From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works"), recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista.
VI
The reflection on the political shell
– in which Cervetto returned to the fundamentals of the Marxist theory of the State – was itself a political battle, as it equipped the new generation of the party against the myths of true democracy that accompanied the reformist line and the electoral expansion of the progressive PCI into new social strata. The very title of the book recalls Lenin’s formula of democracy as the best political shell
for the dictatorship of capital.
However, these editorials were not limited to restoring the concepts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the theory was developed and updated to apply to contemporary forms of imperialist democracy. Alongside those crucial notions, dozens of political regularities are examined; derived as theoretical abstractions from the battles over Italian political imbalance, they in turn became conceptual weapons for subsequent struggles. The analyses and political battles on the Italian crisis of internationalisation in the 1990s, on Europe and the State for the plurality of powers within the Union, and on imperialist democracy in America and China, all owe much to the theoretical framework of The Political Shell.
Method and the Science-Party collects writings published between 1989 and 1995. The text remained unfinished due to Cervetto’s death, but the initial framework reveals the intention to reflect on the origins of the three sources of Marx’s theory, German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism
.
Here too, some concepts proved fruitful in addressing crucial battles. Consider, with regard to Machiavelli and the failure of Italian unification in the 16th century, the issues of fiscal power
and military power
in the birth of absolutist States. The purse and the sword: these are the crucial issues that European imperialism is currently facing. Or consider Engels’ notes on the history of Germany and how the question of political ability
, the subjective factor par excellence
, is addressed in scientific terms.
These are the foundations of historical and dialectical materialism that have made it possible to escape mechanistic thinking in deciphering the political cycle of the metropolises of imperialism. Thus, the analysis of the plurality of powers in the European Union or the convulsions of the Atlantic decline in the United States owes much not only to The Political Shell but also to Method and the Science-Party.
Attention should be paid to the circumstances in which that series of editorials was launched: it was the strategic break of 1989-1991 brought about by the irruption of development in Asia, with the implosion of the USSR, German unification, and the Gulf War. Cervetto wrote:
The analysis of the 16th century as a century of acceleration and rupture in world history is a model for the Marxist vision: Europe takes off, Asia loses ground, remaining the continent of a hundred thousand villages and despotism, America enters civilisation.
This change of era on a centuries-long scale even today requires the axis of theory
to be understood.
Arrigo Cervetto’s publications on the world cycle and international politics from 1950 to 1995 are collected in three volumes. From this vast material, consisting of some 350 articles and several internal reports selected for publication, we have chosen around a hundred. Needless to say, alongside the founding theses of theory and strategy, we have sought to document the main battles and struggles that were the focus of these analyses, which guided three generations of militants.
Unitary Imperialism brings together texts from 1950 to 1980, from the Korean War – which motivated the first internationalist battle of the original group with the slogan Neither Washington nor Moscow
– to the epilogue of the restructuring crisis that engaged Lotta Comunista in class defence throughout the 1970s and definitively emancipated it from its status as a small group.
About fifteen titles can serve as a framework.
For a Clear and Consistent Intervention in the Crisis of Imperialism
[L’Impulso, December 1954] summarises the report that Cervetto gave in Bologna at the 4th National Conference of the GAAP. The three critical issues
identified in the global contention – the German question
, the Asian question
, and the colonial question
– were also the focus of the party’s strategic analysis and internationalist battles. Support for the anti-colonial revolutions of the new bourgeoisies, in line with Lenin’s strategy, came to an end fifteen years later, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, with the Arab-Israeli wars and the end of the Vietnam War. The other two critical issues have never ceased to be constants in the global balance of power: German division and Asian contention, i.e., the true partition
of Yalta and the Asian epicentre of tensions
– today Europe’s rearmament and the emergence of China. In the past, these two issues were also reflected by the two wars
, across the Atlantic and in the Pacific theatre, that made up the Second World War.
Colonial Industrialisation
[May 1959] draws an analogy between the new powers in formation and the democratic revolutions of the European bourgeoisie from 1789 to 1848. The colonial world, having reached its 1789, was soon to reach its June 1848, and for the proletariat every objective reason for alliance with the bourgeoisie would disappear
.
Theses on Imperialist Development
[November 1957] became the founding text of our strategy for 50 years. The prediction of a long cycle of capitalist development in the world and of imperialist maturation in Italy, with its consequences on the struggles of classes and States, is what guided the battles of the unprecedented task, the entrenchment of a Bolshevik organisation in the maturity of imperialism. Now that this strategic cycle has ended in the crisis in the world order, the theoretical framework of the 1957 Theses remains vital: revolutionary strategy stems from the link between the development and crisis of imperialism and the struggle of classes and States.
From Stalinist Autarky to the Single World Market
[January 1960] anticipated by 30 years the dynamics that would lead the USSR and its State capitalism to implode. The Economic Blocs of World Imperialism
[Autumn 1962] is one of the founding texts of the battle against European imperialism.
Lenin and the Chinese Revolution
[Azione Comunista, February to September 1962], as well as being a weapon in the battle against the wave of Maoist ideologies, is a key text in Cervetto’s strategic thinking, connected to the 1957 Theses and The Difficult Question of Times. Lenin’s strategy, especially after the defeat in Germany, was linked to the capitalist development of Asia and the timing of the outbreak of its flammable substances
. This frames the question of long development and the question of times, which is at the heart of the Theses in its examination of the duration of the counter-revolutionary phase
.
The Indonesian Counter-Revolution
[1966] integrates the reflection developed in Lenin and the Chinese Revolution
on Leninist strategy for the colonial question. It was the only study to appear in Italy on that crisis, which was a counter-revolution without revolutionaries
at the crossroads of the directions of influence of the United States, Japan, and China, and costing at least half a million lives.
The Maoist Theory of the United Front
[1969] was part of the same battle against Maoist influence spreading to the left of the PCI. Beijing was proposing a front with Japan and the European powers against Washington and Moscow, which gave the policies of young Chinese capitalism a social-imperialist
character. These strategic formulations, on the other hand, left their mark on the course of Chinese foreign policy, and it is not surprising to find fragments of them today in the formulas of a multilateralist united front put forward in opposition to the unilateral moves of the United States.
The Main Enemy Is at Home
is the editorial of the first issue of Lotta Comunista [December 1965]. The slogan of the German revolutionaries in the face of the 1914 war was taken up again to link support for Vietnamese national reunification to the strategy, whose focal point had to be the battle in the metropolises of imperialism. It was precisely the absence of an International that could unite the two fronts – the bourgeois-democratic and anti-colonial revolutions with the struggle at home
against the powerhouses of imperialism – that left room for those same imperialist powers to compete for influence in Asia. In Indochina, the US sought to prevent Japanese industrial strength from combining once again with China’s demographic weight, as it had in the early 1930s. The same line of analysis would be taken in The Unification of Indochina, a Historical Question
, written in the spring of 1975 at the time of the fall of Saigon, and The New Power Relations in Asia
[March 1976]. In that epicentre of tensions
, the US, the USSR, Japan, and China were engaged in a quadripolar game
. Later, the game would become pentapolar
with the rise of India, and today Indonesia must also be counted as a key force in the regional balance of power.
At the time, highlighting the plurality of conflicting poles in Asia also served to challenge bipolar representations of the contention. The True Partition of the World Between the USSR and the US
, published in the autumn of 1968 after the bloody epilogue of the Prague Spring, did this with regard to the European chessboard; Washington effectively supported Moscow’s weakness because both converged against European imperialism.
In Against War, Revolution!
and Left-wing Interventionism Alongside the Arab Bourgeoisie
[spring and summer 1967] we took a stand on the Six-Day War. By then, the class principle – in Egypt there is a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, in Israel there is a bourgeoisie and a proletariat
– outweighed every national question. Moreover, the national principle was openly exploited by the Middle Eastern powers involved in the conflict, as well as the imperialist powers intervening in it.
German Strengthening and French Repercussions
[February 1978] not only highlighted the real power relations in favour of Germany in the Franco-German axis, but also noted the liberist line taken by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher: the metropolises of imperialism, in order to maintain a sustainable pace, [needed] an accelerated pace from the young capitalist countries
; the markets of industrialised countries had to be left open to exports from developing countries. It was therefore Germany that made the original choice for imperialist liberism, ahead of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It is revealing that, in the new balances in the crisis in the world order, today it is China which is affirming this strategy, offering market access to newly emerging countries in opposition to the American protectionist turn.
Finally, the concluding chapter on the restructuring crisis
brings together articles and reports written between 1975 and 1980. The Historical Regularity of the Crisis
and A Particular Crisis
address the issue theoretically, starting from Friedrich Engels’ thesis of the prolonged cycle
. The new developing areas delayed the crisis in the old areas; the strategic framework of the 1957 Theses was confirmed.
La contesa mondiale (The global contention
) covers the period from 1980 to 1989, from the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, which symbolised the start of a new contention
between the powers, to its outcome in the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, on the eve of the implosion of the USSR. In the third volume on the history of Lotta Comunista, we summarised the subsequent updates and clarifications of Cervetto’s analysis:
The characteristics of the new cycle of ‘imperialist liberism’, the American battle against the ‘Siberian gas pipeline’ and the energy agreement between the USSR and the EEC, Japan’s ‘slow rise’ to political power, the European process and the resurgence of the ‘German question’, the arms race relaunched by Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the parallel but asymmetrical decline of the ‘two superpowers’, the US and the USSR
.
It will be easy to trace the key developments of that decade in this selection of articles. The uneven development in the 1980s in terms of strategic balance meant, first and foremost, the asymmetrical decline of the two superpowers, the US and the USSR, and the re-emergence of Germany and Japan. A Bipolarism in Decline
[February 1985] illustrates how the issue of European and Japanese rearmament posed uncertainties that remain to this day. However, it also shows how the issue was transformed by German and European reunification after 1989-1991 and by the emergence of China as a strategic challenger to the United States.
For Germany and Europe, see the chapter on The Deadlines of the German Question
, and for Japan see the chapter on its strategic slow rise
. Japan Becomes a Political Giant in the New Imperialist Contention
[December 1982] formulates a judgement on Yasuhiro Nakasone’s political line; although in hindsight it would be revised, it contains one of the most valuable methodological insights for a non-mechanistic analysis of power dynamics. In abstract terms, no other power had an interest in strengthening Japan as a competitor, but in practice every power had an interest in playing with more cards in establishing alliances, loosening its alliances, exploiting its alliances, or avoiding any alliances
.
Moreover, already at the beginning of the new contention, the new phase of conflicts prompted Cervetto to return to the Marxist theory of international relations by refining tools that were also to be passed on to the new generation of militants. Traces of this can be found in several articles about these turning points. Marx and Engels’ Theory of International Relations
, published in April 1980, would be included in the introduction to Unitary Imperialism. In the previous three months, several passages had the same theoretical content.
Russian Expansion in Central Asia
[January 1980] introduces reflections on partial balances
and global balances
between the powers, driven by uneven development. The Multidimensional Artery of the Persian Gulf
[February 1980] returns to the issue with the image of the classic straw that breaks the camel’s back, but only when the camel’s back is already full of straws
. Each partial crisis had to be assessed in relation to global balances; the history of imperialism, with the opposite outcomes of the Balkan Wars before 1914 and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, showed how a local conflict could trigger war between the great powers or remain confined to the regional arena: the difference lay in the overall balance of relations.
Europe Also Sets Its Sights on the Persian Gulf
[March 1980] contains fundamental theoretical passages, concluding that the analysis of international politics cannot be reduced to a mere reflection of economic power relations: it is necessary to put the question back on the system of States
, i.e., to consider it in terms of the balance between the powers
. The note on Lenin’s specific use of the theory of equilibrium
and on the breakdown of the order
as the foundation of revolutionary strategy, which is part of the material of Unitary Imperialism, belongs to the same line of thought.
Il mondo multipolare (The multipolar world
) brings together articles from 1990 to early 1995, between the end of the Yalta partition – with German reunification and the implosion of the USSR – and the emergence of China. That it was the beginning of the new strategic phase would become fully apparent at the beginning of the new century, with the European federation of the euro and China’s entry into the WTO, and George W. Bush’s war by choice aimed at preventing European rearmament and deterring Beijing in the Gulf.
The Asian Card in the German Question
[June 1990] refers to the links between reunification and the global balance of power. In the belief that it could play the Asian card
once freed from alliance constraints, Germany could not be blocked. The Half War in the Gulf
[January 1991], in the intertwining of the exhaustion of the Yalta system, the rapid German reunification, the disintegration of the USSR, and the Gulf War, sees effects on the global balance comparable to those of a third world war
.
Hypothetical Hexapolarism
[December 1991] considers Henry Kissinger’s thesis of a possible future multipolar order with six powers; this thesis will be a starting point for analysing the contention as a confrontation between continent-sized powers. World Triumph of Unstable Capitalism
[October 1993] forms the basis of the critique of Marxist theory of the concept of globalisation; the triumph of capital and resulting uneven development would accelerate all its contradictions. The chapter on Migration Flows and the Struggle Over Welfare
is related to the battle of the 1980s, which was documented in Forze e forme del mutamento Italiano (Forces and forms of Italian change
). Here Cervetto emphasised how demography, migration, and the incidence of parasitism were key factors in the imperialist contention.
The last articles study the dramatic acceleration of development in China and Asia. Indeed, as hinted towards by the strategic break of 1991, the turning point of the era was of such magnitude that it could only be compared to that of the 16th century.
A final observation concerns the selection and choice of texts on the imperialist contention included in these Selected Works. In the preface to Unitary Imperialism, dated July 1981, Cervetto explains the decision to collect texts from 30 years of analysis, rather than writing a summary book on trends in international relations
. Firstly, the essential features of unitary imperialism emerged clearly from the contingent analyses presented in the book, however insufficient, partial, and subject to progressive maturation
they might have been. Secondly, in reorganising those materials, little had to be discarded. Thirdly, it was useful to document the evolution of a method of analysis
:
It is in militant work that, ultimately, every theory lives and is tested, since militant work requires answers to the problems that reality poses on a daily basis and forces us to seek a cornerstone of reference in theory.
Let us retain three aspects: the militant work that demands answers from analysis and theory, the progressive maturation of the contingent analyses, and the evolution of the method by which those analyses were conducted.
The first aspect means that those texts are the theoretical and analytical side of the party’s political battles; we have provided an answer in the introduction to these Selected Works, drawing on Cervetto’s own account in the Quaderni, his political memoirs, for the first 35 years and on texts on the history of the party for the following fifteen years.
The second question concerns the implicit rectifications in the progressive maturation of analyses and evaluations. Cervetto deals with this in the introduction to Unitary Imperialism, referring to the reorganisation that Franz Mehring and David Rjazanov had made of the articles, essays, and manuscripts of Marx and Engels. What emerged was a specific theory of international relations
; even if prompted by occasional events, these materials were placed in an organic perspective
spanning half a century, a long-term strategic vision
starting from reflections on the events of 1848 and gradually refined in light of subsequent international politics. Even when assessments and judgements are rectified
, this is not done in an arbitrary or subjective manner:
The rectification is based on new assessments of power relations between the powers, the emergence of new political currents within the individual powers, and the consequences of individual or multiple foreign policy actions. Rectification is, moreover, inherent in this type of analysis, given the subject under examination. Suffice it to say that, before the eyes of Marx and Engels, two great States, Germany and Italy, were formed, and another, the United States, was definitively unified after a civil war of vast proportions.
The point is that the selection of writings included in these Selected Works by its very nature cannot give a full account of the progressive maturation
of the analysis. Some aspects are mentioned by Cervetto himself in his Quaderni, but for an overview we refer the reader to the volumes on the history of Lotta Comunista, where the issue is addressed.
The third aspect is the development of theory. What stands out in Marx and Engels’ writings on international politics, Cervetto notes, is not so much the inevitable rectification of previous assessments as the invariant continuity of certain basic lines of interpretation
. This was no coincidence, because those interpretations were based on the general theory of Marxism
, from which the specialisation concerning international relations developed
.
We note that these basic lines remain. However, as for the tools of analysis, Cervetto concluded that it was necessary not only to apply the Marxist theory of the balance of power
, but also to develop this theory in a consistent and scientifically founded manner
, forging perfected and in-depth tools of analysis
.
Some of these theoretical developments have been reported. There are crucial moments when this theoretical side of the political battle becomes more evident, and there are texts that define it: the 1957 Theses, the true partition in 1968, the restructuring crisis in the 1970s, the difficult question of times and the articles at the start of the new contention around 1980. Still, there are literally hundreds of observations on method and theory accompanying the succession of articles, where concepts and scientific syntheses are not only enunciated but can be seen, so to speak, at work
in the analysis. A brief and entirely provisional overview: unitary imperialism, unity and scission of imperialism, imperialist development, imperialist partition, uneven economic and political development, partial crisis and general crisis, restructuring crisis, peripheral crises, crisis of internationalisation, imperialist liberism, historical collision provoked from outside, balance of power, unintended consequences, partial equilibria and general equilibria, critical issues of the contention, economic power and military power, law of imperialist alliances, plurality of political powers of the States, general line of an imperialist power and plurality of political lines, monetary power in imperialist democracy, military weapons and monetary weapons, national wars, imperialist war, multiform combination of factors, rate of political correspondence, political use of economic force, use of abstention from violence, etc.
Here too, this selection of writings can only account for the main tools and developments. Still, it will be sufficient for those who want to embark on their journey of science and struggle in the collective battle.