Prefaces

Guido La Barbera

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Preface to the English Edition

In 1943, in an Italy still devastated by war, the political and military crisis of Fascism catapulted a new generation of workers into the political struggle. Many of these youths received their ‘political baptism’ in the armed struggle against Fascism, the Resistance. Among those youths there was the widespread hope – and often the conviction – that the Resistance meant fighting against society divided into classes, against exploitation, and against capitalism as a social system and not only against one of its most repressive, violent and bloody forms. But, at the end of the war, those aspirations were to be bitterly disappointed. The fall of Fascism merely meant a change in the political shell and postwar restructuring was being carried out thanks to the perpetuation of the same mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, guaranteed by a different form of class rule.

The political and social struggles had activated a sizeable working class minority, but most of the energy poured into the antifascist struggle was channelled by the Italian Communist Party of the time into class collaboration and the subordination of the workers’ interests to the national interests of Italian capitalism. Many illusions were dispelled.

For the handful of young workers who did not want to submit to the myth of ‘national collaboration’, to confusion, renunciation and sterile regrets, it meant persisting in their political struggle and finding the way for their anti-capitalist struggle in the coming phase.

But the rubble of the imperialist war was not only physical. An apparently insurmountable wall loomed before that handful. The very idea of ‘communism’ was monopolised by a PCI that disguised its irreversible bourgeois choice in ‘Marxist’ phraseology and put itself forward as the champion of national interests via the myth of the ‘national way to socialism’. This was a party dominated by the Stalinist ideology of the USSR as the ‘homeland of socialism’, the defence of which had to be a priority for the international proletariat. The ‘big lie’ of Russia as a socialist country was a powerful ideological weapon for subjecting the international workers’ movement to the interests of the USSR in the world contention. The imperialist division of the world between the great powers that had been sanctioned by the Yalta agreement was transfigured into opposition between an imperialist camp and a ‘socialist’ camp. The proletariat was called upon to side with one imperialist bloc against the other, and to defend a false socialism that harshly repressed its own working class. It is no accident that Cervetto would define Yalta as ‘the nadir of internationalism’.

In his preface to the book Guido La Barbera draws attention to the boulder that obstructed the difficult path of the ‘Founding Group’ as they reconstructed internationalism:

What did the Second World War and Yalta mean for the Italian working-class movement and for the little group – a tiny part of working-class energies – that became the original nucleus of Lotta Comunista?

As Lorenzo Parodi, the co-founder with Arrigo Cervetto of Lotta Comunista, was to write years later, recalling his choice – when he was only seventeen – to fight in the Resistance, by instinct, we had grasped that the war was ‘imperialist’. Nevertheless, we needed to go on, to discover, besides our class instinct, why imperialism existed. Class instinct had to be followed by scientific knowledge. To do this, all the ruling political and ideological rubble that crushed the workers’ movement and made it a tool in the struggle among the various capitalist and imperialist fractions needed to be cleared away. The forces acting in the future economic cycle, the classes and their fractions, the political forms of class rule, and the nature of imperialism needed to be analysed. An internationalist vanguard could be formed only through a clear vision of the imperialist nature of the conflict that had just ended, of the State-capitalist nature of the USSR – discovering how the economic laws of capitalism worked in it –, and of a scientific analysis of the Yalta partition between the imperialist powers and the successive ‘cold war’, when the world seemed to be split between two opposing blocs while there were already glimpses of inter-imperialist clashes in the ‘Western bloc’.

La Barbera writes that, in its analysis of imperialism, the generation of Marxists subsequent to Lenin’s

had failed to link up successfully with Marx and Lenin’s conceptions. 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.

The thread of Marxist theory had been broken.

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.

Marxist science provided the tools for studying society and for the scientific definition of the strategy of the international workers’ movement in its long struggle for communism, with a cultural baggage of analyses and experiences that was largely unexplored. It was, and still is, necessary to repossess that heritage.

Today, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the takeoff of China and the new powers, and the emergence of Europe as a continental power have presented new, unprecedented scenarios and set new times for the contention among the powers [...] and, consequently, new tasks for our scientific elaboration, essential to the building of an internationalist party.

Retracing that original nucleus’s intense labour of studying, clarifying and reappropriating Marxism forms part of our task today.

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Preface

A party is built on strategy. The group that founded Lotta Comunista came to this conclusion at the close of the 1950s. It was the central thesis of Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party¹, the core text of our organisation, written in 1964. As What Is to Be Done? had been for Lenin’s party, so Class Struggles has been and is for Lotta Comunista.

To reconstruct the history of a party is also, inevitably, to deal with the genesis and evolution of its strategy. For Marxism, ‘strategy’ is primarily an assessment of the timescales and forces of class dynamics, from the objective driving force – capitalist development – to the subjective strength of the revolutionary party. The introduction to the second Italian edition of The Difficult Question of Times¹ is virtually a summary of the first part of our history, and a good place to start:

Lotta Comunista was born facing ‘the question of times’.

At the end of the 1940s, the men who would be its founders began to grope their way through the dense ideological fogs of the Yalta partition. Young workers, won over to politics during the war and the partisan struggle, they found every kind of obstacle in their path, obstacles generated or magnified by the world conflict that had just ended.²

The first obstacle was the imaginary times of the period. The idea that a new world war was about to break out between the USA and the USSR discouraged any assessment of the strength of European imperialism. What were seen as the tight timescales of this crisis overshadowed the lesson of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and led to makeshift solutions, whereas the real need was for the forces of the revolutionary party to be rebuilt in organisational coherence and homogeneity of political theory and strategy.

A second obstacle derived from the nature of the Italian working-class movement and from the state of the international revolutionary movement.

On the one hand, the maximalist political tradition of the class movement in Italy did not facilitate a methodical analysis of the world cycle and of the dynamics of capitalism. Traces of this are to be found in the article on the Times of Class Tradition, in which Arrigo Cervetto recalls Karl Marx’s well-known statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: men make their own history, but under circumstances determined by facts and tradition. This reference of Marx’s to tradition is important, Cervetto observes, because it is put on the same level as facts. Tradition is a fact and not an abstract and arbitrary idea, even if, in most cases, it wears the ideological clothes of false consciousness, of myth, of the misunderstanding of the real facts of the past and of the causes that determined them, the inexact measurement of the times that regulated them. But tradition is a fact because it is the social practice of the past. It is, ultimately, the experience that each class or class section has accumulated. If it is not accorded the necessary scientific attention it becomes a braking factor rather than a wealth of experience. Facing the question of times in the Italy of the 1950s meant refusing to be crushed by the tradition of maximalism and its psychological time.

On the other hand, on the international movement front, Marxist theory had failed to link up successfully with Marx and Lenin’s conceptions of the development of capitalism in the age of imperialism. What mean global capitalist development in the imperialist stage? Amidst the social and political ruins of the post-war period – Cervetto wrote in The Times of the Fifties – the revolutionary movement was unable to immediately understand that part of the objective development identified by Lenin was in progress. A link between Lenin’s theoretical work and the real movement had been skipped. A generation had been swallowed up. It would take a decade – until the 1957 Theses grasped the long time of imperialist development in the Asian area – for the science of Marx’s Capital and of Lenin’s Imperialism to be reconnected to the practical tasks of the revolutionary struggle».³

In the beginning, then, there was the war, and its consequences for Europe – the partitions agreed at Yalta and the myth of Stalin’s USSR as the bastion of world socialism. What did the Second World War and Yalta mean for the Italian working-class movement and for the little group – a tiny part of working-class energies – that became the original nucleus of Lotta Comunista?

The more specific a historical reconstruction, the more it focuses on individuals, on the events that have shaped them, their personality and psychology. Here is this little group, making their own history within the limits of facts and tradition. The ‘facts’ were the factory, Fascism, the world war; the ‘tradition’ was political culture that influenced how they moved within their working-class world: maximalism, socialism, a generic and imprecise ideal of ‘communism’, even anarchism. Most of them were young manual workers, responding with political passion to those ‘facts’ that seized hold of them and forced them to make choices.

The working-class energies that between 1943 and 1951 led to the meeting at Genoa Pontedecimo and the formation of GAAP (Anarchic Groups of Proletarian Action) may be divided into four main currents: the Savona group (Arrigo Cervetto); the Genoa group (Lorenzo Parodi and later Aldo Pressato); the Sestri Ponente^** group (Aldo Vinazza); and the Tuscany-Lazio group (Pier Carlo Masini and Ugo Scattoni). More details will follow with regard to the history, organisational strength and membership of these groups. However, almost the whole membership had passed through shared experiences: manual labour, the Resistance, and a political baptism in the 1943 and 1944 strikes. Most had gone on to take an active part in the partisan struggle, a direct and almost inevitable consequence of their participation in workplace struggles and the need to avoid the fascist police and deportation to Germany.

Resistance militancy also explains a great deal about their initial choice of anarchism: the frustrated aspirations of the partisan struggle drove them to seek for ‘another’ (non-Stalinist) communism in the Italian working-class tradition of libertarian communism. The task would be to sift the anarchist movements for those prepared to take part in organised and politically-directed action and leave behind a tradition of individual rebellion opposed to organisational control.

This was GAAP’s initial project, but almost immediately Arrigo Cervetto and Pier Carlo Masini had diverging views as to how it should be directed. Masini wanted to build on the anarchist tradition: his great fear was ending up as a small, closed group like Amadeo Bordiga’s. Cervetto tended to take his cue from all the strands of the working-class movement, and from the PCI sphere of influence in particular. Masini sought theoretical and political solutions from anarchism; Cervetto from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Gramsci.

The unremitting exchange of letters between Cervetto and Masini reveals that as early as 1949 the two held potentially diverging views as to what it would mean to take the anarchist movement as a starting-point. Cervetto was looking for theoretical and political clarity on the nature of the State, and on imperialism. His persistence on the issue of imperialism put pressure on libertarian anarchism’s basically anti-authoritarian line on the USSR, in an attempt to thwart the associated danger – of a slide to the pro-the-West and pro-the-US field. If imperialism were the objective trait that united Washington and Moscow, it would make it difficult to view the main enemy as the USSR and its oppressive State control, to the point of supporting the USA in the ‘Cold War’ line-up. But primarily the concept of the USSR as imperialist and State-capitalist in nature would facilitate confrontation with the Stalinist PCI and the opposite danger – falling under the spell of ‘Eastern’ Moscow, a feature that was fated to increase as the ‘Cold War’ developed. Cervetto quickly came to the conclusion that the toolbox of Marxist theory was the only thing that could consolidate and stabilise his militants, with its capacity for opposing the ideologies of Yalta on all fronts.

Masini was wary of theoretical research on imperialism, seeing it as one more element in the danger of becoming a small [sectarian Marxist] group closed in on itself, and insisted on the need to draw every possible vital force from the anarchist tradition. Before long, what had seemed a clash between two different personalities or points of view came under the spotlight of the two strategic issues already mentioned – the timescales and the forces of imperialism.

The notion of an imminent conflict between two single blocs – the USA and the USSR – neglected the forces rising in Europe. In June 1950, faced with the Korean War, the internationalist watchword was ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’. The formula of a working-class ‘Third Front’ adopted in the spring of 1951 lent itself to being confused with the idea of a European ‘Third Force’ that was being debated in France, Britain and Germany as well as in Italy, by diverse currents united by reservations about the Atlantic Alliance.

The prospect of the coming war led Masini to take on board a pre-1914 scenario and to picture a clash in Europe between the ‘Right’ and a Zimmerwald Left – the internationalist currents that at the time had opposed the first imperialist world war. This picture led to great interest in the resignations of Cucchi and Magnani³ from the PCI, in Bevan’s Labour Left, and in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Masini held that American domination would make any ‘Third Force’ of European imperialism impossible. But when this did indeed take shape – from the European Coal and Steel Community to the European Common Market – the consequence would be that the Left would end up playing the ‘left’ wing of the European Third Force. Such was to be the road Masini would follow when after 1957 he fell back onto Pietro Nenni’s PSI and then onto the PSDI.

In reconstructing this first stage of the party’s history we end at 1952, after the initial step of the Genoa-Pontedecimo meeting, when this divergence within GAAP was already unfolding and Cervetto had sketched a preliminary outline of his thinking on the party, imperialism, Marxism and the State. We will see the 1951-1952 forerunners of the mature Cervetto’s thinking on theories of the State and of unitary imperialism.

The era of Azione Comunista, which started soon after the narrative of this book ends, was to many intents and purposes a period of marking time. Apart from the firm principles of the ‘1957 Theses’, from the end of the 1950s through to the early 1960s Cervetto and Parodi were forced to take up their road from the point at which they had arrived in 1952-1953. In the meantime much energy would be lost in the attempt to consolidate the diverse groups of the Movement of the Communist Left around the newspaper Azione Comunista.⁴

^* Reproduced in English in Our Internationalist Struggle, éditions Science Marxiste, 2011.

^** Residential and industrial neighbourhood of west Genoa, once separate from the city, with its own local council.

^*** For Aldo Cucchi and Valdo Magnani see ‘Back to the little group and anarchism’, Chapter 7 and the section Biographical Profiles.

^**** The political group ‘Azione Comunista’ (Communist Action) was formed in 1954 by a small core of PCI dissidents: its same-name publication came out in 1956. In 1956-1957, GAAP joined what was by then this newly-named group, ‘Movimento della Sinistra Comunista’ (Movement of the Communist Left); cf. Chapter 2, Passion Disciplined by Reason and Chapter 11, Conclusions.

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USEFUL DATES

• 1943

  • 25^th July: The Grand Council strips Benito Mussolini of his office as Prime Minister and places him under arrest.
  • 25^th July: Demonstration in Savona, strike at the Ansaldo works in Genoa: political baptism of fire for Cervetto and Parodi.

• 1944

  • April: Palmiro Togliatti announces the ‘Salerno turnaround’.
  • Spring: Cervetto joins the partisan struggle. Parodi goes into hiding with a libertarian communist group. Masini leaves the PCI.

• 1945

  • 4^th/11^th February: Yalta Conference.
  • 25^th/30^th April: End of the war in Italy and Fascism.
  • 8^th May: End of the war in Europe. Germany divided into four zones.
  • 6^th/9^th August: Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  • 15^th August: Unconditional surrender of Japan.
  • 25^th April: Partisan forces enter Savona. Cervetto joins the PCI. Parodi becomes a militant libertarian communist, working within Ansaldo and in the Nervi area of Genoa.

• 1946

  • 22^nd June: Togliatti concedes an amnesty for political crimes.
  • Spring: Cervetto working at Ilva. Leaves the PCI and calls himself an anarchist.

• 1947

  • January: De Gasperi on a mission to the USA to secure loans to Italy.
  • May: The PCI and the socialists are expelled from the government.
  • July: India granted independence.
  • March: Masini joins Umanità Nova in Rome.
  • September: Cervetto, Parisotti, and Bogliani form their young anarchist group ‘No God, no Boss’.

• 1948

  • January: Cervetto’s first article appears in Umanità Nova.
  • April: Marshall Plan begins. De Gasperi’s Christian Democrats win the elections.
  • May: Pier Carlo Masini holds meetings in Genoa and Savona: over the next few months he makes contact with Cervetto and Parodi.

• 1949

  • 4^th April: Italy joins the Atlantic Alliance.
  • 20^th April: World Peace Congress in Paris. Parisians for Peace movement born.
  • 1^st October: Mao proclaims the People’s Republic of China.
  • 23^rd/25^th April: Italian Anarchist Federation holds its National Congress at Livorno.
  • September: First issue of L’Impulso.
  • November: First clash between Cervetto (‘the Marxist’) and Masini (‘the anarchist’).

• 1950

  • April: Schuman Plan for the European Coal and Steel Community.
  • 25^th June: Korean War begins.
  • November: Chinese forces become involved in the Korean War.
  • March: Cervetto, Parodi, and Masini agree to collaborate on Milan’s Libertario.
  • April: Second clash between Cervetto and Masini extends to Genoa and Rome sections: Cervetto is for Marxism and Leninism.
  • June: In the face of the Korean War, the watchword is: ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’.
  • 15^th August: Meeting held at Florence with the aim of forming ‘an organised and federated movement.’ A National Congress is arranged for February 1951.
  • September: Attempt to establish the political line of the Congress. Third C/M clash, this time over unitary imperialism.
  • December: Cervetto sacked from Ilva.

• 1951

  • January: North Korean and Chinese forces take Seoul.
  • 12^th/14^th February: Italy supports the Pleven Plan for the EDC (European Defence Community).
  • March: General strike in Franco’s Spain, at Barcelona.
  • 11^th April: Truman dismisses General MacArthur.
  • 23^th April: Aneurin Bevan (Labour Left) resigns from the Attlee government over cuts to health services in favour of rearmament.
  • 29^th June: Ceasefire in Korea.
  • January: Cucchi and Magnani resign from the PCI.
  • 24^th/25^th February: Meeting at Genoa Pontedecimo constitutes GAAP.
  • May: L’Impulso launches a campaign for an internationalist ‘Third Front.’ Cervetto in Argentina.
  • March: The USSR puts forward a proposal for a united, neutral Germany.
  • October: XIX Congress of the USSR Communist Party. The Malenkov Report. Stalin’s Economic Questions of Socialism in the USSR.
  • 5^th November: Eisenhower becomes president of the USA.
  • May: Cervetto returns from Argentina. Over the next six months, he studies theories of imperialism.
  • 1^st/2^nd June: Second National GAAP Conference in Florence.
  • 26^th October: Open split in GAAP’s National Committee over the war and European imperialism.