectives: a perfected and critical Leninism. The rock on which we could founder is the same as the one that made Lenin write State and Revolution: the practical issue of power (not metaphysical, nor authoritarian, but practical, and vital for safeguarding a Revolution). I think we’re heading in the right direction to navigate past this rock. If we can find the formula for ‘a new kind of power’ we’ll have won an important theoretical battle.40
Lenin was the whole point: in fact, Cervetto weighed in against Masini’s tendency to widen the field of reference:
But we should we careful not to fall into Luxemburgs rigidly Marxist ‘democraticism’ or into Gorter’s ‘council communist’. We need to get beyond that, because Lenin was right when he criticised them both [...] I believe that Luxemburg and the council movement constituted a sort of ‘resistentialism’ within Marxism, only more honest than that, more concrete and useful. But politically Lenin was right. It’s useless, even dangerous, to lull oneself with a ‘workers’ democracy’ mysticism. We have to resolve the formula ‘All power to the Soviets’ in a practical sense, which is to find a theory for a mechanism of political representation that would go beyond both the State (the traditional bourgeois mechanism) and the dictatorship of the proletariat (the State-Commune, the highest point of Leninist thought).
By the term ‘resistentialism’ Cervetto meant the individualist and anti-organisation current within Italian anarchism. His letter then went on to state a somewhat rash intent, as we shall see later:
We have to go beyond Lenin. We’ve had twenty-six years he never had. We need to resolve the issue of power, get beyond Leninism’s precarious young maturity, putting out of our minds the legacy of a senile anarchism. How can we do it? Listen, this will be history’s test for us, the frontier from which a new road begins [...] either that, or we fall back into Utopianism, bourgeois ‘realism’, the calamity that is the State.
The second confrontation
The clash during the Italian Anarchists Federation conference proved to be the start of a second round of debate as to what tactics to adopt in relation to the anarchist movement. Two major differences had emerged since the time of the first confrontation in November 1949. Cervetto had become more precise, in terms of action as well as thought, and now his communications were addressed not only to Masini, but also to Vinazza and Scattoni:
I’m going to speak to you frankly, even crudely, without veiled allusions, the way every revolutionary should speak. What’s happening now had to happen, it was natural for it to happen. We’d got it into our heads to revive a political corpse (anarchism) that historically had accomplished and outlived its function as the political infancy of the working class, We wanted to renew a Movement that history had already condemned to death – that’s what we were working for. What was the result? We managed to retrieve from anarchism the best energies, the strengths that couldn’t be allowed to die with it. So we can say that we’ve partly done our duty. Today, continuing to work in this particular way, we have come up against the kind of anarchism that can accurately and historically be so labelled, since it is chaotic, anti-organisation, anti-society, individualist and petty-bourgeois. I repeat: it was natural that this should happen, because we were going against anarchism’s basic principles, all the unilateral theories of anarchism, of political struggle, of political movements, the claim that one need only re-read Bakunin, Malatesta and then Lenin in order to see how fundamental a part the first two were of Leninism, etc. In other words, maybe without realising it, but because we had set out on the right road, we, and our Marxism, reached the point of fighting against anarchism, because if we were going to fight as sincere revolutionaries that was the only thing we could do. If you examine anarchism and Marxism closely, you’ll be convinced of this.41
Cervetto felt his perceptions were confirmed by his encounters with young communist intellectuals, and ended by stating his belief that Marxist-Leninism, in its modern [Gramsci’s] interpretation is the ideology, the only revolutionary ideology for the working class, whether industrial or agricultural
.
Anti-State, anti-Parliament and anti-Party were concepts from anarchism that should be preserved, but should also be seen as part of the political development of Marxism. The immediate tactic should be to carry on as long as possible within centrism and Mantovani’s Libertario, while attempting to convince as many as possible that there was an alternative:
Meanwhile we need to work hard. We need to form a minority with a direction, theoretically well-prepared – we need to critically study Marx, Lenin and Gramsci to reach our conclusions [...] We need to get to the point where we become a minority that while splitting from the anarchist movement is capable of inititating an effective piece of work, so that we don’t end up as have so many groups on the Left.42
The discussion, widened to Vinazza and Scattoni, had become more important, was no longer merely an exchange – even a fairly robust exchange – of ideas, nor was it any longer a matter of clarifying ideas between the Savona group and Masini: Cervetto had also extended it to the Sestri and Rome groups. Cervetto was aware of this qualitative change, and kept Masini informed:
I’m also sending this letter to Scattoni and Vinazza. I have to be open about my position with these closest comrades. Ideology isn’t contraband, to be secretly smuggled in: it has to be clearly stated. Politically Marxism will be disadvantageous. But if our militants are going to study they’ll have to study Marxism because only from here can they understand the subtle distinctions Pm starting to draw politically. Believe me, in Marx, Lenin, and especially in Gramsci, I’m finding original themes which, if we develop them collectively, can provide a structure for the ideology of a mass revolutionary movement».43
All three replies [Masini’s and Vinazza’s on 18th April, Scattoni’s on 22nd] were negative. Masini repeated the line he had taken the previous November, writing that his immediate thought was «the same old hysterics, the same doctrinaire self-indulgence: and at a time like this!» And his actual reply to Cervetto is sharper than in November, perhaps taking account of the negative vibes from Sestri and Rome. As to «that plan», the one detailed by Cervetto «we were already agreed» wrote Masini, going on the attack:
a) We must critically filter all theoretical and practical experiences of the working class: from Marxism to Leninism, from trade unionism to anarchism, from Spartacism to the communism of the councils.
All theoretical and practical experiences
: the differences between Masini and Cervetto as to which theoretical texts should form the base of the movement were not just superficial. By widening the field of reference Masini was placing all theoretical contributions – including Marx and Lenin – on the same level. By limiting the field of reference and clarifying that between, say, Lenin and the communism of the councils Lenin was right, Cervetto was establishing a hierarchy between the theoretical sources that placed the Bolshevik experience at the highest point the working-class movement had yet reached.
b) no matter what the label, we have three firm principles: we are anti-State, anti-Parliament and anti-Party but only insofar as helps us to reach the most advanced point the working dass has yet reached (number one, the Russian Revolution: number two, the Spanish Revolution);
c) in Italy – not just because of our own circumstances, but primarily because of the existence of a strong tradition – we should take anarchism as an organisational but also historical (or, if you like, prehistorical) base.
In Italy, up until today and in spite of its weaknesses, anarchism is the only working-class movement that has survived. The rest are in the gutter. I’ve read Labriola’s letters to Engels. When all’s said and done, maybe he mocked the anarchists but he didn’t hate them: he hated the Italian social democrats (and he comments that ultimately the anarchists were ‘communists’ and he was right, even today Piombino’s anarchists, who are the most extremist of organisations, are basically ‘communists’ to give one example). Now we’d need to have a long discussion as to the decisive importance of tradition. A reading of Gramsci, who’s so sensitive to this problem, should help you remember.44
In the abstract, Masini was flexible about the future shape of the movement: they should pay attention «to the content, not the container», they should be preparing the content of the anarchist movement and a certain amount of disenchantment couldn’t be discounted. But the content would remain even if the container was emptied: Lenin hadn’t been afraid to empty social democracy of «its rotten elements», etc. The central issue remained – Masini held the anarchist tradition to be vital, and was convinced it could be transformed. In a sense, it’s true that this does distinguish his position from Cervetto’s, but it’s also true that, as Masini said in an interview following Cervetto’s death: «I wasn’t properly an anarchist either».45
The road Masini subsequently took bears this out: joining Pietro Nenni’s autonomist PSI (Italian Socialist Party) in 1958 was basically not so different from that of bringing anarchism back into politics, in the sense of retrieving a working-class traditional movement in which anarchism and socialism had grown from the same stock and in which the alien element was the PCI’s obedience to Stalinism. In fact, when that tradition
escaped Russian imperialism’s Stalinist influence, it ended up being influenced by Italian and European imperialism.
In that second clash, in 1950, it was clever of Masini to remind Cervetto of the importance Gramsci had placed on tradition, primarily because this importance had a very real basis. Cervetto was to return to this issue in later years with his reflections on psychological time
, reflecting on what Marx had said about tradition as a «fact» that weighed on the minds of the living.
The question was whether this ‘fact’ had been correctly understood. Masini over-estimated it; he failed to sufficiently distinguish the different factors that came together in anarchism, how the ‘nihilism’ of the individualist and petty-bourgeois strands ended by paralysing the movement’s real working-class content. Most importantly, as could be seen as early as 1951 with the ‘Third Front’ debate, sympathy for anarchism, as indeed for all the various currents of the working-class movement, could not be isolated from the ever-increasing realities of imperialist currents. The claim for total autonomy was a central preoccupation of Masini’s, but anarchism – his romantic version of this autonomy – was vulnerable to being swayed by forces he did not see, or was not in a position to estimate.
In the spring of 1950, Vinazza and Scattoni similarly replied along Masini’s erroneous line; Masini had invoked tradition, and Cervetto was to learn just how heavily that weighed.
Vinazza wrote:
I’ll be clearer: I want an ideological and organisational renewal of anarchism, an adaptation to tactics that are correct for this period, for a movement that for me is still what it always was.
I don’t want to take ‘the good’ out of anarchism in order to bring it into an ideology (Marxism) that according to me can’t be renewed (even if it does contain indisputable truths). A while ago, in Sestri, you told me that Marxism hadn’t been put in place in Russia: I’ m convinced that it has.46
The same went for Scattoni, who drew on Gramsci for his evaluation of ‘tradition’ and quoted from notes on Machiavelli: We feel solidarity with those who have now grown old: for us they represent the past that still lives alongside us, that we must acknowledge and reckon with, that is one of the factors in the present and the threshold of the future
. Scattoni, too, believed it was important not to separate from anarchism:
It doesn’t seem to me that what we’re saying is an integral part of Leninism, but I think that Lenin often drew on anarchism (his speeches at the start of the revolution, at the beginning of the peasant problem, etc).
[...] Once we’ve got a trained minority, I don’t think we’ll need to split from the movement, if it’ll be all the confused part of it that’ll split off, because it won’t be geared up to a process of change, it’s just something that’s hung about for a long time.47
Cervetto’s reply kept going back to the point that Masini, in the final analysis, had evaded: how to train militants, what texts to use to give them direction – how to meet the requirements demanded by practical political work:
Why are we always debating the same issues? I understand the importance of tradition, among other things. What I don’t understand is what material we are to use to train our militants. Since militants need to be prepared, and since they don’t have time to search through hundreds of books – because they have to be political activists, not intellectuals – I tell them to concentrate on Marx, Lenin and Gramsci (a selection of about twenty books of these authors make up the militant’s essential bibliography, and are easily obtainable). This is my Marxist orthodoxy: I can’t tell them to read Bakunin or Malatesta. Training has to be based on Marxism, so that they can acquire Marxist concepts that will help them oppose petty-bourgeois anarchism. This is the whole problem of educating militants, and not only militants, but those young people who contact us asking what they should study.48
As Cervetto pointed out, it was paradoxical that this ‘little group’ should be even further restricted by the attention focused on the anarchism debate. Within the Peace Committees we’re finding elements who want our material
. It was one thing to fight within the anarchist movement, quite another to engage in political work: I think it’s more useful to employ our energies outside than within it
.
The issues that were surfacing: working with the masses, propaganda material, the need for a regular scientific publication – would only be resolved over the following decade. Masini’s solution to the above, although coming across as somewhat convoluted, demonstrates that Cervetto had hit the nail on the head with his practical questions. With a touch of irony, Cervetto had rejected the accusations of «doctrinaire self-indulgence» («oh, these Marxists, always wanting to go back to what Marx actually said»): Masini tried to offer him a middle ground of practical compromise. On the theoretical level it was perhaps slightly less than the «critical examination of the problem of the State» which had closed the last debate, perhaps slightly more in that it explicitly acknowledged that the issue of political activity while lacking a clear theoretical direction was still unresolved. However, what Masini had grasped was the practical importance of consolidating a national organisation to be used in the future:
If I spoke of ‘doctrinaire self-indulgence’ it’s because I’m more Flesh than Word. But in that flesh I’m still very much aware of both the theoretical and the practical problems. Today my main preoccupation is a practical one: how to build the material core, the practical instrument for our theory. And this core, this instrument, has to be made up of a national organisation, no matter how small. What I think is that for thirty years hundreds of heretical variations rose up against Bolshevism and were all defeated because they had no historical core to support them. Hopefully, we’re about to work this miracle: for all these reasons, anything that looks like a lack of patience (even if it’s not) grates with me, or, if you like, embarrasses me.49
The issue was a very real one, and differences widened over how to consolidate that material core. Masini was agreed on the need to have written material for militants and others, but was cautious regarding Marxist texts: Marx on materialism, maybe, and a history of Leninism but not actually Lenin: no Marxist texts for those outside the movement – it must be our interpretation of Marx [...] our interpretation of the whole history of the proletariat
.
Masini’s estimate of the movement’s current condition also opposed Cervetto’s position on the need for external work rather than internal focus: until the other regions had reached the levels of Liguria, Tuscany and Lazio, Masini explained, I intend to concentrate my efforts inside the movement
. On another occasion,50 Masini stated that only Savona was in a fit condition to carry out external work, a series of contacts in the PCI sphere of influence. The debate also reflected the fact that the Liguria and Savona groups were developing differently from the others, and in addition there was a division of roles, with Masini tending to concentrate on relations with the anarchist movement. Masini voiced the above assessments during his trips up and down the peninsula to link up the various groups: in 1954 this task would fall to Cervetto.
The difference in development is confirmed by a June 195051 report on the Savona group, which suggested that all the GAAP groups should organise political propaganda and outreach work
based on Libertario. In Savona a core of activists
managed to guarantee a regular sale of 300 copies per week: from Sestri Ponente Aldo Vinazza reported 130 weekly sales.52
Savona put pressure on all the groups to plan for this organised distribution of the newspaper. Cervetto clarified that this activity, widened to include the PCI’s sphere of influence, was carried out essentially as communists
eschewing all anarchist mysticism
. It can be seen how this sort of urging contributed to provoking a further reckoning between Cervetto and Masini, the third in the course of a year.
A stumbling block: the «simultaneous withering away» of the State
In relation to this, it may be useful to mention an exchange of letters over the summer of that year between Cervetto and Livio Maitan, an Italian exponent of the Trotskyist groups affiliated to the Fourth International of Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo. In an early letter, Maitan replied to Cervetto’s requests for his assessment of Gramsci, Trotsky, and some of Tasca’s theories as reproduced in Pannunzio’s Il Mondo (The World). Maitan produced some well-balanced replies: in your letter, he wrote to Cervetto, there are passages that make one think you are an adherent of Marxism
but other of your statements seem to exclude it.53
Also interesting is a reply, in July 1950, to two questions put to him by Cervetto:
1) Stalinism persecutes Leninism and Marxism, and has been made possible by a core of opportunists grouped round the concept of the State; 2) a revolutionary opposition to Stalinism must be based on a radical critique of the Marxist theory of the State.
Maitan’s response to this question of continuity between Lenin and Stalin was cast in the Trotskyist ‘centrist’ mould: there is no continuity, yet Stalinism is credited with having a twofold nature – it is counter-revolutionary towards the proletariat but it «transcends» the rule of the bourgeoisie. His reply on the issue of the State is more balanced, highlighting the stumbling-block of the simultaneous withering away of the State
which Cervetto was unable to avoid as he prepared his theories for the Pontedecimo meeting:
The anarchists’ fundamental error – and in this you seem to be basically on the same lines – is to make of the State a fundamental cause, a sort of Holy of Holies. In other words, according to you the State is the ultimate cause of all the ills of society, whereas in reality the State is only a subordinate cause. In fact, Marxism tells us that the fundamental cause is class division, and from class division derives the need for the State. It’s true that the State, in its turn, becomes a source of ill, but – I’ll say it again – only as a secondary, not as the primary, cause. Do you think that the State is the cause of class division? And do you realty think that the State is a primary cause? If you do, you have to answer the question: why did the State come about? And then you have to find a reply that’s different from the one Marx found – that the State came about as a tool of oppression for the use of the ruling class. From that concept, it follows that the State can only disappear when class divisions are eliminated. You must know that what you define as your goal (‘anti-State’) is also the ‘goal’ of Marxism, with exactly this theory – that in the communist phase of society the State will become extinct. The disagreement is about how we can get to that point.54
This part of Maitan’s reasoning is irreproachable and is a correct exposition both of the materialist method and of Engels’ theses in Anti-Dühring: it was mainly socialism of the ‘soapbox’ variety that viewed the power of the State as the prime cause of the violence imposed on society. In addition, Maitan did not shirk from going back to the core question that had been posed in 1917 for ever after: how to organise in order to defend the revolution and ensure the redistribution of wealth.
Maitan and Cervetto would meet again, at the Genoa meetings held to assess potential support for an ‘Internationalist Front’ (to be detailed in the next chapter). It’s worth noting that throughout the pair’s future contact, mainly in attempts to unite the ‘communist left’ around Azione Comunista (Communist Action) Maitain would carry with him a twofold reputation: correct as to Marxist principles in relation to the State, confused but confident as to the social nature of Stalin’s USSR.
The third confrontation: the «issue of imperialism»
In mid-August 1950, at a meeting in Florence, it was decided to begin preparations for a national conference in February 1951. Although the venue was not immediately decided, this was to be the Pontedecimo Conference, at which GAAP would be born. A letter of Cervetto’s dated the end of August praised a study of Masini’s on Gramsci’s concept of a «historical bloc», and added an exacting observation on Masini himself:
I knew that G. [Gramsci] would have been an important step in your development, ‘correcting’ and ‘widening’ your outlook. And up to a point it will help you get rid of a certain residual schematism that you sometimes quite comfortably make use of i.e. the issue of imperialism and my position on it, which, let me tell you, is instinctive.55
Further on, in a long paragraph on the importance of Gramsci, Cervetto maintains that Gramsci’s thinking helps to seriously tease out a solution to the problem of ‘imperialism’
. We have already noted that at this time Cervetto was overestimating the contribution Gramsci’s theories could make to the group’s theoretical problems, but it is also very clear what was driving Cervetto to do this.
He was searching for a Marxist – but not Stalinist – hook, a conceptual tool for an understanding of the ‘new’ imperialism and the USSR issue. In September, preparing his theoretical presentations for the Pontedecimo conference, Cervetto was searching for principles that would enable him to get round the schematic notion of unitary imperialism as formulated by Masini. It can be said that in Gramsci Cervetto was seeking a dialectic, and thought he had found it in the idea of the historical bloc.
Throughout the autumn of 1949 and the spring of 1950 the Cervetto-Masini debate continued to grapple with such issues as the nature of the anarchist movement, the issue of the State, and Cervetto’s propensity to seek a leading theory for the movement’s militants in Gramsci and Lenin. Over the summer and autumn of 1950 their discussions centred more on the question of imperialism. The salient feature that comes up again and again, in relation to the instability of a local group or the defection of some militant, is the belief in the decisive role of theoretical and political clarity.
According to Cervetto, what erodes a movement’s strength and hampers recruitment is the lack of a clear point of reference, and this is not simply a question of education and training. Politics is a clash between forces: inconsistency means leaving an opening to the enemy: political theory and analysis are a weapon for exploiting the enemy’s own contradictions: and knowledge of imperialism and how it behaves is essential for the movement’s capacity to endure and to provide solid certainties for its militants.
Masini’s reply embraced all the connected themes of this confrontation, although he appeared to consider imperialism as an issue apart. Conversely, Cervetto continued ever more clearly to link the question of tactics to a theoretical base and to strategic analysis, in a debate that was to run throughout the second half of 1952.
A letter of Masini’s, written in early September 1950, is useful for gaining an overall picture of the preparations for the Pontedecimo conference. Basically it asked Cervetto to be patient both in relation to the place of Marx and Gramsci as theoreticians for the movement, and in relation to imperialism. As for the business of imperialism [wrote Masini] try to leave out any external suggestions [...] keep your reservations for your own specific study of the issue
.
A dozen confident and great-hearted men
It’s worthwhile taking Masini’s letter of clarification point by point. (Masini also replied in this vein to an open letter from Sestri which, influenced by Cervetto, referred to Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Malatesta and Gramsci as theoretical sources for militants).
In a continuing tug-of-war, Masini objected to the Marx-Lenin-Gramsci reference, and clearly asked everyone to avoid creating problems: I would ask you to bear in mind the following [he wrote] and I trust you will understand
.
At the Florence meeting we took a step forward: we became a coherent group. At this coming conference we will take another step forward: from being a group we’ll move on to being a group movement. Not only will we define our relationship to the overall movement, we will also lay down the base programme for our organisation. Nor will that be the final phase: from being a group movement we will have to go on to research, establish and recruit a working-class movement in Italy. We will have new and difficult problems to face. But we do not despair, because we know that our work really is developing on a base of favourable objective conditions – the disintegration of Stalinism and the upsurge of new working-class energies.
In the immediate future, Masini considered that Cervetto’s insistence on a ‘Marxist’ theoretical direction would be an impediment.
But today we have to think for today. Today it’s not so much a case of saving a few hundred young people from the failures of history and politics: it’s a case of taking up anarchism’s valid causes (causes expressed from the heart, but causes of the past) and bringing them to a level where they can build a working-class movement.
In addition, there are two practical elements: a) the need to make physical contact with the masses of this county, of Italy (put yourself in the place of the ‘communist revolutionary groups’ – for example, Livio Maitan’s Trotskyist organisation – and just think of the problems they have: they’ve got members, but what members! – adventurers, failures, random intellectuals – people who ruin whatever chance the organisation might have. They haven’t got what we’ve got: a dozen confident and great-hearted men). And b) the material means for action.
That dozen
is a realistic enough reference to the numbers on which the possibility of rebuilding a working-class organisation depended at that time. In the period leading up to the birth of GAAP, Masini wanted to exclude any reference that could compromise our difficult, delicate task
and below he goes back to the ‘little group’ issue:
There are still a few months left in which a number of comrades will move from their present positions, but they will only move if they see us at a standstill. Why will these comrades move? – for the banal reason that ‘we support the concept of organisation’. Only with time will we be able to widen their horizons.
There are two great dangers always in my mind.
That we might end up forming the typical Left group, the little left-wing chapel. That would be suicide, and I really don’t want to die like that.
Then there’s the danger of becoming like the sort of school where everybody passes the exams and no one ever fails (like the ‘fustice and Liberty’ movement, which in twenty years failed to establish a stable party).
If we stop thinking we can adapt the movement to our intellectual experiences, we can avoid these dangers. Gramsci’s intellectual is a labourer who kneads and moulds the material that takes shape in his hands. I think that’s how we need to be, and probably you do, too.
The realistic side of Masini’s words should not be ignored. Cervetto would avoid the ‘little group’ clique by working in depth among the masses, but the attention focused on the human material available to the anarchist movement provided him with the direction. The flaw in Masini’s draft plan was the notion that an organised force could do without theoretical and strategic clarity. Thus the imperialism issue became almost secondary, or at any rate one of Cervetto’s personal preoccupations.
As for the business of imperialism, try to leave out any external suggestions and keep your reservations for your own specific study of the issue. I’ve already explained my own position: it’s not ideological in the worst abstract sense, but political, fixed by the exigencies of revolutionary realism (like Lenin’s position in the face of the - war). But we will talk about this when we come to discuss our political line.56
Imperialism became a business
limited to Cervetto’s personal study, because Masini thought he was facing the same sort of war as 1914, and imagined that the clash between the two blocs would drive the masses into opposing it. This line of thinking is also found in Masini’s assessment of Tito and Yugoslavia:
The move from Stalinism to a working-class revival will come about in an accidental, confused, disorderly manner. A moment in this disorder is the rule of Tito. But it will implode under the impact of the international crisis (there are no islands in the age of imperialism). We need to maintain contact with Tito’s supporters in order to move them from their current positions and to retrieve them at the right time (when the myth of Yugoslavia, the second socialist homeland, collapses).57
Anarchism: a «focused, federated» movement
The October editorial ‘Anarchists’ gives a good idea of the controversy within the Italian Anarchist Federation, with Masini accused of being a tool of the Stalinists and his replies in the name of a focused, federated anarchist movement
. Behind the pleas of «don’t compromise anarchism», wrote Masini, there’s a whole hinterland of dearly-held prejudices, of cosy received wisdom, false dogmas and heresies, and behind these flimsy curtains a few burnt-out iconoclasts want only to keep wandering aimlessly round and round
. Confronted with a strong, focused and federated anarchist movement
with its own programme and organisation, all the existing happy families party vegetating within its own friendship networks
was fated to disappear:
They’re screaming that the anarchist movement in Italy is going to the dogs. We say, don’t worry, it’s not the movement that’s going to the dogs, only a few undeserved reputations and official positions, a few little myths. On the contrary, the anarchist movement in Italy is finding its direction, organising and growing in strength every day.
They cry out that it’s not true, that the movement is really menaced by class enemies, neo-anarchists, by the ‘youth’, by revisionists: by people paid by Stalin. Or Tito. Or by the late Trotsky – even by Bordiga. While we explain that no one’s menacing the movement, which doesn’t need to be rescued by anyone, that all it needs is to find a theoretical base and direction, organise itself on the practical level and involve itself closely in the struggles of the working masses.
Then they protest that we aren’t anarchists, that we shouldn’t be allowed to speak in the name of anarchism, that the media shouldn’t publish our articles, that the groups and the federation shouldn’t take part in our propaganda intiatives, that we should be barred from meetings etc, etc. They define us as ‘Bolsheviks’ although they know of our unyielding opposition to Stalinism (which is a degenerated form of Bolshevism, but hasn’t Bolshevism been dead and buried these twenty years) [...]
Yet in spite of all this we are, and remain, anarchists. We behave and talk as anarchists, we write as anarchists: day by day we claim our right to follow the historic path of anarchism: day by day we prove our capacity to promote anarchism.
For those who haven’t yet understood, we say again, and loudly: WE ARE AND REMAIN ANARCHISTS». 58
From a subsequent letter, we can tell that Masini attempted to forestall Cervetto’s reservations by cherry-picking the meaning of the editorial, dismissing it as a tactical manoeuvre for the imminent Italian Anarchist Federation conference at Ancona: «you will have understood [he writes] that the editorial ‘Anarchists’ had a psychological pre-conference function».59
But from an examination of a year’s confrontation between Cervetto and Masini it is obvious that the issue could not be downgraded to differences of focus or purpose.
The «militant Bolshevik spirit»
The three confrontations – autumn 1949, spring, then autumn 1950 – during which differences regarding the future of GAAP became explicit, are linked by a common factor. The difference between Cervetto, who held that everything useful had been extracted from anarchism, and Masini, who maintained that there were still youths to be won over, was not a matter of a purely practical assessment. When Masini asked Cervetto to be patient, to understand, not to compromise the preparations for the Pontedecimo conference, he underlined the practical side – the energies it might be possible to attract from anarchism – but his reasoning demonstrates that he continued to believe that anarchism could once again become a live movement. Or perhaps that through anarchism it might be possible to regenerate a ‘genuine’ working-class movement, free from the external influences of either Stalinism or the Atlantic Alliance. In 1988, in the preface to a biography of the Carrara anarchist Ugo Mazzucchelli, Masini would give this interpretation of his period of militancy in GAAP:
Many years ago, I tried to push the anarchists to organise themselves politically, and above all to take political action. That attempt failed due to the errors I made in planning and tactics (or perhaps simply tact) but primarily due to a senseless campaign which targeted me as a heretic and a revisionist. Yet I remain convinced that if the anarchists want to take the risk, cross the frontier and enter the city, if they want to face up to reality and leave their mark on it, if they want to come out of their limbo of fringe magazines, their festivals and their self-congratulatory meetings (all good and worthy things in their place, that I take part in myself) then they must make up their minds to get into politics. Politics is neither good nor bad, it’s just risky. Errico Malatesta was in politics all his life, measuring himself against the movers and shakers, the events of his time, without ever betraying his principles.60
It is clear that in the absence of a precise political and strategic content, that phrase to enter the city remains a formula vulnerable to uncertain, and even opposing, outcomes. At the end of the decade Masini himself was to take to the city
and sign up to reformist socialism.
This was precisely the Mazzucchelli case’,61 i.e. the failure in the autumn of 1950 of initiatives connected with the setting up of GAAP to gather much support from the youth of Carrara, which convinced Cervetto even more as to the value of the study of Marxism. Already he had been able to ascertain, from Genova and Savona, where he had consistent contacts, that a Marxist training was a protection against any return to anarchism
. Not that a ‘Bolshevik’ perspective could be said to be in tune with Masini’s ‘Anarchists’ editorial:
It is an important first step towards that militant Bolshevik spirit, the features of which are a natural ideological and psychological distance from and disregard for anarchism [...] We should try to encourage comrades to study Marxism: this would reduce the Mazzucchelli cases.62
The battle at Ilva, Savona
The last weeks of 1950 were taken up by the preparations for February’s conference, but Cervetto also had to deal with his own situation at Ilva. The loss of his job there was a factor in his return to Argentina a few months later. A summary of that harsh defensive battle can be found in his reflections as to the need for a strong and structured party to resist the influence of the Stalinist PCI:
Final balance: many useful experiences, a deeper knowledge of the political situation of the working class and of the masses. We have been better able to verify how the PCI controls the masses, the many methods it uses for making contact with it, how it exploits any independent movement etc. This brief experience has shown me the great importance of resolving the problem of ‘contact with the masses’. My preoccupation with forming a united minority – as far as possible – may seem excessive, but it is an external expression of what I believe is required today in terms of tactics and of fundamental ideology. What I mean is, the minority must be united for today, not just in terms of the interests it historically represents. The minority must bind itself to the masses now, not assume that this bond will arise at some future time and in different objective conditions.63