From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works"), recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista.
VII
In this chapter, we offer a selection of writings on the Italian cycle, in both politics and in social and economic change, taken from three books that collect articles written over a 40-year period, from 1950 to 1991.
Il ciclo politico del capitalismo di Stato (The political cycle of State capitalism
) spans from the post-war period, at the beginning of the 30 years of the accelerated development of the economic miracle, until 1967, when the first signs of the struggles of workers’ spontaneity had already appeared, but before the explosion of the autunno caldo (hot autumn
) of 1969.
These are articles that appeared in Libertario, l’Impulso, Agitazione (the internal bulletin of the GAAP), Azione Comunista, Prometeo and, lastly, Lotta Comunista. The succession of publications describes the path taken by the original group, which included Arrigo Cervetto, Lorenzo Parodi and, shortly afterwards, Aldo Pressato: from the libertarian communism of the Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action (GAAP) to the Leninism of the strategy-party, via the dead end of Azione Comunista. This was fruitful on a scientific level, but a lost decade
in the battle to establish an organised force based on the Bolshevik model. Three articles mark the final battles which would soon give rise to Lotta Comunista: The Strategy of the Party and the Party of Strategy
, The Leninist Party Develops With Strategy
, and The Leninist Party Is Formed in Clarity
. Published between July 1963 and February 1964, they form a kind of preface to Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party, written in the months that followed, and help to understand the context in which Cervetto conceived that book as a What Is To Be Done? for the Leninist current in Italy.
In the preface to Il ciclo politico del capitalismo di Stato, written in 1989, Cervetto highlights its central theme: the rise of State capitalism
was analysed in the context of class struggles and the clash between fractions of the ruling class
; that rise had characterised a political cycle
. Those pages reveal a strategic focus on trends in development and concentration, an analysis of the pressures exerted by the big bourgeoisie — as well as the middle and petty bourgeoisie, under the pressure of those key economic groups — and an analysis of the parties that were their instruments, alongside a denunciation of the conditions of the proletariat and attention to the resumption of its struggles in the first manifestations of trade-unionist spontaneity.
In the 1950s and 60s, Cervetto was confronted with a form of State capitalism in which the legacy of the previous interwar cycle, such as the IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, Institute for Industrial Reconstruction
) and the large State banks, combined with the major infrastructure and industrial plans of the post-war economic boom
, with examples such as Autostrade and ENI for the transport and energy networks, respectively, and ENEL for the electricity network. When that cycle ended with the restructuring crisis of the 1970s, the start of the cycle of imperialist liberalism and then the privatisations imposed by European constraints affected several of those groups. They were privatised, subject to mergers and acquisitions, or even disappeared in a war of capital in the European single market which saw the large Italian conglomerates lose out or downsize overall.
After the battles of that European restructuring, while Intesa Sanpaolo and Unicredit retain the imprint of what were once the three so-called banks of national interest
(BINs) — Banca Commerciale, Credito Italiano, and Banco di Roma — only Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) and Monte dei Paschi di Siena remain under State control or majority ownership. On the other hand, most of the large surviving concentrations in industry and services remain State-owned, including through CDP, such as ENI, ENEL, Leonardo, Fincantieri, Ansaldo Energia, Poste Italiane, FS with Trenitalia, and RAI.
As for the parliamentary parties, all those that represented the political cycle of State capitalism ceased to exist, swept away by Tangentopoli [a widespread corruption scandal involving major political parties], when the combination of the collapse of the USSR in 1989-1991, the launch of the single market in 1992, and the Maastricht Treaty aimed at a European federation created the conditions for that political-judicial spiral. The parties and governments that succeeded them from the mid-1990s inherited the ties and influences of public capital. However, the EU single market, European legislation, and the constraints of stock market listing, where these applied, avoided or contained the most blatant clientelist and parasitic features of the senile State capitalism of the old cycle.
Also in the 1989 preface, Cervetto pointed out that, on a theoretical level, those articles from the 1950s and 60s had overestimated the timing of the trend towards State capitalism, but this was the result of the political battles of the time. It should be remembered that the PCI (Italian Communist Party), as the hinge-party between Italian and Russian imperialism, was linked to State capitalism in Italy, as shown by its entrenchment in Genoa, and was literally in the pay of the State capitalism of the USSR. The interplay of currents within the DC (Christian Democrats), as well as the DC’s relations with the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), PRI (Italian Republican Party), and other minor parties, were also largely influenced by the struggles between State capital groups and by compromise and convergence with large private businesses. All this unfolded in an ideological climate dominated by the allure of a third way of Catholic solidarism and by demands for the planning of a mixed economy by secular technocracies. As Cervetto put it:
Ultimately, the rigidity of our approach was the result of a denial of the primacy of politics in the formation of State capitalism. It was a polemical rejection of theories of totalitarianism, a rejection that can be better understood if linked to the whole debate on the social nature of the USSR.
Yet the need to engage in that struggle within the political cycle of State capitalism
, against its groups and parties — the Stalinist PCI in particular — had led to a reaffirmation of the Marxist method:
Political institutions follow the economic process and not vice versa. It is society that creates State capitalism and not the State that forges its own capitalism.
That methodological lesson must be cherished, today and in the years to come. Consider the new mobilising ideologies in the crisis in the world order, where Russia and China are pointed to as autocracies, as if their political powers could stand on their own and manipulate the oligarchs, i.e., the large key groups of capital, like puppeteers. Or consider the State interventions in the global crisis of 2008 or the pandemic of the century of 2020, or even the combinations of protectionism, industrial policy, and rearmament plans in the crisis in the world order. In May 2021, we wrote:
After the 2008 crisis, we noted and even defined the major State intervention plans — in the rescue of banks and the automotive sector — as a partial return, in new forms and to varying degrees, to the cycle of State capitalism. But at that time, countercyclical intervention to tackle the crisis prevailed [...] Instead, there is a further step, a qualitative leap, when, under the pretext of the pandemic, State intervention translates into massive investment plans: in infrastructure, electricity, and digital technology. The intervention is of a different nature; it is State capitalism as an expression of the rise of strategic competition; it is not just a cyclical intervention, but a structural leap.
To this list must be added the rearmament plans of all the major powers. In this sense, the historical trend towards State capitalism is confirmed, as imperialist competition deepens into a crisis in the world order.
Regarding plans for the war industry, we had to exclude Rearmament in the Name of Peace
, published in Libertario in September 1950, from the selection of articles. We would at least like to mention the title, which shows how much the struggles of that time, of that group of young workers who began rebuilding the class party 75 years ago, have in common with today’s struggles. Among the articles we are republishing, some milestones of scientific reflection or of political party struggles stand out. Psychology as a Science of Business
, published in Prometeo in March 1959, during a period of collaboration with the dissident Bordigists of Battaglia Comunista, is a seminal and extraordinarily prescient text for the analysis of show politics and today’s television democracy. His Majesty’s Opposition the Centre-Left
, published in May 1963, saw the tumultuous process of proletarianisation, and the growth of white-collar workers in industry and wage earners in the service sector, as the American script
of capitalist development and social change. Using the same criteria, drawn from Marx and Lenin and put into practice in the battles of the 1960s, it was possible to analyse the massive proletarianisation in Asia. Genoa, Spearhead of the Revolutionary Strategy
, from October–November 1966, was the key to the battle of Genoa, in its broad scope of tracing out the unprecedented task of developing an organisation based on the Bolshevik model in a metropolis of imperialist maturity. Establishing the party at the highest point of Italian imperialism, in the capital of State capitalism
, would mean being able to do so throughout the Italian metropolis.
L’inequale sviluppo politico (Uneven political development
) is a collection of articles which appeared in Lotta Comunista between 1968 and 1979. We will not return here to the themes of the crisis of imbalance and the restructuring crisis that are at the heart of those texts and which we addressed in the introduction to these Selected Works [see Internationalism — Special Issue, September–October 2025], based on Cervetto’s own review of them in the Quaderni 1981-82 of his political memoirs. However, three aspects of them merit additional reflection.
In the 1991 introduction to L’inequale sviluppo politico, with regard to political imbalance and the non-correspondence between economic structure and institutions, Cervetto writes that greater consideration must be given to one aspect of this weak correspondence, namely uneven political development
. This helps us to understand how political failure to adapt can continue for a long period
.
This observation refers to the adjustments that Cervetto himself, ten years earlier, had made to the analysis of the crisis of imbalance. It had been a hasty conclusion
to believe that big capital could quickly rectify that non-correspondence; by deepening the analysis, it was possible to overcome the simplification of a certain mechanistic approach
, which was inevitable when there was a need for a powerful idea
to guide people in political combat. This clarification was part of Cervetto’s teaching to the second generation of the party. Taking greater account of the superstructural aspect
meant studying the long-term factors of imbalance, with a historical-materialist reconstruction of political cultures and the moral factor of national tradition.
The second reflection concerns the outcome of the crisis of imbalance. In July 2000, in the introduction to Crisi di internazionalizzazione (Crisis of internationalisation
), we noted that in the 1990s the crucial issues of that imbalance linked to inflationary management of currency and public spending
had been resolved by the transfer of sovereignty to European institutions, sanctioned by the Maastricht Treaty and by the federal unification of monetary power in the European Central Bank
. However, Cervetto’s own observations in the early 1980s — which carry so much weight in his Quaderni — led us to add that there is a regular trait of theatricality and inconclusiveness in Italian political culture, a permanent feature that will continue to mark the course of political struggles, beyond the resolution of the crucial issues of imbalance
.
Obviously, Cervetto’s writings did not include the solution to the critical factors of imbalance through the European constraint, because that unprecedented process was completed in the second half of the 1990s, after his death. However, they did contain the forecast of the fundamental features of that result and the analysis of the trends that prepared it
:
Imbalance as an effect of internationalisation, its solution in the European process, the price paid in the weakening of large business groups, the link with the balance of power in Europe, the change in the social stratification of imperialism, the political struggle played out between foreign constraints, social psychologies of parasitism, and the weight of the moral factor of Latin political tradition.
Above all, Cervetto’s work contained a political theory updated to address the issues raised by a mature imperialism, starting from the foundation of a Marxist theory of monetary power in the imperialist age: an unavoidable premise for the examination of the nascent European political cycle
.
The third reflection refers to a fundamental achievement of the 1970s, the organisational battle that made it possible to resist the campaign of slander and intimidation against Lotta Comunista and, paradoxically, to strengthen the party at a time of working-class retreat. The path of an orderly retreat
was indicated, but with forces prepared for any sudden acceleration. The General Task
was the key editorial of that battle, and the unpredictable storm of the pandemic of the century confirmed its decisive importance. As Renato Pastorino wrote in May 2020:
We faced the difficulties by drawing on our wealth of experience and organisation. First of all, we started from ‘The General Task’, Arrigo Cervetto’s editorial of September 1975 and a milestone in the party’s battle to establish itself.
This editorial established an essential feature of Leninism, which had to be preserved:
At every moment, the organisational plan and systematic work are present as a guarantee and necessary condition for dealing with turning points, social explosions, and political complications.
Forze e forme del mutamento italiano
(Forces and forms of Italian change) is a collection of articles published between 1985 and 1991. In the introductory article, Cervetto clarified the Marxist conception of change, distinguishing it from bourgeois sociological theories:
It is a term that performs an ideological function, often in a reformist sense. Reformist ideology propagates the idea of ‘change’ and associates this idea with that of ‘progress’, whereby change is implicitly understood as improvement. [...] In the imperialist phase [...] the general line of capitalism is reactionary, and reformist currents no longer play a progressive role. Reforms are readjustments of the imperialist system.
Cervetto’s analysis considered the effects of the restructuring crisis in Italy at the economic, industrial, financial, and social levels, with the downsizing of industrial sectors that had been the basis of 30 years of the country’s development. Large private and State-owned business groups had been overwhelmed, followed by layoffs, early retirements, and cassa integrazione [a sort of furlough payments]. Conversely, small and medium-sized enterprises in the Third Italy
had multiplied. Restructuring also affected the labour market:
While there are companies and sectors that are expelling labour, there are others that are absorbing it.
Cervetto’s analysis captured the change of those years, reflecting on the strength of Marxism in contrast to the ahistorical view of social relations
of bourgeois sociology:
Marxism did not limit itself to recording economic and social change; it equipped itself with analytical tools that allow us to reconstruct the entire process of change in the socio-economic formation, i.e., in the structure and superstructure.
We only touch here on the political battle waged in the 1980s over change; see the introduction to these Selected Works and to the review of them in the third volume on the history of the party. Returning to the notion of socio-economic formation
meant being able to understand the nature and contradictions of change, vital for implanting the Bolshevik model within the imperialist maturity of Italy. The article Technician-Producers
, analysing the extent of skilled labour in industry and production services, remains exemplary for the dialectical spirit with which it addresses the advantages and disadvantages of the development of those wage stratifications:
Imperialism corrupts and co-opts some of these men among its dignitaries and praetorians, but it cannot gratify the masses. [...] Historical experience shows that it is precisely among the most skilled workers that the labour movement has produced the vanguard fighters of decisive struggles [...]. The ‘producers’ spirit’ of these wage earners can be impoverished by individualism and careerism or exploited by the ideologies of modernity, technocracy, and reformism. But it can also be the vehicle for encountering Marxist science, the universality of communism, and the dignity of revolutionaries.
This dialectical view of change had to encompass all aspects of social transformation, but as a prerequisite it required an analysis of what could be called a ruthless reality, free from all sentimentality. Let us return to the Livorno Conference of 1957, when Cervetto and Parodi found themselves in the minority with their Theses on imperialist development, in the face of militants dominated by a poorly thought-out passion which prevented them from accepting the long timescales of the counter-revolutionary cycle. As Cervetto commented in the Quaderni, they did not have sufficient theoretical preparation to discipline their feelings and prevent them from influencing their political assessment
. For them, passion and political judgement were the same thing, in that mixture of mood and political activity that has always been the characteristic of maximalism and will always be the weakness of the revolutionary movement
.
Faced with the real conditions of the class, maximalism oscillates between the euphoric, uncritical exaltation of its potential for struggle — often accompanied by a romantic portrayal of its conditions of poverty and exploitation — and disillusionment when those expectations are not met or escape into some salvational myth. In the battles of those decades: either the victorious assault, as sentiment suggests; or the despair of there is nothing to be done when that sentiment is not reflected; or refuge in the myths of the USSR, Maoist China, and the rural areas of the Third World, that were supposed to encircle the metropolises of imperialism.
With the growth of world production, which recovered in the second half of the 1980s, the tertiary
sector expanded, as did the number of people employed in public administration and education, and concomitantly female employment. The new social stratifications brought with them new ideologies, resulting in the transformation and downsizing of traditional political parties. It was a question of combating the new ideological forms of property-owning individualism — a manifestation of the spread of home ownership — progressivism, and subjectivism expressed by the new strata, in the awareness of the petty-bourgeois spirit
that was penetrating the class by these routes. But at the same time, it was a question of grasping every contradiction of that transformation, and what was true for the technician-producers was all the more true for the younger generations of that emerging workforce.
The text contains some truly crucial theoretical insights: the multi-income family, a new form of wage aristocracy; the law of population in the imperialist age, characterised by a general trend towards demographic decline in mature metropolises, with the consequent need to make up the labour force deficit through immigration. The book contains razor-sharp judgements, devoid of any romanticism about the real conditions of the working class, yet at the same time it grasps its contradictory movement that provides an opening for party action. Beyond that, only the grind of imperialist conflict, with its dynamic of crises, catastrophes, and wars, could shatter the political and social passivity of the broad masses: this is the thesis which can be read between the lines in Social Contradictions and Political Passivity
, written in April 1991, commenting on the Italian repercussions of the first Gulf War and the emergence of left-wing papism
. Today, however, it remains crucial that the crisis in the world order begins to undermine the certainties of that social passivity and conformism, even if only a minority can yet be won over to revolutionary consciousness.
Other chapters of Forze e forme have been decisive for difficult political battles, such as the articles on the Mediterranean policy of Italian imperialism and its poisoned seeds
in the aberration of terrorism. One last aspect is worth mentioning, and it also comes with a reading recommendation. Much of the book is an assessment of Italian imperialist development and maturation since the 1950s and 60s; ultimately, the changes of the 1980s continued to follow the American script foreseen at the time. To that end, Cervetto retraces the elaboration we have seen collected in Il ciclo politico del capitalismo di Stato and L’inequale sviluppo politico. A good study plan would be to start with a critical review of Forze e forme and then go back to the earlier texts.
(From the introductory note to The Italian Cycle
chapter).