From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista.
I
Arrigo Cervetto was the founder, theorist, and leader of Lotta Comunista. From his first involvement in the partisan war in 1943-44 until his death in February 1995, his more than 50 years of political activity can be summarised in around twenty key battles. It goes without saying that those struggles - aimed at the restoration and develop ment of Marxist theory on economics, politics, social change, and international relations - are the common thread running through this selection of his writings. His memoirs, Quaderni 198I82 (“Notebooks 1981-82”), provide an account of those battles up to 1980.
First battle: the factory and the partisan war
The son of emigrants to Argentina from Savona in Italy, Cervetto was born in Buenos Aires in April 1927, a circumstance that would later influence his thinking about international politics. His early formative experiences, in Savona, were linked to the factory and the war. In early 1943, Cervetto was hired as an apprentice at the Ilva steelworks. In the Quaderni, he describes how “the mood of protest against the war and fascism” was growing in the factory, along with ideas of “a communism generically understood”, where for everyone “Russia was the myth”. That “simple idea” - starting from the factory, spread by the old PCI (the Italian Communist Party) militants, and symbolised by “protest songs” and aspirations for “equality” and “freedom” guided, through Cervetto, a first group of “young communists” in the Villapiana district, who would soon join the partisan struggle.
These pages also reveal the moral factor that directed Cervetto towards the class to which he belonged, and his conviction - when he tried his hand as a historian of the workers’ movement and the Resistance in the Savona area - that he could be its spokesperson. Those works were collected and published in 2005 in Ricerche e scritti. Savona operaia dalle lotte della Siderurgica alla Resistenza (“Research and writings. Savona’s working class from the steel industry struggles to the Resistance”). In these Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), we have limited ourselves to a general introduction and his article “La Resistenza prigioniera di Yalta” (“The Resistance imprisoned at Yalta”), but this should be enough to make it clear that these essays are much more than local historiography.
We let the Quaderni speak:
“I worked at Ilva and did the night shift. The first time, it seemed like hell to me, with those machines that never stopped and the steel castings that filled the whole warehouse with sparks. I was afraid to fall asleep because a boy who had fallen asleep had been hit by steel bars that had fallen out of a wagon without him noticing. Another boy, who lived in my neighbourhood, was crushed to death by a ladle.
When, years later, I wrote one of the first essays to appear on the workers’ struggles that began in 1861, I pointed out that the first spontaneous strike at the steelworks had been in protest against, and solidarity with the victims of, fatal accidents at work. Normally, work continued after the dead had been cleared away, but on that occasion the factory workers stopped working. The bishop’s secretary, who was very knowledgeable about local history, told me that I had given a historical account of a strike that had taken place not for economic reasons, but because of the value of Christian tradition. I replied that solidarity, in that case, had an antagonistic value because it had manifested itself for someone but also against someone. In any case, I knew it well because I had experienced it. The historians at the ‘Biblioteca Feltrinelli’ wrote to me on other occasions because they found in my pages a working-class spirit that was not found in other writings on similar subjects, even those with greater erudition. The secret is simple: in those pages was what I had experienced. There was the young man covered in the reddish dust of the foundry, there was my grandfather seriously injured at the rolling mill, there was the metal bar that had taken away one of my toenails, there were those freezing mornings when even sea water evaporated into fog, and those hot summer afternoons spent at Ilva. At last, those things that do not count in official history, and those men who will never have a name or a voice, could be heard, through my thinking brain and my writing hand. They were many fragments of reality that mingled in the dust of the lives of millions of men and were scattered in the winds of time, coagulating in my brain and taking shape in my writing. I tried to bring rationality to it. There was no need for passion: they provided all of that.
In this lay - and still lies - all my pride: to be the instrument of revenge for those destined for anonymity, and for those whose contribution only remains in the material civilisation, in a world where the individual is exalted only to highlight the few who truly matter. It is a world where the individual cannot understand that he himself is the product of millions of individuals who came before him and that what he eats, what he wears, what he uses, is the fruit of a collective work that has continued for centuries.
He walks on the pavement and the asphalt, climbs the stairs, turns on the light, makes phone calls, watches television, listens to music, and uses not only what millions of people are producing at this moment, but also, at least four or five times as much, he uses what has been produced by millions of people who are no longer with us. Those people left their souls in their work. Priests look for it in heaven and prevent everyone from seeing it on earth, from seeing it on the pavement beneath their shoes. The work of human labour is immortal, and the immortality of man is in his work. When his body decays and breaks down into unorganised matter, he remains in what he has done. His work cannot disintegrate and disappear, because the men who succeed him need it and use it. Without realising it, they continue it, just as, without realising it, they continue to carry within themselves genes that are millions of years old, and each of their cells produces only what the old ones allowed it to produce.
Only the work of a very few individuals is known. Only a very few are remembered. The rest, almost in their entirety, end up in the great mass grave of the human species. Yet, history is the past of this great mass grave. History, says Marx, is the history of class struggle. If we do not investigate the great cemetery, we cannot know what really happened. One contemplates only the most conspicuous graves without noticing the endless cemetery of the past. Who knows those billions of men who speak only through their work? And how can one hear their voice, if one is not able to listen to the heartbeat of the productive forces? I did not know these things when, back in 1943, I went to work the night shift at Ilva. I felt them, though; they were part of my character and my life as a man. Perhaps it was precisely because I was so animalistic that I was able to be a little bit human. When, reading some Marxist texts and many history books, I came to know them, I was able to give logical expression to everything that had been confusedly expressed in passion. Pages from the history of class struggle felt like a breath of fresh air. It was as if I had lived them. I walked down the street, mentally conversing with the thousands of unknown characters in those pages. I immersed myself in the old newspapers in the library and continued to talk to the men who had walked the streets I was walking on. I found my grandfather again after many years. I had no money, but I lived the richest days of my youth. I was a young man among the old men of the past, and an old man among the young men of the present. And when I drew the first conclusions from my research, passion and reason had merged in the pleasure of finally giving a voice to those who did not have one in life. I was convinced that I was their spokesman”.
Cervetto considered July 25th, 1943, to be his political baptism. A few months later, during the demonstrations for the fall of Mussolini, and then those of September 8th, he came to the decision to join the partisan formations:
“It didn’t take much for us to take to the streets on July 25th. They shot at us from the fascist militia barracks. One woman was killed, and others were wounded. Guido was shot through the leg. It seemed like it was all over, but it was only just beginning. We were still handling leaflets. Soon we would be handling weapons.
On September 8th, the barracks were emptied; people ran to grab blankets, uniforms, boots, sacks of pasta, and sugar. They looked like ants. The Germans stood by and watched, some of them laughing. We found rifles and ammunition. We were as happy as if we had found the treasure of Mompracem. We thought of arming a rebel army, but no one wanted those rifles and declined them with a thousand excuses. Thus began - with tears of disappointment - my true political apprenticeship. The dream lost some of its naivety and reality imposed itself with its brutality. We cursed everyone and trusted no one. Those were dark days of anger and loneliness. They passed quickly. The awareness and recklessness of youth took over. We started joking again and convincing ourselves that, after all, it was better this way. We were a small group, we knew each other well, and we felt strong. We were strong only in our will. So, we began to challenge the fascists.
When I think back, it seems unreal. If I hadn’t lived through it, I would find it hard to believe because it defies all logic. And yet, in those months, and in that working-class neighbourhood, a group of young people got it into their heads to challenge the fascists. They would shoot wildly on certain nights, shouting ‘Cowards, come out!', and we would laugh, thinking of the butcher in the square who would find his shop shutter riddled with bullets”.
In May 1944, Cervetto joined the partisans operating in the hinterland of Savona and the Langhe region of southern Piedmont. He was wounded twice, while between a third and a half of the group of “young communists” from his neighbourhood who had joined the Resistance lost their lives. Other passages from the Quaderni give an idea of how formative that war experience was for Cervetto’s deep convictions:
“I was the politician of the group just because I had read something, and Piero and Nino [Piero Parisotto and Antonio “Nino” Bogliani] continued to see me as such over the years with boundless trust, which was the most profound thing they gave me. They continued to see me as I was in those days of struggle, when trust was placed in the man rather than in what he said. ‘Arrigo said so’. I may have said some thing obvious, but that didn’t matter to them. They had trust in what I did. What I said was only a consequence. When you risk your life, the political relationship is reduced to its essence. Everything depends on the relationship between men acting together, and everything stems from the assessment these men have of each other. It is difficult to conceive how decisive and selective this judgement is at specific moments. In normal political ac tivity, when mistakes are paid for, but not with one’s life, trust cannot have the intensity of exceptional moments. Yet, it is precisely in these moments that people’s characters come into focus and stand out in all their features. Characters are exaggerated. Those who are afraid have no escape - they are afraid; those who are undecided have no way out - they are undecided; those who back down have no choice - they back down. When politics becomes action at that level of risk, relationships between people become hypersensitive and charged with an animal instinct. Trust and mistrust are the two sides of this instinct. Instinct can sometimes play nasty tricks, but if you survive, it means that, for the most part, it was useful, since it was unavoidable anyway.
Once the exceptional moments have passed, politics rises to rationality, but even the most rational politician will appeal to passion the more exceptional his struggle becomes. There always comes a time when men in political struggle put their deepest resources to the test. So do classes and their parties”.
“From the German soldiers who hunted me down, I learned to fight militarily without being stopped by rain; from the German mortar crews in the battle of Castino, I learned that there is such precision in their shooting that I would have been blown to pieces if I had not left my position after the second shot; from the fascist who thanked us before being shot, because we had ordered that he not be tortured, I learned how deeply rooted nationalist fanaticism can be; from the courageous and just working-class commander who begged for the lives of a group of ‘S. Marco’ soldiers - captured to avenge a young comrade who had been murdered while being subjected to mockery and humiliation - to be spared, I learned that sometimes it takes courage to cry, when it is to prevent the cruel demands of the struggle from consuming unnecessary victims in the fury of feelings; from the commander who trembled like a leaf, suddenly conveying a kind of incredulous terror to me - his subordinate and a boy in front of him, an adult and prestigious superior I learned that one cannot presume to have control over other people’s lives, unless one has the natural characteristics that allow it”
The war and the Resistance were the first battle for Cervetto and that first group of young people. Although they were swept up in political passion in those tragic and exceptional circumstances, it is a decisive fact that they were caught up in it without any real awareness of what was happening:
“Unaware of the real content of that imperialist war and clinging to the myths that the dialectic of opposition effortlessly produces, we were small leaves in the impetuous winds blowing across the world. With or without us, those winds would have continued on their way. But passion, even if just a leaf, remains passion. It is part of man. When directed, it is a powerful political factor. Politics is struggle, not an academic exercise, because no one risks even a hair on their head for a mere political hypothesis. Only passion drives people to risk their heads. In the end, those with the most passion will prevail. The sceptical petty politician, who projects himself onto others and is thus unable to understand the passions that move them, is doomed to be crushed by the events he underestimates and ridicules. As long as there are heated social and political struggles, passion will drive the most willing young people into the dark nights and streets of a working-class neighbourhood of some industrial city. They must not find themselves at dawn wondering why the day is so different and wasting years studying in despair, as has happened.
Since then, I have dedicated my life to giving an outlet of political reason, strategy, and calculated struggle to my passion, and to that of future generations”.
Two conclusions can be drawn from that first founding battle of Cervetto’s political career. The first is his conviction that without passion there can be no revolutionary struggle, but that passion must be guided and disciplined by “political reason” and strategy. Several decades later, in the 198os, urging action to win over the third generation of the party, Cervetto stated that a young person could be attracted to Lotta Comunista as a “party of scientific order”, finding in it “a passion for theory, a passion for struggle” and “a taste for understanding, a taste for fighting”. That call to unite science and struggle also reflected the lesson he had learned from his initiation into the partisan war.
And here is the second conclusion from that battle: that patrol of young workers, who would give life to the original group and from which Lotta Comunista would emerge, had begun to fight in the ideological fog of the Yalta partition, where, for everyone, Russia was the guiding myth. But that “simple idea” driven by passion, that aspiration to a “communism generically understood”, had proven to be a trap and an illusion. In the USSR those ideals had been counterfeited and transformed into instruments of State capitalism, and in the ignominy of Yalta the imperialist partition of Europe was passed off as an advance of the “socialist camp”. The lesson for Cervetto was that he would never again be a tool in the hands of others.
Within a few years, this matured into the conviction that only Marx’s science, together with Lenin’s organisation, and their vision of strategy, could root a revolutionary minority in strategic autonomy from any influence. In the immediate term, this led Cervetto to break away from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) - in which he had been briefly active after April 25th, 1945 and prompted him to seek a different, non-Stalinist communism, in the libertarian world of the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI).
The Korean War and the political battle within libertarian communism
In the anarchist movement in Savona, around the respected figure of Umberto Marzocchi, Cervetto was the main organiser of the youth group “Né dio né padroni” (“Neither God nor masters”); through this, he came into contact with Lorenzo Parodi - a factory worker at Ansaldo linked to the Genoese libertarians - and with Pier Carlo Masini. A Tuscan intellectual from the liberal-socialist world, Masini, after a brief stint in the PCI in Florence, had turned to anarchism in opposition to Palmiro Togliatti’s Svolta di Salerno (the 1944 “Salerno Turning Point”), and had become editor of Gioventù anarchica and Umanità Nova.
Cervetto and Masini became the leading figures of the GAAP (Gruppi Anarchici di Azione Proletaria, the “Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action”), whose aim was to search the world of libertarian communism for forces willing to engage in organised, class-oriented militancy, distancing themselves from the petty-bourgeois, individualistic, and anti-organisational side of that tradition.
In truth, Masini and Cervetto’s perspectives diverged rather quickly, with the former seeking theoretical and political solutions in the libertarian tradition and the latter already writing in June 1949 that he considered himself a “Marxist-anarchist”. From 1950 onwards, the internationalist battle over the Korean War was a defining moment for that political alliance:
“Sitting at a table outside a bar in the public gardens, Masini and I made grand plans. The Korean War had just begun. In the heat of that June afternoon, Masini read me an editorial centred on the slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow”, and I was satisfied. He told me that even a small group of young factory workers like us could play a decisive role in the turbulent future that lay ahead, given that the older generations were now worn down by ideologies that would be shattered by the impetuous movement of world events. We cited several historical precedents and, in particular, the watershed of 1914. There are moments, Masini said, when a group of determined men with iron wills and clear ideas, are able to see more than all the others, who are conditioned by a thousand traditions and political habits. We must work to bring these men together”.
Cervetto’s judgement of Masini is very generous, recognising above all how much his knowledge of history had allowed him to draw on the Marxist theory and analysis of Amadeo Bordiga, while avoiding the “liquidating” inadequacy of the Bordigist conception of the party as a mere guardian of the programme, and its paralysing idea of the totalitarian dominance of American imperialism:
“Many years have passed. Masini is now an established historian, he collects awards, he is a ‘best seller’ - as I jokingly say to Parodi - whereas the two of us are not. He is a liberal democrat. I attacked him politically because it had to be done, but I never criticised him on a personal level, even when others did.
Back in 1950, he was undoubtedly the person who best understood my character, my experience, and my determination. He did not flatter or encourage me. He often criticised me, as I criticised him. He rationally encouraged what should and could be directed towards a practical and concrete goal, and which would otherwise have remained unexpressed.
His knowledge of history, illustrated not in broad strokes as Bordiga did, but in biographical details that I asked him for in order to compare them with the practice I knew, acted as a spur to me.
It was clear to me that the world was dominated by unitary imperialism. Vercesi and Bordiga presented it as a totalitarian monster, and I could not un derstand how it could be undermined, so omnipotent was it. Perhaps we had to wait for it to collapse on its own, I thought, but this prospect satisfied my reason little and my passion not at all.
Masini, on the other hand, told me that Bordiga’s analysis was the most acute that the workers’ movement had ever expressed, but also the most nihilistic in action. We had to grasp that analysis as a weapon with our hands of stubborn will and determination. History could teach us how to translate it into a real movement.
As Masini delved into the details of his historical examples, I descended rom the mists of theory and returned to earth. After all, eight years earlier I had started out in the same way. It wa a papier-mâché society that a group of unprepared young people had been able to challenge. It was the same society undermined at its foundations - that a group of young people, prepared by five years of reflection, was about to challenge again.
We said goodbye happily at the station”.