From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista.
II
“Neither Washington nor Moscow”, “Neither Truman nor Stalin”. These were slogans sufficient to rally the internationalist cause, not only against the influence of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) on one front, but also, on the opposite side, against the pro-American, “Westernist” leanings present in certain political currents of anarchist individualism. There was a unitary imperialism to be fought, of which the US and the USSR were both expressions.
1951, Genoa Pontedecimo
In the ideological climate of the Cold War, heightened by the Korean War, a third world conflict was considered imminent; La guerra che viene (“The coming war”) was the title of a Trotskyist-inspired pamphlet that ultimately leaned in favour of the USSR, but reflected a widespread perception. The internation alist principle alone proved insufficient. To maintain that war between Washington and Moscow was imminent, Cervetto would argue fifteen years later at another fateful juncture - the end of the Prague Spring under the tracks of Russian tanks - was to ignore a key force in the power struggle, European imperialism. Yalta itself had shown that there was a de facto agreement be tween the US and the USSR, a “true partition”, to keep Europe divided.
On 24th-25th February, 1951, the Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action (GAAP) were formed at a conference in Genoa Pontedecimo. Their ambition was to wage an internal battle within the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) for a “coordinated and federated” movement of libertarian communism. This date marks the founding of the original group which would, fifteen years later, give rise to Lotta Comunista. In the run-up to the conference theoretical and political differences had already emerged between Masii and Cervetto. One area of difference concerned the question of the State, with Masini seeking references in the libertarian tradition - the Arshinov Platform - while Cervetto was already reflecting on Lenin’s State and Revolution, and on the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional form from State to non-State. He would later reproach himself for having set out in Pontedecimo the anarchist thesis of the “simultaneous liquidation” of the State apparatus at the moment of revolutionary insurrection. Another area of difference concerned imperialism, where Cervetto called for reflection on unitary imperialism, which should not be conceived as a homogeneous totalitarian whole, and where Masini was reluctant to discuss the “matter” of imperialism, fearing that Marxist concepts would hinder proselytism in the anarchist movement. Cervetto also objected to the ill-defined and “very dangerous” formula of a “Third Front” opposed to Moscow and Washington. Borrowed from the French libertarians of Georges Fontenis, this slogan risked confusion with third-force Europeanist political currents.
The struggles at Ilva and a fruitful year in Argentina
No sooner had the discussion on the Third Front begun than it was interrupted by the outcome of a battle that Cervetto had found himself unwillingly fighting - his dismissal from the steelworks in Savona. He recounted:
“After several months of struggle, I was about to be fired from Ilva. I had seen the damage caused by the influence of Stalinism in the conduct of the workers’ struggles, which it used against the Marshall Plan and in favour of the USSR. It was easy to slip into wait-and-see and nihilistic positions. I therefore fought for constant participation in the workers’ struggles and in trade union activities, even in positions of extreme minority”.
The Ilva affair precisely illustrates the other battle that the original group found itself fighting in the early post-war years and throughout the 1950s: the political and trade union struggle within the post-war restructuring and subsequent development that would usher in the 30 years of the Italian economic miracle. This battle of the “extreme minority” in the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) had Lorenzo Parodi as one of its first protagonists. From the Ansaldo factory group in Genoa, through the trade union defence committees, he had joined the provincial committee of the Italian Federation of Metalworkers (FIOM) and then the national executive of the CGIL.
In June 1951, Cervetto was dismissed and returned to Argentina. Of that year spent in Buenos Aires, his Quaderni leave us a page of generous words for the exiles of the Spanish Civil War who had taken refuge there:
“I sat in the bars in the centre, frequented mainly by Spanish political emigrants. Anarcho-syndicalists, POUMists, Stalinists, socialists. There were only two Italians, myself and a young anarchist from Puglia, with whom I became friends. There were Argentinians, but few were politicised. There were intellectualised and politicised Jews. I spent hours in silence listening to all these people. They said I knew more than them, but I learned a lot from listening to their stories about the Spanish Civil War, the endless episodes involving unknown protagonists forming part of contemporary history, their memories of the legendary Ascaso and Durruti, their hatred, passions, mistakes, naivety, and pettiness. During the day, I read memoirs and history books about the Spanish Civil War that I picked up at bookstalls. These works gave me a fairly accurate rational understanding of that page of history, as they allowed me to organise the jumble of facts into broad interpretative outlines. However, I was able to understand many things more deeply by listening to those men, even when I realised that they got dates wrong and exaggerated the significance of the events they had experienced. There is nothing more stupid and useless than wanting to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of reality, of facts, of men, wanting to put the world in its place. It is the spiteful stubbornness of those who do not see that life is passion, action, struggle, not argument. Logic must be sought in the dynamics of events and not in the minds of men.
In those hot nights in the bustling centre of Buenos Aires, I spent hours listening to men tell their lives and the history as they had lived it. That was history for them, not the one I could have clarified with my precise historiographical analysis”.
That year in Argentina was, however, a sort of fruitful exile for Cervetto, as it allowed him to study and explore the themes of Marxist theory and international politics from a different perspective. Argentina, with its emigrants and refugees, was certainly an extreme fringe of Europe, but at the same time it belonged to another strategic chessboard, the Southernmost offshoot of the Americas in the Western Hemisphere. From Buenos Aires, one looked at the world from a different angle, which explains, among other things, why US texts on international politics were quickly available in Spanish. These readings gave Cervetto a horizon that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Los Tres Grandes by David Dallin, a former Menshevik who had taken refuge in the United States, predicted the recovery of France, Germany, and Japan from the destruction of war. This was also the view of other authoritative sources in the Italian press, which reached Cervetto in reviews sent by his comrades in Genoa, and later, in the autumn of 1952, in an essay by Stalin himself, which was discussed in the international press.
Cervetto gained from this a multipolar view of power relations that escaped the dominant representation, which was limited to US-Soviet bipolarism. The idea that a new world war was imminent was not confirmed by the power gap between Washington and Moscow, nor by the signs of detachment of the European powers from the United States; Germany was on the rise again, as was Japan.
Returning to Italy after that year of study, Cervetto initiated a heated debate within the GAAP. In his view, it was now clear that a deeper study of unitary imperialism was essential to guide militants, otherwise they would be influenced by the pacifist campaigns of Stalinism: this had happened to part of the Turin group, which had been captured by the pacifist and pro-Russian propaganda of the PCI.
Masini challenged Cervetto’s analysis; he continued to believe that war was imminent and gave no weight to the distinction of Europe as a third force between the US and the USSR, despite the signs of this with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which preceded the EEC, the European Common Market (or Community). Ironically, Masini would ultimately be caught up in the very forces whose existence he denied: when the crisis of Stalinism in 1956 and the establishment of the EEC in 1957 gave a “European” Pietro Nenni the strength to break away from the PCI, Masini believed he could bring the libertarians into the autonomist Italian Socialist Party (PSI).
With that battle in 1952, the political struggle within libertarian communism was coming to an end. Soon the possibilities for work in the anarchist world of the FAI would be exhausted and the crisis of Stalinism would open up other perspectives in the dissident wings of the PCI. In that confrontation, however, it became clear that the study of international relations was a prerequisite for political action. One had to avoid being gripped by either Russian or American imperialism - “Neither Truman nor Stalin” - but also by European or Italian imperialism. In this sense, that battle within libertarian communism was a founding moment for the conception of the strategy-party.
The crisis of Stalinism and the merry-go-round of Azione Comunista
During the 1950s, decisive events marked the beginning of a long cycle of uneven post-war development and the resulting change in power relations between the major powers.
In 1953, Stalin’s death triggered a turbulent succession struggle in the USSR which would conclude only in 1958, with the definitive rise of Nikita Khrushchev. Moscow’s relative weakness, together with the difficulties for Russian State capitalism in maintaining control of the sphere of influence established by the Yalta partition, was exposed by the strikes in Berlin in 1953 and in Poland in 1956, and above all by the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Later, the same would hold true with the Prague Spring in 1968: Russian imperialism had to compensate for its lack of economic strength with military force; Washington let it happen.
In 1954, the French defeat in Indochina and the beginning of the revolt in Algeria showed the acceleration of the anti-colonial revolutions; in 1955, the Bandung Conference of the non-aligned countries saw the emergence of these new bourgeoisies in the international contention.
Thus, the “fateful” year of 1956 became crucial in the convergence of these trends. In February, Khrushchev’s report [also known in English as his “secret speech”] to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) laid bare the crisis of Stalinism, which then came to a head with the strikes in Poznan in June and the Russian tanks in Budapest in October. Gamal Abdel Nasser, champion of young Egyptian capitalism, decreed the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July; in October, the Suez Crisis saw the failure, at the behest of the United States, of the military intervention of France and Great Britain. The coincidence of the two crises revealed the logic of the bipolar balance of Yalta, in which Moscow could crush the Hungarian uprising within its sphere of influence, while Washington could humiliate its European allies within its own.
These events served as a testing ground for the GAAP and for Cervetto, who had become its leading figure in the analysis of imperialism and international relations. The theoretical and scientific battles over the trends of unitary imperialism, the nature of the USSR as State capitalism, world capitalist development, and the emergence of new national bourgeoisies in the anti-colonial revolutions, all became political battles for the winning over and orientation of militants.
The crisis of Stalinism had reverberated throughout the constellation of Russian-obedient State-parties in Eastern Europe, as well as in the PCI and the French Communist Party (PCF) in the West. Already in 1955, the appearance of Azione Comunista (“Communist Action”), a maximalist movement of PCI dissidents at odds with Togliatti, was seen within the GAAP as an opportunity to break out of isolation, i.e., to replace proselytism among the libertarians of the FAI, which had by then dried up, with that directed towards the PCI dissidents. Cervetto would have preferred to fight that political battle from the outside, preserving the autonomy of the original group selected in the GAAP, but the decision to merge into a single formation prevailed.
Here are some passages from the memoirs of Cervetto, who was chosen as envoy to Milan to work on the editorial staff of the movement’s new newspaper:
“To tell the truth, I thought that we could contribute to the process of forming a revolutionary movement in Italy with a tactic that did not see us directly involved in the Azione Comunista initiative. But my comrades, dazzled by the opportunity that presented itself, did not understand this.
I was wrong not to insist on my proposal and not to provoke a split in our organisation. As a politician, I regret this mistake, which caused me to lose years of time; as a militant, I do not. Having brought discipline to its logical conclusion was a lesson for me more profound than any other, because it is always easier to impose discipline on others than on oneself.
Perhaps a little more individualistic pride would have favoured, in the long run, the formation of the Leninist party in Italy because I could have implemented the ideas I already had at the time years in advance and thus could arrive at the spontaneous struggles of the 196os with an already structured group, and not with a political current still to be structured”.
“Spring was well underway, and I found myself in Milan, even though I didn’t want to be there. But I took on my task with the utmost commitment. I was able to devote myself fully to the activity after years of struggle that had prevented me from doing so. It seemed like the ‘red spring’ of ten years earlier was returning, when I had gone to Milan shortly after the uprising. Back then, you had to be careful on the avenues because fascist cars were speeding by and shooting at anyone in partisan uniforms. We didn’t pay any attention and ended up in a boarding house partying with some girls we found in the chaos.
They were the same green avenues with trams emerging from among the trees, but there was no more shooting. The few and dangerous cars of the past were no longer there, but there were enough cars to show that the metropolis was marching forward in full development. I had collected data on motorisation and FIAT and thought about the inevitable social and political consequences, as the failure of the trade unions in Turin in 1955 was a clear indication.
The ‘red spring’ was no longer naive. It was just a ‘thaw’. Things were getting back on track. The imperialist order that had caged the world since 1945 was beginning to creak in the East. Since 1953, I had been following the dull rumbling at the foundations of unitary imperialism. In March 1956, rumours about the 20th Congress and a whole series of events in Eastern Europe indicated that a storm was approaching. We wrote about it in Impulso.
I knew, and wrote, that there would be no revolutionary crisis in the West, but I also knew that a page was being turned.
In that hot spring, I travelled far and wide in Milan, met hundreds of people and attended dozens of meetings. Milan was the most vibrant centre of evolution for political movements in Italy. By following it closely, I was able to gain a fairly accurate picture of the trends at work and their foreseeable future. Once again, I found myself observing reality in its essence. I scrutinised it carefully, trying to grasp it at the moment of transition between much talk and actual action. Others dreamed, as always, of a mass revolutionary movement, but I saw the process of social-democratisation of the masses.
The crisis of Stalinism would accentuate this process, but in the inevitable upheaval that would mark the transition, a great deal of energy would be released that could be recovered to build a strong Leninist party and to reweave the fabric that had been started in 1917 and interrupted in the 1920S.
In this sense, Masini was right: Azione Comunista was a unique opportunity. I believed that it would have been so anyway, even if left to its own devices. But now I was there and, unlike Masini, looking more to the future than to the present, I thought that I might as well push it in the most favourable direction”.
“It was now the middle of summer in 1956. Khrushchev’s report had been publicly released, the newspaper Azione Comunista had come out and was gathering a lot of generic support. For me, it was a question of trying to influence a chaotic and contradictory movement by hammering home the concept of the Leninist party of cadres and the social nature of the USSR. I prepared a series of articles on State capitalism in Russia”.
In December 1956, in Milan, a demonstration at the Cinema Dante was the public debut of that initiative. At that initial stage, it brought together the GAAP, which had become the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL), in which the divergent tendencies of Cervetto and Masini coexisted; the maximalists of Azione Comunista, among whom Bruno Fortichiari - one of the founders of the PCd’I (Communist Party of Italy) - stood out; the Trotskyists of Livio Maitan; and the dissident Bordigists of Onorato Damen:
“We had worked for two weeks to organise the first political rally of the Communist Left, the movement that was attempting to reunify the dissident communist groups and which aimed to return to the ten points of Livorno [a reference to the PCd’I’s original programme]. Militants who for 30 years had been forced to speak at small meetings, often in improvised venues or in friends’ homes, suddenly found themselves addressing thousands of listeners. I could be satisfied because I had contributed to this outcome, but I was more satisfied for them than for myself. Bruno Fortichiari, Onorato Damen, Livio Maitan, and Pier Carlo Masini spoke, and when they finished, the hall rose to its feet to sing ‘The Internationale’. Many did not hide their tears. I knew them, I knew how many years in prison, how much suffering, how many disappointments, how many hopes came down with those tears. It was revenge on the defeat that history had inflicted, it was the answer to the slander of Stalinism, it was the long-awaited reward. For many, it was like being young again.
I found myself in an atmosphere that took me back to the days at the end of the war. I remembered that moment and then the years of struggle, the meetings up and down Italy, the passionate discussions that lasted all night, the reports in Florence, Bologna, Livorno, Pisa, the meeting in Pontedecimo. In a corner of the hall, I shared the passion of many comrades, both known and unknown. But I also knew that this enthusiasm did not favour the formation of a revolutionary organisation with a clear political line, capable of tackling the class problems that the development of capitalism in Italy was posing. The sentiment that united those present could not unify the political ideas that animated them. The rally had raised the problems, but it had not solved them.
In the afternoon, at the meeting of the ‘Umanitaria’, I was the first to raise the problem of strategy and to raise the question of the social nature of the USSR as a discriminating factor. For many, I was the spoilsport”.
In the end, only the GAAP and Azione Comunista merged into the Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (‘movement of the communist left’). That same crisis of 1956, however, combined the illusion of a vast shift in the PCI electorate with the autonomist turn of Pietro Nenni’s PSI, influencing Azione Comunista and Masini:
“I was commuting between Milan and Savona. The PCI was going through a crisis among its intellectuals who, following in the footsteps of A. Giolitti, were leaving to form newspapers and magazines and join the PSI, which proclaimed itself independent from Stalinism. This influenced, as I had predicted, the Azione Comunista movement, where Masini and others saw an outlet in a renewed PSI capable of reducing the influence of Stalinism. I had strong doubts, partly because I knew the PCI’s base well and partly because I knew the PSI fairly well. I had been, albeit briefly, a very active PCI militant and I knew how the PSI was viewed by militants who, like me, had dedicated everything, and often their lives, to a political cause. The PSI was seen as an ambiguous gathering place for those who did not want to commit themselves and were willing to compromise, not as a tactical expedient, but as a political solution. Furthermore, I believed that sympathies towards the PSI were an obstacle to the selection of revolutionary cadres that should have characterised our intervention in the crisis of Stalinism in Italy”.