From the series Spain 1936
The USSR’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War was one of those combinations of factors and one of the moments in Stalin’s manoeuvring among the imperialist camps. Moscow moved from the tactics of social-fascism to the Popular Fronts, then to an alliance with Nazi Germany, and finally to a coalition with the Atlantic powers in the Second World War – all in accordance with its own power interests, to which it had subordinated the International. In 1936, the great trials against the Bolsheviks began in the USSR; in Spain, Stalinism revealed itself as a force of the international counterrevolution.
Thus, the crucial lesson of 1936 and 1937 in Spain and Catalonia lies in the strategic inadequacy that ultimately united Trotsky with the anarchist and centrist currents of the POUM: that assault lacked a strategy-party capable of grasping all the international connections of that revolutionary crisis.
A second line of reflection concerns the issues of the State and proletarian power, and here the Spanish experience directly touches upon the history of the original group that would give rise to Lotta Comunista in the 1960s. The GAAP aimed to bring together the available forces for an oriented and organised libertarian communism, rooted in the proletariat and thus distinct from the individualist and petty-bourgeois elements of the anarchist movement. It was precisely the issues of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a provisional State, and the rather problematic theory that a simultaneous liquidation
of the bourgeois State was possible at the moment of the revolutionary insurrection, that were debated in 1951 at the GAAP’s founding conference in Genoa Pontedecimo.
In the division of tasks among the speakers at that conference, Arrigo Cervetto, without much conviction, put forward the thesis of simultaneous liquidation. Subsequently, as his transition to Leninism took shape, he referred to it as a mistake, and, following Lenin, came to the conviction that the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the true fundamental difference separating the Leninists from the libertarians. It goes without saying that, in that reflection, an assessment of 1936 in Spain could not fail to be at the forefront. Contributing to this was Cervetto’s stay in Argentina from 1951 to 1952, where he had temporarily moved after being dismissed from the Ilva steelworks in Savona. It was a fruitful year of study, but also an opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge in Buenos Aires of the large community of exiles from the Spanish Revolution.
A page from Cervetto’s political memoirs and some archival documents bear witness to the dual significance of his encounter with those militants: the generous recognition of their revolutionary passion, but also a deepening of his reflection on the State, democracy, and the ideologies of totalitarianism, which was gradually leading him to distance himself from the anarchist tradition and move closer to Marx and Lenin.
I used to sit in the bars in the city centre, which were mainly frequented by Spanish political exiles: Anarcho-syndicalists, POUMists, Stalinists, Socialists. There were only two of us Italians: myself and a young anarchist from Puglia, with whom I became friends. There were Argentinians, but few of them were politically active. There were intellectual and politicised Jews. I spent hours in silence listening to all these people. They said I knew more, but I learnt a great deal from listening to their experiences during the Spanish Civil War, the endless episodes involving unknown protagonists of a chapter of contemporary history, the memoirs of the legendary Ascaso and Durruti, the hatreds, the passions, the mistakes, the naivety, the pettiness. During the day, I would read memoirs and history books on the Spanish Civil War that I picked up from market stalls. These works gave me a fairly accurate and rational understanding of that chapter of history, allowing me to organise the jumble of facts within broad interpretative frameworks. Yet, I was able to understand many things more deeply by listening to those men, even when I realised they were getting dates wrong and exaggerating the significance of the events they had lived through. There is nothing more foolish or futile than trying to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of reality, of facts, of people – trying to force the world into a mould. It is the spiteful pedantry of those who fail to see that life is passion, action, struggle – not argument. Logic must be sought in the dynamics of events, not in the minds of men
.
In this context, a meeting with Diego Abad de Santillán, a historic figure in Argentine and Spanish anarchism who had served in the 1936 government of the Generalitat of Catalonia, is revealing of Cervetto’s already ongoing shift away from anarchist maximalism. Santillán, Cervetto notes, maintains that capitalism is a secondary enemy
compared to the State, and that it is totalitarianism that makes the State the master of everything and everyone
; even among socialists and liberals
there are opponents of totalitarianism with whom to fight together
. From that meeting emerged a study programme on the definitions of totalitarianism
, in which Cervetto’s intention was by then to base ourselves on Lenin’s Imperialism
.
In his articles from the 1980s, later collected in The Political Shell, we find the rejection of the ideologies of totalitarianism and the formulation of the theory of imperialist democracy. While Cervetto’s reflection on the theory of the State, initiated in the early 1950s, was also a review of the Spanish experience in the Civil War, the fall of Francoism in 1975 served as a seminal historical test for the Marxist theory of democracy as the best shell for capital. The formation of the European Economic Community (EEC), writes Cervetto in the article Spain in Relations Among Powers
, had accelerated the development of Spanish capitalism
; the profound shift in the proportions of the classes and class fractions had strengthened industrial capitalism and triggered a cycle of workers’ struggles:
This has highlighted the inability of the fascist form of the State to deal with the social struggles brought about by economic development itself. Fascism, with its corporatist theory and its practice of class conciliation, proves itself completely powerless not only to prevent industrial action but also to suppress it.
Indeed, the more it attempts to suppress it, the more it forces the proletariat’s economic struggle – an objective phenomenon determined by the development of the market – to turn against the State, i.e., against the oppressive machinery through which capitalism exercises its dictatorship.
The fascist form thus becomes, at this point, a negative form of State for industrial capitalism.
The crisis of the fascist form of the State poses for Spanish capitalism the problem of establishing the democratic form, better suited to set up a practice of class conciliation, in the context of an economic struggle of the proletariat that is now inevitable, given the degree and pace of development of the economic structure. Only the democratic State can, in this situation, permit a genuine dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, because it manages to contain the proletariat’s struggle at the economic level and to divert at the parliamentary level that political momentum which would otherwise be directed against the bourgeois State – precisely because, in its fascist form, the State is identified with the repression of the economic struggle.
Instead, it is in the general interest of the Spanish bourgeoisie that the proletariat does not identify fascism with the State, just as it is in its general interest that the proletariat is merely anti-fascist and not also anti-State, since, in this way, it will be able to remain democratic and accept the capitalist dictatorship in its democratic form
.
Also in the 1970s, a third line of thought emerged regarding the Spanish experience in relation to party theory, in connection with the unprecedented task of establishing an organisation based on the Bolshevik model in an advanced imperialist metropolis such as Italy. Introducing such a foreign body
at a time when social-imperialist tendencies
– embodied by the support of the large Italian business groups for the rise of the PCI – were strong, meant provoking a process of rejection
, as Cervetto notes in his memoirs. That was the purpose of the campaign of slander and intimidation orchestrated against Lotta Comunista by the epigones of Stalinism and by virtually the entire Italian press; to oppose the dominant trend meant risking political and, indeed, physical elimination
:
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 counterrevolution politically and physically eliminated every attempt to reconstitute the revolutionary tradition. I analysed in minute detail all the errors of Trotsky, the POUM, the CNT, and the dissident communists in Italy. I interviewed dozens of protagonists to understand this properly, and because I have never trusted written sources alone
.
Part of this critical scrutiny involved dialogue with the Trotskyist Grandizo Munis and the publication in Italy of his Lessons of a Defeat, Promise of Victory.
So, it is not just about strategy, nor merely about the theory of the State and democracy as the best shell for capitalism. The struggle for the party – and thus also the battle of Genoa and the battle of Milan from those times, through which the Stalinist smear campaign was countered – also drew upon the critical assessment of the Spanish Civil War and the 1937 Barcelona uprising. In this sense, the hard work required to fulfil the unprecedented task of establishing the party in the Italian metropolis is, to a certain extent, indebted to those internationalist militants, in the same spirit with which, 75 years ago in Buenos Aires, Cervetto interviewed the exiles of that revolutionary assault.
Is there a way to come full circle? Is there anything that the experience of these decades in Italy can offer to those in Spain who wish to engage in internationalist militancy?
Certainly, there is. It lies in the perspective of a European Leninism – the new dimension of the unprecedented task placed before the younger generations of the Old Continent and, through that entrenched presence, directed to the global working class. The specific contribution of Lotta Comunista’s experience in the struggle to establish an internationalist force in Europe lies in having demonstrated the possibility of entrenching the Bolshevik model of party – a plan-party, a science-party, a strategy-party – in a metropolis of mature imperialism, i.e., Italian imperialism and, inevitably today, the European imperialism that encloses it. Precisely an unprecedented task, which has required working against the tide, against the prevailing tradition of maximalism and its propensity for revolutionary rhetoric, which throughout history has characterised both socialism and anarchism, in the Italian tradition as much as in the Spanish one.
The curse of Spanish maximalism is no less severe than that of the Italian; forged by the influences of Proudhonism and Bakuninism, Marxist theory has never carried any real weight there. Moreover, as we have seen, its defining feature is the influence of ideologies born of localism and fragmentation. This is where the most insidious obstacle lies. The revolutionary proletariat wrote glorious chapters in Catalonia in 1936 and 1937, but the entanglement with Catalanism is a yoke from which we must free ourselves, for it is destined to shackle our class within interclassism and within the machinations of their bourgeois politics.
As imperialist development reaches maturity, in Spain, in Europe, and now throughout the world, no question of nationality can any longer be resolved at the national level; either it is merely a myth that imprisons us in the curse of tradition, or it is a problem that only the communist revolution will be able to resolve once and for all. The Bolshevik militant, Cervetto reminds us, ought, according to Lenin, to be a synthesis of the German organiser and propagandist, the French agitator, the English man of action, and the Russian revolutionary wholly devoted to the cause of the proletariat
. If Iberian internationalism can grasp the glorious strength of its own tradition, yet also transcend its limits, it will bring the indomitable spirit of revolutionary Spain to the unprecedented task of a European Leninism. It can be done – this is among the lessons we learnt from Spain 1936.