From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works"), recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista.
V
The Leninist tactic in the educational crisis and the union tactic on the prospects of trade unionism had already produced results in Genoa that alarmed the Italian Communist Party (PCI). With the restructuring crisis, when opportunism began to side with austerity policies and the Leninists with the defence of wages, however, the reaction of opportunism became furious, following the Stalinist script of slander and intimidation.
In those years, I worked to ensure that what was a tradition for my generation would become a common heritage for the new generation. We needed to select, discipline, and amalgamate. We needed to assert ourselves to do so. In 1974, the spontaneous movement of students and workers, unable to find a trade-unionist solution to the crisis of imbalance in Italy, channelled itself towards the largest opportunistic and inter-classist organisation with the most structured presence and the greatest availability of experienced personnel: the PCI. From 1974 to 1976, for three years, a thousand streams swelled the river of the PCI. The trend towards the formation of a two-party system in Italy, centred on the DC and the PCI, was strong. Some powerful groups, such as FIAT, were aiming for it. The Carter-Brzezinski line, which invented so-called ‘Eurocommunism’, also contributed to this, thinking that they had an extra card to play, in addition to the Chinese one, in their relations with the USSR.
I feared that the new generation that had gathered around our organisation did not have enough experience to resist the PCI's expansion, which was being driven by powerful financial groups and promoted by the main press and weekly magazines read by young people. The most hotly debated issues were modernisation, youth culture, and women's emancipation, reflecting the changes that had taken place over twenty years of strong economic development in the social composition, income, consumption, and demographic composition of the Italian imperialist metropolis. A huge mass of graduates, the children of workers, employees, farmers, and the petty bourgeoisie, swelled the public bureaucracy out of proportion. There were almost a million teachers. The PCI provided the ideology necessary to justify the impetuous rise in social parasitism and to give it a ‘progressive’ label. The campaign on divorce was the clearest example of the operation underway and proof of the new social-imperialist ideology that was infesting previous ideologies with its sycophantic acquiescence to the parasitic needs of the new intellectual generation, bred by the expansion of Italy's share in the distribution of global surplus value. To follow this trend, in the style of the intermediate
approach of Trotskyism, would have been political suicide. To instead oppose it and preserve the possibility of internationalist action in the future meant risking political and even physical elimination. To implant, even in embryonic form, a foreign body, such as a Bolshevik-type organisation, when social-imperialist tendencies are strong, means provoking a process of rejection.
But there was nothing else to be done. I spent years studying the failure of Trotskyism and anarchism in the 1930s, in the Spanish Civil War, and in the imperialist Second World War. I studied, in depth, how the counter-revolution politically and physically eliminated every attempt to reconstitute the revolutionary tradition. I meticulously analysed all the mistakes made by Trotsky, the POUM, the CNT, and the dissident communists in Italy. I interviewed dozens of key figures to gain a thorough understanding, and because I never trusted written sources alone. When I reached an agreement with Pier Carlo Masini in 1950, I had very clear ideas on the subject because, for five years, I had done nothing but clarify my ideas. I was determined not to stop where Bordiga had retreated. I knew perfectly well what it meant to set up a Leninist organisation, even a small one, after decades of opportunist dominance. Onorato Damen told me that I was trying to run before I could walk. I didn't reply because there was no point in replying. All that remained was to act and take the risks that one always takes when one acts.
In 1957, I thought that there was a possibility, before a solid social imperialism consolidated itself in Italy, of exploiting a couple of decades to build a revolutionary party. If we failed to take advantage of this opportunity, the chances would be lost for who knows how long. When the student and trade union movements emerged in the late 1960s, I thought that, sheltered by those confused movements, the Leninist party could now insert itself, without remaining completely isolated and subject to elimination.
However, when these movements lost all traces of their confused maximalism and ended up in the hands of the PCI, the attempt to establish Leninism in Italy found itself isolated. Opportunism, directly and indirectly, by stirring up various small groups, tried to crush us in a thousand ways, with smear campaigns, physical attacks, and various forms of pressure. The attack was violent and unrelenting for several years, but the new generation passed the test.
As we commented in the third volume on the history of Lotta Comunista, in some ways, the battle in Milan was fiercer, more violent, and more prolonged than the battle in Genoa, but Genoa had already shown the way forward in the form of in-depth political work among the proletariat
. At the height of the campaign of aggression and slander, almost no bourgeois newspaper failed to join the chorus of infamy
; after decades of counter-revolution, they did not want to accept that the proletariat could find in a Bolshevik organisation the strength to restore communism and internationalism
. Therefore, the outcome of those two battles shaped the following decades:
Slanderers and aggressors have now disappeared; the PCI has been overwhelmed by the collapse of State capitalism. Lotta Comunista has entrenched the Bolshevik model in the Italian metropolis and therefore in Europe. Communism and internationalism have their bulwark in the working class
.
Cervetto’s assessment of that defining moment is, in fact, the conclusion of the Quaderni (Notebooks
) of his political memoirs:
It was the most important achievement of my life, as a militant and as a man, because it was a collective achievement. I learned a lot during those years of bitter struggle, I learned from the whole organisation, I learned even from the most modest militant, and I felt more than ever like a simple militant myself, like the many who defended the organisation and who had the pride and passion to fight a battle that the history of the workers’ movement will one day celebrate. I wanted to be with them because I felt like one of them, because they are the comrades I have admired the most, because I was politically born right on the front line where there was the most risk. That was the distance I had to cover and that was the pace I chose. As long as I can move, I’ll always try to run. What's the point of having legs if you don’t sometimes try to run?
The battle of Turin, a few years later, was a consequence of European restructuring in the strict sense. The creation of the European Monetary System had prevented Italian groups from resorting to the competitive devaluation of the lira. FIAT had tried to take this route one last time, but had been rejected by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the new governor of the Bank of Italy. In the 35 days
affair at FIAT, the PCI and the trade unions became trapped in a maximalist pursuit that ignored the real balance of power in the restructuring process and the need to organise an orderly retreat
for the working class.
That battle represented a defining moment for the establishment and formation of the party in Turin, but that practical application of What Is To Be Done? was instructive for the entire organisation. In terms of analysis, the study of big economic groups and of the restructuring process was systematised. On a theoretical level, Ciampi's line allowed for a deeper understanding of the concept of monetary power.
The internationalist battle over the new contention
Three other battles followed the events summarised in Cervetto's Quaderni. The first concerned relations between the powers. In January 1980, the USSR invaded Afghanistan; in August, strikes began in Poland, which would lead Gen. Jaruzelski to declare martial law the following year; in September, the conflict between Iran and Iraq began.
It was the new contention, a phase of conflicts in which the powers would test the relations and balance of power modified by decades of uneven development and the restructuring crisis. Alongside the internationalist political initiative, the new situation called for the Marxist theory of international relations to be revised and developed; the introduction to Unitary Imperialism, many of the reflections in the opening section of La contesa mondiale (The world contention
), and The Difficult Question of Times represent the theoretical side of that battle.
Here is how it was reviewed in the book on the history of our party:
The political struggle of our party was fought on several fronts. One front was internationalism, denouncing Russian imperialism and expressing solidarity with the Polish proletariat in its struggle against State capitalism. The new situation required appropriate theoretical and analytical tools, and another front was the reviewing and refinement of the Marxist theory of international relations. Taking stock of the 1970s, which had been his 'fruitful decade' in terms of theoretical development, Cervetto also took the opportunity to clarify, refine, and rectify what needed to be corrected: political analysis needed dialectical science, and history and social psychology needed to be studied in depth in order to understand the relationship between the economic base and its political reflections. In terms of the political leadership of our party, it was a question of providing tools to the second generation, which was being pushed to take on more responsibility in leadership and theoretical development. This was the internal front of the political battle of the ‘new contention’, and the 1980s would put the second wave of militants to the test
.
Social change in the 1980s
The second battle concerned the social restructuring of the 1980s and the spread, in Italy, across all classes and class stratifications, of the typical traits of the advanced maturity of an imperialist society. On reflection, those social conditions were ultimately the result of the unfolding of the American script of Italian development identified in the 1960s, combined with the consequences of the restructuring of the 1970s. Again, here is the review contained in the party history:
The combined effects of the change were manifold, following a truly ‘biological’ process of social transformation. The ‘multi-income family’, in which multiple incomes and assets were combined, became the new form of labour aristocracy. As the demographic decline accelerated, ‘social mobility’ meant that the wave of white-collar and bureaucratic employment in the so-called service sector was matched by a growing proportion of migrant workers, assigned to the most thankless tasks at the bottom of the wage ladder. Understanding the nature of this change was a vital issue for the party; only through scientific knowledge of its contradictions would it be truly possible to entrench the ‘Bolshevik model’ in the mature Italian imperialist metropolises.
It was a question of combating the new ideological forms of property-owning individualism, progressivism, and subjectivism expressed by the new strata, in the awareness of the ‘petty bourgeois spirit’ which was penetrating the working class in those ways. But it was also a question of exploiting the possibilities of addressing the new class strata of ‘technician-producers’, as well as the workforce being trained in secondary schools and universities, through systematic organised intervention among the new generations.
For the party, the 1980s were years of theoretical, political, and organisational struggle over social change. We are left with some truly crucial theoretical insights. The notion of the multi-income family
as a specific form of the bourgeois family in imperialist maturity. A population law
that sees a general trend towards demographic decline in mature metropolises, with the consequent need to make up the labour force deficit through immigration. Finally, the overall and combined features of this change as a social hallmark
of the maturity of imperialism. And we are left with the definitive test of Leninist organisation in those conditions.
The end of Yalta and the irruption of Asia
The battle of the 1980s over social change was Cervetto's last great struggle to establish a Leninist organisation in conditions of imperialist maturity. The puzzle of that unprecedented task had been solved.
It had taken almost 50 years, since the beginnings of the 'original group', and the involvement of two generations of revolutionary militants: Cervetto observed that the reproduction of the 'party species' was such a complex process that it took more than a generation to discover and put to the test the right political formulas and techniques. The continuity of the first two generations, that of the partisan war and that of the workers’ struggles and student unrest of the late 1960s, now made it possible to recruit the third, under full imperialist maturity.
This was the last piece of evidence that was still missing; and so even entrenching the ‘Bolshevik model’, in the end, had its regularities, its political laws of Leninist organisation. Marxist science had provided the strategy, political analysis had identified the path in a series of political battles, but now the science-party and the strategy-party were truly and completely a plan-party, because the methods and the fine-tuning of our organisational battle had guaranteed continuity through a new generation and the repeatability of that connection for the generations to come.
The organised work of entrenching the party among young people and technician-producers
confirmed the regular features of an effective generational continuity, and closed the circle with 1975 and with the battles of Genoa and Milan, when the party had achieved, on the field, putting an end to its status as a ‘small group’ at risk of marginalisation
.
Cervetto faced one last battle between 1989 and 1995, the year of his death: the implosion of the USSR and German reunification, together with the wars in the Balkans and the first Gulf War in 1991, which together represented a strategic break
with effects comparable to a world war. Again, from the book on the party’s history:
In terms of Marxist science and the party’s political struggle, that strategic break tested and confirmed the scientific basis of Arrigo Cervetto’s work on at least three levels: the analysis of State capitalism in the USSR, the analysis of the world market and of the long cycle of development predicted by the 1957 Theses, and the specific analysis of international relations and the balance of power between States, to which both the Yalta partition and its dissolution were linked. [...] The effects of a world war without open warfare required careful reflection on the part of Marxist theory; the partial wars and crises that had nevertheless ensued were at the centre of our internationalist struggle. Not only that: the effect of that strategic break in Asia was the relaunch of the opening-up by China, freer to turn to world markets now that the USSR had collapsed; a shift in the world's centre of gravity was brewing, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, comparable only to the epochal transition of the 16th century
.
Twenty battles and the twenty-first
In February 1995, Arrigo Cervetto passed away after more than half a century of militancy, still with his books open and pen in hand, writing his last work, Il mito della classe media in Asia
(The myth of the middle class in Asia
). Twenty battles and the start of the twenty-first, because China's emergence was the prerequisite for the new strategic phase: with it, the cycle predicted in the 1957 Theses would begin to come to an end, because a new imperialist giant was emerging from Asia, capable of challenging the powers of the old order.
THEORETICAL WRITINGS
Here we present the complete texts of Arrigo Cervetto’s theoretical works.
Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party first appeared in 1964 as a series of articles, later collected into a book in 1966. Cervetto intended it to be a foundational text for the Leninist current in Italy
, the equivalent of What Is To Be Done? for the Italian metropolis. He began from Lenin’s reading of Karl Marx's Capital to find the foundation of the Bolshevik conception of the party. I think I am the first Marxist to develop this interpretation of the Leninist party
, he wrote to Lorenzo Parodi, and to establish such an organic link between Capital and What Is To Be Done?
.
In the tangle of its contradictions, capitalist development generalises its socio-economic formation with the regularity of a natural law. This drives the class struggle and the economic struggle of the workers, which must be elevated — by the organised action of the party — to a political consciousness of their relationship with all social classes and strata and with the State. This same dynamic of development, along with the classes themselves, drives the powers and their system of States on a global scale; this is the foundation of revolutionary strategy.
The struggles between classes, the balance of power among States, and the dynamic of uneven development that drives and transforms them both: the various circumstances of this process have, at different times, brought to the forefront one or another of the three chapters of Class Struggles. Here, we offer only a brief outline of this interpretation; the complete arguments can be found in the prefaces to the fifth and sixth editions.
At the height of the Italian economic miracle, following the American script of development, wage struggles and the battle over the prospects of trade unionism placed the emphasis on the second chapter; the political consciousness brought from without into the economic struggle.
In the 1980s, with the social transformations of imperialist maturity, attention had to turn to the general theory
of the first chapter and the notion of the socio-economic formation in its complexity of interrelations. The battle over social change could then target the new social strata of technician-producers
and the future labour force in high school and university education, welding the strategy-party to a new generation, yet only through the awareness that every condition of the socio-economic formation, even that of the late maturity of imperialism, is riddled with contradictions that can be seized by the class party.
With the implosion of the USSR and the strategic break of 1989-1991, with the irruption of Asia and China triggering a new strategic phase, and finally with the crisis in the world order, it is the third chapter — that on strategy — which comes to the fore, and the notion of consciousness brought from outside the economic struggle now extends to include the contention between the powers and the countless threads binding it to the condition of the classes.
The Difficult Question of Times brings together articles written between 1981 and 1984, published as a book in 1990. Originally it was to form part of Unitary Imperialism, a theoretical introduction to those 30 years of analysis on international relations. However, along the theoretical thread of imperialist development, the book can be considered a completion of the third chapter of Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party, the chapter on strategy, and stands in continuity with Cervetto’s 1957 Theses.
The link between the times of capitalist development, class struggle, and contention between States has always been the foundation of strategy, from Marx and Engels' Manifesto to Lenin. Leon Trotsky's strategic inadequacy and Amadeo Bordiga's liquidationism ultimately stem from the limitations of their analysis of imperialist development and its uneven unfolding, whether it be the overestimation of the stagnating character of the cycle in the 1930s or the idea of the total domination of the American almighty dollar
in the postwar period. In the 1950s, the connection with Lenin's strategic conception of imperialist development had to be re-established, and this was the purpose of the 1957 Theses.
A passage that lies at the heart of The Difficult Question of Times is today the compass for evaluating the crisis in the world order. Against the mechanistic and non-dialectical
conclusions that the communist movement drew from the crisis after 1914, Lenin called for a study of the contradictory movement of social reality
, restoring the thinking of Marx and Engels:
There is no crisis that is irreversible, there is no automatic collapse of capitalism. The concentration that leads to crisis recreates, with the crisis itself, the conditions for the resurgence of small-scale production and small capital, imperialism, which causes war and, consequently, crisis, at the same time spreads capitalism throughout the world. The contradictions that this global process generates are such and so many that they cause economic and political crises, which are likely to be transformed into revolutions, provided that there is a communist party capable of doing so and that the working masses are objectively drawn into the struggle
.
As for Marx and Engels, for Lenin the question of times
concerns not so much the world market and the fate of capitalism as the assessment of the quantity and quality of contradictions and the subjective capacity — that of its vanguard party — to exploit them.
The study materials for The Difficult Question of Times followed in the footsteps of the great schools that formed the second generation of Lotta Comunista in the early 1970s. The same applies to The Political Shell and Method and the Science-Party; alongside Marx and Engels' strategy and Lenin's theory of imperialism, the Marxist theory of politics and the State and the materialist method had to be part of every militant's arsenal of ideas.
The Political Shell is a collection of editorials published between 1977 and 1989. Like other works, these writings are linked to crucial political battles: for Cervetto, the book was simply the product of the crisis of imbalance
, i.e., it was the theoretical side of the reflection on the mismatch between institutions and political forms and the economic evolution of Italian society
.
Here too the driving force is the imperialist development of the Italian metropolis: We thought that the growing integration of the economy into the European market would accelerate its development and exacerbate tensions. Society was running at twice the speed compared to the long-term pace that had caused the political crisis at the end of the century, the liberal crisis and the advent of fascism in the early postwar period, and the crisis of Mussolini's regime 20 years later. At double the pace, the entire political machine had begun to show signs of decay and wear
.
In connecting to the European market, the large groups of capital needed an adequate imperialist State
; half a dozen political battles were linked to the progression of this imbalance, from tactics in the school crisis and on the prospects of trade unionism, to the battles in Genoa, Milan, and Turin during the restructuring crisis, and finally to the battle of the 1980s concerning social change and the new characteristics of imperialist maturity.