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Lotta Comunista: The Origins 1943-1952

Guido La Barbera

Preface to the English Edition

In 1943, in an Italy still devastated by war, the political and military crisis of Fascism catapulted a new generation of workers into the political struggle. Many of these youths received their ‘political baptism’ in the armed struggle against Fascism, the Resistance. Among those youths there was the widespread hope – and often the conviction – that the Resistance meant fighting against society divided into classes, against exploitation, and against capitalism as a social system and not only against one of its most repressive, violent and bloody forms. But, at the end of the war, those aspirations were to be bitterly disappointed. The fall of Fascism merely meant a change in the political shell and postwar restructuring was being carried out thanks to the perpetuation of the same mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, guaranteed by a different form of class rule.

The political and social struggles had activated a sizeable working class minority, but most of the energy poured into the antifascist struggle was channelled by the Italian Communist Party of the time into class collaboration and the subordination of the workers’ interests to the national interests of Italian capitalism. Many illusions were dispelled.

For the handful of young workers who did not want to submit to the myth of ‘national collaboration’, to confusion, renunciation and sterile regrets, it meant persisting in their political struggle and finding the way for their anti-capitalist struggle in the coming phase.

But the rubble of the imperialist war was not only physical. An apparently insurmountable wall loomed before that handful. The very idea of ‘communism’ was monopolised by a PCI that disguised its irreversible bourgeois choice in ‘Marxist’ phraseology and put itself forward as the champion of national interests via the myth of the ‘national way to socialism’. This was a party dominated by the Stalinist ideology of the USSR as the ‘homeland of socialism’, the defence of which had to be a priority for the international proletariat. The ‘big lie’ of Russia as a socialist country was a powerful ideological weapon for subjecting the international workers’ movement to the interests of the USSR in the world contention. The imperialist division of the world between the great powers that had been sanctioned by the Yalta agreement was transfigured into opposition between an imperialist camp and a ‘socialist’ camp. The proletariat was called upon to side with one imperialist bloc against the other, and to defend a false socialism that harshly repressed its own working class. It is no accident that Cervetto would define Yalta as ‘the nadir of internationalism’.

In his preface to the book Guido La Barbera draws attention to the boulder that obstructed the difficult path of the ‘Founding Group’ as they reconstructed internationalism:

What did the Second World War and Yalta mean for the Italian working-class movement and for the little group – a tiny part of working-class energies – that became the original nucleus of Lotta Comunista?

As Lorenzo Parodi, the co-founder with Arrigo Cervetto of Lotta Comunista, was to write years later, recalling his choice – when he was only seventeen – to fight in the Resistance, by instinct, we had grasped that the war was ‘imperialist’. Nevertheless, we needed to go on, to discover, besides our class instinct, why imperialism existed. Class instinct had to be followed by scientific knowledge. To do this, all the ruling political and ideological rubble that crushed the workers’ movement and made it a tool in the struggle among the various capitalist and imperialist fractions needed to be cleared away. The forces acting in the future economic cycle, the classes and their fractions, the political forms of class rule, and the nature of imperialism needed to be analysed. An internationalist vanguard could be formed only through a clear vision of the imperialist nature of the conflict that had just ended, of the State-capitalist nature of the USSR – discovering how the economic laws of capitalism worked in it –, and of a scientific analysis of the Yalta partition between the imperialist powers and the successive ‘cold war’, when the world seemed to be split between two opposing blocs while there were already glimpses of inter-imperialist clashes in the ‘Western bloc’.

La Barbera writes that, in its analysis of imperialism, the generation of Marxists subsequent to Lenin’s

had failed to link up successfully with Marx and Lenin’s conceptions. Struck down by the Stalinist counter-revolution, the next generation was unable to carry forward the task. The result was the abyss of the Second World War, a poisoned chalice that the world proletariat was forced to drink to the dregs without being able to resist either that appalling massacre or becoming enslaved by the ideologies of Yalta.

The thread of Marxist theory had been broken.

When the war ended, it all had to be done over again. For the new generation, the task was to reconstruct the basic principles of internationalism, to build an organisation, and to embark on a difficult apprenticeship in order to reclaim the analytical and strategic method that would enable it to confront the multiple powers of the class enemy: American, Russian, Italian and European imperialism.

Marxist science provided the tools for studying society and for the scientific definition of the strategy of the international workers’ movement in its long struggle for communism, with a cultural baggage of analyses and experiences that was largely unexplored. It was, and still is, necessary to repossess that heritage.

Today, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the takeoff of China and the new powers, and the emergence of Europe as a continental power have presented new, unprecedented scenarios and set new times for the contention among the powers [...] and, consequently, new tasks for our scientific elaboration, essential to the building of an internationalist party.

Retracing that original nucleus’s intense labour of studying, clarifying and reappropriating Marxism forms part of our task today.

Preface

A party is built on strategy. The group that founded Lotta Comunista came to this conclusion at the close of the 1950s. It was the central thesis of Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party1, the core text of our organisation, written in . As What Is to Be Done? had been for Lenin’s party, so Class Struggles has been and is for Lotta Comunista.

To reconstruct the history of a party is also, inevitably, to deal with the genesis and evolution of its strategy. For Marxism, ‘strategy’ is primarily an assessment of the timescales and forces of class dynamics, from the objective driving force – capitalist development – to the subjective strength of the revolutionary party. The introduction to the second Italian edition of The Difficult Question of Times1 is virtually a summary of the first part of our history, and a good place to start:

Lotta Comunista was born facing ‘the question of times’.

At the end of the 1940s, the men who would be its founders began to grope their way through the dense ideological fogs of the Yalta partition. Young workers, won over to politics during the war and the partisan struggle, they found every kind of obstacle in their path, obstacles generated or magnified by the world conflict that had just ended.2

The first obstacle was the imaginary times of the period. The idea that a new world war was about to break out between the USA and the USSR discouraged any assessment of the strength of European imperialism. What were seen as the tight timescales of this crisis overshadowed the lesson of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and led to makeshift solutions, whereas the real need was for the forces of the revolutionary party to be rebuilt in organisational coherence and homogeneity of political theory and strategy.

A second obstacle derived from the nature of the Italian working-class movement and from the state of the international revolutionary movement.

On the one hand, the maximalist political tradition of the class movement in Italy did not facilitate a methodical analysis of the world cycle and of the dynamics of capitalism. Traces of this are to be found in the article on the Times of Class Tradition, in which Arrigo Cervetto recalls Karl Marx’s well-known statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: men make their own history, but under circumstances determined by facts and tradition. This reference of Marx’s to tradition is important, Cervetto observes, because it is put on the same level as facts. Tradition is a fact and not an abstract and arbitrary idea, even if, in most cases, it wears the ideological clothes of false consciousness, of myth, of the misunderstanding of the real facts of the past and of the causes that determined them, the inexact measurement of the times that regulated them. But tradition is a fact because it is the social practice of the past. It is, ultimately, the experience that each class or class section has accumulated. If it is not accorded the necessary scientific attention it becomes a braking factor rather than a wealth of experience. Facing the question of times in the Italy of the 1950s meant refusing to be crushed by the tradition of maximalism and its psychological time.

On the other hand, on the international movement front, Marxist theory had failed to link up successfully with Marx and Lenin’s conceptions of the development of capitalism in the age of imperialism. What mean global capitalist development in the imperialist stage? Amidst the social and political ruins of the post-war period – Cervetto wrote in The Times of the Fifties – the revolutionary movement was unable to immediately understand that part of the objective development identified by Lenin was in progress. A link between Lenin’s theoretical work and the real movement had been skipped. A generation had been swallowed up. It would take a decade – until the 1957 Theses grasped the long time of imperialist development in the Asian area – for the science of Marx’s Capital and of Lenin’s Imperialism to be reconnected to the practical tasks of the revolutionary struggle».3

In the beginning, then, there was the war, and its consequences for Europe – the partitions agreed at Yalta and the myth of Stalin’s USSR as the bastion of world socialism. What did the Second World War and Yalta mean for the Italian working-class movement and for the little group – a tiny part of working-class energies – that became the original nucleus of Lotta Comunista?

The more specific a historical reconstruction, the more it focuses on individuals, on the events that have shaped them, their personality and psychology. Here is this little group, making their own history within the limits of facts and tradition. The ‘facts’ were the factory, Fascism, the world war; the ‘tradition’ was political culture that influenced how they moved within their working-class world: maximalism, socialism, a generic and imprecise ideal of ‘communism’, even anarchism. Most of them were young manual workers, responding with political passion to those ‘facts’ that seized hold of them and forced them to make choices.

The working-class energies that between 1943 and 1951 led to the meeting at Genoa Pontedecimo and the formation of GAAP (Anarchic Groups of Proletarian Action) may be divided into four main currents: the Savona group (Arrigo Cervetto); the Genoa group (Lorenzo Parodi and later Aldo Pressato); the Sestri Ponente** group (Aldo Vinazza); and the Tuscany-Lazio group (Pier Carlo Masini and Ugo Scattoni). More details will follow with regard to the history, organisational strength and membership of these groups. However, almost the whole membership had passed through shared experiences: manual labour, the Resistance, and a political baptism in the 1943 and 1944 strikes. Most had gone on to take an active part in the partisan struggle, a direct and almost inevitable consequence of their participation in workplace struggles and the need to avoid the fascist police and deportation to Germany.

Resistance militancy also explains a great deal about their initial choice of anarchism: the frustrated aspirations of the partisan struggle drove them to seek for ‘another’ (non-Stalinist) communism in the Italian working-class tradition of libertarian communism. The task would be to sift the anarchist movements for those prepared to take part in organised and politically-directed action and leave behind a tradition of individual rebellion opposed to organisational control.

This was GAAP’s initial project, but almost immediately Arrigo Cervetto and Pier Carlo Masini had diverging views as to how it should be directed. Masini wanted to build on the anarchist tradition: his great fear was ending up as a small, closed group like Amadeo Bordiga’s. Cervetto tended to take his cue from all the strands of the working-class movement, and from the PCI sphere of influence in particular. Masini sought theoretical and political solutions from anarchism; Cervetto from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Gramsci.

The unremitting exchange of letters between Cervetto and Masini reveals that as early as 1949 the two held potentially diverging views as to what it would mean to take the anarchist movement as a starting-point. Cervetto was looking for theoretical and political clarity on the nature of the State, and on imperialism. His persistence on the issue of imperialism put pressure on libertarian anarchism’s basically anti-authoritarian line on the USSR, in an attempt to thwart the associated danger – of a slide to the pro-the-West and pro-the-US field. If imperialism were the objective trait that united Washington and Moscow, it would make it difficult to view the main enemy as the USSR and its oppressive State control, to the point of supporting the USA in the ‘Cold War’ line-up. But primarily the concept of the USSR as imperialist and State-capitalist in nature would facilitate confrontation with the Stalinist PCI and the opposite danger – falling under the spell of ‘Eastern’ Moscow, a feature that was fated to increase as the ‘Cold War’ developed. Cervetto quickly came to the conclusion that the toolbox of Marxist theory was the only thing that could consolidate and stabilise his militants, with its capacity for opposing the ideologies of Yalta on all fronts.

Masini was wary of theoretical research on imperialism, seeing it as one more element in the danger of becoming a small [sectarian Marxist] group closed in on itself, and insisted on the need to draw every possible vital force from the anarchist tradition. Before long, what had seemed a clash between two different personalities or points of view came under the spotlight of the two strategic issues already mentioned – the timescales and the forces of imperialism.

The notion of an imminent conflict between two single blocs – the USA and the USSR – neglected the forces rising in Europe. In June 1950, faced with the Korean War, the internationalist watchword was ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’. The formula of a working-class ‘Third Front’ adopted in the spring of 1951 lent itself to being confused with the idea of a European ‘Third Force’ that was being debated in France, Britain and Germany as well as in Italy, by diverse currents united by reservations about the Atlantic Alliance.

The prospect of the coming war led Masini to take on board a pre-1914 scenario and to picture a clash in Europe between the ‘Right’ and a Zimmerwald Left – the internationalist currents that at the time had opposed the first imperialist world war. This picture led to great interest in the resignations of Cucchi and Magnani3 from the PCI, in Bevan’s Labour Left, and in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Masini held that American domination would make any ‘Third Force’ of European imperialism impossible. But when this did indeed take shape – from the European Coal and Steel Community to the European Common Market – the consequence would be that the Left would end up playing the ‘left’ wing of the European Third Force. Such was to be the road Masini would follow when after 1957 he fell back onto Pietro Nenni’s PSI and then onto the PSDI.

In reconstructing this first stage of the party’s history we end at 1952, after the initial step of the Genoa-Pontedecimo meeting, when this divergence within GAAP was already unfolding and Cervetto had sketched a preliminary outline of his thinking on the party, imperialism, Marxism and the State. We will see the - forerunners of the mature Cervetto’s thinking on theories of the State and of unitary imperialism.

The era of Azione Comunista, which started soon after the narrative of this book ends, was to many intents and purposes a period of marking time. Apart from the firm principles of the ‘1957 Theses’, from the end of the 1950s through to the early 1960s Cervetto and Parodi were forced to take up their road from the point at which they had arrived in -. In the meantime much energy would be lost in the attempt to consolidate the diverse groups of the Movement of the Communist Left around the newspaper Azione Comunista.4

* Reproduced in English in Our Internationalist Struggle, éditions Science Marxiste, 2011.

** Residential and industrial neighbourhood of west Genoa, once separate from the city, with its own local council.

*** For Aldo Cucchi and Valdo Magnani see ‘Back to the little group and anarchism’, Chapter 7 and the section Biographical Profiles.

**** The political group ‘Azione Comunista’ (Communist Action) was formed in 1954 by a small core of PCI dissidents: its same-name publication came out in 1956. In -, GAAP joined what was by then this newly-named group, ‘Movimento della Sinistra Comunista’ (Movement of the Communist Left); cf. Chapter 2, Passion Disciplined by Reason and Chapter 11, Conclusions.

USEFUL DATES

  • 1943

    • 25th July: The Grand Council strips Benito Mussolini of his office as Prime Minister and places him under arrest.
    • 25th July: Demonstration in Savona, strike at the Ansaldo works in Genoa: political baptism of fire for Cervetto and Parodi.

  • 1944

    • April: Palmiro Togliatti announces the ‘Salerno turnaround’.
    • Spring: Cervetto joins the partisan struggle. Parodi goes into hiding with a libertarian communist group. Masini leaves the PCI.

  • 1945

    • 4th/11th February: Yalta Conference.
    • 25th/30th April: End of the war in Italy and Fascism.
    • 8th May: End of the war in Europe. Germany divided into four zones.
    • 6th/9th August: Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
    • 15th August: Unconditional surrender of Japan.
    • 25th April: Partisan forces enter Savona. Cervetto joins the PCI. Parodi becomes a militant libertarian communist, working within Ansaldo and in the Nervi area of Genoa.

  • 1946

    • 22nd June: Togliatti concedes an amnesty for political crimes.
    • Spring: Cervetto working at Ilva. Leaves the PCI and calls himself an anarchist.

  • 1947

    • January: De Gasperi on a mission to the USA to secure loans to Italy.
    • May: The PCI and the socialists are expelled from the government.
    • July: India granted independence.
    • March: Masini joins Umanità Nova in Rome.
    • September: Cervetto, Parisotti, and Bogliani form their young anarchist group ‘No God, no Boss’.

  • 1948

    • January: Cervetto’s first article appears in Umanità Nova.
    • April: Marshall Plan begins. De Gasperi’s Christian Democrats win the elections.
    • May: Pier Carlo Masini holds meetings in Genoa and Savona: over the next few months he makes contact with Cervetto and Parodi.

  • 1949

    • 4th April: Italy joins the Atlantic Alliance.
    • 20th April: World Peace Congress in Paris. Parisians for Peace movement born.
    • 1st October: Mao proclaims the People’s Republic of China.
    • 23rd/25th April: Italian Anarchist Federation holds its National Congress at Livorno.
    • September: First issue of L’Impulso.
    • November: First clash between Cervetto (‘the Marxist’) and Masini (‘the anarchist’).

  • 1950

    • April: Schuman Plan for the European Coal and Steel Community.
    • 25th June: Korean War begins.
    • November: Chinese forces become involved in the Korean War.
    • March: Cervetto, Parodi, and Masini agree to collaborate on Milan’s Libertario.
    • April: Second clash between Cervetto and Masini extends to Genoa and Rome sections: Cervetto is for Marxism and Leninism.
    • June: In the face of the Korean War, the watchword is: ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’.
    • 15th August: Meeting held at Florence with the aim of forming ‘an organised and federated movement.’ A National Congress is arranged for February 1951.
    • September: Attempt to establish the political line of the Congress. Third C/M clash, this time over unitary imperialism.
    • December: Cervetto sacked from Ilva.

  • 1951

    • January: North Korean and Chinese forces take Seoul.
    • 12th/14th February: Italy supports the Pleven Plan for the EDC (European Defence Community).
    • March: General strike in Franco’s Spain, at Barcelona.
    • 11th April: Truman dismisses General MacArthur.
    • 23th April: Aneurin Bevan (Labour Left) resigns from the Attlee government over cuts to health services in favour of rearmament.
    • 29th June: Ceasefire in Korea.
    • January: Cucchi and Magnani resign from the PCI.
    • 24th/25th February: Meeting at Genoa Pontedecimo constitutes GAAP.
    • May: L’Impulso launches a campaign for an internationalist ‘Third Front.’ Cervetto in Argentina.
    • March: The USSR puts forward a proposal for a united, neutral Germany.
    • October: XIX Congress of the USSR Communist Party. The Malenkov Report. Stalin’s Economic Questions of Socialism in the USSR.
    • 5th November: Eisenhower becomes president of the USA.
    • May: Cervetto returns from Argentina. Over the next six months, he studies theories of imperialism.
    • 1st/2nd June: Second National GAAP Conference in Florence.
    • 26th October: Open split in GAAP’s National Committee over the war and European imperialism.

Chapter One

«ONE OUGHT TO KNOW WITH WHOM ONE IS DEALING»

 

Knowing your enemy is half the battle.

This was the Bolsheviks’ motto as they studied imperialism, just before the dark night of Stalinism swallowed up the extraordinary endeavour that was the October Revolution: a study carried forward not in centres of academic learning, but in the theoretical and political battle that every generation of revolutionaries has had to face. For Marx, the task was to understand the moves of the rising English, French and German bourgeoisies, and how a reactionary Tsarist Russia was attempting to oppose them. For Lenin, the task was to interpret the struggle between the imperialist powers at the historical crossroads of 1914, at the outbreak of the first imperialist world war. In the crisis of the 1930s, struck down by the Stalinist counter-revolution, the next generation was unable to carry forward the task. The result was the abyss of the Second World War, a poisoned chalice that the world proletariat was forced to drink to the dregs without being able to resist either that appalling massacre or becoming enslaved by the ideologies of Yalta.

When the war ended, it all had to be done over again. For the new generation, the task was to reconstruct the basic principles of internationalism, to build an organisation, and to embark on a difficult apprenticeship in order to reclaim the analytical and strategic method that would enable it to confront the multiple powers of the class enemy: American, Russian, Italian and European imperialism.

One ought to know with whom one is dealing. Thus wrote Marx to Engels in November 1853. It wasn’t by chance that Marx, seventy years before the Bolsheviks, was posing himself the same problem. The political battle against the Palmerston government, and the attempt to provide the Chartist movement with a theory of revolution, had caused him to go back to the study of foreign policy. For the vanguard of the English working-class movement, penetrating the mysteries of international politics meant defending the movement’s autonomy, shunning the siren voices of liberal policies, and unmasking the plots the Liberals were hatching in Europe.

Marx took the strategy-party one step further along its path. In the London of 1853, knowing with whom one was dealing meant guarding one’s autonomy from the forces of the English bourgeoisie; in Germany, in dispute with Ferdinand Lassalle, it meant defending that autonomy from Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian statism; in France, from the myth of Louis Napoleon, «liberator of peoples.

In the First World War, imperialism’s first global conflict, it was Lenin’s task to go onwards and upwards, in search of a strategy that would be equal to the new era. The theory outlined in Imperialism, and the principle of autonomy from all the warring powers, formed the basis of the internationalist strategy adopted by the revolutionary Left at the Zimmerwald Conference, and the tactic of revolutionary defeatism opened the way to October 1917.

In the 1950s, knowing with whom one was dealing was a hard-won achievement that we can follow throughout the single political battles. But it is most productive to begin with the conclusion drawn by Arrigo Cervetto fifteen years after the struggle started, when he finalised his formulation on the «true partition» between the USA and the USSR, and on the balance of power involved in the Yalta partition. Cervetto’s 1968 conclusion started from an explicit critical revision of the theories that between 1947 and 1953 forecast war between America and Russia:

[...] the prospect of a US-USSR war formulated by a number of groups from 1947 to - was an ideological abstraction and not the result of a Marxist analysis. Without the application of Marxist science, there could not be a strategy that would illustrate the prospects for the revolutionär struggle and guide the tactical behaviour of the revolutionary proletariat.

Without a clear strategic vision, a truly revolutionary party could not exist, since the definition of ‘revolutionary party’ can only be attributed to a political body that operates objectively in the process of the laws of movement of society since it is consciously aware of its development, follows its evolution, anticipates its outcome, and regulates all its tactical actions according to a specific coordination or, rather, according to prospective coordinates. [...]

The United States and Russia did not, and do not, have serious disagreements in Europe. They had and still have them in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, but not in Europe. Those who conceived and conceive of such disagreements in Europe cannot be Marxists, since they imagined and imagine that a historical, social and political reality – European imperialism – has disappeared.4

The balance-of-power theory

Two articles, in March and April 1980 – ‘Europe, Too, Aims at the Persian Gulf’ and ‘Marx and Engels on the Question of Inter-State Relations’* – take up the thread of the true partition. These articles can now be found in The World Contention and the introduction to Unitary Imperialism.

The division that came out of the Second World War is set within the framework of the Marxist use of equilibrium theory:

Amadeo Bordiga held that Yalta signalled the triumph of US imperialism and the financial conquest of the so-called socialist markets by the USA. At Yalta, the ‘mighty dollar’ lent US imperialism an air of supremacy that made it appear a super-imperialism, which could not be seriously challenged even were the European imperialisms to achieve their eagerly sought-for recovery.5

Cervetto takes up the issue of post-war imperialist competition with Bordiga as being one of method even before being one of analysis:

In our opinion, relationships between imperialist powers cannot be deduced exclusively from financial relations, since these, which are based on economic power, represent a series of concrete relations. But ultimately, relations between economic powers become relations between States, giving rise to a system of checks and balances. The concept of equilibrium, widely employed by Marx and Engels in analysing the international relations of last century**, is useful in representing the action of multiple economic powers acting via a multiplicity of States that objectively exist within a system of reciprocal relations. The action of economic powers on the world market brings about shifts and movements within politisai superstructures; such movements cannot take place directly, but only through the political super-structures themselves. In the field of world politics, this means through States.6

The article continues by discussing global equilibrium, a concept arising from the consideration that a relationship between only two economic powers, between only two States would not require a concept of balance for the purposes of analysis, nor would it be of specific interest to Marxist science in considering international relations. What is actually under consideration is the relationship between multiple economic powers and between a multiplicity of States, and to the complexity of economic analysis is added the complexity of an analysis which must of necessity focus specifically on effects such movements have on the system of States.

The Yalta partition was an example. Uneven capitalist development had halved the importance of the USA in relation to Japan, Germany and France, and it became necessary to clarify how much real substance remained to «the power relations formally established at Yalta»:

In reality, from the economic-power-relations point of view, the answer is: not much. Bordiga’s criterion, set according to financial power relations, is not much help in understanding the actual evolution of relations between powers. In order to extricate ourselves from this tangle of contradictions, we need to reset the focus onto the system of States and take up the issue in terms of the balance between powers.7

Only the concepts of the balance of power or ‘politics of equilibrium’ could explain that contradictory dynamic, and subsequently Cervetto sketched in bold the concepts expressed twelve years previously in his analysis of the «true partition»: the American power was supporting the relative weakness of the USSR, with the aim of keeping Germany and Europe divided.

Inter-State uneven development and balance of power – a specifically Marxist use of equilibrium theory – were key concepts in the formulation Cervetto developed of unitary imperialism. They are echoed in an April 1980 article, which was later to form the first part of the introduction to the book Unitary Imperialism. In the concluding section of this introduction, Cervetto rejects that there is any contradiction between the Marxist theory of imperialism and the balance-of-power theory. He also rejects the theory that the trend is towards organised bipolarism:

The State system can no longer be described in terms of balance, since there is no longer any chaos of powers to balance: the States are grouped around two poles, America and Russia. The world is no longer disorganised into a plurality of powers, but organised into two direct blocs by two superpowers, each with an atomic arsenal and forced to observe joint, agreed-upon rules in inter-State relations.8

* A. Cervetto. Unitary Imperialism – Vol 1. Reproduced in English édition Science Marxiste 2014.

MISSING!

** The 19th century.

Theory and the ‘strategy-party’

Cervetto was referring to theories typical of the ‘bipolar’ debate of the 1970s, but theories and ideologies closely associated with this had existed from the very beginnings of bipolarism. As we shall see, such theories heavily influenced the diverse meanings that clustered around the concept of unitary imperialism in GAAP’s internal debates on the issue during the early 1950s. Cervetto’s theory linked theory of imperialism, law of uneven development and equilibrium theory:

This kind of analysis, as we have summed it up, corresponds neither to the reality of the world system on the one hand, nor to the Marxist theory of imperialism on the other. The latter deserves the credit of having identified the law of the uneven development of capitalism which is expressed in the impossibility of the stable duration of two blocs frozen by two superpowers, amidst the decline of some powers and the rise of others.

The uneven development of capitalism leads to a dynamic of plurality of powers that in turn leads to a plurality of poles.9

In 1980 Cervetto’s conclusion was that, our analysis of the imperialism of the past decades had demonstrated that uneven development had not strengthened bipolarism, but multipolarism. As a consequence of the increasing complexity of competition, analysis of international relations required a coherent scientifically based development of equilibrium theory.

1980 was the start of the new contention that would do away with the Yalta balance. The new season was announced by the invasion of Afghanistan, the challenge created by the euromissile rearmament, and tensions in Eastern Europe and around the Euro-Russian gas pipelines. It is worth noting that Cervetto wrote of «development» of equilibrium theory – hence of deepening and widening this theory – and not merely a revision of it.

Every crisis, every war, every moment of definition in imperialist relations and hence in Marxism’s strategic vision, required such an effort. To study the genesis of the result of this theory, to link it with fifty years of Marxist analysis of international relations, to see the practical and immediate implications for the party’s establishment and for its political autonomy, means retracing the stages of the organisation’s development in the light of the history of the strategy it has formulated.

Chapter Two

THE FOUNDRY AND THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE

 

What forces were there for starting again, at the end of the 1940s? At the beginning of that road, you could count the core groups on the fingers of one hand: Genoa, its Sestri Ponente district, Savona, Rome. Of course, there were also Turin, Vicenza, Bologna, Milan, Bolzano, Trieste, Livorno, and a few sympathisers down South, but that was all it amounted to. Although there were periodic attempts at ‘linking up’ along the whole length of the peninsula, apart from the three Ligurian groups and the Tuscany-Lazio one, there wasn’t much more than a network of individual sympathisers.

The Savona group

Arrigo Cervetto, founder of Lotta Comunista and its undisputed leader until his death in 1995, was born in Buenos Aires in 1927, to a family who had emigrated from Savona. Returning to Liguria, he started work when still a boy, and in 1943 was taken on as an apprentice at the Ilva steel-making plant in Savona. The party archives contain a biographical sketch by Cervetto detailing the principal stages of his theoretical and political battle.10 Parts of this appeared in the 2005 collection Ricerche e scritti (Notes and Researches),11 which he wrote on the history of Savona and on the partisan struggle:

I worked at Ilva, on the night shift. The first night it seemed to me a real inferno, with all those machines that never stopped and the flows of steel that filled the factory with parks. I was afraid of falling asleep, because a lad who did had been struck by a steel bar that had slipped off one of the cars without his noticing. Another boy, from my neighbourhood, had been crushed to death by a casting ladle.

The experience of life in the foundry was the first decisive factor in shaping Cervetto, and the real inspiration for his historical research during the 1950s. It was to remain a sideline to his political thought: nevertheless it clearly reflects the ‘moral factor’ at the root of his political passion. What moved him was the idea of giving a voice to that anonymous army of producers who used up their existence within the walls of the foundry – the idea that was to become the militant battle for that class to have a revolutionary theory, to organise.

Years later, when I wrote one of the first accounts of workers’ struggles since 1861, I highlighted that the first spontaneous strike at the steel-making industry was one of protest and solidarity after a fatal industrial accident. Usually work was resumed after the dead were taken away, but on that occasion the workers downed tools. The bishop’s secretary, who was an expert in local history, told me that I had recorded historical testimony of a strike that had not taken place for economic reasons, but in the spirit of a precious Christian tradition. I replied that in this case solidarity was an antagonistic value, because it had been expressed for someone, but also against someone. In any case, I was well aware of all this, since I had lived it. Another time the historians of the Feltrinelli Library wrote to me because they found in my writing a class spirit that was missing from other, perhaps more scholarly, writings on the same subject.

The secret was simple: those pages contained what I had lived through. The dead boy, covered in the red dust of the foundry; my grandfather, seriously injured in the rolling-mill; the iron bar that took off one of my toenails; those freezing-cold mornings when even the sea seemed to be evaporating and those hot summer afternoons at Ilva. At last all the things of which official history takes no account and those workers who would never have a name or a voice would be able to make themselves heard through the thoughts of my brain and the words written by my hand. So many fragments of reality mingling in the dust of a million lives, scattered on the wind of time only to take form in my brain, take shape in my writing. I tried to be rational. I had no need of passion: their passion shone through it all. It was and is all my pride to be an instrument of revenge for all those fated to anonymity, all those alone in the material civilisation of a world which extols the individual only so that those few who matter will stand out. If, in this world, we remain only isolated individuals, we will never understand that we are the result of those millions who have gone before us, and that what we eat and wear, everything we use, is the fruit of collective work that has been going on for centuries.

Walk on the pavement and on the road; go up the stairs; switch on the light; make a telephone call; watch the television; listen to music: you are using not only the product of millions of workers at this moment in time but far more – you are using what has been produced by the millions who no longer exist. These people have left their souls in their work. The priest looks for the spirit in heaven, preventing us from seeing it here on earth, in the pavement under the soles of our shoes. What human beings make by their labour is immortal, and their immortality lies in what they have made. When the body decomposes, when the physical material of which it is made breaks down, human beings survive in what they have made, and this can never break down and disappear, because those who come after them need and use what this labour has produced. Without realising what they are doing, they carry it onwards, just as without being aware of it they carry within them genes millions of years old, and every one of their cells can only produce the new if the old makes it possible.

The labour of only a very few individuals is acknowledged and recognised. To only a very few is it granted to be remembered. The rest –almost all– ends up in the great communal grave of the human species. Yet, history is the past of that great communal grave. History, says Marx, is the story of class struggle. If we don’t look into the great cemetery, we cannot know what really happened. We will gaze only at the most ostentatious tombs, and never see the immense cemetery of the past. Who can know those billions of people who speak only through what they have made? And how can we hear their voices if we can’t listen to the beating heart of the productive forces?

I didn’t know all these things when, in that long-ago 1943, I worked the night shift at Ilva. But I felt them: they were part of my nature, of my life as a human being. Perhaps it was because there was so much of the animal in me that I succeeded in being to some small extent a human being. When, by reading a few Marxist texts and many history books I came to understand the material, I managed to give logical expression to what I had previously expressed in passionate confusion. Pages of the history of class struggle flowed over me like cool water. I felt as if I had lived them. I would walk along the street mentally addressing the thousand unknown characters in those pages. In the library I plunged into old newspapers and went on talking to all those who had made the street on which I was walking. After many years, I found my grandfather again. I had no money, but I was living the richest days of my youth. I was young amidst the old of the past and I was old amidst the youth of the present. And when I drew the first conclusions from that research, passion and reason fused into the pleasure of finally giving a voice to those who had had no voice in life. I was convinced they spoke through me.

The first «communist group» in which Cervetto found himself was entirely spontaneous: a group in the Villapiana neighbourhood of Savona, meeting at the local bar and boxing club. At work, impatience with the regime and the call to communism of the old PCI militants transmitted the first elements of politics to the youth of the neighbourhood.

Working at Ilva also meant being in touch with how the mood against the war and Fascism was gathering momentum. Along with this mood went the ideas of a vaguely understood communism. None of this was new to me. You could hear this mood expressed in the bars, it was quite usual, but it never took on any more exact political tone. People played cards and pool like they always did. As always in bars, the mood was mainly directed at how the game was going, but it was quite usual for those players who were Fascists to let comments that touched on politics pass with indifference. Basically, not many of us younger ones talked about politics for long. Along with a few others, I’d got together a communist group that had no contact with any other organisation; a restricted group, without any possibility of expansion, since it was based exclusively on friendship. I remember those young friends and comrades of mine, but some of them from a long way away because they didn’t survive; they fell on the hills of the Langhe*. Elia, Bruno and Pietro will never again feel the spring sun that warmed me during those days, the sun that today touches my memory of them. But I had years ahead of me to know Piero and Nino, to remember them more clearly. I’m one of the few still left alive of that young group who wanted to rebel against the world. But if you don’t have a lever to move the world, the world rolls over you, and we didn’t have the lever. We didn’t even think we needed one. We put our heads down and drove on with the force of a simple idea of communism – that of the songs of protest, equality, liberty.

Piero and Nino were Piero Parisotto and Antonio Bogliani, Cervetto’s first comrades in the true political sense. Parisotto, ‘commandant Moose’ in the partisan struggle, had been a member of the PCI Youth Front from 1943; in 1946 he left the party to move on, along with Cervetto and Bogliani, to libertarian communism. He became involved in the activities of GAAP, but proved unable to bear the harshness and disillusions of the postwar period, and committed suicide in 1953. Bogliani – partisan codename ‘Shadow’, Cervetto’s close friend and contemporary – was later to work at Servettaz-Basevi, a firm manufacturing ship-unloading systems, and would remain a militant revolutionary until his early death in 1973. Cervetto has left a vivid picture of him in his ‘Notebooks’:

One evening, in the spring of 1942, Nino and I were wandering along the main street of the city. The black-out was on. Suddenly, amid the silence of the few passers-by, bedlam broke out. Fascist shouts threatened truncheon blows**. Two men ran past us and slipped into a sidestreet, then stopped and began to sing Bandiera Rossa. Nino and I were a few steps away from them, so we joined in the chorus. Today it would be just a case of making a din late at night. At that time it was a challenge: a childish challenge, but not one that arose out of boredom. Voices and threats proliferated in the darkness, and the shoes of those eager to teach us a lesson started to run in our direction. Of course we took off, and when we rounded the corner one of the men was waiting for us. He patted us happily on the shoulder. We were even happier than he was [...] We went to Nino’s house, laughing in reckless stupidity. Nino had no parents: he lived with his grandfather, a retired dock worker. When we ran away from home to join the partisans in the hills, we had no money for the train fare to Ceva***. Nino ran back home and took half the stuffing out of his grandfathers mattress. We sold the wool to a lame money-lender.

“The poor old soul – his bones will feel it when he gets in bed”, I told Nino, and he started to laugh. Whenever we remembered that episode, we used to burst out laughing, even if years had gone by. Now I’m laughing alone. The old man died just after the war ended. I saw Nino die in hospital, and with him went a friend, a brother, a comrade, part of our shared adolescence, of a youth during which we bad shared the same difficulties, the same struggles, the same ideals.

It’s hard for me to recall this friendship without becoming emotional [...] It’s hard to understand how one forms a friendship that defies time. It’s even more difficult to understand what sort of emotion friendship is. Although maybe our friendship wasn’t so hard to understand. We were two boys on our own, with no money and no chance of getting any. When we had no cigarettes, Nino used to pick up cigarette ends, swearing, and roll me a cigarette. I was embarrassed, but I’d make fun of him; then he would grumble. He’d be critical of me, but then, as always, we’d start to laugh together. When be ended up in prison for a couple of years because of some loose ends from his partisan days, as soon as I got my first pay packet I bought tobacco and a jacket and sent them to him at the prison of Alessandria. I didn’t exactly leave myself without cigarettes, but I certainly smoked less for a while. I’d have picked up cigarette ends myself, that time.

When he got out, we used to go to an open-air dance hall, more to drink than to dance. There was a girl who was a friend of my sister’s, and he talked about her so much that I made a sort of proposal on his behalf. A little later they got married.

Nino was impulsive, a bit of a muddler, a strong and cheerful man in his private life. Only someone with his nature could have come unscathed through so many hardships and stayed an optimist with a hint of naivety. On first appearances he didn’t seem like that because he was a great grumbler, but then immediately he would tell some risqué joke. Basically earnest and loyal, he remained the boy who had helped me live through those hard years. We understood each other because we knew each other well. We loved each other because in struggle, amid ironies, illusions and hopes, we had grown up together. Those years have passed, and my friend is no longer with me.

Of the three young friends who fell in the partisan struggle, we can be certain of the identity of only one: Elia Sola, junior boxing champion, member of an autonomous partisan brigade, taken prisoner by the Fascists and shot in Carrù, Piedmont, in February 1945. Not much else is known about the young group from Villapiana, except that being part of the partisan struggle was as crucial for them as their experience of working life in the factory.

At least one other of this trio was either killed in combat or executed. Cervetto was wounded in July 1944. Parisotto was to commit suicide a few years later. Bogliani would spend two years in prison due to the convoluted events that followed the liberation of Italy on 25th April 1945. Those years were scarred by disillusion, even desperation, and painful attempts to make sense of all that had happened. Largely because of his links with workplace politics, Cervetto was the natural leader of this group.

Because of my readings, I was the politician of the group, and for years Piero and Nino continued to see me as such, with a boundless faith that was their most precious gift to me. They continued to see me as they had during those days of struggle, when trust was put in the man rather than in what he was saying – “Arrigo said so”. I was probably just stating the obvious, but this didn’t matter to them; they had faith in what I was doing, what I was saying followed on from that. When you’re risking your life, political relations get reduced to their essence. Everything depends on how you work together, everything comes out of what you think of each other. It’s hard to imagine just how much this sort of judgement is decisive, at times to the exclusion of everything else. In politics you pay for your mistakes during times of normality, but not with your life: faith can’t be as intense as it is in exceptional moments. Yet it’s precisely during these moments that character is forged, and becomes a permanent part of personality. Certain features become exaggerated. If you’re afraid, there’s no escape; if you’re indecisive, there’s no loophole; if you pull back, you can’t explain it away – you’ve pulled back. At that level of risk, when politics becomes action, relationships become hypersensitive and take on an almost animal instinct. Faith and mistrust are the two sides of this instinct. There are times when your instinct can let you down, but if you manage to survive it means that it’s been more or less useful – and anyway, you can’t rid yourself of it.

When the exceptional moments have passed, politics becomes rational, but even the most rational politics will appeal to the passions the more its struggle becomes out of the ordinary. In the political struggle there always comes a time when you pull out all your resources. This applies to the classes and their class parties.

Cervetto considered 25th July 1943 to have been his true political baptism. His close comrades remember the summer of 1993 and a toast – somewhat short on rhetoric – to fifty years of militancy: the plastic cups, the detached irony, and the simple gaiety of that anniversary contrasting with the parliamentary political catastrophes that were wending to their end in those months that ran between the fall of the USSR and Tangentopoli****.

Cervetto recalled 1943, in the contradiction between the instinctive passion driving forward the struggle and the impossibility of understanding the world events in which they were caught up.

I’d come off shift at Ilva and report the discussions Id heard and the informal contacts I’d had with older communist workers. For everyone, Russia was a mythical place, it was the dream. Nino, who exonerated everything, used to say that in that ‘paradise’ even the children belonged to the whole of society, not to the family. Poor Nino: he was an orphan. And after an hour’s dreaming we’d start to play pool or go spar with each other in the gym. So the evenings would pass, and sometimes even the nights, listening to American music or Radio London [...]

It didn’t take much for us to take to the streets on 25th July. From the Fascist militia barracks shots rang out. One woman fell dead, others were wounded. Guidocaught a bullet in the leg. It seemed as if everything was ending, but really it was just beginning. We were still waving leaflets. Soon, we would be wielding weapons. On 8th September the barracks were sacked; people ran to take away blankets, uniforms, boots, sacks of pasta and sugar. They looked like ants. The Germans watched us and laughed. We found rifles and ammunition. We were as happy as if we’d found the treasure of Mompracem*****. We thought we were equipping a rebel army, but what we got was a thousand excuses: nobody wanted them. So, amid tears of disillusion, my true political apprenticeship began. The dream lost part of its innocence and reality forced itself on me in all its brutality. We cursed everyone; we distrusted everyone. Those were black days of anger and isolation. Then they were over. Consciousness, and the recklessness of our youth, took over. We started to make light of things again, to convince ourselves that in the end it was better this way. We were a small group, we knew each other well and we felt ourselves to be strong. In fact, the only strength we had was our willpower. That was how we started to challenge the Fascists.

When I think about it now it seems unreal. If I hadn’t lived it I’d have a hard time believing it, because there was no logic to it. Yet during those months and in that working-class neighbourhood, a group of young men took it into their heads to challenge the Fascists, who’d go mad, shooting into the night and shouting “owards! Show your faces!” We’d laugh, thinking how the local butcher would find his shutters riddled with bullet-holes [...]

Ignorant of the real nature of that imperialist war, clinging to the myths that the dialectic of opposition for its own sake effortlessly produces, we were only leaves in the violent winds that were blowing throughout the world. With us or without us, those winds would have continued to blow. But passion, even if It’s just a leaf, endures. Passion is in the nature of humanity. Properly directed, it is a powerful political factor. Politics isn’t an academic exercise: politics is struggle. People don’t risk their lives for a mere political hypothesis. Only passion pushes you to risk all. Ultimately, passion is what wins the day. Petty politicians, with their scepticism and their intrigues, judging everyone by themselves, incapable of imagining that passion can move others, are destined to be swept away by the very phenomena they underestimate and deride. As long as burning social and political struggles exist, passion will drive the most active among the young into the night, onto the darkened streets of a working-class neighbourhood in an industrial city. When the dawn breaks, they must never again find themselves asking why the day is so different from what they had expected, and lose years of their lives in desperate study, as happened then. Since that time I have dedicated my life to providing this passion – the passion of my own generation and that of the generations to come – with political reasoning, strategy, and order-of-battle calculations.

* This area, between the regions of Liguria and Piedmont, was the base of major partisan units.

** The truncheon was a hallmark of the Fascist squads.

*** Small town in Piedmont, from which the two young workers try to bushwack.

**** The fall of the USSR triggered a transformation of the Stalinist PCI, which changed both name and loyalties to PDS (Left Democratic Party); in the early ’90s, an extended bribery and corruption investigation extended this transformation to all the long-standing parties in Italy which disappeared, and their political personnel were forced to find a berth in new political formations. The corruption system that was uncovered by these investigations was usually referred to as Tangentopoli (in English ‘Bribesville’).

***** Reference to E. Salgari’s The Tigers of Mompracem, a novel about a bunch of rebel pirates.

Passion disciplined by reason

We can draw two conclusions from these first steps taken by the Savona group – a literal «baptism of fire» in the tragic and exceptional circumstances of war, the fall of the Fascist regime, the Resistance, and the bitter disillusion of the hopes that had nurtured such radical choices. Cervetto’s final words on his understanding of that crucial, transitory period refer to the dialectic between «disillusioned passion» and «passion armed with reason». He describes the next five years as a tortured period, indeed of «desperation», spent in search of answers. The key to all these years was passion, to the point that Cervetto writes of preferring those who act, even out of the confusion of imperfectly-understood aspiration, to the intellectual cynicism that preaches to others of their duties. Passion armed with reason, disciplined by and anchored to theory, was also the key to the commitment to keep on keeping on that was so necessary to a militant in the long times of imperialist development.

The issue was to be publicly aired in 1957 with the clash over the ‘Theses’, rejected by the Movement of the Communist Left, the umbrella group to which GAAP had adhered, grouped around the newspaper Azione Comunista. The ‘1957 Theses’ foresaw that the «counterrevolutionary phase would last a long time»: it was essential to take account of the passions grafted onto a political tradition that proved unable to move away from fantasies of immediate revolutionary liberation, and did not want to hear that such fantasies, which misinterpreted reality, were damaging the revolutionary movement. Disconnected from strategy, passion became a blind alley leading to an ineffectual maximalism. Within the discipline of the strategy-party, it could become consciousness, and motivate a militancy that would work upon the long times of the counter-revolutionary phase. This is the thorny issue of psychological time, which Cervetto, reflecting on Leon Trotsky, was to resolve in his theoretical writings of the 1980s, and which during the postwar period was part of his political apprenticeship.

Five years to redeem the disillusioned passion of partisan militancy; five years that were not only the transition from revolutionary instinct to disciplined effort, but were also an initial reckoning of the why of the disillusion that had cost Parisotto his life. Cervetto notes that: the collapse of the myths intersected with a laborious theoretical and political search for why it had happened, and why the world appeared as a world of imperialist powers.

Never again a tool in the hands of others

This tells us about another fundamental trait of Cervetto’s psychology: the determination that matured within him never again to be used by others because he had failed to understand the nature of the game. Cervetto had nearly lost his life in the partisan struggle, and others really had lost it, aspiring to a ‘communism’ that had revealed itself to be a travesty of Russian imperialism. For his young group, this was the ignominy of Yalta, a small but real drama amid a colossal tragedy for the international proletariat.

The idea of passion armed with reason, which matured over a decade within the concept of a party that would include a ‘scientific laboratory’ – a strategyparty – had a second meaning, which Cervetto drew from his own experience and from that of his little group: it was a symbol of class defeat but also of potential liberation. Never again to be a tool in the hands of others: only materialist theory, Marxist science and Leninist organisation could establish this strategic independence for a group of militants.

Masini, attempting with alleged realism to avoid ‘small groupism’ by remaining set in the anarchist tradition, on the one hand conjured up a picture of a real movement that did not exist, and on the other ignored the actual forces – political forces in Italy, imperialist forces on an international scale – that were competing for influence over the working class. Masini was to fall by the wayside, while Cervetto would continue along his path, grasping Marxism and Leninist organisation as the handholds that would lead to autonomy.

In evaluating the partisan struggle, Cervetto was to reject the notion of the Resistance betrayed, partly due to having thought it through theoretically, partly as a result of his own direct experiences. One could speak of aspirations betrayed12 in the sense of those generically understood communist ideas that had motivated so many of the partisans. The objective reasons for the underground movement had to be understood, although such a movement had become inevitable – an elementary class defence – after the 1943/1944 strikes, the Fascist repression and the Nazi deportations. But it was also necessary to understand relations between classes, and international relations between the powers, in the imperialist war that had made the Resistance into the prisoner of Yalta.

Cervetto’s Ricerche e Scritti (Notes and Researches’) provides further material on this theme. Here we have limited ourselves to recounting the first steps taken by the ‘Savona Group’ a few months after 25th April 1945. The USSR mythology had even induced Cervetto to pick ‘Stalin’ as his codename in the Resistance: now, along with Parisotto and Bogliani, he turned his search to libertarian communism. In Savona the anarchist movement possessed a prestigious figure in Umberto Marzocchi, who under Fascism had been forced into political exile in France. He had fought in Spain, and then with the French Resistance. With the group ‘No gods no masters’ Cervetto, Parisotto and Bogliani would for a time be part of the FAI, the Italian Anarchists’ Federation, ‘Marzocchi’s lads’.

The Genoa group

The central figure of the Genoa group was Lorenzo Parodi. Born in 1926, he worked at Ansaldo Engineering and was co-founder of the party with Arrigo Cervetto. Parodi died in July 2011, after leading the «fortunate life»13 of a long-time militant.

Parodi too left documentation14 that helps us put together the history of the party; considerations on the first steps into libertarian communism also open Cronache Operaie15 (Workers’ Chronicles) his collection of experiences of factory life in the 1950s. The essence of these initial notes appeared in a commemorative article published as a foreword to L. Parodi The Suez Canal Company (Marxist Study Centre publications – 2011).

His* professional apprenticeship preceded his political novitiate by a year. It began at the Ansaldo Engineering works in Sampierdarena** in the summer of 1942, when the last push of the war was churning out the biggest batch of working-class hands. Bartolomeo Parodi, blacksmith’s mate in the forging section, tells his family about the demand for extra hands: his son turns up to fill in the Job application form that includes the question “Who is recommending you?” Answer: “My father”. Having been taken on, he leaves the little nuts and bolts workshop in Nervi*** where he has worked since the age of fourteen, and enters Ansaldo’s small machinery sector.

In the spring of 1943, for the first time, the apprentice hears talk of strikes. He is part of that moment of working-class spontaneity, involved in the discussions that take place regarding the role and the functions of the ‘shop stewards’**** [...] The problems of tying to combine the Fascist union officials’ ‘democratic recovery’ with the spontaneous outburst of the workers’ long-repressed rage become evident at the political crossroads of 23th July. At Ansaldo, the ‘shop stewards’ and the timekeepers are seen as class enemies, and are chased off the shop floor. The timekeepers’ worktable flies out of a window [...] It’s then that [...] the writer learns of a communism that’s ‘different’ from the Stalinism of the Muscovite church: libertarian communism.

After ‘8th September’ we find ourselves between the anvil of American bombardments, which cause the deaths of a number of my workmates at Ansaldo, and the hammer of the German raids to round up labour. One afternoon in the spring of 1944, the writer arrives at Sampierdarena for the two-to-ten shift to be warned by friends that the German dragnet has reached Ansaldo and is hauling in workers to send to Germany. Instant decision: to get back on the tram, return to Nervi and went to underground.16

War, factory life, the 1943 strikes, the road to the clandestine life in order to avoid deportation: all these were objective factors in the situation of a large part of that young working-class generation, during those years of exceptional historical circumstances. But to rebel against that situation, to choose struggle and class militancy lay in the character, the tenacity and revolutionary passion of those who chose not to submit. In the introduction to Workers’ Chronicles which Parodi initially produced as a collection of 1950s factory-life articles for Il Libertario and for Prometeo, he mentions his first steps in political life, from his early investigations into communist anarchism to his final political home: Marxism and the Leninist concept of the party.

Forced to go underground, in 1944 Parodi joined a group of comrades who had had to make a political choice – rejecting the line of national collaboration laid down by Togliatti as soon as he landed at Salerno from political exile in the USSR. The choice was libertarian and internationalist communism as opposed to the Stalinist obedience of the PCI line.

In Parodi’s words:

There is a libertarian and anarchist trade-union tradition in Genoa that goes back to the beginnings of the working-class movement, the peculiarities of the First International in Italy, the spontaneous reactions to the corrupted nature of the Second International, and from there to the characteristics of the ‘Red’ movement in the post-World War I period, when an important trade union centre such as that of Sestri Ponente was headed by the anarchist tendency.17

Parodi’s choice was linked to those traditions, but above all it «affirmed his rejection of Togliatti’s opportunism» along with the as yet confused notion of salvaging what could be salvaged of the class energies that had sprung from the Resistance:

The writer of these ‘chronicles’ had started with the idea of focusing on the positive experiences of the working-class movements various elements, and on the way realised that the first necessary element was the theoretical consistency of the science of revolution. He realised that since Marx had taken twenty years to write Capital, not much less time would be needed to completely assimilate and understand it. Finally, within a collective educational process, he was able to ascertain that, if Lenin bad had to employ the energies of an entire generation of revolutionaries to free Marxism from the mystifications of social-democracy, the same use of energies would be required from more than one generation to solve the same problem: to free Leninism from the mystifications of Stalinism.18

While working at Ansaldo, Parodi had become involved with libertarian communism through Vero Grassini, son of a historic figure in the Genoa anarchist movement, Emilio Grassini. When, in 1944, in Genoa Nervi, Parodi’s evasion of the German dragnet left him with no choice but to go underground, this led to a decisive meeting with Antonio Pittaluga, a joiner who from the ‘Bazarin’ after-work employees club had organised the first PCI underground cell at Nervi. Parodi recounts how:

He later broke with the party at the time of the Salerno turnaround. That wasn’t the road he intended to go down, Pittaluga told party emissaries: his compass was set for communism, not for some transformist landfall at the port of historic compromise with the bourgeoisie.

At his home in Nervi, Pittaluga organised a little centre of conspiracy that promoted that ‘different’ communism of which Vero Grassini had spoken at Ansaldo. When he left the PCI, Pittaluga got in touch with the Genoa headquarters of the anarchist movement. He already knew Emilio Grassini, who along with Vincenzo Toccafondo, a self-educated worker from Sampierdarena and a good talker in charge of liaison, he had invited to speak to the younger workers at a meeting at the ‘Bazarin’. The Nervi libertarians met in the evenings at Pittaluga’s home. They held group reading sessions (memorably Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread) and drafted The Seed, a little magazine typed on an ancient Remington with a right-hand margin that always had to be set manually [...]

The average age of the Nervi group was pretty low. In 1944 the oldest member was Pittaluga himself, at 31; the youngest was Parodi, at 18.19

Every member – six in all – of this group was committed to a basic work of conversion: «every member was committed to engage a circle of friends, and Pittaluga carried this out at the ‘Bazarin’ despite police searches». The group established relations with anarchists of the pre-Fascist era.

Antonio Pittaluga was killed in an assault on a German roadblock on 24th April 1945, and the rest of the group, also part of that action, were taken prisoner. They were released two days later, when the German forces surrendered in Genoa. Lorenzo Parodi was to remain the most active of the young Nervi group, along with Agostino Sessarego, employed at Aura, a company in the food sector in Nervi, and subsequently Mario Vignale, who worked at the Olcese cotton mill in Lavagna and later in the construction industry. These comrades were to be part of Lotta Comunista’s founding group, and would remain committed to revolutionary militancy for the rest of their lives.

An article in the anarchist weekly Umanità Nova in September 1948 brought Parodi into contact with Pier Carlo Masini. Within a few months Parodi had taken on responsibility for the political direction of tactics within the trade unions and the workplace activities of the group that would later form GAAP; in these commitments the distinction between the Genoa and the Sestri Ponente groups would vanish. In his recall of the party’s history, Parodi writes:

[...] Beginning in 1949 industriai restructuring with its epicentre in Liguria, swept over the country. Thousands lost their jobs. Business and industry intended to free themselves from the additional workers it had been necessary to take on for war-time output and move to new time-and-motion production systems on which to base wages. Genoa was in the grip of the ‘Sinigaglia plan’ for an iron-and-steel industry working according to an integrated cycle. The dangers of constructing an industrial site on the sea that this system required left in its wake a trail of dead workers. Who can ever forget the dead worker pushed through the streets of Cornigliano and Sampierdarena in a handcart in sign of protest. Both ILVA and Ansaldo were downsizing and our comrades who worked there were directly affected [...]. The nucleus of our organisation, which was just taking shape, was predominantly working-class, and active in trade-union issues. However, our organisation’s political action could not focus only on the extreme protests originating from the trade union activity within the CGIL.20

In 1951 it was the political clash with Stalinism, rather than the trade-union struggle, that led to the constitution of the Ansaldo Sampierdarena GAAP group. This process also consolidated the political relationship between Parodi and Aldo Pressato, who today is a leader of Lotta Comunista’s:

[...] we started to apply our tactics within the trade unions from about -. We developed this through the system of shop floor representation, standing for election to workplace councils and as departmental shop stewards, who were then known as trade union ‘experts’. During the shop steward elections at Ansaldo Sampierdarena, we were directly involved in a real political battle in our department with the PCI candidate. The result of the vote, 60 to 60, was an unpleasant surprise for the PCI activists, who had thought their party members would automatically vote for the PCI candidate, and who had bullied and tried to isolate us. The outcome was that the PCI cell had to acknowledge our representative. This was when our workplace GAAP group took shape, thanks to the contribution of our comrade Aldo Pressato and others mentioned in L’Impulso in 1951 as members of the ‘Third Front’ campaign. Over time, this nucleus was destined for important political developments as the forerunner of Lotta Comunista.21

* Here Parodi uses the third person when speaking about himself.

** Neighbourhood in the east of Genoa, once separate from the city and with its own local council, in which important engineering and steel works were concentrated at the time.

*** Residential neighbourhood in the east of Genoa.

**** Really ‘trustees’ placed in workplaces to represent the Fascist trade unions.

The Sestri Ponente group

In the postwar period the anarchist tradition was perhaps most firmly established in Sestri Ponente, a strongly working-class district of Genoa. The anarchist-led trade unions were big in a number of factories including Ansaldo Fossati (munitions), and libertarian communism had played an important part in the partisan struggle. According to Ettore Ricci, at the time a youthful militant, membership of the anarchist movement ran in families, thanks to the tales of the veterans of the 1920s, when the anarchists controlled the CGIL regional headquarters; and was later reinforced by the return of those who had fought in the Spanish Civil War or who had been exiled by the Fascists*. The memory of these experiences and of the partisan struggle was the main factor influencing membership in the immediate postwar period: as that emotional link grew weaker with time, contact with the movement decreased, with some sinking into passivity and others joining the PCI.22

The young Aldo Vinazza (-) worked at Ansaldo Fossati (munitions) where a group of revolutionary trade unionists was active. The most committed of the Sestri youth, Vinazza had an important role in GAAP’s core work of organisation and correspondence. In June 1950 he gave this account of how an area of influence previously considered to be solid and widespread was in fact rapidly crumbling.

In 1945 groups run by comrades of the older generation flourished throughout Liguria. The name ‘Libertarian Communism’ attracted many elements who were complete strangers to anarchist ideas. Personal respect for the main figures of the movement in Liguria was also an influence. There was intense verbal and media propaganda, with thousands of newspapers and pamphlets sold. Externally a lot of good work was done that was not subsequently developed properly by the movement, perhaps through a lack of capacity on the part of some comrades. The movement began to haemorrhage members.

At Sestri Ponente 100 young people and some 6 to 7,000 older ones were left at a loose end, their ideological certainties evaporating, with the euphoric activity of the first months falling off. Many began to move towards the PCI: the most active were the first to go.

In 1945 the Sestri group had between 600 and 800 members: by 1947 it had 325 adults and about 30 in the youth section: in 1948, 240, with 20 of these youth section: in 1949 184, and in 1950 126 all told. Numbers in the Voltri, Pra and Pegli** groups also only reached the hundreds, a good many of them in the youth section, and this was the case in the whole of Genoa and for all the other groups. In - there was a split in the Sestri group: around 20 revolutionary trade unionists led by Giovanni Mariani (subsequently to become secretary of the CGIL Sestri branch) formed a group that was later absorbed into the PCI. Those of the youth section who remained, and who had a reasonable level of political experience, began to acquire critical sense, to oppose the bureaucratic approach of the older members and the deliberations of the directive, their centrist positions and their paternalism, and began to work independently.

There were moments of bitter confrontation at Sestri between the older anarchists and the new generation Masini and Cervetto were addressing. But in terms of what influence their and other local internationalist groups could command in the postwar period, it’s worth remembering that during the times of underground struggle, and just after 25th April, the strength of the Stalinist PCI was too well-organised to be seriously challenged, as can be seen from Vinazza’s statistics on libertarian communism in Sestri Ponente. Such a rapid falling back on the prevailing Stalinism demonstrates the devastating damage inflicted on the revolutionary movement by the party’s historic delay i.e. the lack of an organised force which in that moment would have had the strategic and political clarity required to defend and consolidate a consistent working-class position. Even a network of cadres, had it been united by strategy, would have made a difference. By February 1951, when it joined GAAP, the Sestri group had shrunk to a handful from the youth section, and this was also true of the Savona, Genoa Nervi and Tuscany-Lazio groups.

* During the Fascist period, the police forced the regime's political opponents to live under police surveillance in isolated localities, very far from their normal places of residence and difficult to get to (islands, mountain villages, etc.).

** Voltri, Pra, Pegli: three neighbourhoods in the west of Genoa, once separate from the city and with their own local councils.

The groups in Rome and Tuscany

Pier Carlo Masini was born at Cerbaia Val di Pesa in 1923, making him three to four years older than Cervetto and Parodi. At first this was an important point: in 1948, when the young anarchist movement was drawing its first breath its members, most of them aged around twenty, came into contact with Masini as a twenty-five-year-old conference speaker and editor of Umanità Nova.

When in 1941 he began his studies at the ‘Cesare Alfieri’ Political Sciences Faculty of Florence University, Masini was attracted to the liberal-socialist group led by Tristano Codignola and Aldo Capitini. In January 1942 most of this group was arrested, and although Masini, then little more than a boy, made a number of admissions, these seem simply to have confirmed what the Fascist police already knew. Masini was later to write of this episode that his spell in Murate* had provided the political maturity he had hitherto lacked.23 Following his release from a sentence of political confinement, Masini joined the PCI and was politically active in Florence and in San Casciano Val di Pesa, his home town, where he represented the party in the CLN (Committee for National Liberation). His break with the party came at the time of the ‘Salerno turnaround’: Masini declared himself opposed to the Togliatti line, sent a letter of resignation, and was subsequently expelled from the party.24 He then joined the youth section of FAI, representing Florence at the Young Anarchists Convention at Faenza in 1946, becoming editor of the monthly Gioventù Anarchica (Young Anarchist) in - and then of Umanità Nova from 1948 to the beginning of 1950. The idea of a libertarian party as a working-class force with a political direction was clashing with traditional anarchism and its ‘anti-organisation’ currents.

Cervetto almost certainly met Masini for the first time in 1948, at a May Day rally in Savona, and met Parodi in the October of that year. In the ‘Notebooks’ he kept on the party’s history, Cervetto describes his relationship with Masini at the time of its politically consolidation, in the June of 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War:

PCM [Pier Carlo Masini n.d.r.] and I had great plans, as we sat at an outdoor table of a bar In the public gardens. The mar in Korea had just begun. In the heat of the June afternoon PCM read out an editorial that hinged on the slogan ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’. I liked that.

He told me that even a small group of young workers like myself could play a decisive role in the troubled future ahead, since the older generations had used up their energies on ideologies that mould crumble in the violent events of the real world.

We recalled historical precedents, particularly the 1914 watershed. There are times, said PCM, when a decided and strong-willed group with clear ideas can see better than most how much others are influenced by a thousand traditions and political habits. We have to work to get such a group together.

Cervetto is generous in his assessment of Masini, honestly recognising just how central his contribution was during those years: it was Masini’s knowledge of history that allowed that band of comrades to grasp Amadeo Bordiga’s theory and analysis without remaining stuck in the superficial inadequacy of his concept of political action:

Many years have gone by. PCM is now an acclaimed historian with a collection of prizes, a ‘bestseller’ – and we aren’t, as I joked to LP [Lorenzo Parodi n.d.r.]. PCM is a liberal democrat now. It’s been necessary for me to attack him politically, but I’ve never criticised him on the personal level, even when others were doing so.

In that long-ago 1950, he was undoubtedly the one who grasped the essence of my character, my level of experience, my determination. He didn’t flatter or encourage me: he often criticised me, as I criticised him. In a rational way, he drove onwards with all that should or could be directed towards a practical, concrete objective that might otherwise have never come to pass. I was urged on by his knowledge of history, which he expounded not along grand lines, like Bordiga, but in the detail – at times even biographical – that I asked for in order to be able to compare it with the history I knew.

I was clear that the world was dominated by unitary imperialism. Vercesi** and Bordiga presented it as a totalitarian monster, and I couldn’t see any way to get at something so powerful. Maybe you just had to wait until it collapsed under its own weight, I thought, but this prospect didn’t much satisfy my reason, and certainly not my passion. PCM said that Bordiga’s was the most acute analysis that the working-class movement had ever produced, but also the most ‘nihilist’ as far as action was concerned. We should take hold of that analysis as a weapon in our hands and go stubbornly on, with will-power and determination. History would teach us how to translate it into the real movement.

As PCM went deeper into the detail of his examples from history, I would come back down to earth from the clouds of theory. After all, eightyears ago I had started off in the same way. It had been a society of smoke and mirrors that a band of unready boys had been able to challenge: the same society – its foundations now undermined – that a youthful group armed with five years of thinking was getting ready to challenge again.

When we parted at the station, it was with a feeling of satisfaction.

In Cervetto’s ‘Notebooks’ comments on the meeting at Pontedecimo, we also find a personal and political sketch of Ugo Scattoni, militant leader of the Rome libertarian communists. Born into the working class in 1906, Scattoni was head of the Central Rome group, which at the end of 1949 joined Masini in the Tuscany-Lazio Inter-regional Committee.

There were around twenty of us at Pontedecimo, and most of us were just over twenty years old. The only exception was Ugo Scattoni, who was nearly forty. His Roman accent reminded me that the struggle wasn’t confined to the industrial cities of the North. He didn’t speak much, but when he did he brought practical sense into the discussion. I found everything he said worthy of consideration.

As the years went by we often found ourselves working politically side by side, and I had the chance to get to know him better and to understand why he had spontaneously won my respect.

At lunchtime I used to go to the trattoria he favoured in Via Ostiense and we’d eat together. We would sit among the workers in their overalls and order fettuccine and steak. Scattoni invariably cut his piece of meat in half, eating one half and making up a sandwich with the other half, which he would carefully wrap up in a paper napkin. He never spoke about his private life: he was very reserved and didn’t confide in anyone. At times I’d make him laugh by recountingfunny stories about political events or people. I was curious about this rationing of the slice of meat, and one day I asked him why. He replied that the second half was bis evening meal. He worked half the day in an artisan’s workshop, so as to be able to devote the rest of his time to political and trade union activities. On a half day’s pay, he couldn’t afford to buy a lot of food. Since I was used to this sort of thing myself I couldn’t really call it a lesson, but it was a practical insight into the life of a professional revolutionary. Scattoni was a workers’ delegate: you might find him on a day towards the end of February, on the outskirts of Valpolcevera*** hanging about with PCM, our only intellectual. Scattoni was truly worthy to represent the revolutionary workers of Rome. It was only from some comrades that I learnt his brother had been shot by the Germans in the Ardeatine Caves**** as a militant of the Bandiera Rossa partisan unit***** with which Scattoni himself had fought. fust before he died, Scattoni sent me a letter joining with our 25th anniversary celebration of the Pontedecimo meeting. He was ill, and couldn’t attend, but he wished us good work. I wrote the obituary for this friend and comrade of so many hopes and battles, and I thought of that trattoria by Ostiense Station and what this militant revolutionary, this member of the FIOM’s Central Committee and of our organisation’s National Committee, used to eat for his supper.

Although less detailed than the description of Sestri Ponente, an account dated February 1950 gives some idea of the Roman group. The attempt to start up a focused, federated movement had around a hundred sympathisers in the whole of the Lazio region. After 1947 serious tensions developed in the Rome-Central group as the exponents of the individualist, anti-organisation tradition rejected the activist, propagandising stance of the younger members. In an environment long used to a merely formal political adherence, the latter were feared because of their age and their ideas about anarchism: they looked to Masini, who arrived in Rome in 1948 as editor of Umanità Nova. But there were difficulties: from 1950 they had no headquarters they could use for political meetings and for organising propaganda.25

* Ancient Florentine monastery which became a prison towards the end of the 1800s.

** Pen name of Ottorino Perrone (see Biographical Notes).

*** Valpolcevera: industrial neighbourhood of Genoa that takes its name from a nearby stream.

**** Mass execution carried out in a disused quarry on the outskirts of Rome on 24th March 1944, in reprisal for an attack on Nazi Occupation troops. 355 hostages were executed, of whom around half were partisan prisoners.

***** A unit of the Rome branch of the Trotskyist Italian Communist Movement, which opposed the ‘Salerno turnaround’ and refused central party control. It took part in a number of actions against the Nazi-Fascist forces, and played an important part particularly after the Ardeatine Caves reprisal.

The strength of GAAP: ‘only a handful’

An examination of the available information on correspondence, meetings, and newspaper sales gives some idea of the dimensions of GAAP’s organisational strength and the extent of its sphere of influence.

Il Libertario had been founded in Milan by Mario Mantovani, long-time exponent of anarchist communism, persecuted for his politics under Fascism and a political leader in the libertarian units during the partisan struggle.

At the beginning of 1950 a collaborative agreement was reached under which Cervetto, Parodi and Masini wrote more than a hundred articles over three years for the paper: it’s estimated that by 1951 it was selling between five and six thousand copies per week.

Although GAAP promoted and distributed Il Libertario, it was not their paper. In the spectrum of anarchist positions, Mario Mantovani in Milan, like Umberto Marzocchi in Savona, embodied a ‘centrist’ area calculated to avoid a split with the Italian Anarchist Federation. In the activities of GAAP, Mantovani and Marzocchi saw the possibility for reviving the anarchist movement: conversely, the focused, federated movement of Masini and Cervetto worked towards separating the «historic centre» from the anti-organisational currents such as Volontà and the Adunata dei refrattari [Resisters] in an attempt to use the former network of relationships to reinforce GAAP.

In this sense Il Libertario’s 5,000 copies, rather than being a feature of a wide sphere of influence, indicated the circles towards which Masini directed his activities, with his notion of combing the anarchist movement for possible additions to the strength of his organisation.

The first number of the monthly L’Impulso sold 1,000 copies. From March 1951 it was published as the newspaper of the Anarchist Groups for Proletarian Action; in 1953 its format changed, and from being an internal bulletin it became a newspaper in the true sense, replacing Il Libertario, which in the interim had ceased publication. In 1955 L’Impulso was selling around 1,500 copies, with 400 subscriptions: around a thousand of the total being sold within the major political groups. The subscriptions are a good indicator of a tighter circle of sympathisers: towards the end of 1955 there were around thirty in Rome and Savona, and nearly forty in Genoa. There were also around twenty in Vicenza, Torino, Bologna and Milan, but this did not approach the organised activity of the four main groups above.

A further piece of information regards those who in one way or another came into contact with GAAP, whether as activists, supporters, or as those the activists tried to engage – around 500 people, a number not far from the total of subscriptions. From a sample analysis, the estimate is that nearly 60% were wage earners: 45% of these manual or industrial workers, 12% other.

Finally, there was the closest circle of all: the militants, the activists, those who always came to meetings. After 1951, this consisted of five or six people in Savona, around fifteen in Genoa, six to eight in Rome, about thirty in each of the four major groups: fifty to seventy in total over the course of a year. This statistic slightly underestimates those not mentioned in written sources, but not by much. Around 1951 a dozen people had formed the nucleus at the centre of activity and internal circulars were typed and carbon-copied fifteen at a time; at the second National Conference, held in Florence in 1952, there was talk of the organisation’s frame of reference amounting to about one hundred individuals.

5,000 – Il Libertario’s widest sphere of influence: 1,000 to 1,500 copies – the organised sales of L’Impulso: 400 to 500 – the closest circle of sympathisers and subscribers: between 50 and 70 activists: no more than 10 to 15 militants driving the organisation. There were just over twenty at Genoa, Pontedecimo, in February 1951. Those who chose to start again were only a handful.

Above: those who took part in GAAP’s third National Conference, held at Livorno in September 1953. There is no photographic record of the first two national conferences, held at Genoa Pontedecimo in 1951 and at Florence in 1952. At the back, standing, from left to right: Sirio del Nista (wearing a white shirt), Luciano Arrighetti, Achille Ferrario (jacket and tie), Aldo Navolini (obscuring unidentified participant), Pasquale Borgese, Marco Giacomelli, unidentified, Antonio Bogliani (in jacket and tie, under the word ‘Livorno’), Pier Carlo Masini, unidentified, Vanda Làzzari, Ugo Scattoni (in white shirt with braces), Vittor Ugo Bistorti, Lorenzo Parodi (jacket and tie), unidentified. Seated, extreme right, Alfonso Failla. The participant standing in front of him and wearing a check shirt has not been identified. Seated at the table in the middle, from left to right: Aldo Vinazza (in white shirt), Claudio Micco, Mario Filosofo and Arrigo Cervetto. Front row, seated, from left to right: Lorenzo Gamba, two unidentified participants, Aldo Vignale (centre, wearing jacket), unidentified, Piero Pagano.

Right: Sestri Ponente. The symbol of the libertarian communists, a yellow torch against a red and black back ground, it appears on a plaque situated at the entrance to the town hall to commemorate those who fell in the partisan struggle.

Chapter Three

LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM

 

An examination of the debate within the groups that were to create GAAP (Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action) gives a vivid picture of the problems that between 1948 and 1951 had to be slowly and painfully faced. Three major confrontations, progressively more serious, took place between Cervetto and Masini in the autumn of 1949 and again in the spring and autumn of 1950. As preparations were being made for the National Conference at Pontedecimo – from which GAAP would be born – debate on the nature of the organisation and on theories of the State and imperialism began to define the characteristics of the new political group, but also revealed the differences. The first step had been to look for ‘a different kind’ of communism in anarchism. Along this road Cervetto, with an ever-surer grasp, would raise the issue that had been first posed by Marx and Lenin: our militants need a theoretical base, and it’s to Marxism that we must turn: we need an organisation of cadres and we must study the State and imperialism: Leninism should be the base from which we start again.

Cervetto’s first letter to Masini is undated, but can be placed as written in the second half of 1948. It’s the letter of a young man introducing himself to the editor of Umanità Nova – probably urged on by Marzocchi: alongside the political themes there are allusions to literary interests. It’s worth reproducing Cervetto’s description of himself, since this is the start of a rapidly-evolving relationship and because the letter is unusual in itself:

I’m young and I’m always looking for something. I hope you can help me. I suppose I should tell you something about myself. I’m twenty-one years old, I work and I read. What does that matter? There’s plenty like me. You have to imagine a boy who goes to school, finishes primary, studies at technical college for two or three years, then starts work at fourteen, fifteen, because his family needs the money. Follow this boy as he works, through a stormy adolescence full of doubts, as he does stupid things and asks silly questions and takes his first steps into young adulthood. Around him is a world he doesn’t really understand, an ‘adult’ world full of pain. How can you understand the world, when you’re seventeen?

And anyway, at the time the world was all Fascism, war, uniforms, songs. To go back to this boy – he plays, he’s got his interests, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he thinks. His strongest feeling is for class struggle, for politics. It’ll be a hatchet in his hand through the jungle of life.

Some books – Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Maxim Gorky’s The Spy and The Mother, Cronin’s The Stars Look Down – you read as soon as you learn to, they’re books that shape you.

So this boy reads, he finds support for his aspirations, he understands that these aspirations are towards freedom, progress. He takes to the hills, becomes a partisan, suffers hunger and cold, shoots and is wounded, experiences danger, comes close to death. In that moment he’d like to pray to some god, but he can’t, he doesn’t know who to pray to, almost he prays to himself, because he’s alone with the responsibility of being himself. It’s not some kind of Odyssey, it’s just the story of a youth. It could even be my story. I was eighteen when I came home after a year as a partisan. Over the whole of Savona, across the red of the flags, of the headscarves and rosettes, enthusiasm for communism was spreading. It seemed like the start of a new era, all those hopes rewarded. We talked and drank together, we felt we were ‘comrades’. I joined the Communist Party, I went to all the meetings – the cell meetings and the secction meetings. I began to read Lenin, Marx, Engels, as well as I could. “This is the truth”, I thought. But it wasn’t enough, so I began to read Vittorini and the Politecnico. The passion for literature, still a passion with me today, began to take shape. My thinking was like a set of scales. The more I read, the more I felt my transient beliefs fall away. So I took up anarchism, more through emotion than through any ideological maturity.

Revulsion with the PCI had brought Cervetto to feel hostility towards any form of organisation – an understandable paradox. Now he was over that fixation and was convinced of the need for an active movement [...] armed for the struggle.

Reckoning with Bordiga

It took only a few months for the contact with Masini to become a working relationship. Masini urged Cervetto to read Bordiga, who had taken up a number of undeveloped anarchist theories; it had become a basic tenet of Masini’s – which can be found in his theses on the State at Pontedecimo in 1951 – that this part of Bordiga’s work could provide a core for a vanguard anarchism:

I’m sending you under separate cover some material drawn from Bordiga. In my opinion this school of thought doesn’t have any firm basis, but the ideas here go beyond Marx, beyond Lenin; they’re very modern ideas, with which we have to reckon. On the one hand, they identify elements which, borrowed from anarchism and correctly reassembled into theory, can be reintegrated into an anarchism for the vanguard: on the other, they’re free of all the authoritarian Jacobin-style inconsistencies and basic abstractions of Bordiga’s thoughts.26

In April 1949 the Italian Anarchists Federation held their national conference at Livorno. Cervetto found it a disillusioning experience: if anarchism goes on the way it did at Livorno, the day of its death won’t be far off, and personally I’m not going to its funeral. He asked for guidance: direct me to the work that needs to be done.27 It was the first sign of differences, although Masini was also strongly critical of traditional anarchism:

MILAN: a disaster. In Lombardy (and above all in Milan) anarchism is a back to front anti-capitalist reaction. The movement has not mastered the information on capitalist civilisation (dimensions, organisation, division of labour) nor on the unsuccessful revolutions against it (socialism, trade unionism, communism) – in a word, it has not reacted going forwards. In general, anarchist comrades religiously damn capitalism and the whole of the modern world. Or else they’re bourgeois who’ve taken up anarchism as a sort of society game.28

Cervetto was searching for a rigorously class-based concept: the anarchist movement, he wrote, must be the political movement of the proletariat or it perishes from its own contradictions:

Many of my comrades take me for a Marxist, though instead of distancing themselves they seem to draw nearer to my concepts. I’m happy about that, since for me Marxism is an inexhaustible fount of ideological riches. I could almost identify myself as a Marxist-anarchist. But Im not sure about this yet: I still have a great deal to read, study, weigh up and critique before I can adopt firm patterns of thought.29

The Kronstadt article

On 12th June 1949 Umanità Nova carried an article by Cervetto commemorating the Kronstadt rebellion*, put down by the Bolshevik government in 1921. Cervetto had discussed the article with Masini, who had suggested outlines and material and subsequently wrote suggesting corrections and additions. It’s unfortunate that the original draft is not available, because the published version reveals the co-existence of two theories that clearly emanate from two different authors. In the first part it is stated that State capitalism won because the revolution couldn’t or wouldn’t let go of the State and thus remained completely dominated by it. Stalinism didn’t begin with Stalin «but with Lenin, who believed that the State would ‘wither away’»: Stalin was the automatic consequence of the Bolshevik counter-revolution; he was the final product of the repudiation and the annexation of revolutionary power by the State.

Later, however, the article contains an acknowledgement that much energy and many anti-conformists were active within the State and within Bolshevism in ways that had revolutionary consequences in the conviction that «the State, if it could be liberated from bureaucracy, was the most appropriate means by which the best people, those who had distinguished themselves by their integrity (Lenin among others), could take a lead role»:

In short, a State that would be the political expression of the local Soviets and co-ordinate their economy, that would reflect and stabilise all the forms of freedom that had been conquered by the rank and file. This, plus the existence of an omnipresent anarchist vanguard, was why in - there continued to be a constant and intransigent revolutionary pressure aimed at restraining the power of the State: not, as official Stalinist historiography later asserted, in order to overthrow it, but in order to free up a space for creative capacities and their further development.

It wasn’t in vain that Lenin had launched the motto emblazoned on the banners of the October Revolution: ‘All power to the Soviets’.30

These two theories are worth keeping in mind, since already they embody the difference of opinion between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the claim that revolution and the dissolution of the State is a ‘simultaneous’ process: a formula that Masini was to borrow from the platform of the libertarian communism formulated in 1920s Paris by Peter Arshinov.

* The Kronstadt rebellion was a major unsuccessful uprising against the Bolsheviks in the later years of the Russian Civil War. Led by Stepan Petrichenko and consisting of Russian sailors, soldiers and civilians, the rebellion was one of the reasons for Vladimir Lenin’s and the Communist Party’s decision to loosen its control of the Russian economy by implementing the New Economic Policy (NEP).

The rebellion originated in Kronstadt, a naval fortress on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland that served as the base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and as a guardpost for the approaches to Petrograd.

I’m not an anarchist. Do I have to say it again?

The differences soon came out into the open, hastened on by Masini having to resign from Umanità Nova in the summer of 1949. «I can’t see myself as an anarchist», wrote Cervetto, and not as a Bolshevik, either [...] I’m isolated. And later:

I’m not an anarchist (at least while anarchism is officially understood in a particular way). Do I have to say it again? I’m just somebody who got interested in anarchism one day (I was twenty years old) and got carried away by it. After which I started to study and my enthusiasm subsided.31

Two weeks later, we get a nod in the direction of Lenin, more than to Karl Marx:

I never thought that Marxism, and above all Leninism, could be such a powerful weapon. Every day I find in it more food for thought, for my ideas and my studies. You emerge from it either as a fanatic or as a revolutionary.

The idea was that Masini and Cervetto could bring together two distinct contributions, in a new anarchism that would have won the battle against «bourgeois individualism»:

I’m getting close to it, helped on by Marxist and Leninist concepts (I mean, by examining and filching the historical instruments that these concepts represent): you by extracting, lifting from and breathing life into Malatesta. I don’t doubt that the point at which we meet will be fruitful and constructive.32

An initial confrontation

That was in the summer of 1949. In late autumn came the first spark, lit by a continuing discussion begun six months before, after the anarchists’ conference at Livorno. On 13th November, Masini’s attempt to organise a demonstration at the Spanish Consulate in Genoa against Franco’s dictatorship led to the arrest of a number of anarchist sympathisers. Lorenzo Parodi noted in his memoirs that the drive for ‘propaganda by action’ in Genoa had a lot to do with the tension evident in the subsequent meeting at Cervetto’s house in Savona. We can guess at an animated debate which left Masini in the minority, and ill at ease. «Next time we’ll talk in a cafè», he wrote three days later, «not in Cervetto’s room or in his kitchen, where the oppressive silence, the cold, the emptiness and the domestic environment won’t confuse me».33

The first lines of this letter read as if Masini wanted to use irony, even against himself, to dilute a too-stormy confrontation. He describes himself in the cold of the Turin train sitting in the corner of a third-class compartment with his head in his hands and his pencil in his hair, almost as if mimicking the debate of a few evenings before:

In three days I’ve declared war on you ten times, then ten times I’ve asked you for a truce.

There were recriminations about what had been said. For Cervetto anarchism is the petty-bourgeois ideology of the working class: anarchism is finished. Masini wasn’t an anarchist anyway and Cervetto was for a working-class State and for an authoratitive party. Eventually Masini proposed they come to an agreement, since Cervetto must stay in the movement.

It seems to me that on the ideological level we could agree to declare the failure of traditional social democracy, Bolshevism, trade unionism, anarchism. We’ll save anarchism to save ourselves. After that we won’t need it any more. Because right now it’s a clean banner and a blank page on which plenty can be written. Here’s how I see the future:

  • a) We declare the failure of the past (even ours).
  • b) We move on to form a new (anarchist) movement.
  • This timescale – years.
  • Then we have the historical perspective – decades.
  • c) We form a working-class movement.
  • Natura non facit saltus.

The debate went on for months along these lines, with Cervetto taking up precise ‘Leninist’ positions, while Masini seemed to be trying to retrieve as many of the youths as possible from the anarchist movement. The real theoretical dissent still centred on the interim State i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat; a year later, during the preparations for the Pontedecimo Conference, nothing had changed:

On the ideological plane, our positions correspond. We’re agreed on abstentionism. On the ‘party issue’ no one wants a traditional working-class party, nor the social democrats’ electoral agency, nor the Stalinists’ association of Italo-Soviet friendship, but something different, a type of meta-party.

There’s still the problem of the interim State. In theory, Cervetto agrees with my opposition to it. In practice, I doubt this.

But think about this, Cervetto: if we assume that the dissolution of the State in a revolutionary phase specifically requires the formation of revolutionary cadres, then in terms of their training it’s useless, counter-productive, to talk to them in the language of ‘dictatorship’, of ‘hegemony’ and ‘takeover of power’. This would constitute an immediate surrender to the idea of the State, a falling passively and sluggishly back onto positions of renunciation, of merely preventing counter-revolution. We need to aim decisively at non-State, concentrating all our forces on the revolutionary period, without exceptions, without postponing facing the problems.

In terms of what was to be done, Masini asked Cervetto not to take up a rigid position: the anarchist movement would be based on organisation, the best brains of Russian anarchism joined the Bolsheviks, but that was when Bolshevism wasn’t yet full-blown Stalinism, and at a time when the anarchist movement didn’t have the young members it has today, nor the ideas that are exciting them now.

At times historical analogy caused Masini to lose his sense of proportion: above, he seems to be saying that the anarchists wouldn’t have joined Lenin if GAAP had been around at the time. In any case, the new organisation was to be based on the inter-regional Tuscany-Lazio section, to be extended into Liguria and Piedmont as the Italian Anarchist Federation collapsed. Cervetto could have an important role in this and thinking about the ideological base could incorporate what he wanted in terms of clarifying the State-party-parliament problem, alongside a critique of traditional social democracy, Bolshevism, trade unionism and anarchism.

The tone of Cervetto’s reply was friendly without abandoning his point of view. He rejected the idea that his ties with the movement were loosening, but confirmed his position on a workers’ State and an authoritative party. He would remain in the movement to help the young, to prevent vital energies going to waste. We’ll stay, he stated, until we find a working possibility, and:

Masini could be one. Masini could be the non-anarchist who wants to be an anarchist, just as there are anarchists who want to do non-anarchist things. The thing is, Masini wants to take action, and in taking action he forgets this fact. And is he really so sure that anarchism is a clean banner, and the surest anchor for our salvation? For us anarchism is something more and something less. Understood historically, it’s an experience that can provide pointers, but that has to be rejected in its entirety. And in this it may be that we can come to a more solid agreement.34

On the issue of revolutionary power, the solution proposed was critical examination of the problem of the ‘State’. From anarchism, Masini had taken its properly political part, «the anti-State», wanting it to be a tenet for the Movement, but Cervetto saw no reason why this shouldn’t be at least open to debate. The tactic was to consider all possibilities, theory should be armoured, ready for anything.

The Arshinov platform

This explicit conflict, the first of a series that would define the relationship between Cervetto and Masini, deserves further consideration. The terms of their discussion on the theory of the State were those of the Arshinov platform. In December Masini circulated a typed translation: to his disappointment Cervetto found it inconclusive. A number of passages, which were to surface again as the conceptual base of the Theses on the State approved at Pontedecimo in 1951, confirm that this was the core of the clash:

Communists think that in their hands the State can become a powerful tool in the proletariats struggle. Anarchism believes that to be a fatal theory [...] in Russia itself we have seen how the State, albeit in the hands of the Bolsheviks, ended by taking an independent role and pursuing its own aims, how it became a base for privileged groups, restoring subjection and exploitation by force.

While communists think that the working masses possess only a destructive power, and entrust the constructive part to the State, anarchists believe that within the working masses lies enormous potential that should not be obstructed, and for this reason the State must immediately disappear [...] to be replaced by a productive network of workers’ organisations based on anarchist ideas.

Anarchists don’t want to take political power, they don’t want the dictatorship that leads to the rebirth of the State [...] but they don’t want to go backwards either [...] instead, the masses have to be helped to take the road to revolution and stay on it [...] this is why we need the leadership of the UAG (General Union of Anarchists).

In any ‘transitional period’ there would still be State coercion, wages, etc. Anarchists reject this line.35

Only a year had gone by since the first contact between Cervetto and Masini, yet already one can see how their relationship was changing. One factor was undoubtedly Cervetto’s personal maturation and his studies, in which he explicitly sought solutions in Marx, Lenin and Gramsci. But another factor, not to be ignored, was that Cervetto was no longer the youth trying to find his way in life, and Masini was no longer editor of Umanità Nova, looking for fresh talent. Somehow their relationship had become a completed and political one, with an organisational history.

Having broken with the Italian Anarchist Federation, which meant leaving the newspaper, Masini still had his project for the organisational development of the Tuscany-Lazio committee, and a bulletin, L’Impulso, which he had begun to publish from September 1949. But Cervetto in Savona also had his own group, albeit limited to six or seven comrades. When he had his discussion with Masini in the emptiness of his kitchen, Cervetto had brought along a young worker from Ilva. When Masini had explained his plan, which anticipated Cervetto as part of and important in an extended organisation in Liguria and Piedmont, he had a card in hand, but had to reckon with the fact that he was no longer addressing only an individual. True, he had ended on a firm note: That’s life, comrades. Think about it. But Cervetto could come back at him with the need for critical examination of the problem of the State, and in the plural: That’s life. Well, we can say that too.

The «little group» phobia

That discussion in Savona was the first step towards resolving the issue. But the picture, at the end of 1949, would be incomplete without taking account of a specific preoccupation of Masini’s, which he himself defined as a phobia about little groups. Below he writes for the first time about this concern of his, the implications of which will gradually become clearer:

I’ve got a worry that I need to get off my chest: I have a terrible fear of ‘little groups’. Ours is perhaps not such a little group, and in certain areas it has strong ties to a prominent and widespread movement. But this isn’t enough. We must remember that selection will open up big gaps in the movement.

There are 100 of us in the whole of Italy, and there’s a risk that it’ll stay that way. So we have to work on the organisational level [...] You have to take on not just an ideological identity, but also organisational strength . The province of Savona has 220 thousand inhabitants, the province of Imperia* 162 thousand.

That’s 382,000 inhabitants, and the recent census shows an increase to a total of 400,000. Until there’s at least 400 of us in these two provinces we’re just a laughing stock.36

We have already attempted to draw up a statistical balance sheet for the lifetime of GAAP. Here Masini’s hypothesis is an organised presence of one per thousand of the population, but he seems not to have taken cognisance of the difference between districts with a working-class population and the rest of the territory, nor does he explain how one would distinguish between an active core and a wider sphere of influence. It’s also important to be precise about the nature of Masini’s phobia. History and culture, as Cervetto notes, meant that Masini did not underestimate how much a «little group» could achieve – one example were those followers of Garibaldi who had strengthened the First International in Italy. Nevertheless, Masini was anxious that the movement avoid becoming isolated and turning into the typical little group an enclosed Marxist sect.

* A province in Liguria, situated between the province of Savona and the French border. The two provinces form the western half of the Ligurian region.

Between Gramsci and Lenin

Meanwhile, the issue of historical references to Marxism was still at the core of Cervetto’s studies. During the first half of 1950, studying Gramsci was central to the differences, but also to the developing collaboration, between Masini and Cervetto. A page from the ‘Notebook’ on the party’s history throws some light on this. Cervetto wrote that much of Gramsci’s work was unconvincing but nonetheless helpful since it set boundaries round and ordered themes, and sent me back to writers and texts such as B. Croce, A. Labriola and L. Einaudi, which I would then read in a more systematic way.

Even the notes on Americanism led me to read about American society in a systematic way, which had not been the case with my previous jumbled reading of American articles and fiction. Gramsci was a linguist and a philosopher even in the prison that became his grave. He taught me a method of study without my even realising it, in the world of public passions in which I lived and continue to live, in this beautiful county of sunshine and irrational emotions. During those years there were many who referred to Gramsci, but in fact there were few who really read him seriously, as I was doing. I really needed to do that: if I hadn’t, I would have been like all the rest. Some of Gramsci’s quotes sent me back to read – in some cases re-read – the classics of Marxism. In this way I was better able to understand Bordiga – albeit distorted by his ostentatious Rabelaisian style that irritated me as Ive always been irritated by gratuitous vulgarity – as well as Trotsky’s My Life and 1905, and Plekhanov’s Problems of Marxism.

When I had got my ideas clear I abandoned Gramsci. I met PCM [Masini] and lent him Gramsci’s work in exchange for the text books he had for the Political Sciences exam. My head was full of Machiavelli anyway, with having studied Gramsci – PCM’s exam text books couldn’t be any more difficult. PCM wrote an interesting tract highlighting Gramsci’s theory of a historical bloc between structure and superstructure. One day he brought me a history book belonging to one of his colleagues. I’d never have imagined that thirty years later Giovanni Spadolini would become Prime Minister.

The allusion to a historical bloc between structure and superstructure is worth remembering, since it was involved in Cervetto’s interpretation of the idea of socio-economic formation which he stressed during the early 1960s. For the moment, his study of Gramsci was part of his research on Marxist method in those first months of 1950:

One can synthesise: G. the philosopher + G. the historian + G. the politician + G. the sociologist (a new sort of sociology, nothing commonly understood by that word). In fact, rather than sociology Gramsci’s is a philosophy of praxis as applied to economic analysis, history, folklore, culture and morals – the city and the countryside, issues such as the South, Americanism, Fordism. Unlike the laws of the positivist sociologists, Gramsci uncovers the nature, the hidden corners of a society, a class, a country. He identifies the features of modern civilisation, traditions, ‘common sense’. In short, like a Gramsci plus a Lenin: the theoretical precision, intelligent research, ideological ability and method of study of the one plus the tactical and organisational genius, the severity, the politicisation of revolutionary will of the other. If we could purge Gramsci of some tendencies he shares with Croce, if we could disconnect him from a nationalist interpretation (which he inherited from Marx and Labriola, right up to Stalin as ‘theoretician of the national question’) we would have the revolutionary thinker, the new thinker of modern collective civilisation.37

Working towards a new Leninism

Many of these assessments would be reviewed in the years to come: paradoxically, the Gramsci of the debate on Italy would prove the most useful in drawing out the various threads of national political thought and in reconstructing the Italian ‘moral factor’. In Gramsci, Cervetto appeared to be seeking the tools for understanding the characteristics of change and modernisation, though already he also seemed aware that Gramsci’s eclecticism, while widely useful in a variety of areas, could not provide a solution in terms of revolutionary practice. Conversely, in Lenin Cervetto sought the theory for a party equal to an era of imperialism, a coherent system that could not be used by the enemies of the working class:

Lenin was something else entirely. He was Political Man par excellence, power was the whole goal of his life, he formulated action out of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Lenin was the creator of Marxism for the age of imperialism. Take that away and there’s nothing left of Lenin. Gramsci’s work is fragmented, anybody can plagiarise it (even the haute bourgeoisie applaud his Letters at the Viareggio prize-giving*); he writes for everybody, his researches are for everybody, at times you might almost say that he lays the basis of a Marxist humanism. Lenin doesn’t do that: Lenin works for Leninism. I’ve often asked myself, if you took away parts of Lenin’s work, what would remain? The fragments of the Leninist machine wouldn’t be good for anything.38

It’s no coincidence that Masini’s reply involved a precise statement that points up his differences with Cervetto:

You say “use Gramsci”. I say “integrate Gramsci” [...] I believe that the working-class movement should take in all practical and theoretical experience, not to make some kind of concentrate of them (Gramsci and Malatesta, Lenin and Luxemburg, Gorter and Trotsky) but to take account of them in formulating our platform today.39

It’s almost superfluous to note that this debate on theoretical sources was another facet of the differences driving Cervetto and Masini apart. The issue raised its head again in relation to an article of Masini’s for Piccola Enciclopedia Anarchica (the Anarchist’s Little Encyclopedia) which focused on the theory that without organisation and leadership the working class is defeated. As far as Cervetto was concerned, anarchism had failed and the thing was to work towards a «neo-Leninism»:

But don’t you think that the further we go in this examination of history, nothing is left of anarchism? Historically anarchism, even when it was a class movement, represented the instinctive rebellion of the working class. I believe that our reason for existence is to be a neo-Leninism with alternative objectives: a perfected and critical Leninism. The rock on which we could founder is the same as the one that made Lenin write State and Revolution: the practical issue of power (not metaphysical, nor authoritarian, but practical, and vital for safeguarding a Revolution). I think we’re heading in the right direction to navigate past this rock. If we can find the formula for ‘a new kind of power’ we’ll have won an important theoretical battle.40

Lenin was the whole point: in fact, Cervetto weighed in against Masini’s tendency to widen the field of reference:

But we should we careful not to fall into Luxemburgs rigidly Marxist ‘democraticism’ or into Gorter’s ‘council communist’. We need to get beyond that, because Lenin was right when he criticised them both [...] I believe that Luxemburg and the council movement constituted a sort of ‘resistentialism’ within Marxism, only more honest than that, more concrete and useful. But politically Lenin was right. It’s useless, even dangerous, to lull oneself with a ‘workers’ democracy’ mysticism. We have to resolve the formula ‘All power to the Soviets’ in a practical sense, which is to find a theory for a mechanism of political representation that would go beyond both the State (the traditional bourgeois mechanism) and the dictatorship of the proletariat (the State-Commune, the highest point of Leninist thought).

By the term ‘resistentialism’ Cervetto meant the individualist and anti-organisation current within Italian anarchism. His letter then went on to state a somewhat rash intent, as we shall see later:

We have to go beyond Lenin. We’ve had twenty-six years he never had. We need to resolve the issue of power, get beyond Leninism’s precarious young maturity, putting out of our minds the legacy of a senile anarchism. How can we do it? Listen, this will be history’s test for us, the frontier from which a new road begins [...] either that, or we fall back into Utopianism, bourgeois ‘realism’, the calamity that is the State.

* A famous Italian literary prize, set up in 1929. Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison (first, incomplete edition) was awarded the prize in 1947.

The second confrontation

The clash during the Italian Anarchists Federation conference proved to be the start of a second round of debate as to what tactics to adopt in relation to the anarchist movement. Two major differences had emerged since the time of the first confrontation in November 1949. Cervetto had become more precise, in terms of action as well as thought, and now his communications were addressed not only to Masini, but also to Vinazza and Scattoni:

I’m going to speak to you frankly, even crudely, without veiled allusions, the way every revolutionary should speak. What’s happening now had to happen, it was natural for it to happen. We’d got it into our heads to revive a political corpse (anarchism) that historically had accomplished and outlived its function as the political infancy of the working class, We wanted to renew a Movement that history had already condemned to death – that’s what we were working for. What was the result? We managed to retrieve from anarchism the best energies, the strengths that couldn’t be allowed to die with it. So we can say that we’ve partly done our duty. Today, continuing to work in this particular way, we have come up against the kind of anarchism that can accurately and historically be so labelled, since it is chaotic, anti-organisation, anti-society, individualist and petty-bourgeois. I repeat: it was natural that this should happen, because we were going against anarchism’s basic principles, all the unilateral theories of anarchism, of political struggle, of political movements, the claim that one need only re-read Bakunin, Malatesta and then Lenin in order to see how fundamental a part the first two were of Leninism, etc. In other words, maybe without realising it, but because we had set out on the right road, we, and our Marxism, reached the point of fighting against anarchism, because if we were going to fight as sincere revolutionaries that was the only thing we could do. If you examine anarchism and Marxism closely, you’ll be convinced of this.41

Cervetto felt his perceptions were confirmed by his encounters with young communist intellectuals, and ended by stating his belief that Marxist-Leninism, in its modern [Gramsci’s] interpretation is the ideology, the only revolutionary ideology for the working class, whether industrial or agricultural.

Anti-State, anti-Parliament and anti-Party were concepts from anarchism that should be preserved, but should also be seen as part of the political development of Marxism. The immediate tactic should be to carry on as long as possible within centrism and Mantovani’s Libertario, while attempting to convince as many as possible that there was an alternative:

Meanwhile we need to work hard. We need to form a minority with a direction, theoretically well-prepared – we need to critically study Marx, Lenin and Gramsci to reach our conclusions [...] We need to get to the point where we become a minority that while splitting from the anarchist movement is capable of inititating an effective piece of work, so that we don’t end up as have so many groups on the Left.42

The discussion, widened to Vinazza and Scattoni, had become more important, was no longer merely an exchange – even a fairly robust exchange – of ideas, nor was it any longer a matter of clarifying ideas between the Savona group and Masini: Cervetto had also extended it to the Sestri and Rome groups. Cervetto was aware of this qualitative change, and kept Masini informed:

I’m also sending this letter to Scattoni and Vinazza. I have to be open about my position with these closest comrades. Ideology isn’t contraband, to be secretly smuggled in: it has to be clearly stated. Politically Marxism will be disadvantageous. But if our militants are going to study they’ll have to study Marxism because only from here can they understand the subtle distinctions Pm starting to draw politically. Believe me, in Marx, Lenin, and especially in Gramsci, I’m finding original themes which, if we develop them collectively, can provide a structure for the ideology of a mass revolutionary movement».43

All three replies [Masini’s and Vinazza’s on 18th April, Scattoni’s on 22nd] were negative. Masini repeated the line he had taken the previous November, writing that his immediate thought was «the same old hysterics, the same doctrinaire self-indulgence: and at a time like this!» And his actual reply to Cervetto is sharper than in November, perhaps taking account of the negative vibes from Sestri and Rome. As to «that plan», the one detailed by Cervetto «we were already agreed» wrote Masini, going on the attack:

a) We must critically filter all theoretical and practical experiences of the working class: from Marxism to Leninism, from trade unionism to anarchism, from Spartacism to the communism of the councils.

All theoretical and practical experiences: the differences between Masini and Cervetto as to which theoretical texts should form the base of the movement were not just superficial. By widening the field of reference Masini was placing all theoretical contributions – including Marx and Lenin – on the same level. By limiting the field of reference and clarifying that between, say, Lenin and the communism of the councils Lenin was right, Cervetto was establishing a hierarchy between the theoretical sources that placed the Bolshevik experience at the highest point the working-class movement had yet reached.

b) no matter what the label, we have three firm principles: we are anti-State, anti-Parliament and anti-Party but only insofar as helps us to reach the most advanced point the working dass has yet reached (number one, the Russian Revolution: number two, the Spanish Revolution);

c) in Italy – not just because of our own circumstances, but primarily because of the existence of a strong tradition – we should take anarchism as an organisational but also historical (or, if you like, prehistorical) base.

In Italy, up until today and in spite of its weaknesses, anarchism is the only working-class movement that has survived. The rest are in the gutter. I’ve read Labriola’s letters to Engels. When all’s said and done, maybe he mocked the anarchists but he didn’t hate them: he hated the Italian social democrats (and he comments that ultimately the anarchists were ‘communists’ and he was right, even today Piombino’s anarchists, who are the most extremist of organisations, are basically ‘communists’ to give one example). Now we’d need to have a long discussion as to the decisive importance of tradition. A reading of Gramsci, who’s so sensitive to this problem, should help you remember.44

In the abstract, Masini was flexible about the future shape of the movement: they should pay attention «to the content, not the container», they should be preparing the content of the anarchist movement and a certain amount of disenchantment couldn’t be discounted. But the content would remain even if the container was emptied: Lenin hadn’t been afraid to empty social democracy of «its rotten elements», etc. The central issue remained – Masini held the anarchist tradition to be vital, and was convinced it could be transformed. In a sense, it’s true that this does distinguish his position from Cervetto’s, but it’s also true that, as Masini said in an interview following Cervetto’s death: «I wasn’t properly an anarchist either».45

The road Masini subsequently took bears this out: joining Pietro Nenni’s autonomist PSI (Italian Socialist Party) in 1958 was basically not so different from that of bringing anarchism back into politics, in the sense of retrieving a working-class traditional movement in which anarchism and socialism had grown from the same stock and in which the alien element was the PCI’s obedience to Stalinism. In fact, when that tradition escaped Russian imperialism’s Stalinist influence, it ended up being influenced by Italian and European imperialism.

In that second clash, in 1950, it was clever of Masini to remind Cervetto of the importance Gramsci had placed on tradition, primarily because this importance had a very real basis. Cervetto was to return to this issue in later years with his reflections on psychological time, reflecting on what Marx had said about tradition as a «fact» that weighed on the minds of the living.

The question was whether this ‘fact’ had been correctly understood. Masini over-estimated it; he failed to sufficiently distinguish the different factors that came together in anarchism, how the ‘nihilism’ of the individualist and petty-bourgeois strands ended by paralysing the movement’s real working-class content. Most importantly, as could be seen as early as 1951 with the ‘Third Front’ debate, sympathy for anarchism, as indeed for all the various currents of the working-class movement, could not be isolated from the ever-increasing realities of imperialist currents. The claim for total autonomy was a central preoccupation of Masini’s, but anarchism – his romantic version of this autonomy – was vulnerable to being swayed by forces he did not see, or was not in a position to estimate.

In the spring of 1950, Vinazza and Scattoni similarly replied along Masini’s erroneous line; Masini had invoked tradition, and Cervetto was to learn just how heavily that weighed.

Vinazza wrote:

I’ll be clearer: I want an ideological and organisational renewal of anarchism, an adaptation to tactics that are correct for this period, for a movement that for me is still what it always was.

I don’t want to take ‘the good’ out of anarchism in order to bring it into an ideology (Marxism) that according to me can’t be renewed (even if it does contain indisputable truths). A while ago, in Sestri, you told me that Marxism hadn’t been put in place in Russia: I’ m convinced that it has.46

The same went for Scattoni, who drew on Gramsci for his evaluation of ‘tradition’ and quoted from notes on Machiavelli: We feel solidarity with those who have now grown old: for us they represent the past that still lives alongside us, that we must acknowledge and reckon with, that is one of the factors in the present and the threshold of the future. Scattoni, too, believed it was important not to separate from anarchism:

It doesn’t seem to me that what we’re saying is an integral part of Leninism, but I think that Lenin often drew on anarchism (his speeches at the start of the revolution, at the beginning of the peasant problem, etc).

[...] Once we’ve got a trained minority, I don’t think we’ll need to split from the movement, if it’ll be all the confused part of it that’ll split off, because it won’t be geared up to a process of change, it’s just something that’s hung about for a long time.47

Cervetto’s reply kept going back to the point that Masini, in the final analysis, had evaded: how to train militants, what texts to use to give them direction – how to meet the requirements demanded by practical political work:

Why are we always debating the same issues? I understand the importance of tradition, among other things. What I don’t understand is what material we are to use to train our militants. Since militants need to be prepared, and since they don’t have time to search through hundreds of books – because they have to be political activists, not intellectuals – I tell them to concentrate on Marx, Lenin and Gramsci (a selection of about twenty books of these authors make up the militant’s essential bibliography, and are easily obtainable). This is my Marxist orthodoxy: I can’t tell them to read Bakunin or Malatesta. Training has to be based on Marxism, so that they can acquire Marxist concepts that will help them oppose petty-bourgeois anarchism. This is the whole problem of educating militants, and not only militants, but those young people who contact us asking what they should study.48

As Cervetto pointed out, it was paradoxical that this ‘little group’ should be even further restricted by the attention focused on the anarchism debate. Within the Peace Committees we’re finding elements who want our material. It was one thing to fight within the anarchist movement, quite another to engage in political work: I think it’s more useful to employ our energies outside than within it.

The issues that were surfacing: working with the masses, propaganda material, the need for a regular scientific publication – would only be resolved over the following decade. Masini’s solution to the above, although coming across as somewhat convoluted, demonstrates that Cervetto had hit the nail on the head with his practical questions. With a touch of irony, Cervetto had rejected the accusations of «doctrinaire self-indulgence» («oh, these Marxists, always wanting to go back to what Marx actually said»): Masini tried to offer him a middle ground of practical compromise. On the theoretical level it was perhaps slightly less than the «critical examination of the problem of the State» which had closed the last debate, perhaps slightly more in that it explicitly acknowledged that the issue of political activity while lacking a clear theoretical direction was still unresolved. However, what Masini had grasped was the practical importance of consolidating a national organisation to be used in the future:

If I spoke of ‘doctrinaire self-indulgence’ it’s because I’m more Flesh than Word. But in that flesh I’m still very much aware of both the theoretical and the practical problems. Today my main preoccupation is a practical one: how to build the material core, the practical instrument for our theory. And this core, this instrument, has to be made up of a national organisation, no matter how small. What I think is that for thirty years hundreds of heretical variations rose up against Bolshevism and were all defeated because they had no historical core to support them. Hopefully, we’re about to work this miracle: for all these reasons, anything that looks like a lack of patience (even if it’s not) grates with me, or, if you like, embarrasses me.49

The issue was a very real one, and differences widened over how to consolidate that material core. Masini was agreed on the need to have written material for militants and others, but was cautious regarding Marxist texts: Marx on materialism, maybe, and a history of Leninism but not actually Lenin: no Marxist texts for those outside the movement – it must be our interpretation of Marx [...] our interpretation of the whole history of the proletariat.

Masini’s estimate of the movement’s current condition also opposed Cervetto’s position on the need for external work rather than internal focus: until the other regions had reached the levels of Liguria, Tuscany and Lazio, Masini explained, I intend to concentrate my efforts inside the movement. On another occasion,50 Masini stated that only Savona was in a fit condition to carry out external work, a series of contacts in the PCI sphere of influence. The debate also reflected the fact that the Liguria and Savona groups were developing differently from the others, and in addition there was a division of roles, with Masini tending to concentrate on relations with the anarchist movement. Masini voiced the above assessments during his trips up and down the peninsula to link up the various groups: in 1954 this task would fall to Cervetto.

The difference in development is confirmed by a June 195051 report on the Savona group, which suggested that all the GAAP groups should organise political propaganda and outreach work based on Libertario. In Savona a core of activists managed to guarantee a regular sale of 300 copies per week: from Sestri Ponente Aldo Vinazza reported 130 weekly sales.52

Savona put pressure on all the groups to plan for this organised distribution of the newspaper. Cervetto clarified that this activity, widened to include the PCI’s sphere of influence, was carried out essentially as communists eschewing all anarchist mysticism. It can be seen how this sort of urging contributed to provoking a further reckoning between Cervetto and Masini, the third in the course of a year.

A stumbling block: the «simultaneous withering away» of the State

In relation to this, it may be useful to mention an exchange of letters over the summer of that year between Cervetto and Livio Maitan, an Italian exponent of the Trotskyist groups affiliated to the Fourth International of Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo. In an early letter, Maitan replied to Cervetto’s requests for his assessment of Gramsci, Trotsky, and some of Tasca’s theories as reproduced in Pannunzio’s Il Mondo (The World). Maitan produced some well-balanced replies: in your letter, he wrote to Cervetto, there are passages that make one think you are an adherent of Marxism but other of your statements seem to exclude it.53

Also interesting is a reply, in July 1950, to two questions put to him by Cervetto:

1) Stalinism persecutes Leninism and Marxism, and has been made possible by a core of opportunists grouped round the concept of the State; 2) a revolutionary opposition to Stalinism must be based on a radical critique of the Marxist theory of the State.

Maitan’s response to this question of continuity between Lenin and Stalin was cast in the Trotskyist ‘centrist’ mould: there is no continuity, yet Stalinism is credited with having a twofold nature – it is counter-revolutionary towards the proletariat but it «transcends» the rule of the bourgeoisie. His reply on the issue of the State is more balanced, highlighting the stumbling-block of the simultaneous withering away of the State which Cervetto was unable to avoid as he prepared his theories for the Pontedecimo meeting:

The anarchists’ fundamental error – and in this you seem to be basically on the same lines – is to make of the State a fundamental cause, a sort of Holy of Holies. In other words, according to you the State is the ultimate cause of all the ills of society, whereas in reality the State is only a subordinate cause. In fact, Marxism tells us that the fundamental cause is class division, and from class division derives the need for the State. It’s true that the State, in its turn, becomes a source of ill, but – I’ll say it again – only as a secondary, not as the primary, cause. Do you think that the State is the cause of class division? And do you realty think that the State is a primary cause? If you do, you have to answer the question: why did the State come about? And then you have to find a reply that’s different from the one Marx found – that the State came about as a tool of oppression for the use of the ruling class. From that concept, it follows that the State can only disappear when class divisions are eliminated. You must know that what you define as your goal (‘anti-State’) is also the ‘goal’ of Marxism, with exactly this theory – that in the communist phase of society the State will become extinct. The disagreement is about how we can get to that point.54

This part of Maitan’s reasoning is irreproachable and is a correct exposition both of the materialist method and of Engels’ theses in Anti-Dühring: it was mainly socialism of the ‘soapbox’ variety that viewed the power of the State as the prime cause of the violence imposed on society. In addition, Maitan did not shirk from going back to the core question that had been posed in 1917 for ever after: how to organise in order to defend the revolution and ensure the redistribution of wealth.

Maitan and Cervetto would meet again, at the Genoa meetings held to assess potential support for an ‘Internationalist Front’ (to be detailed in the next chapter). It’s worth noting that throughout the pair’s future contact, mainly in attempts to unite the ‘communist left’ around Azione Comunista (Communist Action) Maitain would carry with him a twofold reputation: correct as to Marxist principles in relation to the State, confused but confident as to the social nature of Stalin’s USSR.

The third confrontation: the «issue of imperialism»

In mid-August 1950, at a meeting in Florence, it was decided to begin preparations for a national conference in February 1951. Although the venue was not immediately decided, this was to be the Pontedecimo Conference, at which GAAP would be born. A letter of Cervetto’s dated the end of August praised a study of Masini’s on Gramsci’s concept of a «historical bloc», and added an exacting observation on Masini himself:

I knew that G. [Gramsci] would have been an important step in your development, ‘correcting’ and ‘widening’ your outlook. And up to a point it will help you get rid of a certain residual schematism that you sometimes quite comfortably make use of i.e. the issue of imperialism and my position on it, which, let me tell you, is instinctive.55

Further on, in a long paragraph on the importance of Gramsci, Cervetto maintains that Gramsci’s thinking helps to seriously tease out a solution to the problem of ‘imperialism’. We have already noted that at this time Cervetto was overestimating the contribution Gramsci’s theories could make to the group’s theoretical problems, but it is also very clear what was driving Cervetto to do this.

He was searching for a Marxist – but not Stalinist – hook, a conceptual tool for an understanding of the ‘new’ imperialism and the USSR issue. In September, preparing his theoretical presentations for the Pontedecimo conference, Cervetto was searching for principles that would enable him to get round the schematic notion of unitary imperialism as formulated by Masini. It can be said that in Gramsci Cervetto was seeking a dialectic, and thought he had found it in the idea of the historical bloc.

Throughout the autumn of 1949 and the spring of 1950 the Cervetto-Masini debate continued to grapple with such issues as the nature of the anarchist movement, the issue of the State, and Cervetto’s propensity to seek a leading theory for the movement’s militants in Gramsci and Lenin. Over the summer and autumn of 1950 their discussions centred more on the question of imperialism. The salient feature that comes up again and again, in relation to the instability of a local group or the defection of some militant, is the belief in the decisive role of theoretical and political clarity.

According to Cervetto, what erodes a movement’s strength and hampers recruitment is the lack of a clear point of reference, and this is not simply a question of education and training. Politics is a clash between forces: inconsistency means leaving an opening to the enemy: political theory and analysis are a weapon for exploiting the enemy’s own contradictions: and knowledge of imperialism and how it behaves is essential for the movement’s capacity to endure and to provide solid certainties for its militants.

Masini’s reply embraced all the connected themes of this confrontation, although he appeared to consider imperialism as an issue apart. Conversely, Cervetto continued ever more clearly to link the question of tactics to a theoretical base and to strategic analysis, in a debate that was to run throughout the second half of 1952.

A letter of Masini’s, written in early September 1950, is useful for gaining an overall picture of the preparations for the Pontedecimo conference. Basically it asked Cervetto to be patient both in relation to the place of Marx and Gramsci as theoreticians for the movement, and in relation to imperialism. As for the business of imperialism [wrote Masini] try to leave out any external suggestions [...] keep your reservations for your own specific study of the issue.

A dozen confident and great-hearted men

It’s worthwhile taking Masini’s letter of clarification point by point. (Masini also replied in this vein to an open letter from Sestri which, influenced by Cervetto, referred to Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Malatesta and Gramsci as theoretical sources for militants).

In a continuing tug-of-war, Masini objected to the Marx-Lenin-Gramsci reference, and clearly asked everyone to avoid creating problems: I would ask you to bear in mind the following [he wrote] and I trust you will understand.

At the Florence meeting we took a step forward: we became a coherent group. At this coming conference we will take another step forward: from being a group we’ll move on to being a group movement. Not only will we define our relationship to the overall movement, we will also lay down the base programme for our organisation. Nor will that be the final phase: from being a group movement we will have to go on to research, establish and recruit a working-class movement in Italy. We will have new and difficult problems to face. But we do not despair, because we know that our work really is developing on a base of favourable objective conditions – the disintegration of Stalinism and the upsurge of new working-class energies.

In the immediate future, Masini considered that Cervetto’s insistence on a ‘Marxist’ theoretical direction would be an impediment.

But today we have to think for today. Today it’s not so much a case of saving a few hundred young people from the failures of history and politics: it’s a case of taking up anarchism’s valid causes (causes expressed from the heart, but causes of the past) and bringing them to a level where they can build a working-class movement.

In addition, there are two practical elements: a) the need to make physical contact with the masses of this county, of Italy (put yourself in the place of the ‘communist revolutionary groups’ – for example, Livio Maitan’s Trotskyist organisation – and just think of the problems they have: they’ve got members, but what members! – adventurers, failures, random intellectuals – people who ruin whatever chance the organisation might have. They haven’t got what we’ve got: a dozen confident and great-hearted men). And b) the material means for action.

That dozen is a realistic enough reference to the numbers on which the possibility of rebuilding a working-class organisation depended at that time. In the period leading up to the birth of GAAP, Masini wanted to exclude any reference that could compromise our difficult, delicate task and below he goes back to the ‘little group’ issue:

There are still a few months left in which a number of comrades will move from their present positions, but they will only move if they see us at a standstill. Why will these comrades move? – for the banal reason that ‘we support the concept of organisation’. Only with time will we be able to widen their horizons.

There are two great dangers always in my mind.

That we might end up forming the typical Left group, the little left-wing chapel. That would be suicide, and I really don’t want to die like that.

Then there’s the danger of becoming like the sort of school where everybody passes the exams and no one ever fails (like the ‘fustice and Liberty’ movement, which in twenty years failed to establish a stable party).

If we stop thinking we can adapt the movement to our intellectual experiences, we can avoid these dangers. Gramsci’s intellectual is a labourer who kneads and moulds the material that takes shape in his hands. I think that’s how we need to be, and probably you do, too.

The realistic side of Masini’s words should not be ignored. Cervetto would avoid the ‘little group’ clique by working in depth among the masses, but the attention focused on the human material available to the anarchist movement provided him with the direction. The flaw in Masini’s draft plan was the notion that an organised force could do without theoretical and strategic clarity. Thus the imperialism issue became almost secondary, or at any rate one of Cervetto’s personal preoccupations.

As for the business of imperialism, try to leave out any external suggestions and keep your reservations for your own specific study of the issue. I’ve already explained my own position: it’s not ideological in the worst abstract sense, but political, fixed by the exigencies of revolutionary realism (like Lenin’s position in the face of the - war). But we will talk about this when we come to discuss our political line.56

Imperialism became a business limited to Cervetto’s personal study, because Masini thought he was facing the same sort of war as 1914, and imagined that the clash between the two blocs would drive the masses into opposing it. This line of thinking is also found in Masini’s assessment of Tito and Yugoslavia:

The move from Stalinism to a working-class revival will come about in an accidental, confused, disorderly manner. A moment in this disorder is the rule of Tito. But it will implode under the impact of the international crisis (there are no islands in the age of imperialism). We need to maintain contact with Tito’s supporters in order to move them from their current positions and to retrieve them at the right time (when the myth of Yugoslavia, the second socialist homeland, collapses).57

Anarchism: a «focused, federated» movement

The October editorial ‘Anarchists’ gives a good idea of the controversy within the Italian Anarchist Federation, with Masini accused of being a tool of the Stalinists and his replies in the name of a focused, federated anarchist movement. Behind the pleas of «don’t compromise anarchism», wrote Masini, there’s a whole hinterland of dearly-held prejudices, of cosy received wisdom, false dogmas and heresies, and behind these flimsy curtains a few burnt-out iconoclasts want only to keep wandering aimlessly round and round. Confronted with a strong, focused and federated anarchist movement with its own programme and organisation, all the existing happy families party vegetating within its own friendship networks was fated to disappear:

They’re screaming that the anarchist movement in Italy is going to the dogs. We say, don’t worry, it’s not the movement that’s going to the dogs, only a few undeserved reputations and official positions, a few little myths. On the contrary, the anarchist movement in Italy is finding its direction, organising and growing in strength every day.

They cry out that it’s not true, that the movement is really menaced by class enemies, neo-anarchists, by the ‘youth’, by revisionists: by people paid by Stalin. Or Tito. Or by the late Trotsky – even by Bordiga. While we explain that no one’s menacing the movement, which doesn’t need to be rescued by anyone, that all it needs is to find a theoretical base and direction, organise itself on the practical level and involve itself closely in the struggles of the working masses.

Then they protest that we aren’t anarchists, that we shouldn’t be allowed to speak in the name of anarchism, that the media shouldn’t publish our articles, that the groups and the federation shouldn’t take part in our propaganda intiatives, that we should be barred from meetings etc, etc. They define us as ‘Bolsheviks’ although they know of our unyielding opposition to Stalinism (which is a degenerated form of Bolshevism, but hasn’t Bolshevism been dead and buried these twenty years) [...]

Yet in spite of all this we are, and remain, anarchists. We behave and talk as anarchists, we write as anarchists: day by day we claim our right to follow the historic path of anarchism: day by day we prove our capacity to promote anarchism.

For those who haven’t yet understood, we say again, and loudly: WE ARE AND REMAIN ANARCHISTS». 58

From a subsequent letter, we can tell that Masini attempted to forestall Cervetto’s reservations by cherry-picking the meaning of the editorial, dismissing it as a tactical manoeuvre for the imminent Italian Anarchist Federation conference at Ancona: «you will have understood [he writes] that the editorial ‘Anarchists’ had a psychological pre-conference function».59

But from an examination of a year’s confrontation between Cervetto and Masini it is obvious that the issue could not be downgraded to differences of focus or purpose.

The «militant Bolshevik spirit»

The three confrontations – autumn 1949, spring, then autumn 1950 – during which differences regarding the future of GAAP became explicit, are linked by a common factor. The difference between Cervetto, who held that everything useful had been extracted from anarchism, and Masini, who maintained that there were still youths to be won over, was not a matter of a purely practical assessment. When Masini asked Cervetto to be patient, to understand, not to compromise the preparations for the Pontedecimo conference, he underlined the practical side – the energies it might be possible to attract from anarchism – but his reasoning demonstrates that he continued to believe that anarchism could once again become a live movement. Or perhaps that through anarchism it might be possible to regenerate a ‘genuine’ working-class movement, free from the external influences of either Stalinism or the Atlantic Alliance. In 1988, in the preface to a biography of the Carrara anarchist Ugo Mazzucchelli, Masini would give this interpretation of his period of militancy in GAAP:

Many years ago, I tried to push the anarchists to organise themselves politically, and above all to take political action. That attempt failed due to the errors I made in planning and tactics (or perhaps simply tact) but primarily due to a senseless campaign which targeted me as a heretic and a revisionist. Yet I remain convinced that if the anarchists want to take the risk, cross the frontier and enter the city, if they want to face up to reality and leave their mark on it, if they want to come out of their limbo of fringe magazines, their festivals and their self-congratulatory meetings (all good and worthy things in their place, that I take part in myself) then they must make up their minds to get into politics. Politics is neither good nor bad, it’s just risky. Errico Malatesta was in politics all his life, measuring himself against the movers and shakers, the events of his time, without ever betraying his principles.60

It is clear that in the absence of a precise political and strategic content, that phrase to enter the city remains a formula vulnerable to uncertain, and even opposing, outcomes. At the end of the decade Masini himself was to take to the city and sign up to reformist socialism.

This was precisely the Mazzucchelli case’,61 i.e. the failure in the autumn of 1950 of initiatives connected with the setting up of GAAP to gather much support from the youth of Carrara, which convinced Cervetto even more as to the value of the study of Marxism. Already he had been able to ascertain, from Genova and Savona, where he had consistent contacts, that a Marxist training was a protection against any return to anarchism. Not that a ‘Bolshevik’ perspective could be said to be in tune with Masini’s ‘Anarchists’ editorial:

It is an important first step towards that militant Bolshevik spirit, the features of which are a natural ideological and psychological distance from and disregard for anarchism [...] We should try to encourage comrades to study Marxism: this would reduce the Mazzucchelli cases.62

The battle at Ilva, Savona

The last weeks of 1950 were taken up by the preparations for February’s conference, but Cervetto also had to deal with his own situation at Ilva. The loss of his job there was a factor in his return to Argentina a few months later. A summary of that harsh defensive battle can be found in his reflections as to the need for a strong and structured party to resist the influence of the Stalinist PCI:

Final balance: many useful experiences, a deeper knowledge of the political situation of the working class and of the masses. We have been better able to verify how the PCI controls the masses, the many methods it uses for making contact with it, how it exploits any independent movement etc. This brief experience has shown me the great importance of resolving the problem of ‘contact with the masses’. My preoccupation with forming a united minority – as far as possible – may seem excessive, but it is an external expression of what I believe is required today in terms of tactics and of fundamental ideology. What I mean is, the minority must be united for today, not just in terms of the interests it historically represents. The minority must bind itself to the masses now, not assume that this bond will arise at some future time and in different objective conditions.63

Chapter Four

PONTEDECIMO, GENOA, 1951

 

The conference at Pontedecimo, Genoa, established the original group which in the early 1960s would go on to found Lotta Comunista. It was a working-class group, most of whom had been drawn into politics in the course of the partisan struggle: a small group, a hand-picked unit. The first thing to be done was to acknowledge the failure of everything that had gone before, in the catastrophe of the Second World War, the second to maximise the few forces available by ‘100% organisation’. Then to reaffirm internationalism, against both Washington and Moscow. On the issue of the State and imperialism, some of this group continued to follow the anarchist line: for Cervetto, it was a case of restoring the theories of Marx and Lenin. These were the first few steps towards a consistent theory and strategy.

In the division of labour to prepare for the conference that would establish GAAP, Arrigo Cervetto was assigned to draft the theory on the elimination of the State as a tool of the ruling class.

From the correspondence with Masini, it can be seen that Cervetto was reluctant to undertake this. As he wrote at the end of December, passing the whole thing on to Masini, it was not so much that he was uncertain as to his own abilities: he had fundamental reservations as to the possibility of formulating a credible theory cut off from both the anarchist tradition and Leninism.

Doubts on the theory of the State

Masini labelled it a two-pronged formulation and maintained that it had all been clarified. Cervetto’s grave doubts reflected the debate that had been going on for months:

I’ve started to collect material [...] But I have to tell you honestly that this task may be beyond my capacities. To be able to estimate (and not under or overestimate) one’s personal capacities is an iron rule for every revolutionär Some theories are a bit of a stumbling block. For example, the withering away of the State as a classless society is established – you have to admit that this is one of the weakest points of ‘our’ ideology. We’ve never really studied it systematically. You’ll say that this is the inevitable outcome of all our work, that only solutions to immediate problems can provide firm indicators of future problems. Okay, but just think, Lenin wrote State and Revolution in 1917. And with our limited experience we can’t just snap our fingers and get beyond him theoretically – not and be sure that what we produce will have any validity. And now the political exigencies are different: unfortunately, this may push us into going back over most, if not all, of the old anarchist ground.64

Back in March Cervetto, with youthful rashness, had set himself to go beyond Lenin on the knotty issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By December, with time running out and the conference approaching, he was realising the difficulty of a solution, other than that outlined in State and Revolution, that wouldn’t be merely verbal sophistry:

We really must get past the same old anarchist critique. Personally, I think we have to put forward the theory of ‘direct revolutionary rule’ as a provisional phase of the revolution. ‘Direct revolutionary rule’ is a form of State very close to the Commune-State. The phrase doesn’t convey the precise and politically appropriate differentiation, but with anything else we would fall back into the anarchist critique that has never succeeded in resolving the problem.65

February 1951: Pontedecimo

There exist four direct sources that record the conference that gave birth to GAAP in 1951: two internal reports by Cervetto, an account in his ‘Notebooks’, and Parodi’s speech at the public commemoration of the conference 25 years later.

Speaking at a Lotta Comunista national conference in the summer of 1971, Cervetto described «the struggle for internationalism» as the essence of the «first stage» of the party’s development, up to 1956. An overview of the «objective situation» in the immediate post-war period had to begin from the new balance of power that had come out of that conflict:

I) The imperialist order after the Second World War: defeat of German and Italian imperialism in Europe, weakening of British and French imperialism, the rise of Russian imperialism.

In Asia: defeat of Japanese imperialism and weakening of British, Dutch and French imperialism.

An imperialist order that is witnessing the hegemony of US imperialism in the world, and the rise of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe.

II)  The position of Italian imperialism. In the division of spheres of influence, the Italian bourgeoisie is in the American sphere.

The reconstruction of Italian capitalism will take place within this international framework».66

From 1943 to 1947 this reconstruction took place in a context of collaboration between the American party and the «Russian party». This coalition’s ideology was anti-German, anti-Fascist, national reconstruction. Bidding to unify all strata of society, it was a new form of the nationalist ideology of the Fascist 1920s. The evidence demonstrates that this type of ideology «succeeds in producing collaboration between classes: a fact we should never forget», notes Cervetto.

In this situation class struggle, generated by the conditions into which the crisis of Italian imperialism has flung the working class, does not disappear: the «Stalinist ideology» – the myth of the USSR – works to seamlessly join together class struggle and class collaboration with the Stalinist party, the PCI, plctying a fundamental role.

After 1947, there was a degree of change in international relations:

Between 1947 and 1956 capitalist reconstruction was completed against an international background that witnessed the break-up of the USA-USSR alliance, and the so-called Cold War.

Why did this alliance come to an end? Because, while the division of Europe remained unchanged, the struggle began for the division of spheres of influence in Asia. In 1949 Mao’s bourgeois-democratic revolution unified the Chinese State and made a short-lived alliance with the USSR.

While US imperialism had shared spheres of influence in Europe with the USSR, in Asia it ruled supreme and was not disposed to surrender any part of it (either to the USSR or to China). This was what led to the brief USSR-China alliance.

The international picture also determined what was happening in Italy. The period which saw a meeting of interests between Washington and Moscow corresponded to the phase of national collaboration within Italy, which ended when the Washington-Moscow tension began:

After the USA-USSR break (which involved Asia, not Europe) collaboration in Italy broke down in 1947.

The ‘American’ party in Italy (the central government) was united in prioritising a twofold increase in capital.

Once reconstruction had been completed, this doubling of capital was achieved by:

  1. 1)  massive unemployment (2 million)
  2. 2)  massive underemployment (4 million – caused by overpopulation of the agricultural areas – 40% of the active population
  3. 3)  a wages squeeze
  4. 4)  repression (political sackings, police brutality: 150 dead)
The opposition was represented by Stalinism (the PCI) which in this period reached its full strength.

In such a situation, wrote Cervetto, a revolutionary party – even a hand-picked unit – could assert itself only by adopting four conditions:

First: by rejecting all nationalist and class collaborationist positions

Second: by reaffirming proletarian internationalism

Third: by analysing imperialist reality and its features as diplayed by the two imperialist blocs

Fourth: by rejecting the ideology of a leading socialist State and instead carrying out a scientific analysis of the nature of USSR society (theory of State capitalism).

Note that all four of these conditions start off from an international view of the Italian situation. The PCI could not distinguish itself merely by taking part in the maximalist political contests of postwar reconstruction, but had to rely on its position as the (social-imperialist) Russian party.

Hence, the internationalist struggle had to have its own concept of imperialism – unitary imperialism – that could denounce the USSR as an imperialist power, and its own concept of the social nature of the USSR – the theory of State capitalism – that could unmask its oppression of the working class.

Arrigo Cervetto, ‘The Stages in the Struggle for the Development of the Leninist Party in Italy’, August 1971.

In this FIRST STAGE of the PARTY’S STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT, it must struggle to differentiate itself from the following currents:

anarchist – spontaneity (rejection of PARTY STRUCTURES)

Bordiga – (inevitable collapse of capitalism theory)

Trotskyism – (theory of Russia as a degenerated Workers’ State

and

ENTRYISM)

ALL THESE ‘ANTI-STALINIST’ CURRENTS ARE RIDDLED WITH VARYING GRADATIONS OF THE FOLLOWING:

  • 1)  Theory of the USA as the SUPERIMPERIALISM

(BORDIGA = theory of THE DOLLAR AS SUPREME TROTSKYISTS = since the USSR is a degenerated Workers State, THE USA IS THE ONLY IMPERIALISM IN THE WORLD)

  • 2)  A WAIT-AND-SEE, LIQUIDATIONIST POSITION

(BORDIGUIST) = theory of the TOTALITARIAN STATE no point WORKING IN THE TRADE UNIONS WAITING FOR 1975

TROTSKYISTS = ENTRYISM)

  • 3)  THEORY THAT A 3rd IMPERIALIST WORLD WAR IS IMMINENT

(BORDIGUIST

PABLO / MANDEL = ‘La guerre qui vient’)

These positions reflect the 1947 backlash.

TO THE CREDIT OF OUR GROUP. WE HAVE OPPOSED LIQUI-DATIONISM AND ACCURATELY ANALYSED THE DEVELOPING TRENDS.

If consolidating the revolutionary party meant opposing the ideology of the Yalta division – a world split into two camps in which the USSR was socialism’s lead State, it also required a struggle to differentiate the party from other anti-Stalinist currents. It had to differentiate itself from anarchist spontaneity and its rejection of party structures: from Bordiga’s ‘inevitable collapse of capitalism’ theory: and from the Trotskyists, with their view of the USSR as degenerated Workers’ State and their entry ist tactics in relation to the PCI. In varying versions, and to different degrees, all these currents were influenced by ideologies of ‘superimperialism’. For Bordiga, this was the USA – the dollar ruling supreme: for the Trotskyists, their view of the USSR as a socialist, albeit degenerated state, left the USA as the only imperialist power. The anarchists took the opposite position: that the USSR was the real totalitarian oppressor.

Cervetto further noted that all these currents took a liquidationist ‘wait-and-see’ attitude to party work. For the Trotskyists this involved their entryist tactics; for the followers of Bordiga it was composed of the paralysing notion of a totalitarian State and a rejection of work within the trade unions while awaiting the final crisis that would lead to revolution.

For the anarchists, individualism, anti-organisation, and anti-centrism were the important positions. Finally, all these currents were influenced by the theory that a Third Imperialist World War was imminent, but this was also to influence the GAAP groups up until 1952/3.

Do we understand the historical meaning of the party’s actions?

A 1976 presentation, on the 25th anniversary of the meeting at Pontedecimo, provides a more detailed treatment of the theories and policies of that conference. It was addressed to the generation recruited between the 1960s and 70s, brought into politics by the economic 1905 – the cycle that had just ended of working-class wage struggles and crisis in the educational system – and was an attempt to pass on to them the historic meaning of the political struggle in which they were engaged:

Marxism is the science of socio-economic formations, the science of the laws that govern the movements of societies.

It’s the science of history, of the long times in which biological generation succeeds generation, in fixed or given social relations of production.

The dynamic of these social relations, the evolution and crises of their cycles, is a history that takes place over long times.

One of the most difficult Marxist tasks is to define the contingent actions of each generation, the party’s actions within the cycle of history, in the long times of the history of class struggle.

It’s difficult to have a historical understanding of contingent political action: it’s not so much that the concept is hard to understand, it’s more the difficulty of defining it scientifically within the cycles of history, the long times.

Difficult, but not impossible.

One would have to take a few points of reference along this long trek and in the light of these find analogies and differences in the general conditions of the party’s actions».67

Two issues are common to every generation that becomes involved in revolutionary militancy:

1) Do we understand the historical meaning of the party’s practical and daily actions? (Since the great majority of militants come to the party from a specific cycle of working-class struggles, it could be said that this historical meaning has yet to be assimilated.)

2) Can we define the nature of our current party actions within the long times?.

The points of reference taken were the 1907 crisis when repression and reaction after the 1905 revolution almost succeeded in politically killing off the Bolshevik party: the 1930s crisis when counter-revolution and strategic inadequacy led to the loss of an entire generation in terms of the continuity of the working-class party: and the 1950s crisis when it became urgent to restore that continuity. 1907 and the 1930s could be examined as history and theory: for the leaders of Lotta Comunista, the crisis of the 1950s was a direct personal experience. Cervetto notes that the value of the 1951 Pontedecimo Conference lies in that kind of practical experience.

During those years we became fully aware that we were only paying for the party’s 1930s theoretical and organisational crisis.

If there was any credit to be taken, it lay in having recognised implacably and without self-pity just how serious this crisis was: maybe one can only do this sort of thing at a particular age and stage of one’s revolutionary career when hard facts drive one to chose between political passion and passivity. The choice, added Cervetto, lay between militant action and accepting one of the many forms of opportunism: it was a choice between life, in all its richness and pain, and pure and simple biological vegetation.

To live, or merely to exist: to pour all one’s energies into political passion or to allow a society well versed in the art of corruption to dissipate every intense feeling.

Theories on the State

The discussions that took place at Pontedecimo regarding theories on the State and on imperialism were later summarised by Cervetto in a list of key concepts, in which he also indicated where these agreed with or diverged from the views of Pier Carlo Masini. The original list is reproduced below, with numeration added by the publishers for ease of reference.

  • 1)  Cervetto rejected the «anarchist theory of the State.
  • 2)  In the discussions at Pontedecimo, both Cervetto and Masini «accepted Bordiga’s views on the State». Cervetto notes that «in reality, as I discovered later, these were the views of Bukharin» which had also been accepted by Lenin in State and Revolution. The difference, as Cervetto was further to discover, «lay in Lenin’s critique of absolutisation» which was part of Bukharin’s theories on imperialism and State capitalism.
  • 3)  We disagreed as to the period of transition. We both – mistakenly – accepted that revolution and dissolution of the State would take place simultaneously.
  • 4)  We both rejected Bordiga’s «party dictatorship.
  • 5)  «We both rejected Bordiga’s liquidationism and his theory on proletariat / working-class aristocracy.
  • 6)  «We both rejected Bordiga’s superimperialism» – our shared theory, the basis of our political tendency and our strategy, is one of unitary imperialism and two superimperialisms.
  • 7)  «We reached a common solution on Gramsci, as providing further elaboration of the Bukharin-Bordiga-Lenin position on the totalitarian State.

Cervetto concludes by noting that the solution put forward at Pontedecimo was that the concept of Party should be «traditional» but that organisationally it should develop along lines running between Lenin and Gramsci.

Here the 1950 correspondence referred to earlier helps to clarify the situation.

There could be no strategy-party in 1951: the analysis of the international forces of imperialism was still inadequate, and the idea that the party should be rooted in the tradition of Italy’s working-class movement (and particularly the anarchist movement) was a step in the wrong direction. In fact, a decade later this particular conundrum was finally resolved against the idea of a traditional party. This opposite direction – the attempt to establish the Bolshevik party model in a mature imperialist metropolis – was unprecedented, and particularly so in Italy, where it clashed with the traditionally maximalist nature of the Italian working-class movement.

We have previously referred to the role played by Gramsci in all of the above. It is interesting to note that his theories were used as a basis for attempting to go beyond the concept of Bukharin and Bordiga’s «totalitarian State» – a concept that in 1951 was wrongly also attributed to Lenin. (Lenin accepted the stress laid by Bukharin on the need to break up the machinery of the bourgeois State, but rejected Bukharin’s absolutistic concept of a single State-capital concentration leading to a completely militarised society: the conceptual forerunner of «totalitarianism» theory. Bukharin’s «New Leviathan»68 in which all distinctions between big capital, social forces and public power would be annulled, raised all the theoretical issues regarding the nature of the State and of imperialism.

Two of these issues, unitary imperialism and «two super-imperialisms» will be dealt with in subsequent chapters. Here we note only that even at the point of formulating that common solution in the late summer of 1950, there continued to be some difference of emphasis between Cervetto and Masini. By 1996 Masini would lay claim to «the theories on the elimination of the State, but was to add that even the theories on unitary imperialism had two different interpretations».69 There is a temptation to see in the Masini via Bordiga position an echo of Bukharin’s theory, along with its deficiencies of dialectical method. But the extant correspondence suggests a difference of emphasis and not two structurally different interpretations, indicating that undoubtedly unitary imperialism and two super-power blocs were the theoretical basis of 1951s «common» solution.

Arrigo Corvetto, ‘The Historic Experience of the Leninist Party Crises’, 28 February 1976.

E.g.: until recently, I THOUGHT WE WERE MORE THEORETICALLY CONFUSED than in fact we are.

FOR US, BORDIGA DEVELOPS Lenin (which differs from ANARCHIST THEORY only in the issue of a PROVISIONAL DICTATORSHIP).

PCM: BORDIGA’S CRITIQUE of the STATE is TAKEN FROM and DEVELOPED from ANARCHIST THEORY- except that the ANARCHIST MOVEMENT was unable to develop it. We must REINTEGRATE this into the NEW MOVEMENT WE WILL BUILD. In fact, he was not completely wrong about the BUKHARIN – VERCESI – BORDIGA  THEORY, which among other things (then, in 1950!) was characterised by TOTALITARIANISM / FASCISTIZZAZ*.

  • TO SUM UP, THEREFORE:
  • WE BOTH REJECT the ANARCHIST THEORY of the STATE.
  • WE BOTH ACCEPT BORDIGA’S CRITIQUE of the STATE (as I initially thought, also BUKHARINs, and accepted by Lenin in his preface to ‘Stale and Revolution’. (The DIFFERENCE, as I saw later, lay in Lenin’S CRITIQUE of ABSOLUTISATION).
  • We DISAGREED as to the PERIOD of TRANSITION (WE BOTH – MISTAKENLY— accepted that REVOLUTION AND DISSOLUTION OF THE STA TE WOULD TAKE PLACE SIMULTANEOUSLY).
  • WE BOTH REJECT BORDIGAS SOLUTION OF‘ PARTY DICTATORSHIP.
  • WE BOTH REJECT BORDIGA’S LIQUIDATIONISM and his theory on PROLETARIAT/WORKING-CLASS ARISTOCRACY.
  • WE BOTH REJECT BORDIGA’S ‘SUPER-IMPERIALISM (OUR SHARED THEORY, the basis of OUR POLITICAL CURRENT and OUR STRATEGY, is UNITARY IMPERIALISM and 2 IMPERIALIST SUPER-POWERS).
  • WE AGREE TO SEE GRAMSCI (AS DEVELOPING THE (BUKHARIN)-BORDIGA TOTALITARIAN STATE)-Lenin.
  • RESOLUTION: A PARTY BASED ON Lenin/GRAMSCI TRADITION.

* Fascistizzazione: An Italian word meaning ‘to develop elements of Fascism’.

In his 1976 speech, two observations of Cervetto’s cut to the essence of the ‘State’ issue and clarify the crossover with the ‘imperialism’ issue. For Cervetto Bordiga’s theory was a development of Lenin’s. It differed from anarchist theory only in the transitory party dictatorship element. For Masini Bordiga’s critique of the State was taken and developed from anarchist theory, a development which the anarchist movement had shown itself unable to complete. That critique, according to Masini, was to be reintegrated into the new movement we will build.

Cervetto notes overleaf that Masini was not completely wrong in seeing a connection between Bukharin’s theory and that of Vercesi-Bordiga, The latter was characterised, since in 1950 by the thesis of a trend towards «totalitarianism» and fascisisation. In terms of revolutionary attitude towards the State, the only difference between Lenin and the anarchists was the dictatorship of the proletariat: from now on, Cervetto was to remain convinced that this was the point to stress. This can be traced in State and Revolution, where Lenin accepts this emphasis of Bukharin’s, having previously sharply rejected it in bitter clashes with Jurij Pjatakov, Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch Left** over the nation issue and on the use of self-determination of the people in the crisis of imperialism.

In the 1950 correspondence, it appears that Masini, in seeking via Bordiga a reconciliation with anarchist theory, is attempting to avoid or neutralise Lenin – with a perhaps unintended outcome. The totalitarian theories, and the line that from Bukharin’s New Leviathan ran through Bordiga on to the crushing and all-pervading power of the dollar as ‘supreme’ led to a paralysing dead end, which Cervetto was instinctively to reject in the spring of 1950.

Instead, working through Lenin, what remained of the anarchists’ revolutionary attitude towards the State, because it drew on Marxist theory, was brought together in a politically vital synthesis – the unequivocal distinction of the provisional dictatorship of the «Commune-State», which the Paris Commune had been able to grasp as the at last discovered political form of revolutionary power. A distinction that Lenin had initially found to be inadequately stressed in Bukharin’s theories.

** Or ‘German-Dutch Left’, whose frames of reference were the Dutch communists H. Gorter and A. Pannekoek, theoreticians of commune communism, to whom Lenin replied in ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

A workers’ group

We will postpone a complete unravelling of this complex issue to a future time. Here we will conclude our account of the 1951 conference, where the group who would become Lotta Comunista came together. Lorenzo Parodi’s speech to the 25th anniversary meeting in February 1976 provides some information as to who they were. It was a young group. The average age – raised by Roman labourer Ugo Scattoni, the only one aged over 40 – was 28: Cervetto was 24, Parodi and Vinazza 25, and Masini 28. In 1971 Cervetto noted that when the group came together its members had between six and eight years’ experience of politics. This, as Parodi observed in his speech, meant that the youthful delegates had not been involved in the disintegration of the revolutionary working-class movement that had taken place between the two world wars and that most of them were part of the new working-class, anti-fascist generation that had emerged from the experiences of 1945. Many had undergone their political baptism of fire in 1943/44, with strikes, the underground Resistance movement and the partisan struggle. Along with their class origins, these experiences marked their political history:

The social mix of the delegates confirms this: one-third were engineering or steel workers, in the best tradition of the organised and disciplined working-class vanguard located in capitalism’s most important industry: another third were wage-earners from other sectors and the rest were students, with only one academic.70

Among their workplaces were Ansaldo Fossati (Genoa Sestri), Ansaldo Meccanico (Genoa Sampierdarena), Ilva (Savona), Galileo (Florence), and Fiat (Turin). And there were delegates from the Leghorn and Rome branches of the FIOM trade union:

The political starting-point of the delegates, too, reflected the ideological travail of a generation that had lived through a break in history, and which had seen what it had thought a revolutionary opportunity go down in flames in the space of a few months. At the point of working-class recovery, 60% had fallen back on the anarchist movement in the hope of finding there something of a revolutionary nature, and [...] to separate themselves from the patriotic movement represented by the political parties of national unity. They were the younger elements of that current of anarchism which had maintained the working-class and organisational tradition of the ‘red’ period following the First World War.

Another 35% were former members of the PCI, having broken with that party either at the time of the underground resistance movement, or after coming to understand the significance of the ‘Salerno turnaround in terms of its step by step historic compromise with the bourgeoisie.71

What emerges very clearly from the 1949/1950 records is the paradox of these first steps: with so many of the delegates coming from a politically libertarian background, much energy was siphoned off by fighting, within the anarchist movement, against the ‘individualistic’ and anti-organisation currents represented by the Italian Anarchist Federation, yet this was only a secondary battle front. It took up a great deal of Masini’s time and energy, but as early as 1949 Cervetto was beginning to see this particular struggle as a dead end: the real issue was to confront the PCI and the influence of its Stalinist ideology. It was on this main front that in the long term the staying power of their small but organised core of workers would be measured.

As Lorenzo Parodi wrote, this working-class base was decisive in getting over the initial weaknesses on the theoretical and political front:

If that conference had been organised by intellectuals, the internal dialectic would have unfolded amid a tolerance of political differences, with any dissent reduced to purely ideological speculation. This would have led to a very real deformation of the organisation that was taking shape – the consequence of theoretical eclecticism would have been organisational inconsistency.

Instead, our enterprise immediately sought consistency. In spite of all the background differences that for a long time to come were to influence our theoretical formation and our organisational development, we had understood that it was only by achieving consistency in both these areas that we could open a way towards rebuilding a working-class party in Italy».72

«Organising ourselves 100%»

Among Cervetto’s 1971 record are two paragraphs from L’Impulso that accurately exemplify the ‘moral factor’ which his working-class group chose as emblematic of their reconstruction. The notice of the conference, in December 1950, appealed to delegates to set aside personal pet positions, and to avoid splitting hairs since these represent:

the typical indicators of a chronic inability to follow events, to interpret, confront and manage them: a tendency to withdraw to the margins, to play at politics, when what we should be doing is advancing.

In the face of an enemy world that is arming against us, we have decided to speed up our own ‘rearmament’.

This is why we are calling on all comrades to rearm on the ideological level and overcome certain crucial problems that the superficiality of some and the nihilism of others have buried in rhetoric and party mysticism: to rearm on the ORGANISATIONAL level [...] employing rigorous selection criteria and an enormous mobilisation of new energies [...]

Today’s password is Organising ourselves 100%.73

Theoretical and organisational «rearmament» demanded dedication from militant revolutionaries:

[...] if we want to survive and live through the fires of this crisis we have to throw in all our resources, the last lira in our pockets, the last minute of the day, all our intelligence: everything has to be thrown into the balance. We all of us have to lead a life of austerity, eliminating at birth all vanity, egoism, pretension, every personal bad habit.74

We have already mentioned Cervetto’s ‘Notebooks’ reference to the conference at Pontedecimo, his sketch of Ugo Scattoni, and the practical lesson on the professional revolutionary that in 1951 Cervetto drew from this comrade’s personality and lifestyle: the image of the militant worker who chose to work part-time and to have less to spend on food, in order to dedicate himself to political struggle.

This is the fourth source of our reconstruction. Through it we can follow Cervetto as he writes of his passion for politics – a decisive factor in that year of 1951: of his tendency «to get to the heart of every concrete situation», to grasp the essence of a given opportunity:

«P.C.M. [Pier Cario Masini] was right: it was possible to start again. We had to go against the current, but we were capable of doing that. We needed to be serious and methodical to get past the superficial maximalism that’s traditional to Italy. We made the attempt. In the long night of counter-revolution we lit a small light that tried to pierce the darkness.

After some months of struggle, I was on the point of being sacked from Ilva. I had seen the damage Stalinism could do to the workers’ struggles, using them against the Marshall Plan and for the benefit of the USSR. It was easy to slip into nihilism, or just sit on the fence. This was why I always fought for the workers to take part in these struggles, why I was always active within the trade union, even although I was part of a very small minority.

My experiences of war, which had matured me, came in useful at that time. I had thought it an experience of limited value, devoid of meaning but it turned out to be extremely important after all, because it prepared me to face reality and ignore appearances. It’s this part of my personality formation that has often helped me to get to the heart of every concrete situation.

I can make mistakes in identifying the correlations, and this can affect the information I possess on the correlations themselves, and on the order in which I have arranged them in memory and mental logic. Im less likely to make a mistake in identifying the essence of a given situation. Im not saying this out of conceit: there’s evidence for it. Conceit means thinking you’ve already found the solution. For me it’s a case of identifying the essential aspects of the problem, knowing that right there I have to begin a lengthy piece of work, of which every result must be continually debated and continually tested out, but without ever losing the end of the skein. But action demands immediate choices, and these choices cannot be based on empiricism, which would render the action null and void. Choices must have a point of reference: the totality of the choices faced and taken over time, along with further work on the original points of reference, allows a provisional balance to be made at any stage, and makes possible correction of both reference points and choices.

You have to start somewhere. It’s not a question of intelligence, but of character, and ultimately, of temperament and passion.

By the time I got to Pontedecimo I had plenty of both. Giorgio Amendola once wrote of his move from liberalism to Stalinism as a life choice. For me, my own choice was not so much a life choice as choosing life itself. Every individual is defined by his or her own nature, and by the interdependence between that subjectivity and the objective external situation. Engels speaks of chance and necessity. As far as I’m concerned, interdependence is chance. Many factors that combine in the life of an individual do so by chance, within the context of an overall necessity. Only the consciousness of this necessity makes us free, but to be conscious of necessity is to be conscious also of chance. Often our individualistic conceit rebels against being reduced to the vagaries of chance: to accept it looks like fatalism, but it’s not: fatalism is not being conscious of necessity. To be conscious of chance is to be truly free: if you have full consciousness, you are as free as you can be to make your decisions.

Could I have done anything other than become a part of what happened at Pontedecimo? If my disillusion had left me with any other choice, I wouldn’t have lived through difficult years of struggle and study. If you’re not disillusioned you’re not driven to years of questioning. You shut off a stage of your life and that’s it finished. What drives you to questioning to study, is the ardour for the struggle, and you either have that ardour or you don’t. It was this ardour that had been disillusioned: it wasn’t about the choices I had made. Ardour, passion, lead you to choose life, and chance. Ardour and passion can suffer disillusion, but you can’t choose to feel them, in the same way that you can’t choose to be born.

In the small conference room at Pontedecimo there was plenty of disillusion about the years that had just gone by, but above all there was enthusiasm for the future.

During the break, just before getting back to the work of the conference, it had started to drizzle. Carlo Lizzani was shooting some scenes from ‘Achtung banditi’ a film financed by a co-operative of partisans. One scene, set in a little square, involved Fascists shouldering their way through some people who were passing in front of a bar. Lizzani and his assistants asked if, as unpaid extras, we would be those passers-by – but we wouldn’t be able to shelter from the rain, because that wasn’t in the script. We were amused rather than irritated by the request, and played the part to give them a hand. If anything lasting comes out of the story of that day, it won’t be that roll of film that was probably thrown away long ago».75

The «heart of the matter», «the essence» of that political period, of 1951, was the clear-eyed acknowledgement that the working-class movement had gone down to defeat in the 1930s. And the idea that in the internationalist battle against imperialism, against Washington and Moscow, it was possible to start again.

Chapter Five

THE «IMPERIALIST DEMOCRACY» ISSUE

 

There exist additional writings on the theories of the State put forward at Pontedecimo. At the close of 1950 Cervetto himself acknowledged the inadequacy of the version placed before the conference, and noted that it had been an error to accept the anarchist theory of the ‘simultaneous elimination’ of the State, rather than the position of Marx, Engels and Lenin on the ‘dictatorship of the proletaria’. The 1951 deliberations would reach their conclusion in the theory of ‘imperialist democracy’ thirty years later.

The issue was a complex one, involving as it did evaluation on at least five different levels. Firstly, Lenin’s theory of the State, and its relationship with that of Bukharin and with anarchist theory. Secondly, Bordiga’s development of Lenin’s theory, associating it with a part of Bukharin’s totalitarianism. Thirdly, the 1951 theories on elimination of the State and the differing positions of Cervetto and Masini. Fourthly, Cervetto’s 1976 review, which evaluated the Pontedecimo theories in relation to those of Lenin, Bukharin, Bordiga and the anarchists, with his own and Masini’s incomplete 1951 ideas, and with subsequent study of the issue. Fifthly, the completed formulation on the State published by Cervetto, which orders and develops most of these themes within the theory of imperialist democracy while dropping or shelving consideration of other positions.

The aim of the present work is to set the scene for those first steps taken in 1951, partly based on the lines of Cervetto’s 1976 reconstruction. We cannot here hope to go over the whole history of theories of the State and of imperialism, which engaged certain currents of the revolutionary movement over a period of decades up to the endgame of the harsh and tragic counter-revolution of the 1930s. The reader is directed to The Political Shell and The Difficult Question of Times where both these issues are treated more widely.

«Imperialist democracy» in «The Political Shell»

To begin with the conclusion: The Political Shell brings together lead articles published between 1977 and 1989. In five of these Cervetto deals with Bukharin’s theories, all of which touch upon the issue of the Imperialist State.

Alongside the evolution of imperialism, wrote Cervetto in 1977, ideologies evolve to justify the actions of the State, and which, in an infinity of variations, become a shared concept for those who manage the State. Bukharin was tackling the issue during the stormy period of the First World War, and overestimated the tendency of the economy to become concentrated into a single capitalist-State trust: an error that was to have consequences for his theory of the State:

Bukharin peaks of the transition from liberal ideology to imperialist ideology as corresponding to the transition from the liberal State to the imperialist State, which in its turn is an expression of the transition from ‘laissez-faire’ economy to monopoly economy. All well and good, but there’s more to it than that.

On Bukharin’s absolutisation, Lenin points out that while capitalism does concentrate itself in trusts, it also spreads itself throughout small-scale production. It follows therefore that the superstructure will not correspond to the capitalist-State trust Bukharin envisaged: the imperialist State is actually less homogeneous and organic than it would be if capital concentration were absolute. It is rather the product of uneven economic and political development and the clashes between the various fractions of the bourgeoisie for a share of surplus value. Even ideology is influenced by this objective situation.76

Instead, the State of the imperialist phase corresponds to a distribution model with parasitic features. According to Cervetto, Lenin rejects Bukharin’s overestimation of the «Imperialist State» and maintains his own analysis of specific political forms: Lenin sees parasitism as, if anything, a feature common to all States that follow the same lines:

Bukharin gives the name ‘rentier economy’ to this phase of the mode of production and distribution: Lenin acknowledges the spread of capitalism, but also stresses the ‘rentier’ nature of ‘those who live by clipping coupons’. Bukharin defines the political form as ‘imperialist State’: Lenin rejects this absolutisation, sees differences of form and policy in the imperialist State, and identifies the parasitical traits typical of the bourgeoisies of various States, from Japan to Germany to the United States.77

Cervetto bases his critique of Bukharin’s Imperialist State on the science contained in Capital. It has been suggested that with State and Revolution Lenin set himself to write that chapter of Capital – ‘The State’ – that Marx had planned but had not had the opportunity to complete. In the third volume of Capital it is certainly possible to trace Marx’s theoretical statement that democracy in all its variations follows consistent political rules. In this sense, Marx’s dialectical science as found in Capital disproves the absolutisation present in the New Leviathan and totalitarianism theories:

Bukharin theorised a capitalist-State trust arising from a fusion of economics and politics, but we say that State intervention in the economy does not determine the particular form of State. What remains valid is the theory Marx expressed in Volume 3 of Capital, which sees in democracy a ‘specific form’ of the capitalist State, with other political forms as ‘variations and gradations of this specific form’. The tendency towards State capitalism confirms Marx’s theory on the ‘specific form’, which Lenin sums up as the ‘best shell’ for capitalism. Failure to understand this has led to many errors.78

The final step of Cervetto’s 1951 considerations took off from Lenin’s critique of Bukharin’s theory of the New Leviathan – the imperialist State.

«Bukharin saw economic concentration and a corresponding political centralism merging in a single capitalist-State trust – an imperialist State that combined the maximum of economic and political power to hurl against similar competitor imperialist States. But in reality this wasn’t the case. Centralisation of capital and concentration of means of production give rise to a multiplicity of big competing enterprises, and at the super-structure level such competition brings about political pluralism. This political pluralism isn’t the direct democracy of small-scale production, but the imperialist democracy of the big producers, of a few hundred highly-concentrated big businesses.

On the one hand, imperialist democracy is the centralism of a few big economic groups, and on the other hand it is the pluralism of their diverse political wills, conditioned by their interests. Imperialist democracy is most accurately defined as the pluralist political centralism of big capital. It is the best shell for the long and varied struggle for concentration».79

Bukharin’s «New Leviathan» theory

In the autumn of 1915 Bukharin finished his study of Imperialism and World Economy and immediately began work on an essay, ‘Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State’. It was in the nature of a continuation of the first work, the aim being to find in Marx and Engels the premises to critique the crushing and all-pervasive power of the State in a new era.

In his text on imperialism, Bukharin had already theorised the evolution of the State as an entirety new socio-political formation caused by the growth of finance capital with an economic dynamic driving an aggressive foreign policy and the «militarisation of all social life [...] Being a very large shareholder in the State capitalist trust, the modern State is the highest and most all-embracing organisational culmination of the latter. Hence its colossal, almost monstrous, power».80

The essay on the Imperialist State both summarises and develops these theories, and examines the mobilisation of a war economy, with references to passages from Marx and Engels. In the new era, writes Bukharin, differences between groups and fractions disappear, private monopoly enterprises merge into one entity within the framework of the State capitalist trust: and the contradictions between different sub-groups of the ruling class will also largely disappear. The individual capitalist no longer clashes with other capitalists within a national context: all collaborate with each other because the centre of gravity in the competitive struggle is carried over into the world market, whereas within the county competition dies out. A co-operative capitalism arises, in which the State is transformed into a single, centralised, exploiting organisation and within it a hierarchically-structured bureaucracy fulfils the organising functions in complete accord with the military authorities, whose significance and power steadily grow.

As the distinction between State and society dissolves: All of the formerly differentiated political organizations of the ruling classes gradually lose their differential specifications, being transformed into a single imperialist party. From absolute capitalist-imperialist economic concentration to the absolute Imperialist State.

Thus emerges the finished type of the contemporary imperialist robber State, that iron organisation, which with its tenacious, raking claws embraces the living body of society. This is the New Leviathan, beside which the fantasy of Thomas Hobbes looks like a child’s toy.81

As Cervetto pointed out in 1976, at the time Bukharin was writing, the war economy, and especially Germany’s wartime planning, were the influences behind the idea of a militarised and all-pervasive «Imperialist State», anticipating also many features of later totalitarianism and Fascistisasion theories. Bukharin had been motivated primarily by the desire to oppose the German social democrats who had supported the war: his reference to the New Leviathan’s monstrous power was in effect a denunciation of their subservience. The same applies to his references to the Marx-Engels theories of the State, when he writes of how the State will become extinct in a future higher form of society.

In pile of many statements to the contrary, the difference between Marxists and anarchists isn’t that Marxists are for the State and anarchists are against the State. The real difference as regards the way things will be structured in the future is that socialists see a social economy as the result of trends towards concentration and centralisation – an inevitable consequence of the development of the productive forces – while conversely the economic Utopia of a decentralised anarchism would take us back to a pre-capitalist economy. Socialists expect the economy to become centralised and technologically advanced: anarchists would make any economic progress impossible, State power would be continued only during the transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a form of class rule in which the class in power would be the proletariat. As the dictatorship of the proletariat disappeared, the final State form would likewise vanish.82

Lenin’s initial disagreement

Between the summer of 1916 and the first months of 1917, the theoretical disagreement between Lenin and Bukharin focused on these paragraphs. Bukharin had sent ‘Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State’ to the party’s annual journal, the Social Democrat Review83. Lenin refused to publish it. The part dealing with imperialism could be extracted and published, but that on the State was limited: no more than touching on issues of fundamental principle in inadequately thought-out terms. The differences between Marxists and anarchists on the issue of the State had been defined in a completely erroneous way. The conclusion that social democracy had to firmly stress its hostility to the principle of State power was inaccurate, mistaken and contradicted the theory that the proletariat would create its own temporary form of State power. The advice was to leave the issue for further mature consideration.84

In the next few tense months, Bukharin broke ranks and published extracts of his article in Dutch, Danish and Norwegian journals, and finally, under the pseudonym ‘NB’ in the Jugend-Internationale, the publication of the social democrats’ youth organisation. Lenin’s reply – clearly couched as that of an educator «set against flattering youth» while having patience for their errors confirmed his reservations about Bukharin’s rejection of the principle of State power. It wasn’t possible to overlook the essential differences between the socialist and the anarchist attitude towards the State.

Socialists want to use the modern State and its institutions in the struggle for the emancipation of the working class, and in addition stress that the State must be used in the form it takes at the point of the transition from capitalism to socialism. This transitional form – the dictatorship of the proletariat – is also a form of State. The anarchists want to ‘abolish’ the State, to ‘blow it up’ (‘sprengen’ in the expression employed at one point by Comrade NB, who mistakenly attributes this concept to socialists. Socialists – and unfortunately here the author quotes Engels on the subject very selectively – acknowledge the ‘extinction’, the gradual ‘withering away’ of the State, after the bourgeoisie has been expropriated.85

Notes on Marxism and the State

Between the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, Lenin systematically gathered and wrote a commentary on everything Marx and Engels had said on this issue. This was to become ‘The Blue Notebook: Marxism on the State’ which would form the basis of ‘State and Revolution’, of which the foundations were to be laid in the summer of 1917. As a result of these reflections, the accusation of anarchism against Bukharin was initially reduced and then more or less withdrawn, although part of ‘The Blue Notebook’ repeats the assessment that Bukharin’s theories were inadequate. We can understand Lenin’s insistence on not allowing the thesis of State power to be rejected by principle, given that the revolutionary political struggle did not exclude using the State, and given that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a form of State: the Commune-State in fact.

«We differ from the anarchists in (α) our use of the State now and (β) during the proletarian revolution (‘dictatorship of the proletaria’) – very important points for our immediate practice. (This is what Bukharin has forgotten!)

What distinguishes us from the opportunists are deeper, ‘more eternal’ truths, which regard (αα) the temporary nature of the State (ββ) and the damage done by current inaccuracies on this issue at the present time (γγ), the not completely stateist nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat (δδ), the contradiction between State and liberty (εε), the more accurate idea or concept of the ‘Commune’ in place of the State (ζζ), and the ‘smashing’ (zerbrechen) of the bureaucratic machine».86

Lenin added that it was important not to forget the opportunism of the Bernsteins, who in Germany denied the dictatorship of the proletariat, while the official party programme distanced it indirectly, neglecting to mention it and tolerating currents that openly rejected the revolutionary way. Then there was the issue of Bukharin’s article:

In August 1916 Bukharin was told to ‘subject his ideas on the State to mature consideration’. Without doing this he has leapt into print as N.B. and has done so in such a way that instead of unmasking the Kautskyists his errors have helped them! While all the time Bukharin is on balance closer to the truth than Kautsky.

This comment is important in terms of evaluating the parameters of Lenin’s critique and his revised judgement. As Lenin saw it, Bukharin thought he was fighting opportunism by emphasising opposition to the principle of the State, but in the process he was falling into inaccuracy as regards the dictatorship of the proletariat — the real area of difference with the Kautskyists.

In a February 1917 letter to Alexandra Kollontai, Lenin writes of having nearly finished gathering the material on the State and confirms the assessment he made in the ‘Blue Notebook’:

I’ve reached much harsher conclusions about Kautsky than about Bukharin – have you seen his N.B. in No. 6 of the Jugend-Internationale? And in No. 2 of Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata? [the issue that contained Lenin’s reply: editors note]. The issue is of over-arching importance: Bukharin is worth a lot more than Kautsky, but Bukharin’s errors could ruin our ‘just cause’ in the struggle against Kautskyism.87

Two days later, in a letter to Ines Armand, he uses the same expression as in the ‘Blue Notebook’:

[...] I’ve gathered lots of material and I think I’ve come to some interesting and important conclusions, a good deal more against Kautsky than against N. Iv. Bukharin (who is nevertheless still wrong albeit closer to the truth than Kautsky).88

Lenin intended to publish Bukharin’s article, which he had rejected a few months previously, together with his own analysis of Bukharin’s minor errors and Kautksy’s massive falsification and degradation of Marxism. The project was never carried to completion. What remains is a preliminary draft of the planned article, to which we shall return in due course.

‘State and Revolution’: Marxism and anarchism

From these notes it’s clear that the essence of the issue was the dictatorship of the proletariat «the provisional State», as it was referred to in the - GAAP debates.

On the question of smashing the bourgeoisie’s State machinery, State and Revolution abandons the criticism levelled at Bukharin a few months previously. We believe that this was the sense of Cervetto’s 1976 note that in State and Revolution Bukharin’s critique of the State was accepted by Lenin.

Lenin’s text is unequivocal, and his ordered exposition makes it crystal-clear that the issue is to smash the bureaucratic-administrative machinery of the bourgeois State, while it was the power of the proletariat, the Commune-State that would eventually wither away. In fact, within that at last discovered political form two movements combined: the abolition of bourgeois State power and the revolutionary constituting of the semi-State the dictatorship of the proletariat that was destined to wither away. Here we cite only the most important passages:

[...] Engels says that in seizing power the proletariat thereby abolishes ‘the State as State’ [...] As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution ‘abolishing the bourgeois State, while the words about the State withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian State after the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois State does not ‘wither away’ but is ‘abolished by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian State or semi-State.89
The words ‘to smash the bureaucratic-military machine’ briefly express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the proletariat during the revolution in relation to the State. And this is the lesson that has not only been completely ignored but positively distorted by the prevailing Kautskyist ‘interpretations’ of Marxism!90

On the relationship between Marxism and anarchism, Lenin also moved closer to Bukharin, thus withdrawing the accusation that Bukharin had supported semi-anarchist theories. Marxism and anarchism were in agreement on the smashing of the bourgeois State machine, wrote Lenin:

Neither the opportunists nor the Kautskyists wish to see the similarity of views on this point between Marxism and anarchism (both Proudhon and Bakunin) because this is where they have departed from Marxism.91
It would not be surprising if the opportunists classed Engels, too, as an ‘anarchist’, for it is becoming increasingly common with the social-chauvinists to accuse the internationalists of anarchism. Marxism has always taught that with the abolition of classes the State will also be abolished. The well-known passage on the ‘withering away’ of the State in Anti-Dühring accuses the anarchists not simply of favouring the abolition of the State, but of preaching that the State can be abolished overnight.92

The distinction between Marxists and the anarchists is this: (1) The former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the State, recognise that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of the State. The latter want to abolish the State completely overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the State can be abolished. (2) The former recognise that after the proletariat has won political power it must completely destroy the old State machine and replace it by a new one consisting of an organisation of the armed workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while insisting on the destruction of the State machine, have a very vague idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how it will use its revolutionary power.

The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should use the State power, they reject its revolutionary dictatorship. (3) The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution by utilising the present State. The anarchists reject this».93

One can understand Cervetto’s reservations in December 1950 about drafting his theories for the Pontedecimo meeting, since Lenin’s subject-matter went to the conceptual heart of the Arshinov platform, Pier Carlo Masini’s point of reference, and nailed the theoretical weakness of revolutionary attack and abolition of any form of State as a simultaneous process.

‘Absterben’, ‘Abschaffung’, ‘Sprengung’

Lenin’s alternative criticism of Bukharin – that with the notion of blowing up (German = sprengen) the State he was giving in to the anarchists – has an irresolute ring to it.

The study on the Imperialist State would be published in 1925. In a footnote, Bukharin recalls all the vicissitudes, from Lenin’s refusal to publish, his own choice to break with the party by publishing extracts in radical-Left journals up to Lenin’s riposte in the Jugend-Internationale:

My readers will speedily understand that I did not make the errors that have been attributed to me, since I clearly saw the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, as can be seen from Lenin’s note, at that point he did not have a correct position on the issue of blowing up the State (the bourgeois State, that is) and confused this with the withering away of the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the time, I should perhaps have developed the proletarian dictatorship theme more fully. But in my own defence I can say that at the time the social democrats built up the bourgeois State to be so strong that it was natural to concentrate all my attention on the issue of abolishing this machine.94

Bukharin ends by recalling a diplomatic visit paid him by Lenin’s wife when she came back to Russia in May 1917:

[...] her first words were: “Vladimir Ilyich has asked me to tell you that he no longer disagrees with you on the issue of the State”. Once he had reviewed the issue, Lenin reached the same conclusion as to ‘blowing up’ the State, but he developed this theme, and the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat that derived from it, so thoroughly that he laid down a marker for our era in terms of theoretical development in this area.

The reconstruction seems genuine enough, but so does Bukharin’s incomprehension. In his defence he invokes the need to press the Kautskyists on the way they magnified the State, but ultimately this was at the root of Lenin’s objection: in order to unmask opportunism one had to get right to the core of the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this sense – and Bukharin acknowledges as much – State and Revolution gives the whole answer on an issue he had only touched on in his study of the Imperialist State.

Some maintain that all the evidence shows that in the autumn of 1916 Lenin had not fully considered the issue of blowing up the State machinery, but this does not seem convincing. Lenin continued to criticise Bukharin even after he had scrutinised Marx and Engels on the Commune. In the ‘Blue Notebook’ Lenin noted down Marx’s words in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon on the need to smash the machinery of the bourgeois State, but goes on to restate his criticism of Bukharin for not having adequately considered the dictatorship of the proletariat issue. Lenin’s criticism of Bukharin’s inadequately worked-out theory therefore goes beyond the sprengen – blowing up the State – controversy, in which, conversely, Lenin had not been precise. In his draft of the article that was to accompany Bukharin’s, Lenin returns to his objection: Absterben – (abolition) of the State. «Why not Abschaffung (destruction) or Sprengung95 (blow up)?» This insistence confirms that Lenin was concentrating on the issue of the provisional State, and was criticising Bukharin’s terminology.

Above all, however, it hardly seems likely that by the autumn of 1916 Lenin had never considered the issue of «smashing» the State machinery, and in fact he had not failed to do so. Lenin had edited the Russian edition of Marx’s correspondence with Kugelmann. In a 1907 controversy with Plekhanov, Lenin cites exactly what Marx’s position was on the Commune (letter dated 12-4-1871):

This, he says, was an attempt not simply to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it. And he praises our heroic Party comrades in Paris, led by the Proudhonians and Blanquists.96

So in 1907 Lenin had already made the observations that open the ‘Notebook’ on the State, that lie at the heart of State and Revolution and provide the chapter heading What made the Communards’ attempt heroic?

«The New Leviathan» and the national question

However, if we limit ourselves to simply examining the language employed, we are only going round in circles. Lenin may have written that to blow up the State was not a Marxist expression, but Marx’s view of the Commune – which had in fact attempted to smash the State machinery instead of taking it over – had not only been a part of his theoretical background for years, but was a political weapon that he had already employed against centrists and Mensheviks and would soon do so again in the April Theses.

Almost certainly, one of Cervetto’s sources in 1976 was Stephen Cohen, Bukharin’s biographer, who provides a useful overview of events, but lacks the political background to arrive at a complete understanding of his material. The prevailing sentiment of the first chapter of his work97 is his empathy with Bukharin and Western-style Marxism: he compares Bukharin – youthful, libertarian and ‘Westernised’ – with an older ‘Russian’ Lenin who is suspicious of all dissent.

Cohen appears to be unaware of the dynamics of a centralised party, to the point of not understanding Lenin’s insistence that all publications must be authorised by the party. Still less does he seem to comprehend the difficulty of the struggle to consolidate a political group around a defined strategic vision. He writes of Lenin’s battle on the national question and on the right to self-determination, but does not appear to realise its importance, and even labels as «hard to understand»98 Lenin’s harsh attitude to Bukharin when the latter was veering towards supporting the theories of Jurij Pjatakov, Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch ‘Left’.

Cohen does provide some interesting psychological commentary. In Vienna Bukharin had taken courses with the liberal economists of the ‘Austrian school’, the better to confute them; he had studied Rudolf Hilferding’s theories on financial capital and had met the principal exponents of Austro-Marxism. His book on The Political Economy of the Rentier, which opposed Austrian marginalism, was to become one of the few Russo-Marxist texts positively received by European social democrats, and one could speculate that Bukharin might have gained adulation as the young intellectual who had been able to break free of Russia – this from a viewpoint of Lenin as restricted by Russian backwardness. Cohen writes that the rupture caused by the war, and the catastrophe of the Second International had added significance for Bolsheviks like Bukharin who had seen themselves as European social democrats adhering to the advanced Marxism of Germany and Austria.

Cohen fails to display the same level of intuition when he writes of Lenin’s debating style. He appears to be taken aback by Lenin’s intransigence, which in fact is a stubborn focus on the point at issue – his attempt to retrieve Bukharin and prevent external intrusions: in any case, this is the habitual tone in which Lenin communicates. You argue very strangely, really, or rather, you don’t argue at all at all begins his October 1916 letter to Bukharin, refuting Bukharin’s complaints about the rejection of his article. Later he writes to Zinoviev that he has given Bukharin «a bland response»99. Or this November letter to Ines Armand: «I apologise for this long letter and for the abundance of sharp words: I can’t write otherwise when I am speaking frankly. Well, after all, this is all entre nous, and perhaps the unnecessary bad language will pass».100

Cohen tends to treat the national question and ‘self-determination of peoples’ as separate from the issue of the ‘State’, yet this very battle could help, if not to resolve the conundrum, at least to set it in a political framework. Between 1915 and 1916 Bukharin was swinging towards the theories of Jurij Pjatakov, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg, according to which claims for nationhood had no reason to exist in the age of imperialism. It’s clear that for Lenin the two issues – self-determination and attitude towards the State in the age of imperialism – were part of the same theoretical problem, formed a single knot of strategic analysis and were part of the political battle between those who made up the «Zimmerwald Left». The New Leviathan theory, understood as principled hostility towards the State, converged with abandoning struggles for national independence.

It’s not possible here to summarise the flood of articles and letters that from 1915 to the opening months of 1917 document this nexus. It was a period during which Lenin was defining his strategy, and as such would merit a separate study in itself. We quote only a letter (January 1917) which uncovers this nexus between theory of the State, national question and strategy centred on the contradictions of the system of States.

Defending Friedrich Engels from superficial criticism of his 1891 position on supporting a «defensive» war against Russia and France, Lenin rejects any parallels with the 1914 war:

«Wars are a supremely varied, diverse, complex thing. One cannot approach them with a general pattern.

  1. 1)  Three main types: the relation of an oppressed nation to the oppressor (every war is the continuation of politics; politics is the relationship between nations, classes, etc.). As a general rule, war is legitimate on the part of the oppressed (irrespective of whether it is defensive or offensive in the military sense).
  2. 2)  The relation between two oppressor nations. The struggle for colonies, for markets, etc. (Rome and Carthage; Britain and Germany -). As a general rule, a war of that kind is robbery on both sides; and the attitude of democracy (and socialism) to it comes under the rule: “Two thieves are fighting may they both perish” [...]
  3. 3)  The third type. A system of nations with equal rights. This question is much more complex/!!! Especially if side by side with civilised, comparatively democratic nations there stands tsarism. That’s how it was (approximately) in Europe from 1815 to 1905.

In 1891, writes Lenin, French and German colonial policy was insignificant, while Italy, Japan and the United States had no colonies at all. But then:

«In Western Europe a system had come into being (N.B. this!! Think over this!! Don’t forget this!! We live not only in separate States, but also in a certain system of States; it is permissible for the anarchists to ignore this; we are not anarchists), a system of States, on the whole constitutional and national. Side by side with them was powerful, unshaken, pre-revolutionary tsarism, which had plundered and oppressed everyone for hundreds of years, which crushed the revolutions of 1849 and 1863.

Germany (in 1891) was the county of advanced socialism. And this county was menaced by tsarism in alliance with Boulangism!

The situation was quite, quite diffèrent from what it is in -, when tsarism has been undermined by 1905, while Germany is waging a war to dominate the world. A different pair of shoes!!

To identify, even to compare the international situations of 1891 and 1914, is the height of unhistoricalness.

Stupid Radek wrote recently in the Polish manifesto (Befreiung Polens) that ‘Staatenbau’ is not the aim of the Social-Democratic struggle. This is arch-stupidity! It is half-anarchism, half-idiocy! No, no, we are not at all indifferent to the Staaten bau, to the system of States, to their mutual relations».101

Making the State was, in this case, Polish national independence: system of States and mutual relations were the forces in play within the balance of power, a balance at that point shaken by imperialist war. The simplification of the New Leviathan theory only echoed the limitations of imperialist economicism if hostility to the principle of the State was to be extended to utilising bourgeois democracy and to the struggles for national self-determination. The strategy for 1917 would make use of the legal gaps in the State that followed on from the democratic and bourgeois February Revolution: taking the Commune as its model it would claim all power to the Soviets for the proletarian October Revolution: would take up ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in the face of the contradictions of a system of States order that was breaking up in the front line of the trenches: and would make use of the national question and self-determination in order to blow up that prison of the peoples the Tsarist empire.

Using the democratic State: the Commune-State as dictatorship of the proletariat: the theory of system-State balance: national struggles for the independence of new States: these were four theoretical questions on the State and on imperialism on which Lenin fought a relentless battle between 1915 and 1916, and which by 1917 had become practical issues in the revolution. Only by joining up all the pieces of the mosaic can we understand the terms in which the draft of State and Revolution in the summer of 1917 organically developed and laid out the theory of the State, certainly taking into account the clash with Bukharin, and focusing on all the inexactitudes within that confrontation.

‘State totalitarianism’ and the move towards Fascism

From the - documents the reader will recall that at the end of April 1949 Pier Carlo Masini sent Arrigo Cervetto some Bordighist material which again according to Masini went beyond Marx, beyond Lenin. We may guess that Masini was focused on the State: in fact, he writes on the one hand of sharp theoretical elements borrowed from anarchism that can be reintegrated into the anarchism of the vanguard and on the other of «eliminating all Bordiga’s authoritarian, Jacobin, and basically abstract inconsistencies».102

It will be also be recalled that in Cervetto’s 1976 theoretical review, he refers to Masini’s belief that Bordiga’s critique of the State – which took up the anarchist critique went beyond Lenin, whereas in fact it took up Bukharin’s critique, which was accepted by Lenin. As we have seen, all this wasn’t just splitting hairs: anarchism certainly agreed with the stress on «abolishing» the State and on the need to smash the machinery of the bourgeois State, but fundamentally the basis of these points lay in Marx’s theory. At one and the same time the Commune united Marxists and anarchists in the need to smash the bourgeois State, and divided them over the idea of the Commune-State as the at last discovered political form of the ‘provisional State’ of the proletariat.

In accepting Bukharin’s critique of the State, Lenin was not accepting the whole anarchist critique, but the part of it that stressed the need to blow up the bureaucratic-military machine – Marx’s theory, which anarchism shared. Lenin had two separate objections to Bukharin’s writings. Firstly, although Lenin’s theory of the State included Bukharin’s critique, this theory was part of a totality of vision – in State and Revolution – that Bukharin’s work lacked. Secondly, Bukharin was too dogmatic about the tendency to concentrate in a ‘national trust’ State capitalism, resulting in the equally dogmatic theory of a totalitarian New Leviathan.

Two implications arise out of Cervetto noting that Bordiga took his critique of the State from Bukharin and not from anarchism (as Masini had claimed). First, by doing so Cervetto was asserting continuity with Marxism and with Lenin. True, there’s plenty of Bordiga in those 1951 debates, whether his theories were being criticised or accepted, but this was because at the time Bordiga was ‘the’ revolutionary Marxism in Italy, and ‘He’ represented Marxist criticism of the social nature of the USSR. Secondly, Cervetto was also highlighting the dialectical deficiencies of Bukharin’s «New Leviathan» theory, which came down to the «Bukharin-Vercesi-Bordiga» stresses on totalitarianism > Fascistisation.

Correspondence from the editorial staff of Prometeo at the end of May 1949 indicates that after Masini had mailed him the original material, Cervetto had been catching up with missing issues of the publication. For around two thousand lire*, Cervetto received «issues 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12»103 of Prometeo, a subscription to the next six new issues and The ABC of Communist by Bukharin and Preobrazenskij, the official programme of the Internationalist Communist Party**. This tells us that some work on the theory of the State by Bukharin and by Ottorino Perrone (alias Vercesi) had come to the attention of Cervetto and Masini by the spring of 1949, and were part of their thinking on the theories that would be put forward at Pontedecimo.

Vercesi’s 1948 work ‘Parliamentary Democracy and Popular Democracy’ is dominated by references both direct and indirect to Nikolai Bukharin. For Vercesi, State totalitarianism is the ultimate product of capitalist development, whether it is expressed in the parliamentary democracy of the West or in the USSR’s popular democracy. The trend is towards Fascism and State intervention:

[...] today all countries ruled by democracy, whether popular or parliamentary, are going through a phase of increasing Fascism. Leaving aside differences of degree, State interventionism is everywhere triumphant; this is one of the fundamental goals of Fascism, which in its turn represents the only solution capitalism has to offer in the face of the development of the productive forces.104

As regards the tendency towards a State-trust Vercesi quotes Bukharin, straight from ‘Imperialism and World Economy’:

State capitalist structure of society, besides worsening the economic conditions of the working class, makes the workers formally bonded to the imperialist State. In point of fact, employees of State enterprises even before the war were deprived of a number of most elemental rights, like the right to organise, to strike, etc. A railway or post office strike was considered almost an act of treason. The war has placed those categories of the proletariat under a still more oppressive bondage. With State capitalism making nearly every line of production important for the State, with nearly all branches of production directly serving the interests of war, prohibitive legislation is extended to the entire field of economic activities. The workers are deprived of the freedom to move, the right to strike, the right to belong to the so-called subversive parties, the right to choose an enterprise, etc. They are transformed into bondsmen attached, not to the land, but to the plant. Thy become white slaves of the predatory imperialist State, which has absorbed into its body all productive life.105

Vercesi commented that Bukharin at one and the same time author and victim of the decline of the Soviet State had a presentiment of the sort of socialism you would get under the Boss-State. That was in 1948. Regardless of the discovery that Bordiga’s stress on totalitarianism had its roots in Bukharin’s work, one essential point should not be forgotten: the denunciation of the USSR as a Boss-State was at any rate a shaft of light in the dark night of Stalinism. Even that small flame, limited by Bordiga’s liquidationist stance and his strategic inadequacy, was enough, in 1951, to set off on the road again.

* Quite a lot of money in those days and the equivalent of about 10-15% of a worker’s monthly wage, at a time when books were expensive.

** An organisation formed in Northern Italy in 1943 by part of the «Communist Left», expelled from the PCI in the 1930s. At the time its main leaders were Onorato Damen and Bruno Maffi, joined in 1945 by Ottorino Perrone (Vercesi), Amadeo Bordiga, other militants who had come back from abroad, and those who had organised themselves around Bordiga in Southern Italy (Left-wing Fraction of Communists and Socialists). In November 1943 the first issue of the PCI’s clandestine newspaper, Prometeo was published. It would then become the party’s theoretical periodical. From May 1945 the PCI published a weekly, Battaglia Comunista. In 1952 political divergences led to the PCI splitting into two organisations that kept the same name, one respecting the theses upheld by Onorato Damen (and that kept on with the two publications Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista) and the other respecting Amadeo Bordiga’s theses and publishing the fortnightly review Il Programma Comunista.

«New Leviathan» and «World Leviathan»

This was why Cervetto carefully followed the Bordiga debate. The file for his 1971 annual report on the ‘stages in the development of the Leninist party in Italy’ contains a note on Bordiga entitled ‘Theory of super imperialism / super-State / Mighty Dollar’. It’s significant that Cervetto is already using the term super-State. This points to the line of thinking that is again to be found in his 1976 statement, which consists of a lengthy quotation from an article in a 1961 edition of the publication Battaglia Comunista (Communist Battle). Below we reproduce the quotation alongside Cervetto’s synthesis.

Reviewing the - back issues of Prometeo, we find several articles by Bordiga, such as ‘Tendencies and Socialism’ (January/February 1947) ‘America’ (May/June 1947) ‘More on America’ (November 1947) and ‘Europe under Attack’ (August 1949). In these the author, starting from the World War 2 military alliance between Russia and America and American armaments loans to Russia, cautiously touches on the hypothesis that the postwar period will see American imperialism – conceived as a world super-State – buy the Russian ruling class with the Mighty Dollar and economically absorb Russia’s enormous sphere of control.

This forecast is taken up and developed in the section ‘Timeline’* to which the reader is referred.

Bordiga’s theory may be compared with Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism theory.

‘Clearly, Bordiga believes that in this postwar period what Lenin defined ‘an empty abstraction’ will come to pass: that all inter-imperialist clashes – which result from world capitalism’s uneven development – will be eliminated.

Bordiga believes in US ultra-imperialism, and foresees that Western Europe, Africa, Asia, the whole world including Stalin’s Russia, is destined to fall under America’s financial hegemony’, i.e. to become passive pawns of the US global supertrust. ‘Hence, Bordiga believes in the peaceful ultra-imperialism for which Lenin never ceased to reproach Kautsky’.

For Lenin, the ultra-imperialism theory ‘only encouraged the apologists of imperialism in the notion that the rule of finance capital ‘would reduce’ the imbalances and contradictions of the world economy, whereas in reality it ‘exacerbates’ them’. Anticipating that the USSR – the only viable opponent of American imperialism – would instead become its financial serf, Bordiga believed that in the post-war period the imbalances of the world economy would be ‘reduced rather than ‘exacerbated».106

At the end Cervetto notes: «This was part of the basis for the 1975 theory». «Reduced imbalances» was as much a feature of Bordiga’s theories as a mythical deadline for world crisis**.

We will consider super-imperialism in subsequent chapters on the theory of unitary imperialism. Here we will follow the super-State line of thought. A passage in ‘More on America’ contains expressions typical of Bukharin.

The United States is the plutocratic monster State that keeps our American proletarian comrades, not the least in this tremendous crisis, under its classic iron heel.107 A long six-part series (-) and signed A. Orso (Bordiga’s pseudonym) takes up the Marxist theory of the State, in a revealing formulation:

[...] the capitalist system has more than doubled its power, concentrated in the great monster States and in its construction of the new world Leviathans of class rule.108

World Leviathans echoes Bukharin’s New Leviathans. But Bukharin never suggested that State capitalism’s monster States, even centralised in national trusts, could give birth to one single world power.

* The title of a long series of theoretical articles written by Bordiga and published from January 1949 to May 1955 in Battaglia Comunista (-) and Il Programma Comunista (-).

** In 1957, in the article «7 November 1917 - 7 November 1957: Forty Years of Organic Evaluation ef Events in Russia» (Il Programma Comunista, N° 21 / 1957), Bordiga set out the thesis that: Twenty years will still have to go by before the new permanent revolutionary flame conceived within the international framework flares up ... a date that would place this around 1975. This is the mythical deadline mentioned by Cervetto.

Asian Leviathans and the theory of the State

We believe we have now adequately documented the development of the 1951 Thesis on the State, and the point of view from which Cervetto was commenting in 1971 and 1976. In The Political Shell Cervetto would further develop his 1976 observations, confronting both Bukharin’s theory and the accusations of anarchism levelled against State and Revolution by Heinrich Cunow’s German revisionism and Hans Kelsen’s bourgeois liberalism. On the other hand, Cervetto does not analyse the issue of «smashing» the State machine by way of the Lenin-Bukharin clash, from the initial summer 1916 differences, with all their inadequacies and imprécisions, to Lenin’s withdrawal of his reservations, communicated to Bukharin in May 1917.

Was there some reason for Cervetto leaving this issue aside, or was he simply postponing it to future consideration? In the pages that follow our speculations will be informed by scientific caution, taking full responsibility for the interpretations here presented.

The focus on locating in a historical perspective the development of Lotta Comunista’s founding group should not lead us to forget the conditions existing at the time of its first steps. Cervetto’s error (which he later acknowledged) in accepting the simultaneous withering away of the State, is exposed in the first two points of this statement:

«1. The social revolution, which will bring about a classless society, will be completed by the simultaneous abolition of the bourgeoisie as a class and of the State as the class machinery.

  • 2. This simultaneous nature of the revolutionary act will be realised via an assault on the bourgeois regime by mass proletarian organisations (workplace councils, agricultural collectives, people’s committees) in conjunction with the political class (revolutionary minority) movement, which arises out of and leads it».109

In subsequent chapters we will consider just how rigid the initial theory of unitary imperialism was. Certainly, theories such as «the end of nation-State autonomy», «the cancelling out of differences between the metropolises and their colonies», «the end of the politics of power balances» have a distinct echo of the positions Lenin opposed in 1915 / 16. Perhaps because of the strong sense that war was just around the corner, the State took on features of Bukharin’s «New Leviathan». Here is Masini, writing in L’Impulso in March 1951:

Some aspects of the new situation that has been created in every country: the excessive enlargement of the State and the centralisation of dominant groups, from banks to industry, from agriculture to bureaucracy, from the Church to the Army, from the parasitic orders to political cliques, into a ruling class bloc bound together by a relentless will to hold onto power: the central planning of large sectors of the economy, the establishment of an oppressive propaganda machine capable of moulding public opinion in a totalitarian but underhand manner, sophisticated techniques of governing and policing and the unification of the driving forces of the nation’s life towards expansionism. Henceforth war will be total and permanent, conducted on the psychological and economic as well as military level, directly and indirectly: a complex and consummate process aimed at the final annihilation of the enemy.110

It’s as well not to exaggerate these echoes and analogies. The salient fact is that in 1951 there was a general expectation that war was imminent, and this caused the members of GAAP to think in terms of a «new Zimmerwald». It’s no surprise that these were the issues and the materials that they felt compelled to study.

Lenin’s battle to give direction to the «Zimmerwald Left» took place nearly a hundred years ago: it’s been sixty years since the youthful members of GAAP faced the prospect of a «new Zimmerwald»: the theory of an imperialist democracy is thirty years old now. The reckoning between anarchism and Leninism, the distinction between the theory of totalitarianism and the Marxist theory of the State, the confrontation with Bordighist, with Trotskyist or conciliatory theories – surely these issues belong to past centuries, remnants of once-glorious ideals that are now definitively part of history?

Not so. Those political battles are not a mere subject for an academic seminar, they are our story, the story of our party. We must be able to set our daily political activity within the context of history, Cervetto wrote in 1976: this we cannot do unless we travel the crucial pathways taken by the strategy-party, for by doing so we will grasp the significance of those political and theoretical battles.

A less obvious reason is that the political and theoretical reckoning with those other internationalist currents – these, and not the political currents of the bourgeoisie, are our business – may plausibly be considered closed for this political cycle. But who can foresee the future of class struggle, in a new cycle?

What forms will class consciousness take among the hundreds of millions of proletarians who are right now entering their political apprenticeship? – because the objective process that is tearing them from the countryside and piling them into imperialist development’s new metropolises is taking place at this very moment.

What will happen in Asia, where the new Leviathans of the new strategic phase are on the rise? Where China and India and many lesser powers, are putting together the instruments of State for their imperialist ascent?

How will some little group of young workers face their 1951, in Shanghai, Canton or Peking, in a Leviathan rearming on the economic, political and military level, but which still wears the ideological garb of China’s false socialism?

Who is to say that faced with their own particular Leviathan, fighting against a single State-party that still calls itself socialist and communist, they won’t take the road of libertarian communism? Or that they won’t choose to fight under some other internationalist banner? And when the breakdown of world order and an imperialist war at the gates brings together another internationalist «Zimmerwald Left», what will we say to them? How will we fight alongside them, how will we persist, with Bolshevik tenacity, to help them towards a clear strategy?

In this precise sense – the real strength of the world proletariat – the issue of european leninism’s relationship with other internationalist currents must be considered open. And in this sense the experiences, the theoretical issues resolved, the battles for clarity that every generation of Marxists has fought, are not only our yesterdays, but a scientific and political legacy for tomorrow.

Chapter Six

THE UNITARY IMPERIALISM ISSUE

 

In 1951 Europe, and the world, was shrouded in mist. The ‘Cold War’ ideology ruled, and the war in Korea made a world conflict between the USA and the USSR seem a real possibility. In France, Great Britain, Germany and Italy, the talk was of rearmament. Europe, at that time urged by the USA, was planning the EDC (European Defence Community) to keep step with German rearmament. The concept of a ‘unitary imperialism’ was the strategic choice that helped the small GAAP group remain politically independent. But translating this into an ‘Internationalist Third Front’ slogan was unfortunate. It facilitated a link with French libertarian communists, but could also cause confusion with its suggestion of a ‘Third Force’ between the USA and the USSR, which in Europe was supported by important bourgeois currents. Although opposition to unitary imperialism consolidated the internationalist struggle, the theory required to be developed and perfected. This would take place in the years to come, as the mists of the ‘Cold War’ cleared. Not that the USA and the USSR were the only factors in play: capitalist development was throwing up contradictions throughout the whole world, starting with Asia. Washington and Moscow were the capitals of unitary imperialism, but so were London, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo – and Rome.

In his last letter of 1950 Cervetto returned to the issue of studying imperialism. It’s one of his clearest descriptions of a working programme to analyse the nature of the USSR, and the political aim comes across. It was necessary to achieve a scientific definition of the nature of the USSR, following the criteria of Lenin’s Imperialism:

Over the last few days I’ve been reading Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage, etc. It’s a good basis for the study, analysis and interpretation of our own times. If we were well-versed in economics we could use Lenin’s theories to define the imperialist nature of the USSR, but I don’t yet know how. For example, Lenin wrote that ‘capitalism exported goods, imperialism exports capital’, and stresses that this shift is inevitable, since imperialism is the final stage of capitalism. Has the USSR exported capital to its zones of influence, and if so, how much? Only after we have investigated the economic activity of the USSR throughout the world can we State, according to Lenin’s criteria and hence scientifically, in line with Marxist doctrine, that we accept as the base of our ideology that the USSR is imperialist.111

The issue was linked to the search for a scientific formula for unitary imperialism, of which the first signs may be observed in the summer of 1950. As we know, Cervetto was already dissatisfied with Amadeo Bordiga’s Mighty Dollar the idea of an all-pervading American imperialism that crushed any possibility of political action – and had criticised Masini for traces of the same in his thinking. By the end of August Cervetto was noting that his criticism of Bordiga was as yet only «instinctive» and that Masini was showing traces of schematism on the issue of imperialism.

Three notes on unitary imperialism

Cervetto wrote three notes between the autumn of 1950 and the spring of 1952 (the long gap is attributable to his year’s absence in Argentina). They confirm his line of thinking during that historical turning-point marked by the Korean War, and help to set the scene for the rapidly-deepening differences with Masini as to the political tactics to follow. As we shall see, Cervetto’s doubts on the ‘internationalist Third Front’ as an alliance of forces opposing imminent war were paralleled by his theoretical reflections on unitary imperialism.

A meeting held on 23rd September 1950 at Nervi discussed a document that laid out the political line for the National Conference. From the correspondence we know that the original draft was Masini’s: whether Cervetto made any subsequent contribution is unclear. This, with one or two modifications, was the text approved at Pontedecimo in February 1951. One revealing passage, on which we have already touched, was destined to give rise to debate:

Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, dominates the scene in our times. It has reached such an uncontainable degree of concentration that for the first time in history it has given rise to the maximum – and dramatic – antagonism between two single opposing big State blocs. On the international level it has brought about the end of nation-State autonomy: the cancelling out of any fundamental difference between the old metropolises and their colonies (now independent and integrated into their own new political superstate orders: the end of the uneven development of a capitalism now controlled and levelled out by the centres of imperialistpowers, and the end of the politics of power balances and of all pre-existing international juridical organisation».112

The end of nation-State autonomy: the end of uneven development: the end of the politics of power balances: we have highlighted three aspects of a stiffer version of the unitary imperialism theory. A note of Cervetto’s for the meeting indicates that imperialism was one of the problems yet to be resolved: is imperialism unitary and homogeneous?

A note on the theory of uneven development

The issue crops up again in May 1952, when on his return from Argentina Cervetto was able to study the exchange of letters that made public the break between Amadeo Bordiga and Onorato Damen. As we will see from an analysis of the sources, the period in Argentina was a fertile year for his thinking, and the Bordiga debate was to be only one factor in his attempts to refine the concept of unitary imperialism. A hand-written note that can be dated to the spring of 1952, entitled ‘Theoretical note: the question of capitalism’s uneven development’, lists nine points requiring further study:

  • 1. What do we mean by ‘capitalism’s uneven development?
  • 2.  Can we take it from this that imperialism’s development is also uneven, given that it is the highest stage of capitalism?
  • 3. Or is it that capitalism passes through stages of uneven development on its way to its highest stage, imperialism? (e.g. some capitalist countries aren’t yet imperialist, others are on the way, others are already imperialist?)
  • 4.  Or is it: there are feudal countries developing towards capitalism, others semi-feudal, others again semi-capitalist?
  • 5. Are we to understand that the first phase of capitalism has not yet spread throughout the whole world?
  • 6.  Damen writes of «international capitalism, considered to be unitary in fact, albeit to different degrees given the effects of its uneven development».113
  • 7.  Is it true to say that the law of capitalismes uneven development is at the basis of the imperialist disproportion between the USSR and the USA?
  • 8.  Can we speak of ‘uneven development of imperialism’?
  • 9.  Finally, how should we formulate the overall question – quality or quantity? (Are we talking about uneven development in terms of quality or of quantity) while at the same time considering dialectically this quality-quantity relationship (and the passage, or leap, between them?)».114

The note clarifies the presuppositions of the debate that took place between Cervetto and Masini in May-November of 1952, and may be considered the preamble to Cervetto’s letter of 22nd May 1952: You can’t eliminate all the theoretical problems imperialism raises by mechanically waving a Zimmerwald flag.

At GAAP’s second National Conference in Florence on 1-2nd June 1952, Cervetto maintained that: «We must examine, analyse and explain the situation. It’s not enough to say that the two blocs are the same: this would be mere schematism and wouldn’t correspond to reality». Masini’s reply – don’t let yourself get caught up in the Bordighist debate – may be understood as part of the same discussion.

The ambiguities of ‘Third Front’/ ‘Third Force’

We will examine this issue more closely in the next chapter, but first it’s useful to reconstruct how the ‘Third Front’ initiative was debated between the autumn of 1950 and the spring of 1951, in the international context of that phase of the ‘Cold War’. In this apparently bipolar confrontation between two blocs, the USA and the USSR, the very expression ‘Third Front’ lent itself to being confused with the formula of a ‘Third Force’ i.e. with those currents that saw in Europe a possible third bloc with the potential to avoid being caught up in a future war between Washington and Moscow. Masini supported the formula, among other reasons for its potential to facilitate unity of action with the French libertarian communists of Georges Fontenis’ Libertaire, but when it was formally adopted in April 1951, Cervetto’s reservations centred on precisely this inevitable confusion between ‘Third Front’ and ‘Third Force’.

  • «a. The formula ‘3rd Front’ is inappropriate, not to mention inexact as far as ‘3rd’ goes; should be talking about a revolutionary or internationalist front. 3rd immediately implies an erroneous evaluation of the imperialist struggle: apart from the risk of being associated with ‘Third Force’ formulas, there is also the danger of lending comfort to Third Force petit-bourgeois elements, etc.
  • b.  The Front should be proletarian, working class, in nature.
  • c.  A Front of exactly which political forces? [...] the Trotskyists would probably be the only ones to Join».115

‘Highly dangerous and wild’ formulations

A third note of Cervetto’s, still attributable to the spring of 1952, provides a direct example of the political risks in an ill thought-out and superficial formula casually employed to direct militant politics. Cervetto set himself to examine back numbers of the French Libertaire. An unsigned April 1951 article maintains that the West may be for peace, but the East is waiting for war – even if it comes from America – in order to free itself from totalitarianism.

Cervetto notes:

The article contains some highly dangerous and wild formulations. Among much else, it examines the problem of war from the viewpoint of Western and Lastern populations. According to the author, Western populations are against war because war is worse than the capitalist system, in spite of the latter’s defects. The Eastern populations, on the other hand, are supposed to be waiting for war to deliver them from totalitarian slavey. Other statements, such as ‘the main struggle should be against Stalinism’ display a theoretical inadequacy, quite apart from compromising the 3rd Front line – see the resolution on 3rd Front, VI Congress FAF (Libertaire 270).116

This resolution of the VI Congress of the French Anarchist Federation was an attempt to clarify the ‘Third Front’ line, and overall had succeeded in maintaining an autonomous internationalist position. The ‘Third Front’, read the resolution, was «inflexible opposition to Russian and American imperialism», a working-class front for all the exploited against the exploiters, whether capital or State. It was neither a slogan nor a permanent cartel of diverse organisations but an expression of anarchist struggle; hence the ‘Third Front’ position should properly be defended, controlled and directed exclusively by the Anarchist Federation absolutely independently of any other organisation supporting either of these sources of oppression. The formula ‘Against Truman without being for Stalin: against Stalin without being for Truman’ was chosen to highlight «anarchism’s revolutionär pacifism»

Cervetto’s handwritten note on the issue of the “French 3rd Front”.

Cervetto’s concern that the ‘Third Front’ formula would leave an opening to highly dangerous positions indicates that even a principled internationalist position was vulnerable in the absence of a deeper understanding of the nature of unitay imperialism and its dynamics.

In summary, the conceptual core of the issue was simple enough, but an ordered chronology of its development is required. An accurate reconstruction of the clash around the idea of unitary imperialism and the ‘Third Front’ slogan throws light on how Cervetto and Parodi arrived at their choice of a Leninist strategy-party. We will consider the European currents that made up the ‘Third Front’, the French genesis of the slogan in Georges Fontenis’ Libertaire, and the initial discussions in Italy during the autumn and winter of 1950, during the preparations for the meeting at Pontedecimo. We will go on to consider the clarificatory debates of the second half of 1952, Cervetto’s theoretical sources during that year, and finally the theoretical conclusion he developed in 1968, with the scientific discovery (of) the true partition between the USA and the USSR.

The European currents of the ‘Third Force’

In the bipolar world view that was gaining ground at the end of the 1940s, the notion of a Third Force had a multiplicity of uses. At times it had an internal parliamentary significance, as in France, but in its overlap with the bipolar outline of the ‘Cold War’, the two dimensions tended to coincide. For the SFIO (the French Socialists) and for the British Labour Left, ‘Third Force’ was as distinct from the Conservatives (Gaullists and Tories) as it was from the two super-powers.

For some currents ‘Third Force’ took on a European meaning, with Europe as the alternative to Washington and Moscow, although to different degrees. In France, for example, the Gaullists were conservatives but not aligned with the USA; in Great Britain the fact that the ruling administration was Labour facilitated the identification of ‘Third Force’ with a non-Stalinist European socialism, but the crux of the matter was also obscured by Labour’s insular policy. All these meanings – especially in France, as was to become clear when the French parliament checked plans for a European Defence Community – were affected by the fact that European unity meant German rearmament.

‘Third Force’ had its Catholic variation (the MRP, French-European centre, allied with the SFIO); its socialist variation (Guy Mollet in France, Aneurin Bevan in Great Britain); its liberal-radical variation (in Italy, Pannunzio’s Il Mondo and Altiero Spinelli’s European federalists); and its Gaullist variation (Le Monde and Charles de Gaulle, note the biographers of the paper’s editor Beuve-Méry, were often to be found saying the same thing at different times).

British Labour were not alone in being a nationalist variant. There was also Kurt Schumacher’s German SPD, in the sense that the refusal of any alliance with Washington or with Moscow was ‘nationalist’ rather than Europeanist – a national Labour or social-democrat socialism. There was an Eastern ‘Third Force’ variation in Tito’s Yugoslavia, and Belgrade would shortly give birth to the ‘non-aligned’ front at the Bandung Conference.

Amid the ambiguities of the ‘Cold War’, variants of ‘Third Force’ were openly or secretly influenced from abroad, whether from the Atlantic or the Stalinist camp. In Italy the Congress for Cultural Freedom was linked to the initiatives of Ignazio Silone and Pannunzio’s Il Mondo: Altiero Spinelli would present ties with Atlantic politics as a prerequisite for Europe’s emancipation. On the opposing side, neutralist positions within the Labour Left, the French SFIO Left and maximalist socialist currents in Italy were often encouraged by Stalinist party headquarters.

As the positions of the USA and the USSR became more and more polarised, the intellectual components of neutrality became an obvious area for Stalinism to influence. The meaning of ‘Third Force’ evolved alongside the first freeze (-), with the exit of the PCF and the PCI from the French and Italian governments, and following the second souring of relations in 1950, when the Korean War was making an imminent war seem all too likely. This served to accentuate the bipolar line-up of political forces and currents, but the counter-tendency was that it caused Europeanist currents, which had started from a Euro-Atlantic core, to become more structured. The most interesting aspect for us is that between the end of the 1940s and the first years of the 1950s, ‘Third Force’ was a key element, both nationally and internationally, in the political debate. When in April 1951 Cervetto objected to the ‘Third Front’ formula as soon as he saw it, maintaining that ‘Proletarian Front’ would not lend itself to the same ambiguities, he appealed to elements of the political scene who were already following the Europe debate. What makes Cervetto, as distinct from Masini, stand out is his refusal to let himself be used, and his resolve to guard against any future attempts to use him. It was the same instinct he had displayed in 1944 – the capacity to immediately grasp the essence of an issue.

The ‘Third Force’ in France

In France, too, the dominant view of the ‘Cold War’ was of confrontation between two blocs, along with a permanent fear of open war. This meant that international themes prevailed in internal debates leading to a close interweaving of internal and international issues within political parties.117 This indicates a collective psychology similar to that which existed in Italy: the issues of political struggle were defined as imminent war, rearmament, neutrality or Atlanticism, ‘Russian party’ or ‘American party’.

The few differences are worth noting. Due to the political traditions of France, the French experience of the war and Charles de Gaulle’s opposition to the Yalta agreements, the issue of a neutral or ‘Third Force’ position in the Washington-Moscow confrontation was particularly important. For a period the daily Le Monde, edited by Hubert Beuve-Méry, was to be the unexpected platform for an armed neutrality line, along with periodicals such as Esprit and Temps Présent.

Beuve-Méry had been educated by Dominican priests, and held Catholic-Solidaristic third way views combined with economic-technocratic ideas on the State. At the military academy of Uriage, during the Occupation, he had flirted with the pro-planning theories of the Vichy regime’s ‘social’ soul. On 19th October 1945, an article of his in Temps Présent was entitled ‘Neutrality’:

The establishment of a Western alliance comparable to the United States and the USSR, situated geographically, economically and politically halfway between these two powerful ‘partners’ presents as logical, desirable, and advantageous to all. But with one proviso: that the new organisation be independent of both Washington and Moscow.

Jacques Julliard and Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Beuve-Méry’s biographers118 note that this meaning of ‘neutrality’ was more ‘non-alignment’ – an expression that was not current at the time. This neutrality (in 1946 a version ahead of its time) meant an autonomous European unit militarily and ideologically located equidistantly from the two existing blocs. Only subsequently would the term shade into an idealistic pacifism that could be easily manipulated by proUSSR propaganda. From 1947 on, and with the Prague coup of 1948, Moscow’s increasingly hard line caused Beuve-Méry to abandon the notion of equidistance. A few days before the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty he wrote that the need to defend the West was no longer an issue, rather it was a question of how to defend it and from then on he abandoned the term ‘neutrality’.

His two biographers note three features of Beuve-Méry’s ‘neutrality’. Firstly, it sought to retain some freedom of action for France in the face of the Atlantic Treaty’s double bluff. Sirius, as was Beuve-Méry’s Le Monde pseudonym, was extremely doubtful of automatic American intervention in the event of Western Europe being invaded. Secondly, as far as Sirius was concerned German rearmament was to the Atlantic Treaty «as the seedling is to the tree»: the phrase that caused a sensation, but was to be proved entirely accurate. Thirdly: rearmament was fine, but was it necessary to «consider war as immediate and inevitable?»

If this was the case, maintained Beuve-Méry in provocative mode, then Germany should rearm with all urgency, the French Communist Party should be outlawed, factories should be transferred to North Africa, and Paris should join the federated States of the USA, with two elected French representatives in the Senate.

If this wasn’t the case, a strategy for peace was required: a refusal to join in the arms race and a political strategy of détente, of diffidence towards the USA, national independence, a rejection of the ‘blocs’ logic, and rearmament exclusively for the purposes of national defence. Julliard and Jeanneney note that at the time such views were not particularly popular, though later finding support. Ultimately, Beuve-Méry and Charles de Gaulle held many ideas in common, even if these were never shared at the same point in time.

The ‘Gauche’ and the ‘Cold War’

Another important difference between Italy and France was that the French Communist Party was isolated by reason of its ties with Russia. The French Socialist Party lined up with the Atlantic Treaty, and up to 1951 were part of a centrist coalition – labelled as a ‘Third Force’ coalition – because this excluded both Gaullists and Stalinists. For the lifetime of the Fourth Republic, the Socialist Party were part of this «broad majority» in foreign policy. Prior to the 1948 turnaround, however, non-alignment was a big card in the socialist propaganda pack. In 1947 Guy Mollet was for an «international Third Force». Léon Blum returned to the theme in a speech that played on the coincidence of ‘Third Force’ in the French parliament and a ‘Third Force’ between Washington and Moscow:

The majority of French citizens want to be neither Communists nor Gaullists, just as the majority of the world’s citizens want to be neither protégés of the Americans nor subjects of the Soviets.119

In January 1948, the leaders of the French Socialist Party defined an «international Third Force» as lying within their objective of a United Socialist States of Europe in opposition to expansionist American capitalism and the Soviet Union’s totalitarian and imperialist Communism. From the spring of 1948 on, the socialists’ move towards Atlanticism is confirmed by the Treaty of Brussels and the launch of the Atlantic Alliance. The Prague coup on 25th April 1948 was the definitive turning-point of the ‘Cold War’, which was also exacerbated by the Berlin blockade between June 1948 and February 1949.

Guy Mollet’s «Atlantic socialism» was strengthened in the second half of 1950 by the outbreak of the Korean War. France launched an unprecedented rearmament programme, and lengthened the period of national service, a decision passed in the face of opposition from a substantial minority of the Socialist Party leadership. In a similar situation, Aneurin Bevan left the British government and led the Labour Left in opposing an increase in military spending. In Paris the weekly L’Observateur, started by Claude Bourdet, Roger Stéphane and Gilles Martinet, became the catalyst for dissident socialism and neutral pacifism – the future deuxième gauche in embryonic form. In September 1950 Bourdet acknowledged that neutrality served Moscow’s policies to the precise extent that at this moment in time the USSR fears a world war. We are quite disposed towards this meeting of interests. It was to be an anomalous kind of support notes Anne Dulphy,120 different from the open backing Moscow received from the intellectuals of the French Communist Party, which from 1952 on was to lead L’Observateur to present the USSR bloc in a positive light.

Michel Pablo’s ‘The Coming War’

Following this slightly incongruous train is Michel Pablo (alias Michalis Raptis) leader of the Trotskyist 4th International, and his theories. The pamphlet La guerre qui vient (August 1952) makes unscrupulous use of the Stalinist theory of «two camps» gathered around the USA and the USSR respectively, endorsing the Yalta partition as a victory for international socialism. This led to opportunist sophistry based on an incorrect reading of the nature of USSR society and the outcome of the Second World War.

In The Coming War we read that a «new world» has come out of world war: a third of humanity lives in a new social order «preparatory to socialism»: capitalism continues to exist, but has to function in new conditions that cause a permanent and continually worsening imbalance. Two regimes face each other along frontiers thousands of kilometres long: there cannot be peaceful co-existence because the two systems are different in nature, and this leads to conflict. In every crisis «weakness within one of these two systems is automatically translated into reinforcement of the opposing camp». Within the capitalist system a new relationship is growing up between the two capitalist— properly speaking – centres, Western Europe and the USA and this is also taking place between each of these two centres and the colonial and formerly colonial countries. In this misrepresentation, the essential features of the new relations between powers were based on ambiguity as to the social nature of the USSR and the socialist camp and on the notion that capitalist development was stagnating.

Capitalist Europe has irremediably lost its industrial predominance in the capitalist world to the USA, in a relative equilibrium that may be compared to that existing between the two world wars». The colonial and the ex-colonial areas of the world, which had previously ensured European equilibrium by providing raw materials and absorbing capital are either no longer colonies or on their way to independence, and some are in such an unstable condition that capital investment has practically dried up. The countries of Eastern Europe, agricultural producers and consumers of manufactured goods, have been absorbed into the USSR orbit, and the Cold War means that there is no trading with them. The Asian markets have disappeared following revolutions, to the advantage of either new socialist regimes or of the national bourgeoisies that have risen to power (India, Ceylon, Indonesia). In other regions of Asia and Africa, permanent instability reduces the chances of profit (Malaysia, Vietnam, Burma, Iran, the Middle East). In Latin America most European footholds have been eliminated in favour of either American imperialism or of the local bourgeoisies.

Europe’s position in relation to America has now changed to one of increased and irreversible dependence. Only with permanent financial aid can it manage its dollar deficit, paying the price in political concessions that bind capitalist Europe ever tighter to the chariot of American imperialism.

The USA was now at the heart of the system as once Great Britain had been, as workshop and banking centre of the world. The requirements of war had developed the productive forces to an incredible level, which had assisted in surviving the - crisis, but world conditions have been changing in a direction contray to balanced development for this capitalist power. In order to maintain and increase its current productive forces, American capitalism needs unlimited territorial expansion and a constantly extending market. It would need the same world conditions as existed at the time of British hegemony – vast colonial and semi-colonial reserves – but with the changes the war has brought about, this is precisely what is lacking.

The USA is obliged to channel its surplus into the artificial markets of arms and aid: the State assumes a regulatory role but due to this very fact, the development of American imperialism is irremediably committed to preparing for war, and to meddle politically and aggressively in the affairs of all the other capitalist countries.

Having reached the height of its power late in the overall capitalist system the USA cannot exploit the paths of expansion taken in the past by Great Britain and the other capitalist countries. It is the very image of imperialism’s final, parasitic, decadent and destructive phase.

The need to control and if possible monopolise raw materials becomes urgent for the USA as its domestic supplies become exhausted. Enormous economic and political consequences arise from this hunt for raw materials: European dependence, knock-on effects on the sterling area, and interference in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, expropriating of old colonial masters or collaborating with them in arms against nationalist movements.

This theory, that crisis and stagnation would converge in imminent conflict – ‘the coming war’ – facilitated an unbelievable about-face.

More and more ‘intelligent’ bourgeois thinkers, assisted or driven by events, are becoming accustomed to the idea that the capitalist system is irremediably doomed, and that some sort of modus vivendi with the forces of socialist revolution is preferable to a war that would prove catastrophic above all for capitalism. They form the ‘neutral’ – their bourgeois opponents would say ‘defeatist’ – section, particularly of the European bourgeoisie.121

In 1968 Cervetto was to write that during the early 1950s this hypothesis of an imminent war between the USA and the USSR hampered revolutionary strategy because it failed to understand European imperialism. The references to intelligent bourgeois thinkers and «particularly the European bourgeoisie» – thus transformed into allies against the logic of war – indicate the level of degraded opportunism which seized on that failure to understand both the timescales and the forces of imperialist competition.

The ‘Third Front’ of France’s libertarian communists

In the early postwar period the Fédération Anarchiste Française experienced clashes similar to those which in the Italian FAI led to Masini and Cervetto’s initiatives for an «organised and federated» movement. As Masini built his network of contacts from Gioventù Anarchica (Young Anarchists) it was from Jeunesses Anarchistes that Georges Fontenis (-) similarly attempted to consolidate a «libertarian communist» organisation, selecting his forces from the varied sectors of traditional anarchism. Towards the end of 1949 Fontenis started ‘Organisation-Pensée-Bataille’ (OPB: Organisation-Thought-Struggle). In terms of timescales and method this initiative was similar to the activities organised by Masini and Cervetto after the FAI Congress at Livorno in the April of 1949. Unlike the Italians, who were to establish GAAP in February 1951, OPB operated within the Fédération Anarchiste as a secret group. In 1953 it was to become the FCL, Fédération Communiste Libertaire, and along with GAAP and other groups would attempt to set up a Communist Libertarian International. In 1954 OPB’s entryist nature was to become the subject of furious controversy, and in France ‘Fontenisism’122 would be attacked by official anti-organisation anarchism in the same way as in Italy Masini’s methods were censured by the leaders of FAI and by Volontà’s ‘Resistentialist’* currents.

In reconstructing events,123 Fontenis himself later acknowledged that OPB’s underground nature had been a psychological error and a pointless organisational romanticism since OPB had been in the majority anyway in their areas of strength, primarily Paris. From Fontenis’ memoirs we learn that his ‘Berneri Group’ in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, whose members were mainly Renault and Thomson workers, had some bent for organisation. At the Paris regional conference in April 1950, he reports that 290 copies of Libertaire were sold during that week, and 411 in the preceding month. Internal dilemmas reflected those familiar to FAI, with the Bordeaux group refusing to pass on information on the grounds that they opposed centralism.

The idea of a libertarian ‘Third Force’ wrote Fontenis, had been put forward by Fédération Anarchiste in the 1940s, in order to mock the «weakness» of the tripartite government that included the French Socialist Party. Originally, therefore, the notion was little more than a slogan, for effect. Transformed into ‘Third Front’ the formula came back under pressure of the war in Korea and the threat of a «Third World War». On 28th July 1950 Libertaire was headlined ‘Towards World War: What Is to Be Done?’ and launched the watchword ‘Against Stalin without Being for Truman: against Truman without Being for Stalin’. On 8th September the headline was ‘Facing the Coming War’: the following week carried an appeal to the ‘Proletarian Third Front’.

On 20th October ‘Why a Third Front’ attempted to clarify the slogan in the face of resistance and opposition. Some letters defended a pro-American position:

There are two imperialisms, but I know one that is particularly dangerous and totalitarian [...] I don’t support the withdrawal of American troops from Korea [...] In Korea I see only one war criminal: Stalin.124

Fontenis describes his discussions with a group of Milan anarchists in January 1949. Pio Turroni lamented the minute attention to words and the dated sentimentalism of the old anarchists: under the pretext of individual freedom many had become craft workers or shopkeepers, he told Fontenis during a meeting in Paris: guidance was not uniform throughout the regions: there was a «workerism»** tradition in Milan and vague humanism elsewhere. Masini’s first letter to Fontenis is dated 7th February 1950. It’s likely that Mario Mantovani was involved in suggesting the contact, since it was at this time that Masini, Cervetto and Parodi were arranging to collaborate with him on Libertario.

We have already seen that Masini and Cervetto were in Savona in June 1950 to discuss the editorial ‘Neither Washington Nor Moscow’ but in this case there was no link with Fontenis’ Libertaire. A shared internationalist opposition to both blocs explains the similarity between the slogans, and denouncing the USSR’s State capitalism probably comes from Amadeo Bordiga.

The first signs of an internationalist ‘front’, if not yet a ‘Third Front’ date from November 1950. In a letter to Cervetto and Vinazza, Masini notes that I don’t think the time is ripe yet to talk about the projected ‘front’.125 Subsequent discussions clarified the issue. Masini was unsure which tactic to choose: an agreement with other internationalist groups of the Trotsky/Bordiga persuasions or «an initiative of our own for an anarchist movement on the same lines as the Spanish anarchists».126 Cervetto tended towards the second solution, since the nature of anarchism would leave more freedom to work on PCI members. The big question of the moment was whether to turn to the Communist Left or to rely solely on the anarchist tradition: above all it was necessary to consolidate GAAP before taking any further initiative. The internationalist dimension was always in the background: ultimately Masini agreed on the tactic based mainly on our own specific initiative and concluded that a front «is only a present necessity if its base is anchored within such».127

* In the heated debate of the 1940s and '50s among the various Italian anarchist currents, this was the name given to the individualistic current whose frames of reference were the review Volontà and the New York periodical L’Adunata dei Refrattari; the 'Resistentialists' were accused of having a defensive, witness-bearing, exclusively propagandistic and, all told, classless point of view. (Cf. A rivista anarchica, N° 35, October 2005.)

** From the Italian Operaismo.

Studying international politics

By the second half of 1950 Cervetto was regularly writing on international politics in Libertario. Although these writings were within the general two blocs framework – the USA and the USSR both part of unitay imperialism:it is worth noting the indicators that as early as 1950 Cervetto did not consider this framework to be absolute. On 20th September 1950 his article ‘Dirty Wars in the East’ recorded the clash in Asia between US politics and British and French interests. On 4th October he surveys the situation in India, noting Nehru’s opening to the USSR and China, and doesn’t exclude that this displays traces of British interests. On 8th November ‘War Returns to Europe’ focuses on the issue of Germany:

«Evey one knows that this problem is a stumbling-block for relations between the two blocs and that the negotiations to find a common solution have now been dragging on for five years. If we needed concrete proof of the imperialist nature of the United States and Soviet Russia, the policy that they are pursuing in Germany would hand it to us on a plate.

Because of its key position, Germany is a very important card in the warmongering game. It may be said that whoever holds Germany has won. Hence, Germany can never be completely aligned with a single bloc, but will remain divided, as it now is, into satellite States, each one obedient to its own central control.

This is the normal situation. Will it be able to remain like this? Undoubtedly not. As Germany is one of the factors that determine power relations, and as the aim of the cold war is the breaking of the balance of those relations, a normal situation cannot continue to exist, and, and if it is able to, it will be on condition that it becomes of secondary importance.

At present, we know, because we have observed it, that the centre of the struggle between the two imperialist groups is shifting to Europe. Needless to say, Germany is becoming the linchpin of this struggle».128

On more mature consideration, Cervetto was to discard the idea that the ‘Cold War’ aimed to upset the balance in Europe, reaching the opposite conclusion; that in fact the clash between Washington and Moscow was a specific – and mutual policy of equilibrium directed against Germany and Europe. As early as 1950, however, he did not exclude that Germany’s division could be normalised.

By 15th November 1950, he was taking a two-sided view of the friction between Washington and Paris over German rearmament. The Franco-American disagreement could be seen as one example of imperialism’s internal contradictions. On the other hand, Cervetto notes that France is solidly integrated into the Western bloc, therefore cannot form any part of a capitalist alliance against America. In his analysis of French reluctance to see Germany rearm may be discerned the tones and nuances of the international media:

«If we wanted to find the elements that explain this stance, it would be very useful to read the debates about the German question published in such specialised French newspapers as “Le Figaro”, “Le Monde”, etc. At the root of the stance are serious economic reasons that led to last summer’s launching of the ‘Schuman Plan’, regarding the future of the Ruhr industrial and mining basins in particular. Economic reasons are undoubtedly closely linked to the French capitalist structure and, indeed, underpin the logical demands of the French monopolistic groups, besides being the leaven of French nationalism and militarism.

There is one thing for sure – the French position has no possibility of prevailing both because it is too independent and because it really is demagogic, i.e. tailored to French public opinion, more jealous of its independence than the Italian».129

Paris could not prevail because it was «too independent», but its line reflected the interests of the big French business groups. Cervetto was already several steps beyond the idea of an amorphous Atlantic bloc dominated by Washington; he was also aware of the French Le Monde – Le Figaro debate, in which Beuve-Méry, alias Sirius, defended the European third forre while Raymond Aron took stock of Euro-Atlantic ties, and his note on the French liking for independent formulas shows his attention to the detail of national political traditions.

In ‘Imperialism Is Indivisible’ (22nd November) the prospect of war is still in the background, «an extremely dangerous slope, with a third world massacre looming at the bottom», but the article also makes a distinction between Washington, whose aggression is an influence on the USSR, and Moscow, which represents imperialism’s tendency towards detente. The revolutionary opposition fights against both the USA and the USSR, but has enough political maturity to avoid indiscriminately plunging all the specific and differing aspects of its targets into one melting-pot. Knowing how to distinguish helps one not to fall into «ideological traps»:

«Subjectively, the USSR demonstrates the conciliatory tendency of imperialism.

If the Stalinist theory of peaceful coexistence between socialist and capitalist countries is stripped of the demagogy and ideological falsification that deceive the working masses with the myth of socialism in one country, it simply means: the antagonism between the two groups can be resolved in the economic field, without having recourse to war». 130

A forecast on China

‘Moscow and Washington on the Attack in China’ comments on Britain’s game in granting Mao’s China diplomatic recognition, and speculates as to whether the USA would take a similar line in the event of a divergence between Moscow and Peking. On the political front, London knows that only a political agreement and strong economic ties can make China independent of the USSR. China needed capital, machinery and raw materials:

«If Russia can meet this need, China will fully align itself with the Kremlin. Otherwise it will have to depend on other capitalist nations in yet unforeseeable ways and extents.

The UK is not the only country that understands this economic requirement on China’s part; it is also understood and seen as important by the United States, and is one of the reasons behind its policy».131

It’s worth noting that this article appeared on 29th November 1950. The first tensions between Russia and China were to arise in 1957: open crisis ten years later; Washington’s opening to Peking twenty years later. The material was later to be reproduced in Unitary Imperialism:

‘The Emergence of the ‘Chinese Question’ as an Element Extraneous to the Cold War’, ‘Imperialism Is Indivisible; the USSR Is Closely Linked to the United States’, ‘The German Stumbling Block’, ‘The Pleven Plan, an Episode in the Interimperialist Clashes’.

We get a clear sense of just how early a large part of Cervetto’s theories grasped the dynamics that escaped the simple dialectic of USA/USSR bipolarism.

The same is true of a further two articles, published in December 1950. An update on the war in Korea evaluates the USA’s nuclear threat, which had put it at loggerheads with London and Paris.

It is obvious that if Truman’s threat was, as one might suppose, to put pressure on France and the UK in order to soften their recent hardline views on the German problem, NATO, and US policy in Asia, its aim has not been attained for the moment. Indeed, future events will demonstrate how much the French and British weigh in Asian policy.132

A report on the summit meeting between the American President Harry Truman and the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee also turns on diverging USA-Europe interests in Asia. China had come into the Korean War, and this was significant for London and for the imbalance in Anglo-Chinese relations which had only just been established. This divergence of interests was clarified in the course of the meeting:

There has been talk of a Truman-Attlee compromise. Certainly, relations between groups of imperialist allies can only be based on a series of compromises, and in this case also the outcome of negotiations cannot be other than a compromise. The terms could be: peace in Korea (which for the United States would place significant limitations on their actions in Asia): rearmament and increasingpower for Europe (which would give the United States more room for action, with the advantage of having its European satellites lined up broadly in agreement).133

In the final article of 1950, which records the defeat of the French Fronde, the imperialist two-bloc structure and the imminence of war resurfaced. «The French Fronde was only a phase in a process of uniting imperialist groups on one action platform», wrote Cervetto: the centralising process had accelerated preparations for a third world conflict. Nevertheless, his analysis did not abandon the search for distinctions between the two blocs:

In fact, we are witnessing the increasingly evident manifestations of the natural trend of the imperialist phenomenon, namely, internal struggle between the various national groups: this leads to more or less important diplomatic battles in the political field, while in the economic, it is reflected in the attempts of the main financial branches of the respective national structures to integrate.134

For Cervetto, German social democracy’s opposition to rearmament was one of the policies imperialism keeps in reserve. Masini couldn’t grasp this analysis: in the protests of the Left and in anti-war feeling throughout Europe – Bevan in Britain, the followers of Tito in Yugoslavia and of Cucchi and Magnani in Italy – he saw the potential for a Zimmerwald Right that might be vulnerable to pressure from an internationalist movement.

During the early part of 1951 Cervetto’s thinking continued along the same lines as the previous year. In 1952 his ‘Third Front’ critique was to link up with the first elements of analysing the distinctions between European imperialism and the Atlantic Treaty ties, although he wasn’t to make a clear break with the ‘catastrophe – war imminent’ theory until his September 1953 article on the crises at the margins of imperialism. Another article, in March 1954, specifies the need to analyse the «qualitative» as well as the quantitative aspects of crisis, and distances itself from any expectation of a general crisis. Finally, in September 1954, Cervetto’s analysis has reached the fundamentals of the German question, the nerve-centre of the crisis... [a Germany] that has once more become a great economic power.

The Third Front decision

The articles Cervetto wrote around the time of the Pontedecimo Conference, between the autumn of 1950 and the spring of 1951, reveal that he was not completely held hostage by the two blocs view: that he already possessed sufficient analytical elements to be able to object to the Third Front formula as based on an erroneous evaluation of imperialist struggle.

The formula had, however, already been adopted in France by Georges Fontenis’ Libertaire, and reappeared in the spring of 1951 in the context of news of a strike in Barcelona. There was no overwhelming need to co-ordinate with the French movement; however this was the main reason for continuing to support the slogan, although by this time Masini was also having doubts. Further discussions took place in December 1950, during the preparations for the meeting at Pontedecimo. Masini would have liked to adopt the French Anarchists’ charter for GAAP – partly due to the disagreement with the Italian anarchists – but he had a clear opinion of the organised strength and political level of the French:

As a matter of interest, I can tell you that FAF has no more than 875 members, and that its statement of principles is a pretty awful collection of banalities (but on the other hand, their organisational structure seems basically sound).135

Nevertheless, the links with the French were decisive in the adoption of the ‘Third Front’ slogan in the spring of 1951. The May 1951 issue of L’Impulso carried ‘Eight Points for the Third Front’:

  • «1 ) The third front is the working-class line of opposition to imperialism, the workers’ line of resistance and their counter-offensive against the current imperialist war.

  • 2)  The third front is opposed to imperialism as a unitary and indivisible phenomenon, as a contradiction typical of the international organisation of society in competing capitalist States: consequently the third front is opposed to the two biggest head quarters of the imperialist world – the United States of America and the Soviet Union – which in their clashes represent in a concrete way that phenomenon and that contradiction.

3) The third front opposes imperialism and all its policies, from specific single-State policies established by diplomatic agreement and by economic, political and military coalition to the general policy emanating from imperialism’s biggest permanent headquarters, the United Nations.

  • 4)  The third front opposes imperialism and all its political, economic, religious and cultural branches that in every country are managed by the official political parties, the church, the trade unions, and the other various bureaucracies at their service.

  • 5)  The third front is not an automatic and bureaucratic combination of political parties, but is the front line of all the revolutionary forces which oppose both imperialist blocs and all their agents.

  • 6)  The third front is not electoral or parliamentary. It has reservations in principle concerning both elections and the parliamentary system and condemns election competitions and parliamentary assemblies both in themselves and as breeding-grounds of imperialist war.

  • 7)  The third front defines and condemns neutrality, the myth of national defence*, and the concept of a third force as attitudes that are either powerless and naive tricks of the bourgeoisie, or insidious expedients devised by imperialism to confound and weaken the masses’ resistance to war.

  • 8)  The programme of the third front includes: propaganda inspired by the principles of working-class internationalism; the unmasking of patriotism and nationalism; the organisation of all anti-imperialist energies arising from this; the development of the healthiest revolutionary traditions of the proletariat; action and struggle against the machinery of imperialism in all countries. And the liberation of the working class».136

In the same issue, Masini referred to the French anarchists’ initiative and the controversy it had aroused among the Italian anarchists, primarily in order to respond to the concerns that the slogan ‘Third Front’ could be confused with the ‘Third Force’ formula:

[...] the slogan III Front [...] may be distinguished from ‘third force’ because whereas the latter represents a plan for a new coalition of States to counter-balance the two opposing blocs, III Front employs a class line to smash coalitions of all States, with their alliances and their clashes.

Masini’s internationalist consistency is here indisputable: clearly, he was also taking Cervetto’s reservations into account. But his subsequent clarification tracked back to his idea that the bipolar confrontation had wiped out any space for a ‘third force’ line, and in 1952 this led to a fierce argument with Cervetto:

On the other hand, the danger of possible ambiguities has now been overtaken by the way the erisis itself has developed. It is no longer possible, as it was say three years ago, to take up a ‘third force’ position, whether as a geopolitical reality or as a moral democraticpacifist demand locating itself outside imperialism but also outside the anti-imperialist revolution.

Today the pull of the two blocs has become so strong as to allow no alternative other than imperialism or internationalist working-class anti-imperialism: all those not caught up in the coils of official politics will be forced to the extreme Left. From the time of its inception the ‘third force’ was never a political reality: it has died as a democratic plea for balance, mediation and peace: what remains of it is only a mediocre fiction of psychological warfare, or an even more mediocre expedient of electoral battles.

Hence, not only can we exclude any confusion of ‘third force’ and III Front, but we can also exclude that ‘third force’ will ever be in a position to poach the III Front slogan.137

Here were those traces of schematism that Cervetto had already discovered in Masini’s interpretation of «unitary imperialism».The extreme view taken of the two blocs and the idea that war was imminent completely rejected that there might be any dialectic within the two sides. It was a contradiction that Cervetto had already analysed in his international articles. It wasn’t a case of «foundering in the Byzantine Sea»138, as Masini had hastily jotted down that autumn, because a general picture of imperialist forces could allow an evaluation to be made of their political strength, and therefore of the tactics to be used in opposing them. One example may be observed in the tactics adopted in relation to the MLI, a Tito-inspired group that broke away from the PCI, and on a more general level, in relation to all the other dissident groups of European socialism:

The MLI phenomena is interesting though its strategic planning is debatable. It’s the Italian version of Bevan’s rebel Labourism, of the German UAPD: an important moment in the march of the European working class. Two contradictory tendencies seem to be at work here: on the one hand Atlanticism’s usual feint to the Left in order to get the working-class masses to fall into line and get used to the idea of war (the ‘third force’ con repeated, only more to the Left): but on the other a real working-class shift to the III Front line and opposition to imperialism. It’s only an intermediate phase, of course – the ‘neutrality’ that was around in the First Imperialist World War. It’ll take a while for them to get to Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and even longer to get to the victory of the Zimmerwaldian Left! But within the limits of the possible we’re working on the MLI.139

Lorenzo Parodi notes that Masini was reading 1951 as if it was 1914. But in that era of Cold War ideologies it wasn’t possible to force the theory of indivisible imperialism into the list of factors that had precipitated the Great War. He was imagining a «neutralist» phase that could in turn validate «the theory that the’international working class, motivated purely by free will, was moving towards a ‘third front’».140

* In 1914, when faced with the first imperialist world war, all the most important socialist parties belonging to the Second International committed themselves to national imperialism, using as a pretext the defence of their homelands. The only exceptions were the Russian Bolsheviks, the Serbian Socialists, the left wing of the Bulgarian party, a fraction of the Italian party and a few minorities of the other parties. This desertion of internationalism was called defencism (the myth of national defence).

A year of ferrite ‘exile’ in Argentina

In June 1951 Cervetto went back to Argentina, having lost his job in a round of sackings at the Ilva plant. He spent a year in Argentina, and overall it was a fertile ‘exile’, a year of reading and thinking. The benefits surfaced in 1952. By the time Cervetto returned to Italy for the second National GAAP Conference, his concept of unitary imperialism had matured, deepened and sharpened. In the biographical outline in his ‘Notebooks’ is one page on that year in Buenos Aires. Reading alternated with evenings spent with exiled anarchists, many of whom had fought in the Spanish Civil War. In Cervetto’s accounts of their often naive and exaggerated stories, there is never any hint of his adopting a superior attitude: Life isn’t talk – it’s passion, struggle, action.

The June sun set, and the first lights came on in the city that was slowly receding from us. The loudspeaker on deck was nostalgically broadcasting ‘Thinking of you’*: I was enchanted by the strange scene, and my initial sadness melted away. Then the sea breezes woke me from my sluggishness and shook me out of my mood. There weren’t many people left on deck; I went down to my cabin and began to read. I spent the following days reading leaving my cabin in the evening.

I was in Buenos Aires for nearly a year, and that’s how I continued to spend my time.

I raked through the bookstalls of the Cabildo, looking for books on Latin America and the Spanish war. Occasionally I came across Pitigrilli, who’d been a popular writer at the time of Fascism, but also an OVRA** spy, doing the same. As the booksellers got to know me they would put aside for me the sort of books they knew interested me. So the days passed much as they had in Savona. Month after month I tried to dodge the persistent, humid heat. In the evenings it was slightly cooler, so you sweated a bit less.

I used to sit in the city centre bars where the clientele was mostly Spanish political émigrés. They were trade union anarchists, POUMists, Stalinists, socialists. I was the only Italian, apart from a young anarchist from Puglia with whom I struck up a friendship. There were some Argentinians, but they weren’t very political. I used to sit in silence for hours listening to all these people. Some used to say that I knew a lot more about politics than they did, but I learnt a lot from listening to what had happened to them during the war in Spain: all those many stories of a pari of living history, and their unknown protagonists, their memories of legendary heroes, Ascaso or Durruti: the hatreds, the passions, the mistakes, the naivety, the innocence.

I spent my days reading memoirs and histories of the Spanish War that I had picked up on the bookstalls. From them I gathered precise and useful information on that page of history: they helped me organise a whole heap of facts along mayor historical lines. But there was a lot I could only really understand by listening to those guys even when I realised they were getting dates wrong or were exaggerating the importance of events in which they’d been involved.

There’s nothing so stupid as wanting to dot the i of reality, of facts: nothing more useless than trying to cross the t of reality as it’s lived by real people in a real world – the irritating punctuation of those who never see that life isn’t talk – it’s passion, action, struggle. Logic lies in the dynamic of facts, not in our heads.

During those hot evenings, in the busy centre of Buenos Aires, I pent hours listening to these men telling how they had lived their lives and their histories. For them, history was what I could explain with my historical details – yet it wasn’t the same. These guys were twenty years older than me.

Compared with them, I was just a boy, and I kpt quiet unless they asked me something about Italy.

They organised for me to peak at a couple of conferences held in social clubs in neighbourhoods on the outskirts of that immense city, the names of which I don’t now recall. One day they invited me to a secret meeting out in the Pampas. I met a few young Brazilians who had interesting ideas and a good grasp of Latin America’s history and problems, which they were methodically studying. The conference was held in a big corrugated iron hut that got hotter than I would ever have believed possible. For three days I drank boiling maté like everyone else. I didn’t fancy the meat roasting on a charcoal grill, so I kpt myself going with oranges.

* A popular song in Genoese dialect (1925), linked to the story of migrants from Genoa.

** «Organisation of Vigilance and Repression of Antifascism», the Fascist regime’s secret police.

A discussion on ‘totalitarianism’

As part of this period in Argentina, it seems appropriate to consider here two notes on ‘totalitarianism’ which relate back to the issue of the State. Both were written between the second half of 1951 and the opening months of 1952, when in Buenos Aires Cervetto met the Spanish anarchist Sinesio García Fernández, alias Diego Abad de Santillán.

The first note records a debate on theories of totalitarianism. We have seen from Cervetto’s ‘Notebooks’ his generous and human attitude towards the Spanish War exiles he met in Buenos Aires. But it was a different question when the principles of revolutionary theory were under discussion, and here he could be mercilessly critical. Santillán maintained that capitalism is a secondary enemy in the face of the Number One danger, the State. He held that capitalism had awakened the human race to a «new liberal civilisation», it was totalitarianism that had made the State master over everything and everyone: he believed that even among liberals and socialists there were those who opposed totalitarianism, and that it was possible to fight together. Inevitably, Cervetto saw Santillán’s theories as an example of the «Philistine logic of the old anarchist harking back to the Resistance».141

The second note is a programme of study on this issue, introduced by a reminder to Cervetto to himself to make further notes on how this has been dealt with, firstly by the libertarian socialists and Gramsci, and then those who still think they’re in the Resistance, the anarcho-liberals, etc.. The term «estatista»* echoes the vocabulary employed by the Spanish exiles:

  • 1) Totalitarianism seen as a estatista phenomenon that cancels out the individual (clearly, the core of this critique comes from modern liberal ideology in all its variations: Russell, Huxley).
  • 2) Totalitarianism seen as the expression of an allegedly new class (the State) in opposition to the traditional classes who have now become (as per the liberal ’48 view) ‘the people’, or, to borrow Quaker terminology, ‘society’.
  • 3) It would be a good idea to draw up a review (which might someday be placed in the Museum of Nonsense of Cultural Idealism) of all the various definitions of totalitarianism.
  • Work schedule: a) research historical genesis of the term ‘totalitarianism’ (at present I think it comes either from Mussolini himself or Fascist propaganda) b) extend the research beyond the terminology, to how the liberals of 1800 and even earlier saw the concept c) research into the history of how anti-Fascism began d) the various phases of the dispute e) the first anti-totalitarian theories / studies f) the various anti-Fascist currents g) separate study on anti-totalitarianism in the Italian anarchist movement (NB In Spanish War propaganda the anarchists used ‘Fascism’ more than ‘totalitarianism’).
  • 4)  ‘ Totalitarianism’ is an intellectual term: it comes from idealist philosophy. It was in fact first used by intellectuals. Revolutionary currents don’t use it (even the anarchist movement doesn’t use it). Only recently has it contaminated revolutionary currents that are in crisis (and the anarchist movement among the first). It’s been introduced by anti-Stalinist groups, among others.
  • 5) For a definitive study of the problem (to take in certain new aspects of the political-cultural superstructure, I intend to base myself on Lenin’s Imperialism».142

We have reproduced the original text in its entirety, apart from having completed abbreviations for the sake of clarity. The timing of the writing is important: less than a year after the conference at Genova Pontedecimo, Cervetto had already gone beyond both his original theory on the State and on the issue of imperialism.

* Estatista: statism is the belief that the State should control either economic or social policy, or both, to some degree.

Chapter Seven

THE ‘THIRD FRONT’ AND THE THORNY ISSUE OF EUROPE

 

Six months of discussion, from May to October 1952, were taken up with the issue of analysing unitary imperialism. What was the real balance of power between America and Russia? And the centres of European imperialism, which displayed signs of an Atlantic split? And Japan, which had begun to hint at greater political independence from the USA?

How one analysed these questions carried serious political consequences. Only with a scientific notion of the ‘times and forces’ of imperialism could militants be provided with a solid frame of reference and safeguard themselves from disorientation and external influences. Washington was clearly stronger than Moscow: Europe’s priorities were different from those of the USA. This gave the lie to prospects of an imminent war, pushed Moscow towards a defensive policy of ‘detente’, and disclosed European groups with an interest in the markets of Eastern Europe. All this did not mean that Russia and Europe were any less imperialist than the USA.

The second half of 1952 was decisive for throwing light on the ‘Third Front’. In May Cervetto returned from Argentina: in his ‘Notebooks’ (1982) he makes it clear that his departure was organised hastily in view of the preparations that were underway for GAAP’s Second National Conference, which was to be held in Florence, with the date set for 1st June: the next day I was already on my way to make contact with the organisation again and to prepare for the conference in Florence.

Six months of arm-wrestling

In his first letter143 to Cervetto, Masini declares himself surprised at such a hurry it’s strange, since the connection with the imminent conference might seem obvious. The split in the Internationalist Communist Party had become public only a few weeks before, with the publication of correspondence between Amadeo Bordiga and Onorato Damen. Masini was sympathetic to Damen’s group, which he felt had a working-class base, was engaged in a critique of Leninism, was solid against imperialism and not afraid to intervene. In successive exchanges Cervetto agreed about Damen,144 and Masini145 anticipated future collaboration with Damen’s ‘Communist Struggle’ on the strength of a letter the group had written to GAAP’s National Committee. The idea was «to start collaborating on a III Front basis, a collaboration, let’s say, of a ‘Zimmerwald’ kind», thus confirming that the Third Front concept included the search for an initiative shared with other internationalist organisations, although the reference to Zimmerwald continues to hark back to a time when strategy was worked out in the context of imminent war.

In L’Impulso of 15th May, Masini’s editorial ‘Resolute’ sees the fallout from the international situation as putting the anarchist movement at risk of disorientation and betrayal. Masini’s general scenario was still that war was rapidly advancing, signalled by a strengthening of the political-military Atlantic coalition (which now included Greece and Turkey and was opening to Spain, and with Germany co-opted via the European Defence Community), by repression of the colonial area (Tunisia, Morocco, Malaysia and Indo-China), and by the ever more reactionary and aggressive attitude of governments in Great Britain, France, Italy and above all in the USA, where Eisenhower was likely to win the elections. Such exacerbation of the political situation, writes Masini, is frightening in that it faces militants not only with the advance of repression, but above all can create a reaction of surprise at the unfolding of the logical, extremist and Fascist nature of American imperialism. This surprise reaction could lead to disorientation and from thence to betrayal:

Betrayal could come from those surprised by the increasingly crushing pressures of American imperialism: those facing the organised and continual exercise of police, military and judicial violence, facing the ruthless elimination of every scrap of civil liberty, might unconsciously allow themselves to be pushed towards Stalinism.

According to Masini, those most vulnerable to such hasty psychological reactions were not only the most emotional personalities, but most often those disappointed in the Western powers. Those who had hoped in Washington against Moscow were frightened now, but the real militant revolutionaries already knew just «how much potential Fascism was incorporated in the Western democracies», and «what sort of merciless class dictatorship was built into the regimes of the Atlantic Pact countries». Above all, militant revolutionaries know that imperialism is a unity, that the so-called ‘blocs’ complement each other even as they clash with each other – in fact, precisely because they clash with each other.

The ‘betrayal’ myth

Cervetto’s response to Masini contains the first explicit treatment of the political and theoretical issues Cervetto intended to raise at the conference and which signalled a confrontation that was to last the rest of the year. Clearly, Cervetto was not satisfied with a bare declaration of the resoluteness principle, nor with repeated moralistic accusations of betrayal which he felt were inadequate in facing both theoretically and politically the PCI’s rapid erosion of the anarchist sphere of influence. The disorientation to which Masini referred was indeed affecting GAAP directly: with their Turin group in crisis, the spotlight was on unresolved theoretical and political issues.

Of his experiences in Argentina, Cervetto wrote they did not change me, but thy allowed me to study better certain problems in all their aspects: it had been almost entirely a year of meditation, re-reading going back to material I’d swallowed whole and never assimilated. Now he was re-reading Lenin’s Imperialism, with his thoughts focused on the need for direction highlighted by the crisis of GAAP’s Turin group. Cervetto’s assessment was that the psychological disorientation that has attacked that group of militants was based on theoretical deficiencies. It was certainly necessary to be resolute and intransigent in the Zimmerwald of imperialist war, resolute in internationalist opposition, but a simple affirmation of principles was not enough: it was vital to have a theoretical base.

«You can’t settle all the theoretical problems imperialism raises by waving a Zimmerwald banner. You can’t justify your position by using slogans, or just by being sure you’re on the right road.

It’s detrimental to your thinking which becomes negative and mechanical: you risk falling into opportunism, which is frightened to raise problems, to study and discuss them. I believe we should strenuously avoid falling into such positions. I believe we should have the revolutionary courage to face the theoretical problems capitalism raises. If we’re solid in our political position, indepth theoretical investigation should give our militants clarity and even greater ‘resolution’. [The highlighting is the editor’s.] For example, I believe that US imperialism is taking the initiative in war, that it’s the world’s economic colossus opposing a Soviet bloc that’s economically its inferior by at least two-thirds. Why can’t we talk about this?»146

Perhaps the disorientation of the Turin group could have been contained by study, systematically sorted within our own organisation and those comrades might have been brought back and set in the right direction:

«And if collective study should confirm what I think, would that invalidate the Zimmerwaldposition? Wouldn’t it rather armour it with theory, explaining all the insidious claims and problems we are witnessing today? If we were to accept that the USA is on a war footing we couldn’t then go on simply repeating the Zimmerwald-III Front slogan!»

Revolutionary theory had to be capable of sorting and separating society’s contradictions: the ‘imperialism is unitary’ declaration remains only a mechanical formula unless theory is capable of studying analysing detailing and ultimately exposing both the contradictions of such ‘unity’ and difference between the opposing sides. Two opponents aren’t necessarily two equals: they may be for the purposes of propaganda, but they cannot be for theory.

The need for theory

Cervetto concludes by postponing the issue to the national conference («remember we’ll be reconsidering this letter at Florence») and recalling a point from the Bordiga debate: These requirements I’ve mentioned were also dealt with in an article of Mafffi’s in Battaglia Comunista a few issues ago.

This article was possibly ‘Totalitarianism: an Alliance between Capitalists and Opportunists’ (March 1952) which argues the need to analyse the historical evolution of opportunism and its links with the forces of imperialism. The interest of the article lies in its definition of the USSR and Stalinism as a social-democratic moment of unitary imperialism: although somewhat confused, the point seems to be the need to analyse Moscow’s political moves towards detente while not ceasing to view the USSR as an imperialist power.

Here we may recall Cervetto’s note on the disorientation of the French Libertaire in relation to the ‘Third Front’. He was to express numerous reserves at the Florence conference, to the point of suggesting that the formula might be abandoned altogether. One of his arguments was that the new danger was orientalism, i.e. inclination towards the USSR, whereas up till then the anarchist debate had been influenced rather by «westernism», or the propensity to lean towards the US in the cause of opposing the Stalinist USSR of the Spanish Civil War.

Cervetto saw this new veering towards the influence of the PCI and the USSR as a factor in the disorientation that had shaken the Turin group. Conversely, in the conceptual weaknesses of the FAF and its Libertaire, he saw an unconscious veering towards westernism that contradicted Libertaire’s own declaration of principle on the Third Front. ‘Neither Truman nor Stalin’ had been the watchword since 1950, yet these developments showed that in the absence of theoretical depth and strategic analysis not only was it inadequate merely to go on reiterating internationalist principles, but that internationalism itself was thereby put at risk. It was a practical demonstration of Lenin’s principle: «Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement», which was to become the emblematic motto of Lotta Comunista.

As we have seen, Cervetto was to describe the first stage of the party’s history up to 1957 as the battle for internationalism. During that period, what came out of all the debates on the timescales of the coming war, on the internal dialectic of unitary imperialism, on the nature of the USSR and the rise of Europe – was that in the absence of a strategic analysis that could identify the specific features and dynamics of the various forces of imperialism, it was impossible to safeguard even the basic principle of internationalism. If a movement is incapable of tackling the difficult strategic and political issues arising out of the clashes between the imperialist powers, it ends up in the grip of forces with ideological and political influences that it has failed to understand.

The Second National Conference at Florence

At the beginning of June 1952 GAAP’s second national conference was held at Florence. Lorenzo Parodi’s speech appeared to take account of a number of critical observations (and not only from Cervetto) on the Third Front. Parodi pointed out that the Third Front initiative had not been taken at Pontedecimo, but after a referendum among all comrades: the French FAF had followed the same method, and their Paris and Lille congresses had arrived at the same decision. It had been a test of federated organisation and had demonstrated that on a federal level the National Committee could take urgent decisions at any time. The Second Conference now had the task of ratifying the decision and actions consequent upon it. It was an advantage of the initiative that it had directed activity towards a precise objective, thus avoiding the risk of a generic anti-militarism that could be confused with the pacifism of Stalinist currents. It had proved possible to strike at the «westernist» deviations within the international anarchist movement, and contacts had been facilitated both with anarchist movements abroad and with non-anarchist revolutionary movements in Italy.

The minutes of the second day of the conference records Cervetto’s request that the Third Front’ issue be clarified. The campaign must have a time limit: if it’s not successful we’ll have to think up new initiatives and methods. As he had already communicated to Masini, Cervetto made a direct link between strategic analysis and consolidation of militants:

We have to examine the situation, analyse and explain it, and its not enough to say that the two blocs are the same: that would be simplistic, and doesn’t correspond to reality. The difference in wealth distribution between the two groups determines different dynamics. The war initiative is with the USA: the USSR is weaker and pursues a defensive polity of peace, of detente – it’s forced to do so. This doesn’t mean that the nature of the two blocs differs. They’re both imperialists, but are driven by economic reality to behave differently: if we explain how that comes about we can avoid becoming disorientated and making a distinction between the ‘natures’ of the two blocs. Only by explaining how their policies differ because of economic facts will be able to conclude by condemning both on the basis of reason rather than formulas. If all we say to the workers is ‘Neither Truman nor Stalin’, they won’t understand. If we explain to them the various modes of being of imperialism, they’ll grasp what we’re trying to get across.147 [Highlighting by the editor].

Masini replied that the USSR did appear to be hemmed in on all sides, but to break this «can only attack, will only attack», as in Korea. He seemed to agree with Cervetto on the need to analyse the USSR, to study the economic factors that evidence its imperialist nature. The basis of Cervetto’s reply was the nexus between tactics and strategy, between slogan and theoretical analysis:

Masini, I’ll have to say it again: we can’t play on the working class yearning for peace, which is basically a bourgeois yearning. I agree that we need to have slogans. We need to make ourselves understood by the working class, bat we mustn’t compromise on the revolutionary nature of 3rd Front, quite the opposite – we have to make this position a working-class position and translate it into the right political formulas in terms of the masses, of action and straggle. Bat we’ll only achieve this clarity if we can bring a new theoretical understanding to reinforce and sharpen the position of the revolutionary vanguard vis-à-vis the two imperialist blocs.

Back to the «little group» and anarchism

Subsequent letters, over June and July, partly explained the reasons for the disagreement and partly avoided it in planning a programme of activities. The most important was written by Masini immediately after the Florence conference, and expressed increased concern that Cervetto was allowing himself to be influenced by Marxism: «he should not lose [himself] in intellectual orgies»: guard against becoming infatuated with theory but also against a continuing theoretical instability. It was appropriate to concern oneself with historical materialism but not with Marxism: the study of Marxist theoreticians must be accompanied by a critique of social democracy and Bolshevism, so that the organisation didn’t run the risk of «losing its autonomy». The value of theoretical work was not to be overestimated: «to be immune to opportunism it’s not necessary that a militant be encased in theory» the world is divided into the crooked and the honest. Until there was a concrete prospect of a working-class movement, «the real, the solid path we must follow is anarchism»:

There are more than enough Marxist sects and splinter groups. If we want to keep our links with Italian tradition, if we want to claim a place in the Italian working-class movement and maintain our ties with the masses, if we want to be heard, if we want to establish relations with other countries, we can only do it within anarchism and with anarchism. Alternatively, we could just be little group with no substance, no power, no morale, easily isolated and condemned to inertia.148

It was a repeat of the 1950 debate, perhaps reinforced by Cervetto’s year out of Italy. But now Cervetto was further on in his knowledge of Marxist theory, and disagreement became focused on the connection between analysis of imperialism and the Third Front formula. On the latter, Masini rejected Cervetto’s reservations. It wasn’t just a transient rousing cliché but a general call intended to stop any internal deviation, whether towards East or West and externally to open up a new political prospect on the lines of Zimmerwald. Therefore we should make contact with all who would put their revolutionär good faith to the test on the touchstone of opposition to the two imperialist blocs. Unfortunately the Florence conference had not discussed the crisis in the Bordiga party, or Cucchi and Magnani’s MLI, or the PSI, but a lot of work could be carried out in Italy in resisting American imperialism and its rule over Italy.

Cervetto’s reply recalled all the 1950 discussions. It was a duty of theoretical work to deliberate the issues of imperialism, the State, and the social structure of the USSR: he didn’t believe this would cause a crisis as might have happened two years previously. These issues needed to be dealt with, as was also demonstrated by the Bordiga-Damen debate, they would take time to resolve, but they should be confronted and studied:

I think we’re mature enough to study, if not to resolve these problems. That would be enough for me [...] As far as theory goes, I think our job is to define the problem as it exists in reality, now. Especially when this work on theory has immediate implications for political tactics. This was the sense Untended when I spoke of the USA having the war initiative and the USSR the peace initiative. This is the reality today.149

In a letter dated 4th June, Masini accused Cervetto of giving undue importance to theory and the training of cadres. The words used are revealing; Masini believed that cultural work shouldn’t be given more importance than political work:

I believe that our organisation had reached a theoretical level without having the corresponding political development. There have been movements that have reached respectable political dimensions on the basis of modest theoretical assets, and have made history. Now, Pm not saying that our political and organisational growth should go beyond the limits of our theoretical stock, but I do say that in our work we must give both areas equal commitment (think, for example, about how many Italian workers we could attract to GAAP, if our theoretical level was matched by the same level of work to explain and spread our principles – I think a great many would come over to us.150

Cervetto replied that there was a dialectical relationship between quality and quantity in an organisation:

This is why I made a distinction between supporters and militants. The problem is this: + supporters = + militants = + cadres. Only by expanding can we find and train new cadres. We need to have this sort of view: 10 ordinary comrades can help to bring a cadre out of that very rich raw material, the working class. Although I acknowledge we could have done and could do more coal face work, I’m still pushing the theory problem, still considering it dialectically.151

Cervetto insisted that the risk of getting obsessed with theory, or destabilising theory «cannot be eliminated when a group falls into the dangerous practice of taking on stagnant and ultimately mechanical slogans». The distinction between the crooked and the honest belonged to the world of individualism. Ernestan, one of the exponents of anarchism who had gone over to the western tendency and supported the USA might be honest enough as far as that world of the crooked and the honest was concerned but for a militant with working class morals he was crooked, because he was against the working class.

The search for a scientific order

In a subsequent letter, Cervetto goes back to the key problem of imperialism. Some points had originated from a discussion with Livio Maitan, though Cervetto’s opinion of Trotskyism was that it was very weak, not to mention nebulous. He had also given careful attention to the debate between Bordiga and Damen in the pages of Prometeo, noting: «Some very interesting observations». «If I had to choose, I’d pick Bordiga». As long as I didn’t have to list positive and negative elements in each. There were enormous problems that required analysis, and it wouldn’t be possible to resolve them definitively, but at least one could try for a scientific approximation:

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that today it’s not possible to objectively define imperialism as a unitary phenomenon, and especially to define the structure (or social nature) of the Soviet Union. When Marx wrote Capital the bourgeoisie’s economic revolution was already over (the Industrial Revolution came to an end in 1825, he started Capital in 1850. Lenin wrote Imperialism in a period of flourishing economic development (imperialism taken as beginning between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Today it’s totally impossible to define this new economic phase, presenting as it does so many new features and phenomena (’super-colkos’ ‘agrogorod’* etc) and which is spreading to new and larger areas (China etc). Still, we need to study the problem to get to even an approximate assessment. Approximation is a tool for working on theory, and above all for political direction. Working on theory is hard, and you need to equip yourself for it. But we shouldn’t be discouraged by our theoretical failings, nor should we fall back on mechanical slogans152. [The highlighting is the editor’s.]

An invaluable comment, in which may be glimpsed the germ of the scientific newspaper and of the concept Cervetto would arrive at as to its use in relation to political struggle. His eventual claim that Lotta Comunista would be The Economist of the revolutionary movement was based not on mere presumption, but on the notion that if militants could have even slightly more information than their opponents, it would be an advantage. Here lay the importance of approximation as a tool for political direction: it could only be a partial result, but that partial result could help to equip militants.

A further decisive aspect was that scientific investigation was conceived as a plan, without anxiety about the size of the task. In a collective laboratory – today we could add ‘that has been in operation for generations’ – no small step forward is ever lost; every partial result remains a weapon for the political struggle.

«Order» is another term Cervetto frequently uses in referring to the connection between the work of theoretical investigation and the training of militants. In his letter of 7th June he mentions that there are major theoretical problems to deal with, but that were calm, and in good order. It’s the harbinger of the party of scientific order Cervetto was to define in the 1980s, directing the work of the party towards recruiting the next generation of militants.

The connection between theory and the consolidation of militants, the connection between strategy and tactics established through scientific study, even the issue of prioritising political activism over trade union activism is found again and again in various jottings: «we must study the course of imperialism in the years to come»153; Vinazza must remember not to prioritise his trade union work over his political activism. Therefore fewer committees and «more reading and studying for the members of GAAP.154

* Rural town or village.

The Turin group crisis

The confrontation took on harsher tones towards the end of September. Cervetto had gone on a mission to report to the National Committee on the confusion and disorder in the Turin group. One of the group – a Piedmontese anarchist and trade unionist, who had fought in Spain and had taken part in founding GAAP in 1951, had left the Turin group and intended to join the PCI. Cervetto noted that this comrade hadn’t been attracted so much by Stalinism as by reformism: he’s «a reformist who’s joining the PCI», but lessons needed to be learnt from his case. In a face-to-face discussion, Cervetto found that such issues as the State, revolutionary power and the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed to be «news» as far as this particular comrade was concerned, and the rest of GAAP’s political programme appeared to him as inadequate and limited to theoretical abstractions. Cervetto’s conclusion was that lack of clarification and debate on such issues had contributed to theoretical weakness and disorientation.

The same applied to other issues intertwined with that of the State, such as the nature of the USSR and opposition to imperialism. In the Turin group, noted Cervetto, a number of comrades expected that «within five years bread would be free in the USSR». «The National Committee knows my opinion on this, and how I have always posed openly and clearly the problem of the PCI, of the social nature of the USSR, of blocs, and of trends in imperialism». The organisation faced a new and alarming phenomenon the danger of orientalism that was not limited to the Turin group.

We need to face this in the knowledge that its development is favoured by a specific political, economic and social situation in Italy and the world. I’ve repeatedly warned that we must get better at analysing the problems caused by imperialism, and now here’s one that’s directly affecting us. Let’s consider the USSR’s current position, its propaganda about building communism [in which the Turin group had apparently ‘hoped’ if not ‘believed, editor’s note], the poverty and unemployment in Italy. We cannot, therefore, confront the above problem in a mechanical or sectarian way. It’s not a question of intransigence, but of tactics. We have to face this danger with a more precise formulation of our ‘political line’ in relation to imperialism and opposition to it, the situation in Italy and the revolutionary struggle.155

The problem of European imperialism

In preparation for an extended National Committee meeting on 16th October 1952, there was an exchange of letters between Cervetto, Masini and Vinazza. The problem was no longer the USSR alone, but the need for a complete evaluation of unitary imperialism, the clash between Europe and the USA, and the deadlines for crisis and a new world war. Now the question of times was making itself more urgently felt: here was the seed of the analysis of a European imperialism that was distinct from the formal position of the two blocs.

In a letter dated 8th October, Cervetto asks for Masini’s opinion on Stalin’s Economic Issues of Socialism and Malenkov’s Report to the XIX USSR Communist Party Conference. Masini’s lengthy reply confirms his view that another war, on which the Third Front initiative had been based, was imminent. The sole aim of the Malenkov Report was to mobilise forces in the face of increasing tension between the two blocs. It was predictable: war is bearing down on us. Moscow was playing for time in order to gather its forces, but war was inevitable:

It won’t be long now [...] I don’t think the USSR will succeed in gaining much time, nor do I think any intermediary element (a social-democratic Europe, for example) will come into the game: American pressure will choke off any resistance, whether from Bevan or de Gaulle. In fact, European unification, which the Vatican supports, is one element of the American game.156

Only the working class could prevent war, but it was divided in its internationalist opposition by the existence of the Stalinist USSR. Masini believed that if the USSR hadn’t gone Stalinist, «today there would be the same conditions as in -»; but the ‘socialism in one country line’ could never identify with world revolution: sooner or later it would end in tragedy:

I think we’re very close. The world working class cannot but follow the path of independence from the war and the forces in conflict: a path of opposition to it. Already we can see the signs: the working class of the western world will fight against American imperialism, but it won’t fight for the USSR: an indication of this, even in its current imperfect form, is Bevan’s ‘Zimmerwaldian Right.

The USSR, Masini insisted, was forced to use the ideal of peace so the masses would fall in behind its war-chariot: «we revolutionaries can only be pleased that in order to carry out their schemes the enemies of the working class have been forced to make use of the self-same ideals of the working class». Facts would soon give them the lie but in the meantime they have to lend credibility to this flag they’re forced to fly.

Furthermore, many of Malenkov’s statements confirmed that his was a propaganda document. As far as Malenkov was concerned, the Second World War had weakened imperialism, whereas in fact imperialism had been strengthened by the defeat of the working class. There had been no mass action against this world war, as there had been in the First. Malenkov «had produced a propaganda overestimation of the contradictions within the western imperialist capitalist bloc» – «a war between capitalist States was more likely than a war between the capitalist States bloc and the socialist States bloc». Such contradictions did exist, but were very weak and easily overcome: the bourgeoisies of Italy, Great Britain and Japan aren’t in the least bit worried about the situation of their own States and Malenkov contradicted himself by stating that enormous profits were being accumulated by British monopolists, and by the capitalist monopolists of France, Italy, Japan and other countries.

In addition, Masini considered that Malenkov, still in propaganda mode, had overestimated the drive for independence among the colonised populations, which Masini saw as being contained within the limits of an imperialist readjustment crisis. One only had to look at the economic and above all at the financial conditions of the colonial possessions to conclude that aspirations towards independence would end by being satisfied «but within the framework of the Atlantic strategy»: «their current situation of colonial political subjection will turn into a new State of political subjection that will better correspond to imperialism’s level of development, and this will also change the role played by the presiding States of the former colonised world: France, Britain, the United States».157

The first reply, from Aldo Vinazza, was one of unequivocal disagreement:

It seems to me that on the contrary (I’ve had a lengthy discussion with Cervetto about this) the western bloc isn’t at all in a favourable situation (economically or psychologically) for any war any time soon. Nor do I think the USSR is in war mode. The clashes and contradictions within the western bloc are much deeper and more pronounced than as described in your letter.158

In support of his position, Vinazza quoted a long series of events, from the position of the Radical Party in France to the tensions between Labour currents in Britain, and above all the friction between the US and French governments, with Prime Minister Pinay’s rejection of American advice. Then there was the economic crisis in Europe, the delegation of European industrialists on a visit to Moscow, general coldness towards Eisenhower’s call to liberate the countries oppressed by the USSR which has been opposed by all circles (government and others) in the USA and Europe. Plus «Japan’s push towards increasing trade», Yoshida’s enthusiasm for America diminishing, the failure of Belgium’s attempt to lengthen the term of obligatory military service, and a precarious world economic situation «in which the USA will be unable to continue indefinitely down the road of total rearmament». «The psychological offensive in favour of war has not caught on in the world» and in addition differences are appearing between the European powers and the USA:

I believe we’re heading towards a gradual separation between the European countries and America, especially on the economic level. It’s inconceivable that things can go on like this much longer. I think your interpretation of the international situation is too mechanical and that the recent fold peace’ formula is more appropriate to describe what the future situation is likely to be.

We’ll have an America no longer able to bind the western countries to itself (how can it resolve their problems while itself in a crisis spiral?) while as the media reports, the petty bourgeoisie of the western States will accept to do business with the Soviets (see the recent agreement for Great Britain to buy 5 million tons of cereals from the USSR). We may continue to have a (formal) political Atlantic Pact, with in reality (substantial) anti-Atlantic trade». [The highlighting is the editor’s.]

The final sentence laid out the notion – undeniably Cervetto’s, since it is to be found further developed in his mature work – that the relationship between political forms and economic tendencies is not automatic. Masini replied point by point: the key to the controversy was the effective dimensions of European resistance. Vinazza had cited both «cases of working-class reaction and cases of ineffectual bourgeois resistance»:

I stated only that the working class would oppose Atlantic policies: the bourgeoisie wouldn’t. So there’s no point quoting the latter as an example of the West’s lack of cohesion. We know that already: we’re counting on it, but we’re not counting on any bourgeois resistance. Think about Pinay – a gesture: about Daladier and Herriot — one flare-up and it’s over. The Stalinists are bound to exaggerate the importance of these gestures for the purposes of their propaganda. I think they count for very little in the face of the massive pressure from America (on this, see the stats on the economic and financial power of the USA in comparison with the European States). There will be no shortage of hesitations, doubts and uncertainties, but the American steamroller will crush them. The USA is so little worried about European resistance that they favour European union, which could be a union of that resistance, if there was enough of it.159 [The highlighting is the editor’s.]

Masini was weak in dialectic, as can be seen by comparison with Vinazza’s key theories, clearly inspired by Cervetto. The latter contained the notion of the transformation of Euro-Atlantic relations, which any concept not based on dialectic cannot grasp, and which Cervetto was to develop in the early 1970s. It was the embryonic heart of the theories on the true partition and on European imperialism.

Masini saw only one side: the tactic of calculated ambivalence with which the United States went along with European integration so long as it did not threaten the Atlantic relationship, only to move to block it when it acquired strategic independence. Even on the issue of war psychology raised by Vinazza, Masini saw saw the American party making progress: The traditional nationalist movements, which should place themselves in the vanguard of resistance, are today the vanguard of the Atlantic Alliance. He held the same view on a political level: within parliament, the pro-American groups were stronger.

In terms of the economic crisis, which in Vinazza’s theory would prevent the USA from keeping Europe tied to it, Masini continued to reject that the powers of the Old Continent had any margins of autonomy:

The economic crisis? I don’t see it, in spite of rearmament. American imperialism has potential for development right up to the point of war. You say “I believe we’re heading towards a gradual separation between the European countries and America, especially on the economic level”. I see no sign of this. France is tied to America by its colonial policy [...] Germany because it wants to take over the Eastern European countries, even Poland. Austria – much the same, Italy in terms of recovering Trieste, and Spain for tacit support. And its Commonwealth binds Britain to a defensive policy in the Pacific, while the defence of its metropolises relies on the Atlantic Pact. Im not talking here of these countries’ ‘irredeemable’ subjection on the economic plane. You think that America can’t keep going down the rearmament road. I think that unfortunately America can only keep going down the rearmament road. This is the tragedy of capitalism.

In relation to the USSR, Masini turned Cervetto’s urgings as to the need for analysis into expressions of «hesitations and uncertainties»:

In my opinion the USSR and the USA constitute a single bloc: imperialism. You say this opinion is mechanical, trivial and simplistic. Right now Im working on documents from the PC (b) Congress, and every thing I read confirms my views. Certainly, what’s lacking is work on an organic theory of imperialism as it has taken shape after the Second Imperialist World War for example, like Lenin’s study just before the First). Its lacking and this lack leads to hesitations and uncertainties. We have to fill this gap. For my pari, I’ve already begun to take notes. Its possible to find some material here and there. But its not a case of discovering new theories: its a case of demonstrating a theory, finding more and more material to support it: the theory of working class autonomy in the face of the conflict between Moscow and Washington.

Probing further into the USSR issue via Malenkov’s report and Stalin’s writings, Cervetto was struck by extraordinary statistics on Russia’s growth rate (13%). He arranged to study this further along with other comrades, but the overall picture remained clear: the USSR was two-thirds weaker than the USA, which determined its specific policy. Analysing this did not affect the general assessment of the imperialist nature of the USSR: on the contrary, it allowed the issue to be grounded in reality, which in turn helped to direct militants.

There were to be further developments on the question of the USSR’s rate of growth. In -, when the USSR imploded under the pressure of the world economic cycle, Cervetto was sceptical of the theory that Togliatti, as a ‘prisoner of the Russian party’ had been playing a double game all along. After all, Togliatti could have followed the Yugoslavian model, presenting himself as a possibly heretical but ‘nationalist’ communist, without being much damaged by any Russian Fronde.

After all Herbert Wehner, part of the Internationale Secretariat along with Togliatti, recycled himself into German social democracy. In Cervetto’s opinion, if Togliatti hadn’t done the same it was because he had made a genuine but mistaken assessment of the imperialist cycle: he believed the USSR would grow faster than the West. Not well-versed in economics – with the soul of a lawyer and public prosecutor for Stalinism, in the caustic words of Trotsky160 – Togliatti had been deceived by the acclaimed but exceptional growth rates of the 1950s.

In these considerations, in 1952, we see Cervetto assessing the USSR as inferior to the USA by two-thirds, while puzzling over its very high rates of growth. Less well-developed, and therefore less clear, are his reflections on the USSR as a «social democratic factor161». a recent part of the theory of social democracy as created to restrain working-class movements. Cervetto’s mature work would leave this reading aside in favour of social democracy as the «working-class bourgeois party», using its influence on the upper strata of the working class in the struggle among its fractions. In terms of the Italian metropolis of the time, this was Stalinist maximalism as substituting for European social democracy.

Masini, far more than Cervetto, was trapped by an already invalidated maximalism. For Masini, the «world working class cannot but follow the path of independence from the war», but it was hard to understand why, given the way the working class had been used in the Second World War, and given how it had meekly submitted to Yalta, with its lethal myth of Russia’s false socialism.

According to Masini, faced with a war the working class would fight against the USA but not for the USSR, as demonstrated by Bevan’s Zimmerwaldian Right. Masini takes Vinazza – and by implication Cervetto – to task for seeing a mix of working-class and bourgeois forces in the European resistance to the USA, but this demonstrates that Cervetto had no illusions regarding the class position and levels of internationalism of the various Labour and social democratic left wings. Finally, Masini seemed to think Cervetto was influenced by Damen’s theories: as we shall see, this was only one factor in Cervetto’s thinking, but Masini seemed to find it more convenient to treat it as orientalism.

Open disagreement

The differences between Cervetto and Masini became open disagreement at an extended meeting of the National Committee at Nervi on 26th October 1952. To a Turin comrade who had written requesting information, Vinazza replied along the same lines as in his letter to Masini, and on issues such as European anti-Atlanticism and the significance of Stalin’s Economic Questions of Socialism, even more explicitly. The overall significance of the letter was to mark the disagreement between Cervetto and Masini on the issues of timescales and war. By now Cervetto had excluded the possibility of an imminent conflict: Masini considered it inevitable and originating from the USSR precisely because it was the weaker.

In 1968, writing on the true partition between the USA and the USSR162, Cervetto listed various hypotheses on the circumstances in which the USSR might be the prime mover in a war, arguing that the very weakness of the USSR excluded conflict. War is possible if the contenders have comparable strength, not when there is such a marked disproportion of forces. But above all the strategic framework within which the true partition should be viewed must include a scientific understanding of the role played by European imperialism. The USA and the USSR converged in their desire to contain European imperialism, thus invalidating the theory that either would have an interest in moving towards war. Having developed the tools necessary to understanding the power balance, the analysis could then be stripped of all the doubts and ideological elements that were around in 1952, such as ‘psychology of the masses’ and the ‘popular drive for peace’ of which it was said Stalin was forced to take account.

Vinazza’s letter contains a reference to a two-hour contribution of Cervetto’s to the National Committee, which appears to clarify the logical connections:

«Cervetto holds that:

Contrary to appearances, the imperialist West is not totally homogeneous. It’s true that a ‘network of interests’ exists among the big business groups of the various nations (eg. there are ties between Fiat and Ford, as between all of the West’s car manufacturing industry) but it’s also true that there are those who aren’t part of this network, who remain outside of this ‘shared’ dividing up of monopoly profit: large sectors of the petty, middle and even a part of the grand bourgeoisie – the industrialists who went to Moscow, who want to trade with China and with the People’s Democracies. You couldn’t say that those who are excluded are very fond of a West that puts them in crisis, that favours the monopolies to the point of threatening them with bankruptcy (this is a law of capitalism, but it’s also a law that those under threat resist, become obstinate and reject the superiority of the Western way. All this has nothing to do with ideology, whether Eastern or Western: it’s all about material interests».163

Reflecting the debates of the time, the use of terminology is still imprecise, but the concept is clear: a plurality of business groups exists: it’s not just a case of ‘American monopolies’. Contrary to previous formulations, here it’s stated clearly that even ‘grand bourgeoisie’ groups are breaking away from the USA and seeking a relationship with Moscow. This observation is extended to the political, and defines as bourgeois those political forces that Masini saw as separate from the bourgeoisie and constituting a «Zimmerwald Right». Here, in embryonic form, is Cervetto’s 1968 observation on the «true partition»: in the absence of a concept of European imperialism, the revolutionary party lacked both strategy and tactics. It highlights the accurate assessment of Bevan’s Labour Left, and of the currents Masini believed were signs of working-class rejection of war and a move towards a new Zimmerwald: in addition to the Labour Left, the MLI and the left-wing of the SPD, when many of these were already potential recruits to the future autonomist current of the PSI. Cervetto saw these as bourgeois parties; his formula was as yet incomplete, but he was able to grasp their nature because he could differentiate between European and American big business groups. If there were European big business groups whose interests diverged from the interests of the USA, there would also exist the expression of this in terms of political forces. Masini, on the other hand, was dreaming of Zimmerwald and gathering together the nascent currents of European imperialism.

Vinazza’s letter continues with his report on Cervetto’s contribution:

Politically, this resistance turns into the bomb Herriot and Daladier dropped at the congress of the French radicals, condemning German rearmament and the Atlantic Pact because it didn’t offer sufficient guarantees. It turns into the economic nationalism that’s developing in the Japanese bourgeoisie, who want access to Chinese markets again, into Italian economic nationalism. Nitti, Labriola, Molé, etc — what are they but the representatives of that part of the Italian bourgeoisie that’s outside the network of interests?

Not to mention the left wing tendencies of German and British social democracy: if it’s true that they represent the workers, it’s also true that in certain sectors they represent the petty and middle bourgeoisie.

As for Moscow: We know that the USSR is economically weaker, so we know that objectively the USSR has no interests in starting a war.

In fact, Masini’s theories were all based on a war starting.

Vinazza writes of this:

On the international problem, he doesn’t believe what Cervetto says.

He thinks that American pressure will eliminate any differences and will keep the colonial bourgeoisies happy while keeping them under its heel. He thinks that resistance from certain bourgeois sectors is all in the game.

Regarding the USSR he thinks that although the USSR doesn’t want a war, it will be forced to act to break out of its straitjacket (Korea, where the USSR as the weaker has sought a response to American pressure, is an example). He does think that

America has the initiative as far as war goes, but he believes that the USSR, just because it’s the weaker, will fight against being suffocated (which is what American military bases all over the world amounts to).

At the congress* everything was reduced to the Soviet attempt to recreate a 1917 environment.

After a few weeks’ silence, this clash ended as had that on the State: study Marxism. An explicit exchange of letters took place at the beginning of December. Masini wrote that there was a danger of dogmatism: Scattoni wanted a debate on the nexus between theory and practice – comrades should be engaged in practical activity in order to avoid these fixations.

* The XIX Congress of the USSR Communist Party, to which Malenkov's report was presented.

«I don’t know of any anarchist economists»

Around a month of silence: then, in December 1952, Cervetto wrote that he was studying political economy: Rosa Luxemburg, Sweezy’s ‘Theory of Capitalist Development’. He mocks: I’ll write it all up: «of course I’ll be writing about Marx and Lenin and openly supporting their theories». «In political economy, more than in any other branch of study, Marxist economics is the only way. Anyway, I don’t know of any anarchist economists.

On the problems debated, he adds that I thought it best to put them away, in order to take them up again in the future. It was better to leave these issues unsolved and study – political, Italian, American economy – which with time could contribute to a solution. The intention to avoid tensions comes across clearly. Cervetto declares himself to be more circumspect, having changed his opinion on some details. However: «By this I don’t mean that I’ve abandoned what I stated at Nervi. By and large, I still maintain the theory I set out then».164

Chapter Eight

1952: SOURCES FOR THE CLASH OVER EUROPE

 

By the end of 1952 there were two sides to Arrigo Cervetto’s reflections on unitary imperialism. His reservations on the ‘Third Front’ had pushed him to investigate in more depth ideas such as a disproportion of forces between the United States and the USSR, and now he began to study in earnest the differences between Europe, Japan and America. On the other hand, his motives for collaborating with Masini were still far more important than any dissension between them: at Pontedecimo, it will be recalled, there had been a declaration of ‘shared acceptance (of the) two imperialisms’ theory as the premise of the ‘Third Front? slogan. The real gain Cervetto had drawn from his investigations of the imperialism issue was the realisation that without this sort of study it was going to be impossible to consolidate militants. By 1952 the results of his analysis were, as he himself acknowleged, impressive but not yet decisive.

However, the fact remains that for the first time how to assess European imperialism was the subject of an open disagreement that had been brought to the attention of GAAP’s organisational structures: the Florence conference in June and the extended National Committee in October. It is worthwhile to look in more detail at the sources Cervetto was using to clarify the issues in that internal debate.

Stalin and ‘The Economic Problems of Socialism’

Between 1951 and 1952 Cervetto was focusing on material that may be grouped along four major lines. We have already referred to Malenkov’s Report and Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism, which occupied international debate during the autumn of 1952. Dealing as it did with the inevitability of war between the capitalist countries the Stalinist two camps theory claimed that the single world market had been broken up, thus limiting outlets for ‘capitalist’ trade and commerce. The balance between the capitalist powers was therefore fated to change:

Let’s take Britain and France first. There can be no doubt that for them cheap raw materials and guaranteed markets for their products are of prime importance. Can me really assume that they will forever tolerate the current situation, in which the Americans are installing themselves in the British and French economies and with the pretext of ‘helping them via the Marshall Plan are seeking to transform them into appendices of the US economy? And in which American capital is seizing the ram materials and the markets of the Anglo-French colonies, thus preparing a catastrophe for the high profits of Anglo-French capitalists? Is it not more accurate to predict that at the end of the day capitalist Britain, and in its make capitalist France, mill be forced to free themselves from America’s grasp and fight to ensure their autonomy, and of course, high profits?.

The same was true of the defeated powers:

Let’s go on to the major defeated countries, West Germany and Japan. Today these countries drag on a miserable existence under the American imperialist boot. Their industry, agriculture and commerce, their domestic and foreign policies, their whole existence is bound by the chains of the American Occupation. But only yesterday these countries mere great imperialist powers that shook the rule of Great Britain, France, and the United States of America to its very roots both in Europe and in Asia. To think that these countries mill never get back on their feet, mill never again threaten American rule and never aim at autonomous development, is like believing in miracles [...]

After the First World War, too, it mas thought that Germany had been definitively knocked out of the fight, as today some comrades believe it has again, and with it Japan. Then, too, the newspapers loudly declared that the United States had reduced Europe to the bare bones, that Germany mould never rise again, that there mould be no more mars between capitalist countries. In spite of all that, 15 to 20 years after defeat Germany rose up, and took its place as a great power again, throwing off its chains and taking up the march towards autonomous development. Significantly, none other than Great Britain and the United States helped Germany to rise again economically and to increase its economic and military potential. Of course, in helping Germany to get back on its feet economically, the United States and Britain aimed to point a resurrected Germany against the Soviet Union, to use it against the socialist countries. But Germany directed its strength against the Anglo-French-American bloc, and when Hitler’s Germany declared mar on the Soviet Union, the Anglo-French-American bloc not only did not ally itself with Hitler’s Germany, but on the contrary mas forced to enter into coalition with the USSR against it. The battle for markets between the capitalist countries and the desire to sink their respective competitors, can therefore, to all practical purposes, be seen to be fiercer than the clashes between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp.

One should ask: what guarantee is there that Germany and Japan will not get back on their feet again, will not try to shake off the American yoke and live independently? I don’t believe any such guarantee exists.

From this, it follows that war between the capitalist countries continues to be inevitables.165

The international debate: ‘Il Mondo’ and Turin’s ‘La Stampa’

Cervetto’s second line of inquiry was the debate on those theories of Stalin’s that dominated both the international and the Italian Press in the autumn of 1952, i.e. just before the extended National Committee met on 26th October. From 1950 on, Cervetto’s articles had contained references to Le Figaro and Le Monde on the clashes over German rearmament and on the neutralist ‘Third Force’ position. As well as reading the French Press in the original, Cervetto followed the Italian Press and the periodical Relazioni Internazionali. In Il Mondo he had a particularly well-documented source on the Europe-America debate. This publication carried a regular column by Antonio Calvi that dealt with the international debate from a Euro-Atlantic position close to that of Raymond Aron in Le Figaro. Other contributors, such as Altiero Spinelli, were more inclined to a Europeanist view, even if in this particular version Europe was the far shore of a Euro-Atlantic line. For Spinelli – a supporter of a federalist Europe – the goal was Europe as a third force but with the Old Continent cultivating Atlantic ties until achieving the energies and the opportunity to go independent.

The term cold peace quoted in Cervetto’s 20th October letter to Masini, appeared in Il Mondo on 18th October,166 where it was challenged by Antonio Calvi, who didn’t believe that Moscow’s policy had changed. At this time the Atlantic relations policy mix also led to heated debate between Il Mondo’s Calvi and Luigi Salvatorelli of Turin’s La Stampa. In an editorial on 15th October Salvatorelli demanded mutual respect within the Atlantic Alliance, on a basis of partnership and equality. Stalin was excluding condict between the two blocs, sending out messages that he didn’t want war, but at the same time he was sowing discord among the Western powers with his hypothesis that they would clash with America. La Stampa completely excluded a war between the Western powers, but noted that this did not hold good for other areas of tension:

But for the word ‘war’ we should substitute ‘clash’ or ‘dissension’; we should remember that wars are not only military affairs, they can be diplomatic, economic, ideological, and all capable in the long term of causing troubles almost as serious as a real war.167

On 3rd October, La Stampa referred to Washington’s assumptions as to Stalin’s intentions in relation to the presidential campaign in which Dwight Eisenhower was running for the Republicans. The most obvious interpretation saw encouragement to ‘neutralist’ and pacifist movements in Europe. Other versions held that the stress on Western contradictions heralded a period of playing for time during which the USSR would return to the isolationism of - a period during which it had, however, made great efforts to develop commercial trade with the capitalist countries to its maximum level. With an eye more to its electoral campaign, the Democratic Party pointed out a meeting of interests between Stalin and the Republican isolationist currents that were proclaiming their mistrust of their European allies. According to this line of reasoning, Stalin meant to intimidate those American circles favourable to European unification by casting doubt on the wisdom of the United States contributing to creating a federation of States in Europe that in terms of importance and industrial and commercial power [could] constitute a serious challenge to American interests.168

On 25th October, Antonio Calvi in Il Mondo argued against the claim for partnership and equality within the Atlantic Alliance put forward by Salvatorelli:

[...] The Communists have understood our problems better than we ourselves. While many in the West have been talking about the details of Western systems, of counterweights, or worse yet, of the Atlantic Pact as incidental and manipulative and a European Community as permanent and final, the Communists have understood perfectly well that there’s only one game in town: the unity of the Western world.169

Up to this point the debate between Arrigo Cervetto and Pier Carlo Masini had been carried on with reference to sources that were available to both. It’s not certain that Cervetto read Raymond Aron’s Le Figaro articles, although some of his general positions would have been mentioned in Il Mondo, particularly by Calvi.

Economic Problems of Socialism was the subject of ‘Stalin speaks’ which appeared in Le Figaro of 11th-12th October 1952. Aron’s basic position could also be gauged from a previous article ‘Stalin’s Not Afraid’ on a series of discussions between Stalin and the Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni, who at that point was still in thrall to Moscow’s policies. Aron noted how Stalin combined ideology and realism; he would only negotiate if he really had something to fear from the West, just as he had done with Nazi Germany in 1939. The article concluded that Moscow did not look likely either to launch a great war or a true peace. Aron had already employed this concept of war is improbable, peace is impossible in February 1949, commenting on the American airlift mobilised against the Berlin blockade, which demonstrated that peace was not «in thrall to incidents»:

The rivalry between the communist world and the free world will continue without resolution and without explosions. People understand that for years to come we will live in a situation we may label as ‘neither peace nor war’.170

Another of Aron’s pieces distinguishes between inter-State conflict and economic clashes, and provides an example of the tenor of the discussions taking place within GAAP in that autumn of 1952. We will recall that Vinazza had put forward Cervetto’s «cold peace» theory, with Europe formally continuing on Atlantic Alliance lines, but progressively diverging from the USA on the economic plane. Aron wrote that:

It’s not a question of stabilising capitalism: it’s a question of conflict between capitalist States. If they are to develop, these conflicts require a long enough period of peace, or at any rate an absence of total war, between the two camps. Is Stalin really counting on a breakdown in relations between Europeans and Americans? If we’re talking about an imminent breakdown, the answer is, probably not: if we’re talking about, for example, increasing tensions between the Japanese and the Americans, the former keen to trade with Communist China, the latter keen to stop them – well, why not? The greater the area of the world that is barred to the international economic system, the greater its difficulties in functioning. To use Stalin’s language, it’s perfectly true that the extension of the Soviet zone, which rejects free trade, aggravates the contradictions of capitalism. Will these aggravated contradictions trigger a new war between capitalist States? This is a completely different question, on which probably Stalin, as a realistic politician, is less convinced than his dogmatic statements would have us believe.171

Aron did not find George Kennan’s containment theories convincing, concluding that opinion on both sides was the probable continuation of the «Cold War», i.e. a period during which the two camps would co-exist without a great war, but also without real peace.

The article ‘The Cost of Rearmament’ on 22nd October dealt with the incident between head of the French government Antoine Pinay and the United States that was taken, in the debate prior to GAAP’s National Committee meeting at Nervi, as evidence of European autonomy. On 6th October the American embassy had sent Paris a note that was critical of the French government’s military budget. Pinay rejected the note publicly and spectacularly. Aron’s version of the reasons for the Paris-Washington friction involved some contention on payment for arms France had commissioned from America. The conclusion was that France was unable to keep up both its rearmament programme and the cost of the war in Indochina.

The Amadeo Bordiga – Onorato Damen confrontation

Stalin declared that the theory of relative market stability formulated in the 1930s was no longer valid, nor was Lenin’s theory on imperialist development, according to which the parasitism of the imperialist phase did not prevent capitalism from growing at a pace incomparably more rapid than before.

Stalin’s arguments were useful to the ideology of a world divided into two camps. The contraposition of the ‘Cold War’ had consolidated ties in a new market centred around the USSR, China and Eastern Europe, resulting in a high pace of development that would soon lead to the need to export production surpluses. This would reduce the available markets for the big capitalist powers, exacerbating the contraction of their industrial production: this would lead to the disintegration of the world market [...] the deepening of the general crisis of the capitalist world system.

Stalin displayed a remarkable ability to manipulate and divert Marxist categories and concepts into sophistry. It is to be noted that his concept of general crisis and pace of accumulation are inseparable from the social nature of the USSR as State capitalism, and from the independence of the former colonies, which was transforming them into young capitalist powers. By separating the world market into two camps under the pretext of a new market (socialist) that linked Russia’s State capitalism with developing areas like China, he contrived to foresee crisis in the imperialist camp when faced with the high pace of development of the so-called socialist camp.

On the other side was the link between the scientific concept of the world market as unitary imperialism, the nature of the USSR as State capitalism and the struggles in the former colonies as bourgeois revolutions. This theoretical and analytical structure meant that at one and the same time it was possible to oppose the social-imperialist «two camps» theory that was imprisoning the world proletariat in the lie of Yalta, and to grasp all the implications of imperialist development and its pace of accumulation, including an analysis of uneven development and the dynamic produced by the changes in the relative strengths of the powers.

Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Tokyo, Bonn and Rome were all capitals of unitary imperialism: China, India, Indonesia, Algeria and Egypt were all new developing powers: the whole of unitary imperialism’s world market was being dragged along in a long cycle of development, in which however its destructive wars and crises would remain both partial and local.

Outside Stalinist manipulation was the real course of imperialism, with its tangle of contradictions that would have to be ironed out in an autonomous politics, starting with the concept of strategic internationalism. All the Trotskyist, Third World or Maoist variants that misunderstood or later confused the signs of the times – the nature of the USSR and imperialist development – would in one way or another contribute to the Stalinist sophistry that was annihilating working-class autonomy.

These reflections would become the firm principles of the ‘1957 Theses’, which rejected the division of the world economy into «two camps», revealed the USSR as State capitalism, understood the workings of capitalism in the underdeveloped areas of the world, and based the strategic estimate for working-class action on the long times of world capitalist development.

On the scientific journey Cervetto was just beginning – a journey full of practical political implications for the reconstruction of the working-class party – it’s easy to understand his interest in the third line of sources in 1952: Amadeo Bordiga’s theoretical clash with Onorato Damen, which had led to the split in their organisation.

Cervetto had heard hints of internal tensions in PCI, Bordiga’s party, in 1950, and then of crisis in the autumn of 1951, during his stay in Argentina. Since the exchange of letters between Bordiga and Damen was not published until April 1952, Cervetto was only able to study the issue on his return from Argentina. As we have seen, one of the nine points in his ‘Theoretical Notes’ on uneven development is taken from Damen.172

In order to analyse the disproportion of forces between Washington and Moscow, Cervetto had been working on the notion of imperialist uneven development and its strategic and political effects, starting from the common imperialist nature of the USA and the USSR within unitary imperialism. This was the main theme he raised in the spring of 1952 and at GAAP’s Florence National Conference in June. But the correspondence between ‘Onorio’ (Damen) and ‘Alfa’ (Bordiga) dealt only indirectly with the tensions between Europe and America that continued to be the prevalent theme for GAAP’s extended National Committee in the autumn of 1952 (the exception being the point Cervetto borrowed from Damen for his ‘Notes’). America, wrote Bordiga was the No. 1 concentration and capable of crushing any revolution. Japan and Germany are at rock bottom, France and Italy have been severely shaken [...] Britain itself is in serious crisis.173 On the ‘No. 1 concentration’ Damen specified:

The formula is correct, if it is understood in the sense that international capitalism, considered in its unitary reality albeit with differences of scale due to its uneven development has in America ‘its biggest metropolitan concentration of capital, production and power’.174

Our highlighting delineates the statement Cervetto borrowed. To discover the initial moments of Cervetto’s thinking on this we must take a step back, to the books and notes of his time in Argentina.

‘Los Tres Grandes’

This is the fourth, and final fine of contribution to Cervetto’s thinking in 1952. In a sense it is the first, since it is here, among the books and notes he deconstructed in Buenos Aires, that we find his autonomous and original reflections on the issues debated the following year: the relationship between the USA and the USSR and the contradictions between America and Europe.

While Cervetto was in Argentina, Vinazza was sending him packages of newspaper cuttings plus material he had typed out with the help of comrades at Sestri Ponente.175 A note written towards the end of 1951 and entitled ‘History of USA-USSR relations’ concerns an Il Mondo review on 10th November of a book by George Kennan, American Diplomacy:

The complete history of relations between the USA and the USSR could constitute the main chapter in the history of modern imperialism and indirectly contribute to a) historically document the theory of ‘imperialism as a unitary phenomenon of the capitalist erd’ b) provide a picture of current development as it has determined the division of the world into two antagonistic blocs c) demonstrate how imperialism’s contradictions inevitably produced the two-bloc system (practically speaking the USA has created the Soviet bloc as an organic and spontaneous product of its own imperialist actions) as a temporary solution to the imperialist crisis. This we can verify in world political and economic history, thus demonstrating that our exact definition of the Soviet phenomenon is correct. So there’s no need to look for an interpretation of this phenomenon in the degeneration of the workers’ State, as the Trotskyists are doing, but in the very history of imperialism itself d) define Soviet diplomacy e) define USA diplomacy f) help to define the social nature of the USSR, its economic structure, etc. h) provide documentation for anti-imperialist propaganda, which is the more effective the more it shows up the ‘unitary’ and common sides of the two blocs, and above all their ‘conspiracy’ – i) how the USA and the USSR are ‘unitary counter-revolution’.

The study of USA-USSR relations is practically useful to revolutionary politics. It should therefore be used extensively and systematically as propaganda.

We have highlighted that the USSR is a spontaneous product of American action; it records that as early as 1951, in Argentina, Cervetto was considering the relative strengths of the USA and USSR, and it contains one element of the interpretation of Yalta that would reach its completion in 1968, in the theory of the true partition.

Arrigo Cervetto, a note on David Dallin’s book Los Très Grandes, written on a Buenos Aires wholesale textile merchant’s pad.

Among the books Cervetto read and made notes on while in Argentina was Los Tres Grandes, a Spanish translation of David Dallin’s book The Big Three: the United States, Britain and Russia, published in the USA in 1945. Born in 1889, Dallin had been a Menshevik leader and a member of the Moscow Soviet between 1918 and 1921. Exiled from Russia in 1921, he took refuge first in Germany and then in the USA, where his writings found an audience in the American academic and political world via Yale University. Yale University Press had also published a previous work, Russia and Postwar Europe, in 1943; in Spanish translation, this too was among Cervetto’s Argentina reading material.

Los Tres Grandes may be described as one of those books written by a European in order to explain world politics to Americans, and in this sense it is also a sort of guide to the realist school of foreign policy. There is a general acknowledgement of uneven economic and political development, seen in the light of the outcomes of the Second World War. The overall view is influenced by geopolitical theory; contention for control over the continental heart of Europe is set against the sea power of Great Britain and the USA.

For Dallin, the crucial outcome of the war was the passing, after four centuries, of sea power from Great Britain to America. The concern was how Washington would understand its enormous new global responsibilities: whether it would underestimate the revival of the Russian menace, as in the 1930s it had underestimated the Nazis. Dallin’s political aims would become clearer in the course of the 1950s, when he supported German rearmament and John Foster Dulles’ roll back rhetoric – assertive pressure on the USSR to withdraw from Eastern Europe.

We cannot here reproduce Dallin’s theories in their entirety; we will mention however two significant strands that were known to Cervetto before his return to Italy. The first is the realistic recognition of power relations that opens the book, alongside the concept of uneven development. What is required is:

A realistic appraisal of the new world which is now emerging of the dynamic forces which are active in it, of the dangers which threaten at each turn. (...) There is no greater crime against peace than wilful short-sightedness in international affairs.176

In the dynamics of power, wrote Dallin, wars and crises are defining moments, but no order lasts forever. Rise and fall are in the very nature of international relations:

«Great Powers have been born in wars: they have matured in wars: and they have died in wars. War lays naked to the world the developments and evolution within individual nations which were too gradual to have been observed in normal times; international crises reveal their strengths and their weaknesses. Within the past few centuries once great powers – Portugal, Sweden, Holland, Spain, Turkey – became minor powers following a war. The minor powers of yesterday – the United States, Japan – have grown to be great. [...] Who will be the masters of tomorrow? Will the powers defeated in this war be eliminated forever? Will the victors retain their combined dominance over the world?»

Until the beginning of the 20th century, big power status was reserved to European nations. There were five major powers – Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Prussia-Germany – and two minor – Italy and Spain. The great revolution in power relations came «around 1900»:

Europe’s total dominance was at an end. An American and an Asiatic nation were rapidly acquiring wealth, military strength and influence in international affairs. The growth of these two nations brought unfamiliar problems and created new hotbeds of tension. The Far East, secondary or even third-rate in world affairs a few decades before, was becoming a new battlefield both in war and in peace. Its emergence created an upheaval in the international position of a number of nations, Russia among them. It would be too much to say that the centre of gravity had shifted away from Europe. Rather there was now more than one centre of gravity, and the importance of the new ones grew with every decade of the twentieth century.177

During his studies in Argentina Cervetto had gone back to Lenin’s Imperialism. Dallin’s position was exactly socio-imperialist and favoured the USA: his analysis contained serious weaknesses – he overestimated how long Great Britain’s strength would last, and underestimated China, his hypothesis being that it would end up divided. Nevertheless, it would be hard to miss the echoes of Lenin’s uneven economic and political development: the challenge posed by the USA and Japan to the old European order, the 1905 war that shook Tsarist Russia, the entrance of Asia onto the world scene. In this sense, the book was a good starting-point for updating the picture of the imperialist powers at the end of two world wars.

Those who fell from their positions of power, or found those positions to be lower than before included Austria-Hungary in 1918; Italy in 1943; France in 1940; Germany and Japan in 1945. As far as Dallin was concerned, only the United States, Great Britain and Russia survived the lethal epidemics of the twentieth century. These three were the only nations interested in both the old European theatre of affairs and the new one in the Far East.

It is useful to reproduce in full Dallin’s summary of the Second World War, for the multiplicity of conflicts it identifies. In this war:

a multitude of wars were merged into one great war: the outcome of that war must answer a multitude of questions. China’s war against Japan and against foreign privileges; Britain’s war against the hegemony of any other nation in Europe and the Far East; Poland’s centuries-long war for independence against Germany and Russia; the American war against domination in the Pacific and the Far East of any other power and for a stable Europe; Russia’s war of self-defence; the Soviet war for a worldwide Union; the French war against the ‘hereditary enemy’ (Germany); the wars of the Balkan States for territories and predominance; Romania’s war for Transylvania; Australia’s war for security and for Oceania; Germany’s war for half the world; Japan’s war for the other half.178

This concept of a multitude of wars» partially brings to the surface and partially obscures the two wars in Europe and Asia that encompass the whole conflict, and the undifferentiated catalogue of tensions and conflicts does not make clear – as Lenin had made clear in 1914 – the overriding nature of the conflict as an imperialist war. Nevertheless, it is understandable that this wide, even global view could give Cervetto the advantage in facing the situation in Italy, where the horizon had been shut down by bipolarism, and which was imprisoned in the crushing notion of America’s mighty dollar.

In spite of Cervetto’s ties with European immigrants and refugees, Buenos Aires was a different strategic chessboard. From Argentina he saw the world from a different angle, a view from the American hemisphere, and this also explains how works dealing with American foreign policy were so readily available in Spanish. For all that Dallin was imbued with European culture, there was a sense in which from New York the Atlantic and the Pacific were both equally present, and then, the history of Russia was the history of both Europe and Asia: in the 1905 war Japan had knocked at the very doors of the Tsar.

The second strand is that of uneven development as seen not in the rise of new powers but in the re-emergence of the old. Dallin deduced that the preeminence of the Big Three, Washington, Moscow and London, which had come victorious out of the war, could not be durable. The military meeting of interests, like all wartime coalitions, was destined to end swiftly with the war’s end:

A number of other nations will gradually climb the stairs to the big-power throne, and then new groupings, combinations and coalitions will emerge.179

Dallin forecast that Germany, France and Japan would recover economically, but also due to political and strategic factors. In the dynamics of power, the central position of France would be important for European equilibrium, and similarly the central position of Japan for the balance of Asia.

The real issue in Europe was still Germany. Dallin argued that although Germany had come out of the war «crushed, partitioned, powerless», deprived of any military strength and without a voice in European affairs, this is not her first defeat. Germany’s main strength lay in her economy and in her geographical position: Europe needs German industry. The restoration of Germany’s railways was an urgent necessity for her neighbours [...] her machines will be needed for the restoration of the economy all over the continent. His conclusion was that:

A degree of influence in European politics will be reacquired by Germany after a certain time, by economic means. After 1918 the military force of Germany was negligible and remained so until 1933. However, by the middle 20s Germany did play a role in international relations, and it was her rapidly restored economy that was the basis of her rise. Difficult as will be the resurrection of German industry after 1945, the process will essentially be the same, though at first special efforts will be taken to prevent it. New leaders will arise, new political ideas will take shape in Germany, but Germany – a Germany of quite another type – has not been struck out as a political factor in the future.

The end point of this theory sees Germany as a postwar ally. In default of this, the rivalries of the other powers could create space for Germany, as had happened with France after 1815: Even Hitlers rise would have been impossible had it not been for the antagonisms between Germany’s east and west, and between Britain and Franse. The theory of Germany’s inevitable revival suggested that the United States should help this along, in order to balance the USSR’s return to power. Dallin put forward the same considerations for Japan:

Though defeated and ousted from the Asiatic continent, Japan will remain a great economic organism. Her abilities in the economic field are suprising. Her achievements all over the East are spectacular. In Asia and Oceania her trade has equalled that of the United States. Manchuria has developed, under Japan, at an amazing rate. This source of influence on international affairs will remain with Japan. In addition, her geographical location at the very knot of Far Eastern troubles can soon make her either an important buffer State among the big powers or even an ally – with all the privileges of a ‘favourite’ of a big power. An end will be set, of course, to her dream of predominance over the continent of Asia and the Pacific, but Japanese influence in her own part of the world will not be eliminated altogether.

Finally, for Dallin «France will rise again to the status of a great power, although she will probably never be as great as she was in past centuries». It would take years for Paris to rebuild her power, but with or without foreign help France would once again have a strong army under a traditionally excellent military leadership. Paradoxically, Paris would gain advantage from the fact that her demographic losses in the war had been minimal. She would not have a first-class navy, nor a determining influence outside Europe, but in Europe she would emerge on a political plane as «the first power, after Russia». In European affairs, her voice would once again be «at least as important as Britain’s.

There is a striking conceptual resemblance here to Stalin’s theories as voiced in the autumn of 1952 – obviously with a difference in strategic perspective. For Cervetto, the debate on the prospects for European autonomy from the USA was nothing new; for at least a year he had had access to good quality material on the subject.

Methodology: a plurality of bourgeois sources

The overlap between Stalin and Dallin on such issues as the dynamics of uneven development and the revival of Germany and Japan as world powers, gives us an insight into Arrigo Cervetto’s methodology. If we consider the sources to which he had access for his 1952 analysis – leaving aside Lenin’s Imperialism and a few points from Bordiga – we note that they are key ruling class lines of thought, albeit in dispute with each other.

La Stampa, which argued for European autonomy on a basis of partnership and equality within the Atlantic Alliance, was nevertheless tied to Fiat of Turin, a major big business group of Italian imperialism. Il Mondo reflected influential sections of the Euro-Atlantic consensus. Stalin was at the head of Russian imperialism. Le Figaro and Le Monde were typical expressions of French imperialism’s political élites. David Dallin had his own particular history, sharing the fate of many Mensheviks who had taken refuge in the USA, who would have liked to be the infantry of the revolution and instead found themselves soldiers of the Cold War.180 Nevertheless, his work was worth some attention as an expression of the debate between the various currents of American imperialism on postwar prospects.

These were, therefore, ruling class sources, imperialist sources, whether Russian, European or American, right down to a Menshevik enlisted in the ‘Cold War’, and Stalin himself. Maximalist psychology would have rejected a method that so carefully compared ‘bourgeois’ texts. But the scientific value of that analytical method was precisely that it turned to the currents and the schools of thought of the ruling class, gathering them from the best available sources and comparing them.

This was the science of Capital concretely applied to political analysis: the groups and fractions of the bourgeoisie, the powers and the political forces they make use of, are in continual struggle among themselves. The clash between their political expressions is the breach that opens for the science-party, allowing it to know the real strength of its class enemy, and understand its contradictions for the purposes of the revolutionary struggle.

Chapter Nine

THE TRUE PARTITION: A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

 

In August 1968 Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, supported by other Warsaw Pact forces. The action confirmed the difficulty the USSR was experiencing in maintaining its hold over Eastern Europe: after the 1953 Berlin strikes had been crushed, after the Warsaw crisis and the Budapest massacres in 1956, now military means would have to be used to bring Prague to heel.

One page of Cervetto’s work is central to understanding how Marxist analysis faced that historic turning-point, scientifically returning full circle to the 1950s initial formulation of the unitary imperialism theory. In Cervetto’s writings from 1968 on we find the real foundations of his final vision of the Marxist theory and strategy of international relations.

Imperialism and the balance of power: a correction to the theory

1968 has gone down in history above all for the events of May in Paris. Cervetto analysed the French crisis primarily with regards to the power relations between France and Germany. But the true scientific outcome lay in the overall evaluation of the balance of power in Europe:

«Then came 1968. I analysed it on two occasions. ‘The International Dimension of the French Crisis’ focused on the events of May. I maintained that these had no theoretical significance from Marxism’s point of view: they simply confirmed Marxist theory on class struggle, the State, counter-revolution, and the party. All they demonstrated was the relative weakness of France in comparison with Germany.

I saw the invasion of Prague as a manifestation of the ‘true partition of the world. My analysis rejected the established theory that the world was split between the USA and the USSR. I reflected on the concept employed by Marx and Engels of ‘equilibrium – balance of power’ and this led me to hold that the Yalta agreement had been the application of America’s strategy for balance in Europe. By yielding Eastern Europe to the USSR, the United States had mortgaged the future of European imperialism.

1968 was a great opportunity for me to study, reflect and work things out. I had the tools to do it, and this prevented me from being sidetracked by marginal, secondary considerations. My practical training and my past experiences once again proved vital: without them I would have been more influenced by surface appearances. But like a burnt child, I had learnt to recognise fire. For a long time now black shirts, white shirts, red, green or yellow had been only old rags as far as I was concerned.

It was no accident that 1968 provided me with the chance to analyse unitary imperialism at a deeper level. Events favoured my methodology, allowing me to finally see the practical implications of the dynamics of unitary imperialism, which I had previous fl mainly conceptualised as an abstraction. In the 1950s I had seen imperialism as a single worldwide mechanism taking concrete form in a two-bloc division. I had followed the failure of the Bandung attempt to create a third bloc centred round India and China. The creation of the Common Market led me to the idea of ‘Three Imperialist Blocs’. The dynamic of ’68 allowed me to see how this mechanism – how world imperialist blocs formed, survived and balanced – worked in practice. It wasn’t difficult for me to correct my previous – and too abstract – definition of unitary imperialism, even though that initial definition was what had encouraged me to carry on with scientific analysis. Ultimately, pride is an obstacle to scientific work, because it prevents you identifying the errors you inevitable make. Fortunately, Nature has been kind to me: she’s given me plenty of other defects, but not that one. I can feel pride of the heart – for my militancy and my choices – but not pride for my brainpower or what it may produce. I do my best to be a scientist of the revolution, and I know that science is unending research: its error seeking truth, truth seeking out error.

I maintain that ‘the true partition of the world was a discovery. Certainly, it was extremely useful in the years to come. Even if the French crisis caused me to overestimate the relative weakness of France, ’68 was a fruitful year for me. In all my journeyings, I’d have to go back to 1956 to find a year like it. The rest was seconday, even if it came across as more striking».181

This discovery, this fruitful year, came about because an analysis of the international political facts of 1968 had allowed Cervetto to «correct» the theory of unitary imperialism, which had been too much of an abstraction when conceived of as a single dynamic between two economic blocs. Cervetto did not mean so much that the two imperialisms version – two blocs led respectively by the USA and the USSR – was inadequate to describe imperialism’s plurality of forces. He had realised that limitation back in the 1950s and the early 1960s, with his analysis of the crises on the margins of Asia’s development, and of the Common Market as unitary imperialism’s ‘third bloc’. The ‘1957 Theses’ had already moved away from two imperialisms: like ‘68, 1957 had been a fruitful year.

Cervetto had proceeded with the methodological tools of science: analysing real information, formulating hypotheses, verifying the results, highlighting his errors, perfecting the theoretical instruments of the Marxist laboratory. He was not an intellectual cut off from the realities of society, but a revolutionary scientist and the leader of a fighting unit. It was the crises and historical turning-points of the imperialist conflict, and the political struggles to which they called the party, which led to the need for an analysis that would help consolidate militants, and that analytical task had forced on both the verification and the perfection of theory.

In 1956 the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the birth of the Common Market and the political battle centred around the crisis of Stalinism had led to the fruitful year of the ‘1957 Theses’. Twelve years later, the invasion of Prague cut across a USSR in crisis and the growing strength of Germany and Europe at the ‘economic miracle’ stage of the cycle: the French and Italian crises – the latter of an imbalance between the economy and State capacity – were the consequences. The battle for political direction needed the scientific discovery of the true partition: the fruitful year of 1968 was the result, and not on any rhetorical level: in the battle to establish the party there was no separating the three sources – theoretical, political, organisational.

To go back to the theoretical correction: the scientific victory involved the Marxist theory of international relations; the discovery that the economic strength of the different sectors of imperialism translates into a political struggle that must be analysed specifically in terms of balance of power. As we anticipated at the start of this historical reconstruction, the true partition theory revealed that the relative clash between European, Russian and American economic forces moved in terms of a political dynamic of balance, a balance of power that was not a simple translation of the respective industrial and economic strengths of the contenders.

When in 1980 Cervetto wrote that it was time to reconsider the whole issue in terms of the system of States this came out of the discovery and correction of 1968, although the correction did not apply so much to the initial steps in 1951 as to the three blocs theory formulated between 1957 and 1962. Via the Common Market, the ‘European bloc’ was moving forward with its economic plan, but the system of States arising out of the true partition meant that the parallel political process was destined to be a torturous one.

In Arrigo Cervetto’s laboratory

To leaf through the paperwork on which the true partition was worked out is like walking into Arrigo Cervetto’s scientific laboratory. It’s no easy matter: this goes for all the unpublished material we have used up to now – letters, memoirs, file cards, notes, drafts. The material shows us the conceptual passages on which the theory was based from its moment of birth, and thus highlights the continuity of thinking from 1951 on, but no single body of work speaks for itself. To examine, select, link up, and comment on these notes for publication involves a serious political responsibility.

Take for example the material concerning Marx and Engels on equilibrium theory, the national question and revolutionary strategy. They form the three or four main lines of investigation, but primarily they are the original core of Cervetto’s formulations on strategy as treated by Marx, Engels and Lenin: material that was to be integrated and developed in the party’s many conferences and political education meetings on strategy in the early 1970s.

Up to a few days before his death, Cervetto felt it important to stress that he had personally prepared his work for publication. This cost him much effort, but he would have been quick to dismiss any hypothesis based on material that had not been carefully gone over. Indirectly, this threw a veil over unpublished material. Was the intention that this material should never be published, that it should remain in the party archives?

We first dealt with this issue when we published the material on the Resistance and on the history of Savona. This was a precise decision, taken with caution and an acceptance of the political responsibility involved. We followed the guidelines of Cervetto himself, who had anticipated publishing some of it, but only after having integrated the material and prepared the necessary notes. This particular material was in the nature of historical reconstruction, and as such it presented a few thorny problems. At the time the Resistance material was written it had been with a view to a writing competition, and the focus was on the political psychology of maximalism: later writings developed Cervetto’s formulations on the nature of Fascism and Stalinism and on the Yalta division.

We have responded to these difficulties by deciding that when publication of a specific set of materials has been assessed as politically useful, we will produce alongside it a specific analysis of those aspects that are thought to require in-depth consideration.

We had no doubts about publishing the notes on strategy and equilibrium theory in Marx, Engels and Lenin: we need only think – as Cervetto himself observed – of how central these areas are for scientific analysis of international relations, and their importance for the present account of the history of our party. In relation to this material, it would be important to bear in mind six distinct levels of our general political assessment:

  • a)  We have considered how Marx views historical events and how he makes use of them in the various models of strategy derived from 1789 and from the general outline of permanent revolution.
  • b)  We have assessed how Cervetto’s notes reconstruct, in a ‘genetic’ sense, Marx’s strategy, with particular attention to those points that Lenin would review in the light of 1917.
  • c)  Attention has been given to Cervetto’s reconstruction of Marx’s strategy as explained orally, at conferences or political education meetings.
  • d)  We have also considered how much of the material has already been published either in our newspapers or in the texts of our editorial house. For example, The Difficult Question of Times is composed largely of material already used in political education meetings. We have not commented on aspects on which Cervetto himself has elaborated in his notes, and aspects extensively treated in already published versions have been given limited mention. Again, other aspects were only treated orally, without ever appearing in notes or published texts. We have also had to take account of the fact that many of Cervetto’s theories, when they appear in note form, were still at the stage of hypothesis and scientific research. We have used what has already been critically evaluated and published to provide us with a sense of direction and the relative importance of still unpublished material.
  • e)  We have evaluated levels of historical information of the post Marx/Engels/Lenin period.
  • f)  Ultimately, we will require to consider historical research subsequent to Cervetto’s work, at a time when both the archives and new studies will have tackled current problems and led to the production of fresh documentation.

The important point is the political meaning of the true partition formula, which although it makes high-level use of historical material, is not a piece of history. The dovetailing lies in the initial notes on Marx and Engels, from Franz Mehring’s Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, from Pierre Renouvin’s 19th century work on the politics of power balances, on Russian politics and David Dallin’s 1945 book: how all this feeds into the article on the «true partition»: and how all of it was then used in material for political education meetings.

In all this 1968 material lies the heart, the basis of political education on strategy, and the party’s theoretical balance which, at the beginning of the 1970s, was being transmitted to a new generation. It was not a case of delivering a history lesson, but of giving these new recruits the historic sense of their own militancy, as a part of the process of building the strategy-party.

1951 texts: a re-examination

With the above explanations, we can re-examine the writings on the true partition a relatively easy task, since we have the definitive version of Cervetto’s theory in the article published in Lotta Comunista in September-October 1968182. We also have Cervetto’s own comments on the above, his notes on how the «concepts on equilibrium and balance of power employed by Marx and Engels had led him to hold that» the Yalta agreement had been the application of America’s strategy for balance in Europe. By yielding Eastern Europe to the USSR, the United States had mortgaged the future of European imperialism183.

It should be noted that the true partition discovery conceptually ends the quest begun in - by answering three questions Cervetto had raised but to which he had not found a definitive reply. The theory explains the Yalta division starting from the disproportion of strength between the USA and the USSR: Washington conceded Eastern Europe to the USSR. The war that was considered imminent in 1951 never took place because in reality Washington and Moscow were allied in keeping Germany and Europe divided. It was understandable that development had determined the objective strength of European imperialism as a third bloc, but could not determine a corresponding political unity because the power balance prevented it.

Curiously, one of the main contributors to the end of the quest was David Dallin, with two books translated into Spanish, Los Tres Grandes as we have already seen, and Rusia y la Europa. The original American edition, Russia and Postwar Europe, is dated 1943, but successive editions were updated to take account of the postwar era.

In 1952 Cervetto was observing the rise of forces in Europe and Asia that contradicted the ‘two imperialisms’ pattern – hence the notes taken from Dallin’s ‘The Big Three’ on how Germany, Japan and France were returning to their past condition of great powers.

In 1968, he was focusing more on those parts of Dallin’s text that dealt with the balance of power in Europe. The Prague crisis was a fresh sign of Moscow’s difficulties in maintaining its hold on Eastern Europe. More relevant than Dallin were the assessments Marx and Engels had made on Russia, Panslavism, the German question and Palmerston’s foreign policy in relation to the Tsar. Other contributions came from Pierre Renouvin’s (French liberal-realist school) review of international relations in Europe, and François Fejtő’s A History of the People’s Democracies. Fejtő noted that Yalta didn’t require to be a formal or explicit partition agreement: for Washington, it was enough to informally ‘let Moscow get on with it’.

In Rusia y la Europa Dallin summed up British equilibrium policy on the Continent, where Great Britain has always obstructed the rise of a single great power that could dominate Europe and gives his version of the «Eastern Question», which Cervetto noted and summarised.

One of the most insoluble problems of European equilibrium is the status of the band of territories that runs from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. Between 1870 and 1914 stability was guaranteed because France and Germany balanced each other out to the West, while in the East Russia was counterbalanced by the two Germanic monarchies, Prussia and Austria-Hungary.

While maintaining good relations with Moscow, Berlin balanced Western Europe, while Austria resisted any Russian push into Eastern Europe. The multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire was a strange State organism, a sort of relic of the Middle Ages that had survived into the modern world but it played a fundamental role in that band of east-central Europe as a barrier to Russian pressure. When in 1917 Russia ceased to be a real menace, Austria-Hungary ceased to have any function, and collapsed: London did not oppose its fragmentation into a number of small States.

The situation changed in the 1930s and 40s. The USSR became a great military power again, but where previously there had been the two old Germanic monarchies, now there was Hitler’s Germany: a synthesis of Germany and Austria, the Third Reich faced both East and West. With the destruction of the Third Reich, Russia came out of the Second World War (unlike after the First) strengthened, and without Austria-Hungary to act as balance. Cervetto noted that: Britain’s counterweight policy has been rendered futile.

At this point Cervetto challenged two of David Dallin’s theories. In a 1945 work E. H. Carr had maintained that with the fading of its naval power and its economic supremacy, Great Britain will be obliged to abandon its policy of balance of power. Dallin disagreed: with Germany defeated, London would pursue its balance policy, unless Great Britain were reduced to a second or third rate power184. Cervetto notes: History seems to have proved Garr right.

In ‘The Big Three’ Dallin had taken account of uneven development in his forecast that Germany, France and Japan would return to big power status. Cervetto felt that this was inadequate: he considered Dallin had overestimated Great Britain, working from a simplistic sociology of powers and had not adequately linked the long timescales inherent in a power balance change to economic development. 25 years after the war, said Cervetto, London’s reduction to secondary status was a fact, therefore: Britain was no longera ‘third power’ but merely a permanent ally of the USA.

Cervetto’s second criticism of Dallin regarded the strategic lines adopted in Europe by Washington and London while they were wartime allies. True, «a European nation-State that united the industries and the navies of France, Italy and Germany», possibly extended to include Great Britain, and with a total population of 300-400 million, would have been a serious threat to the existence of the USA. Dallin was right to maintain that the interests of Washington, London and Moscow converged against a power that aimed to dominate Europe, but for different reasons. However, Dallin only touches on this issue when he cites the different reasons for the USA such as the problems of the Far East and future economic relations with Russia.

The USA was not as interested as were Russia and Great Britain, because the USA had to operate across all continents, observed Cervetto, and went so far as to add that for Washington Europe isn’t vital. If this observation is taken literally, it contradicts the basis of the true partition theory. In fact, it does not appear in the article published in the September-October 1968 issue of Lotta Comunista, in which, on the contrary, we read of the vital interests of a United States that would be threatened by the birth, whether in Europe or in Asia, of a pole power with an industrial base. It’s one of those cases in which the final text helps us to evaluate the importance of the sources. In the notes he made on Dallin, Cervetto listed the different reasons that had brought Washington, London and Moscow together in a wartime alliance that was nevertheless not an indication of identical interests. The United States was also involved in Asia; the allusion is to the two wars in Europe and in Asia that combined to form the Second World War. Russia, which was neither an island nor a maritime power, but a European continental power could not, like Great Britain, limit itself purely to maintaining equilibrium because it was itself a factor in the equilibrium. Moscow’s natural enemy was not the strongest European power, but the European power whose principal role was played out in Eastern Europe.

The significance of these observations on the USA and Europe was that while it was in the American interest to prevent a European bloc developing, Washington had no direct vital interests in the Old Continent: allowing Moscow to take over Eastern Europe and keep Germany divided was sufficient to prevent European unification. In the 1968 article Cervetto wrote that the USA ceded Eastern Europe and the Balkans to the USSR. In so doing, the Americans surrendered a market that wasn’t theirs, but actually belonged to European imperialism, and kept all the other world markets for themselves. This, we can say, was the difference between the power of Washington and the power of London. Cervetto notes that at the end of the war among the Big Three, [...] London was fundamentally under the influence of the politics of equilibrium: of the three powers, London had everything to lose and not much to gain.

The «true partition» theory is born

The issue of Great Britain is the preamble to the true partition theory. London, in decline, was constricted by its permanent alliance with the USA the ‘special relationship’, and was no longer able to play the role of «third big power»:

«Could it recover this role in a political balance between the Common Market and Russia? Possibly, but that would mean separating from the USA. It would be difficult for Great Britain to become an integral part of a European power, because by doing so it would definitively bind its destiny to Europe – which historically it had survived by never doing.

Unless the European power could play a ‘third power’ role between the USA and the USSR, thus taking on, at Continental level, the principle that had ruled British international policy.

It may be that Britain’s role will be determined as a 5th European power. But the fact is that any dissension between the USA and the USSR isn’t so important as to permit the existence of a European power that would play the third-power role historically so central to British foreign policy»185.

Our highlighting above marks the birth of the true partition theory. The USA and the USSR were not equal in strength, and this had led to a USA-USSR alliance to brake the development of a European power. Europe was completely blocked from operating any policy of equilibrium, and was forced into an alliance with the USA within an over-arching framework of the de facto alliance between the USA and the USSR. Europe could only institute a policy of equilibrium if new powers entered the field. As Cervetto notes: Japan and Asia.

A new season of conflict could be glimpsed on the horizon; it could now be faced with an evolved theoretical tool that would root the strategic autonomy and the political action of the party in even more solid terrain. We read this in the final lines of the article on the «true partition»:

«The inter-imperialist order that came out of 1945 is creaking badly. The imperialist system is brewing up one of its most enormous crises, for which, as always, the working class will pay. Today it is ever more necessary for the international proletariat to prepare itself to fight the imperialist groups if it does not want to be swept away, or become a tool of the insane competition that is shaking the whole imperialist system. Those who are not against world imperialism, against American, Russian, European imperialism, are tools in the hands of competing imperialist groups and cannot be communists, cannot be revolutionaries.

The whole of the revolutionary struggle must be directed towards bringing down all the centres of the imperialist divisions throughout the world; it must be against the Yalta division, but must also prevent other, further divisions by striking at the existing imperialist robber-barons, and the aspiring robber-barons of tomorrow, in all their metropolises».186

Marx and equilibrium theory

‘Strategy-party’ meant not allowing oneself to be used, as had happened in the ignominy of Yalta. For Cervetto, those who had suffered the tragic circumstances of that dishonour had names and faces: the comrades who had fallen in the partisan struggle, convinced they were fighting for communism: the libertarian communist comrades who had lost their way in the disorientation of the postwar era. If the party could help it, there would be no repetition either of Yalta or of the fresh partitions claimed by European imperialism.

But strategic consciousness did not just mean escaping the influence of ruling class forces: it meant identifying trends and movements, in order to understand and exploit the enemy’s contradictions. This may be seen in a second thread of the 1968 material. In working to get to the basics of Marx and Engels’ strategy, Cervetto was seeking both the concept and the uses of the politics of equilibrium.

The preliminary work was Pierre Renouvin’s review of power politics in the Europe of the 1800s. 1848 had shaken the balance of power ratified in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna:

Russia, Great Britain, France – none of them wanted the Austrian Empire to collapse: it was impossible to calculate what the consequences for the balance of power in Europe would be187.

Cervetto noted: Hence, they did not support Hungary – one of the reasons why the Hungarian independence movement failed while the Italian movement succeeded because it was an offshoot of the competition between France and Britain. Hungary, unlike Italy, was the subject of agreements between the powers that made up the Concert of Europe, the Yalta of the time. France and Great Britain feared that if Vienna collapsed it would open up the Danube area to Russia; in addition, an Austria without Hungary would be absorbed by Germany. Russia wanted Austria to continue as a counterweight to Prussia, and wanted to avoid a Hungarian success that might encourage Poland. Scientific intuition leaps out of three lines of Cervetto’s: two question marks signal that here the concept is being formulated for the first time:

Note: can we say that bourgeois revolutions (and if so, why not proletariat revolutions?) such as 1848 depend on the counterbalances of the powers?188

In subsequent years Cervetto was to resolve this issue by concluding that revolutionary strategy should be based on the Marxist study of international relations: it is impossibile for imperialism to maintain equilibrium in power relations, and this creates openings for working-class action. When equilibrium goes into crisis, in the breakdown of order when uneven development leads old and new powers to clash over new power relations and fresh division of spoils – there lies the faultline, the breach where revolutionary strategy can enter.

In 1968, this intuition blended theoretical reflection and direct experience. Regardless of all the rhetoric over the ‘Prague Spring’ the West had stood looking on while Russian tanks invaded Wenceslas Square. The same thing had happened in Budapest, with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and with the Berlin strikes in 1953. Such were the chains with which Yalta had bound the proletariat; why the Hungarian Revolution had remained a heroic but isolated assault, a flash of light in the long night of the counter-revolutionary phase. But the same thing had happened in 1849 in Hungary, at the time of its democratic revolution, crushed by the troops of the Tsar at the request of Vienna and with the backing, tacit or otherwise, of London, Paris and Berlin.

This last precedent takes us back to Marx and Engels and their political battle. Studying their concept of strategy and their use of equilibrium theory was no historical digression: it meant fully utilising the party’s experiences. In Cervetto’s 1968 file on the true partition is a lengthy note commenting on the Eastern Question.

The knot of tensions between the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire and the declining Ottoman Empire had marked the whole of the 19th century, and the Crimean War (-) had been the first conflict between the powers that had defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s France.

Defeating Napoleon, the «victorious anti-French powers» had also defeated the first great bourgeois project of a single European State or empire or United States of Europe. That socially diverse alliance between Russia, Austria and Britain had quickly turned to strife, but within the equilibrium established at the Congress of Vienna each power sought to prevent the strengthening of any other power. Britain found allies in anti-bourgeois fractions in Austria and Russia who were opposed to the formation of nation-States, but it also worked to prevent Moscow and Vienna becoming more powerful.

Hence, London tried to avoid the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, which would have strengthened Russia and threatened Britain’s position. In the course of this struggle new forces appeared that had not been part of the order established at Vienna: France rose again and Germany was heading towards unification. Cervetto noted that Britain’s Turkish policy would be dominated by this dialectic. This is the sense of Marx’s theory of an ‘alliance’ between Great Britain and Russia and his pro-Turkish, anti-Russian position, sustained in fierce diatribe against Lord Palmerston’s policies:

«Essentially Marx’s theory was based on the formation on the Rhine of an industrial (not agricultural) non-Prussian Germany capable of fighting on two fronts:

  • 1)  against the British super-power that alongside the reactionary Holy Alliance was checking Europe’s capitalist (and therefore proletarian) development.

Arrigo Cervetto, notes on Pierre Renouvin’s Introduction to the History of International Relations, handwritten 1968.

The CZECHS did not support HUNGARY.

It was easy for AUSTRIA to put down the revolts in HUNGARY.

ALL THIS DEMONSTRATES THE WEAKNESS OF THESE 1848 NATIONALISMS; THEIR BOURGEOISIES WERE WEAK, AND THIS FACILITATED AUSTRIA’S COUNTER-REVOLUTION.

HUNGARY had the only advanced bourgeoisie, but found itself opposed by the SLAVS (CROATS and CZECHS) plus the ROMANIANS.

These historical conclusions are drawn from Marx, who considered that it would take more than a few years to change these deep-seated trends.

THEN THERE WERE THE ITALIAN AND GERMAN BOURGEOISIES.

But the DIET OF FRANKFURT (MADE UP OF THE SOUTH AND WEST GERMAN BOURGEOISIES) which met on 28th May 1848 and constituted a Provisional Government, gave way to Prussia: following the events of June, when the backlash to the revolution began in Paris, and after a split between liberals and democrats, it discarded the Republican solution and supported a FEDERAL EMPIRE with a LITTLE GERMANY based on the Prussian monarchy (that excluded AUSTRIA, the centre of counter-revolution).

THE GREATER GERMANY PLAN would have included 70 million of a population i.e. a GREAT POWER that could have been JACOBIN.

THIS WAS THE BACKGROUND AGAINST WHICH AUSTRIA ASKED RUSSIA TO INTERVENE (100,000 troops) against Hungary.

  • p . 237 «RUSSIA, GR. BRIT, FRANCE, none of them wanted the AUSTRIAN EMPIRE to collapse: it was impossible to calculate what the consequences for the balance of power in Europe would be.

HENCE THEY DID NOT SUPPORT HUNGARY: one of the reasons why the Hungarian independence movement failed while the ITALIAN movement succeeded – the latter being an offshoot of the COMPETITION BETWEEN FRANCE AND BRITAIN but not RUSSIA. But with HUNGARY, all were in agreement,

  • •  FRANCE = feared that if VIENNA collapsed it would open up the DANUBE AREA TO RUSSIA.

IN ADDITION AN AUSTRIA WITHOUT HUNGARY WOULD BE ABSORBED BY GERMANY. MARX thought this?

  • •  GR. BRIT = essentially same motives as France.

  • •  RUSSIA = wanted AUSTRIA to continue as a counterweight to PRUSSIA, and wanted to avoid a HUNGARIAN success that might encourage POLAND.

NB = CAN WE SAY THAT THE COURSE OF THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS (and if so, why not PROLETARIAN revolutions?) such as 1848 DEPENDS ON THE COUNTERBALANCES OF THE POWERS??

  • 2)  against the counter-revolutionary super-power Russia and its attempts to federalise under its leadership Eastern Europe and its minor ethnic nationalities».189

The politics of equilibrium was to be used towards specific ends within revolutionary strategy. It put together class struggle with the struggles of the States during that period when the international order was shaken by the drive towards nationalism:

«Only the development of this strategy could have driven forward the revolutionary process in Europe, a process frozen by the counter-revolutionary alliance between the British bourgeoisie and the big landowners of East and Central Europe (Prussian, Austrian, Bohemian, Hungarian, Polish).

Our interpretation is that for Marx, slowing down the Ottoman crisis essentially meant helping on the explosion of contradictions that would trigger the revolutionary process in Europe, i.e. preventing the growth of Russia’s power and supporting the development of Germany.

Conversely, the Ottoman crisis could be speeded up by supporting the claims to nationality of remnants of peoples that if successful would never be more than small States, federated and led by a Panslavist Russia. It was no accident that Russia encouraged anti-German revolts.

For Marx and Engels, the nationalist struggles in Italy, Hungary and parts of Poland were a very different matter: they were struggles of bourgeois development that would break up an agricultural and counter-revolutionary power like Austria, or like Russia in the case of Poland: they could not be federated in a counter-revolutionary way. The words our interpretation reveal these notes as the original reflection on Marx’s thinking on strategy and on the Marxist use of equilibrium policy.

Education on strategy: the big push

It’s now clear why Cervetto felt that 1968 had been a fruitful year. The unitary imperialism theory had become a solid body of work, firmly linked to the historical formulations of the Marxist school. It had taken twenty-five years, the timescale of a generation, to shake off the curse of Yalta. The internationalist struggle had taken off at Pontedecimo in 1951: the 1957 Theses had provided an overall strategical vision. Now there was a theoretical body of work armoured against any combination of imperialism’s forces. Closing the accounts with Yalta would allow the party to set a new generation on the right road.

This was the genesis of the big push for the political education meetings on strategy of 1972 and 1973. Cervetto had prepared a large part of the structural material during 1969: the ‘genetic’ reconstruction of strategy in Marx, Engels and Lenin, with a plurality of objectives and a conclusion for the new generation to whom it would be addressed. The various strategy outlines of Marx and Engels, starting with the Jacobin model and the strategy of permanent revolution were viewed as a progression and highlighted the parts Lenin had taken up in 1917. The strategic view of the support given to bourgeois democracy and to German unification facilitated rejection of Stalinism’s falsifications about Marx and the struggle for democracy, and the return to the fundamentals of the Marxist theory of the State was a valuable inoculation against the ideologies of bourgeois democracy in all its variants. The «genetic» view of strategy in Marx and Engels, with its succession of hypotheses, endeavours and errors in the course of a series of political battles helped to shake off schematic and rigid versions based on sluggish, never-varying repetitions of a single strategy.

But above all this was how the scientific achievement of the science-party – already laid out in 1964 in Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party and now developed into the theoretical system discovered with the true partition could be transmitted to a new generation. It was the outcome of the political battles fought by Cervetto’s generation in 1951, 1956 and 1968, but it had also been the knot Marx and Engels had attempted to disentangle, bit by bit, between 1848 and the 1890s, and which Lenin had finally managed to untie in 1917.

In his notes, Cervetto calls the true partition theory a scientific discovery because it untied the crucial knot on the nature and dynamic of unitary imperialism, and identified the specific dynamic of the balance of power, which is not the same as a simple expression of relations of economic strength. At one and the same time this discovery restored and developed the Marxist theory of international relations: a discovery that was bound up with recognising that Britain’s policy of balance and the Anglo-Russian alliance of the 1800s had obvious analogies with the Yalta balance, with the USA-USSR alliance of the second half of the 1900s, and with the invasion of Prague, the crisis that provided him with the opportunity for these reflections. In the solutions Marx and Engels had found to fight the Yalta of their era, and in the use Lenin then made of these solutions, Cervetto sought the conceptual tools to confront Yalta and all future partitions.

These basic concepts, worked out in 1968, became the core of the formulation on strategy during 1969 and the first years of 1970. In this sense, they loop back to 1951, when the theory of unitary imperialism was the premise for the revolutionary party’s strategic autonomy; and back to 1848, 1853, 1859, 1866, and 1870 – to all the successive formulations in which Marx and Engels sought to make strategy into action matched against balance.

What emerges from the educational material is no simple intellectual inquiry, but a deliberation on the strategy-party condensed out of political battles to establish an autonomous working-class party: battles from which have been carved out analogies, patterns, theoretical and political precedents that can be compared and contrasted.

Helpful examples may be drawn from the material used for political education meetings in 1973190. Here Cervetto writes that in - Marx and Engels had tried to bring the theory of the Manifesto into an already existing party. The attempt failed in 1850, and both left the Communist League: analysing the cycle of a new, unprecedented industrial prosperity they held that the revolutionary wave of 1848 had run out.

This cool estimation of the situation, however, was regarded as heresy among many persons (...) Suffice it to say that the reserve maintained by us was not to the mind of these people; one was to enter into the game of making revolutions. We most decidedly refused to do so.

(F. Engels, On the History of the Communist League, 1885)

For which reason we were excommunicated as traitors to the revolution.

(F. Engels, Introduction to Class Struggles in France, 1895)

While we were saying to the workers: you will have to endure 15, 20, 50 years of civil war and wars between nations, not only to change current relations but to change yourselves and become capable of wielding political power, you were saying the opposite – we must take power immediately or go back to sleep.

(K. Marx, Speech on his Resignation from the Communist League, 15th September 1850: Session of the Communist League Central Committee)

Here is the problem of psychological time so characteristic of Italian maximalism. There is also an analogy with the situation Cervetto and Parodi found themselves in when they presented the ‘1957 Theses’. Their forecast of a long cycle of imperialist development, and of a counter-revolutionary phase lasting at least twenty years proved to be unacceptable to the expectations of the diverse left-wing political groups that had come together in Azione Comunista.

A second example, this time in terms of party theory: in England, Marx and Engels tried for years to repeat what they had achieved in 1847 – bringing the Manifesto into an already formed party, in that case the Chartist Party. In 1858 this ended in disaster, with the Chartists opting for an alliance with radical and liberal currents. The study of Britain’s foreign policy – Marx’s pamphlet opposing Lord Palmerston – was part of that struggle: Marx and Engels wanted to give the Chartists ammunition to check the influence of the liberal Left. As he had never publicly opposed Lasalle’s General Association in Germany, so Marx did not oppose the Chartist Party, holding that both were working-class parties.

Cervetto summarises this position:

It’s important for the working class to have a party of its own. Once we’ve consolidated the party, then we can fight over what its programme is to be.191

This was the GAAP tactic, or at any rate the debate that went on intermittently between Cervetto and Masini from 1949 to 1951 around the idea of a focused and federated movement. It also formed part of the issue that surfaced in 1956, when Cervetto opposed Unking up with the diverse groupings gathered around Azione Comunista. Had Cervetto already taken from his experiences in GAAP that the only way forward was a slow work of organisation centred round autonomous policies and strategy?

Such was the experience of the 1950s, seen in the light of What Is to Be Done? and Lenin’s party. Amid all the possible tactical variations, one thing is certain: by the end of that experience, Cervetto was convinced that strategy was the mandatory distinguishing factor: only strategic clarity makes a revolutionary party possible. This statement appears in the editorials written in the early 1970s: ‘Strategy is What Develops the Leninist Party’ ‘The Leninist Party Is Shaped by Clarity’. This is why that watershed was the subject of a tough, unceasing, even bitter political battle, as with Lenin and the «Zimmerwald Left» in 1916, and no fixation as even such as Ugo Scattone, a committed and generous militant, labelled it at the end of the 1952 clash.

Chapter Ten

THE 1980s: DRAWING UP THE BALANCE

 

We have seen how in 1949 Masini advised Cervetto to read Bordiga, and how Cervetto reacted with ‘instinctive’ dissatisfaction to the ‘mighty dollar’ theory. In June 1950, when the Korean War broke out, the watchword was ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’. September saw the first ‘unitary imperialism’ formulations, which would resurface in February 1951 among the political theories aired at the GAAP conference. In April, Cervetto justified his doubts on the ‘Third Front’ formula.

During a year of study in Argentina, Cervetto went back to Lenin’s Imperialism, making numerous notes. The view from Buenos Aires was different from the European outlook; American and émigré Russian writers in America were turning their gaze on Asia and on the future re-emergence of Germany, Japan and France as great powers. Six months of research and investigation brought no resolution, but laid the basis for an analysis of European imperialism and the relations between the USA and the USSR. Only in 1968 would the circle close, with the scientific discovery of the «true partition» – based on that - material, but now integrating within it the Marxist theory of equilibrium. The genetic reconstruction of Yalta offers a scientific view in three successive stages: Bordiga’s ‘mighty dollar’: GAAP’s two blocs and the ‘Third Front: and the ‘true partition’ carried out between the USA and the USSR against Europe. Here was the application of the mature ‘unitary imperialism’ theory.

In June 1986 ‘Unitary Imperialism’s Clashes and Conjunctions’ provided a final balance sheet of all the preceding issues. In this article (now collected in the book La contesa mondiale – The World Contest) Cervetto takes stock of the new contest which flared up in the 1980s, in Eastern Europe the Warsaw coup d’état; in Central Asia the invasion of Afghanistan; in the Persian Gulf the Iran-Iraq war; in the world economy the acceleration of the liberist cycle.

The context was the slow rise of Japan as a world power, precisely as outlined in the 1968 notes on future developments in the global balance of power. By the mid 1980s it was clear that developments in Asia’s power balance had invalidated the objective bases of the Yalta partition. The new contest was the reaction of the two declining super-powers, the USA and the USSR, to the rise of Germany and Japan. Cervetto had anticipated these trends in 1951 and had clarified his thinking on them in 1968: now, in 1980, they exploded onto the world scene. The Prague crisis had demonstrated the pressure of Germany’s rise on Eastern Europe. The outcome of the restructuring crisis in the key year of 1978, with Tokyo and Peking signing a peace treaty, had shown that the Asian powers were on the move.

The ‘mighty dollar’s’ superimperialism

Cervetto was writing in 1986. Moscow was already in crisis; Washington was anxiously eyeing the rise of Tokyo and debating the decline of American power. The subterranean movements that were pressing on the world balance of power were shortly to signal the end of Yalta on a strategic and political level. The faultline would finally give way in -, leading to the fall of the USSR and the reunification of Germany.

Cervetto wrote that the First World War had been fertile ground for a number of superimperialism theories, and it was inevitable that the same should be true of the Second: «the success of the victorious powers immediately suggests the idea of a dominant imperialism, of a now consolidated superimperialism»:

Amadeo Bordiga held that the economic power of the United States allowed it to rule the world, treating as the poils of war not only the defeated powers, but also the weakened colonial powers and devastated Russia. In this analysis, America becomes a superimperialist power.193

The Stalinist concept of a world divided into two camps, in which «the capitalist market is reduced to an American colony», also saw the USA as a superimperialist power.

The risks of the two superimperialisms theory

As far as Cervetto was concerned, GAAP’s 1950s position, which saw «not one, but two poles of imperialism [...] the world divided into two blocs led by Washington and Moscow» was better than the ‘America as a superimperialism’ view, but didn’t go far enough. Since it failed to define imperialist trends either quantitatively or qualitatively, it risked being considered the view of a world dominated by two imperialisms – American and Russian.

To some extent the risk was balanced by the stress on internationalist principles. The general anticipation of a «Third World War» at least avoided falling into Karl Kautsky’s ideology of interimperialist agreement between the biggest powers, according to which peaceful partition would limit policies of aggressive expansion. Further, Cervetto considered that the risks of the «two superimperialisms» theory could be easily overcome by analysing trends in China, India, and the Korean War. By not confining himself to imperialism to the United States and the USSR, by extending his investigations to all old and new powers and Asia in particular, his analysis quickly moved beyond any bipolar pattern. Traces of this widening out can already be seen in his 1950 articles.

Drawing up the balance in 1986, Cervetto wrote that unitary imperialism was the dialectical unity of a clash within a system possessing a common social nature. Using the dialectical method to analyse unitary imperialism had allowed him to assess de Gaulle’s 1960s approach to the Yalta partition. Regarding that particular ideological version of domination by an American superimperialism it was no accident that it flourished in a Europe that over the past twenty years had recovered its imperialist strength: in other words, it had become Europe’s weapon in the struggle with the USA. The same went for the Maoist theories that came out of the rise of Chinese capitalism, and which coincided with de Gaulle’s. Rejecting the two superimperialisms theory made space for the theory of unitary imperialism to «grasp the socio-imperialist nature of Mao’s united front» when Peking proposed a front between the Third World and the Second World i.e. with Europe and Japan against the Holy Alliance of the USA and the USSR.

A further step had to be taken at the end of the 1960s. The crisis in Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Prague displayed Russia’s weakness in the face of German penetration into Eastern Europe. Although the dominant ideology was still of a world divided between the USA and the USSR, Moscow was struggling to keep its Eastern European ‘satellites’ within its sphere of influence. A detailed analysis of the division was required – details that were concealed within the bipolar representation. The starting point for analysing real strengths and weaknesses was uneven development, and its effects on the relative positions of the two powers. Cervetto comments that:

The essential was to define the nature of the true partition of the world. An analysis of unitary imperialism disclosed that as world powers Britain and France were in decline, while Germany and Japan were on the rise. To some extent this had reduced US power, but the USSR was too riven by internal dissensions and contradictions to be much strengthened by this.194

The point at issue – which would come up again in - with the fall of the USSR – was that changes in economic strength did not immediately translate into changes in relation to other States: the political relations between the powers remained as established at Yalta.

In 1968, the relative changes in economic strength did not translate into corre sponding changes within the system of States. The true partition of the world, as established at Yalta, came out of a balance of powers: a balance that is always the result of strategic manoeuvres and of objective and unforeseeable events.195

We can return here to the first chapter of this history of ours, where we wrote of the place of the balance of powers theory within the formulations of the mature Arrigo Cervetto. Economic strength is not identical with power position within the dynamic of States: the relationship is a dialectical one, and this dialectical relationship forms an integral part of the concept of unitary imperialism.

We can trace this, step by step, in the 1986 article, which recon structs the stages that led to that scientific result. It may prove useful to compare the article with the original outline from which it developed, a plan for input to a meeting in June 1986. It includes the following note on the theory of unitary imperialism:

Unitary imperialism is a dialectic between the common interest of the robber-barons to exploit the proletariat and developing countries and the competition between them (see Lenin’s theory on the League of Nations, according to which Wilson’s ‘Open Door’ policy is to all appearances Kautsky’s ‘peaceful superimperialism’). The theory of unitary imperialism is based on the general interests of world capitalism (the international bourgeoisies being local fractions of this class) to maintain conditions that mill ensure the production of surplus value, even when competition becomes mar, and world mar (as in our analysis of the Second World War, the German question, etc)196

More on the «true partition»

In the text of the article, for which Cervetto revised his original outline, he writes of «a dialectic between the general and common interests and the particular interests of the international capitalist class: the general interests lead the national fractions of this class to exploit wage labour, while the particular interests cause them to clash over sharing out surplus value».197

It will be seen that in this clash between «local or national fractions» the political power of States and how this is reflected in the balance of power and political equilibrium become crucial. The States are in the grip of warring industrial and financial groups, whether these are engaged in protecting their own imperialist prominence or whether they are attempting to resist the imperialist prominence of competing groups. The expression local or national fractions is embedded in the very flesh and blood of the laws identified in Capital, where the concept of fractions links to the division of surplus value between industrial profit, commercial profit, interest and unearned income. Here is the Mont Blanc of concrete facts of capitalism’s socio-economic formation. The clash between groups and fractions is in the nature of imperialism, and uneven development is the result of this clash: groups and fractions pursue their international political-military struggle by seizing States and their systems. Capital cannot be defined by its nationality, but partial shares of social capital, and individual groups and sectors of unitary imperialism, compete and clash with each other using every means, including their relations with the political and juridical systems within which they operate.

The true partition matured as a result of the unitary imperialism theory and the analysis of the actual relations that came out of the Yalta partition. It reconstructs the dialectic between economic and political forces within a specific international political analysis that makes a particular use of equilibrium theory, as applied by Marx and Engels, to the international panorama of the time.

These specific tools are used to investigate the dialectical relationship between the strength of an economy and the strength of its State: in other words, the degree of non-correspondence between economic importance and political importance. As Cervetto notes, understanding this dialectic avoids basing action on an inaccurate assessment that would place undue importance on other factors. It also prevented one from falling into the psychological time trap – the gap between the objective wait for a crisis and maximalist impatience:

The concept of equilibrium in the relations between powers [which Marx and Engels had evolved in fifty years of studying international relations: editor’s note] has provided a valuable tool to prevent us falling into either simplification or prophecies of doom and gloom. If we examine international politics we will often be led to questioning the non-correspondence between economic strength and political and military importance.198

Along with equilibrium theory, the outline contains Friedrich Engels’ well-known parallelogram of the forces. Since the balance of power analysis is an international analysis of a parallelogram of the forces of States, the tight conceptual relevance is clear.

As Cervetto advanced through the stages of his thinking, the analytical issue of how to interpret Yalta combined with perfecting his theory. In order to analyse the real situation, the theoretical tools – unitary imperialism, Marxist use of equilibrium theory – had to be developed and perfected, but this was the theoretical side of a political battle: theory evolved and was perfected as and when the battle demanded it. This observation concluded the 1980 introduction to Unitary Imperialism and in 1986 it was again applied to the partial summing-up of the «new contest»:

The new imperialist contest reminds us of the vital need for continuity of our strategic planning which has already given a response to such issues in decisive moments.199

This 1986 article brings together both continuity of method and analytical structure; it’s essentially an ordering of previously formulated theory and concepts in the light of the new battles that were looming on the horizon. With these same tools Cervetto would tackle the collapse of the USSR in - and the end of Yalta by combining recognition of bipolarism’s decline with an analysis of the multipolar dynamic’s parallelogram of forces.

Ronald Reagan’s rearmament, involving an exceptional level of investment in military hardware – including the anti-missile Strategic Defense Initiative or ‘Star Wars’ – was aimed at maintaining US advantage over all the other powers: in appearance a warning directed at the USSR, in reality it was also intended to deter Europe and Japan, powers that by the 1980s were challenging American supremacy.

As Cervetto notes, this rush to rearm was to have the unintended consequence of breaking up the USSR and freeing Germany from the bonds of Yalta, thus opening up the way to reunification. Using Marxist equilibrium theory, the true partition and its end, Yalta and the end of Yalta, were revealed for what they really were.

Three interpretations of Yalta

The outline on which the 1986 article is based is part of a file that deals with those first years of the new contest, and contains a number of notes reminiscent of those Cervetto made in his 1982 notebooks – the scientific discoveries of 1968 and their confirmation. The list of points begins with:

  • «TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF SUPERIMPERIALISM:
  • 1°) METROPOLIS DOMINATES OTHER METROPOLISES, COLONIES AND SEMI-COLONIES.
  • 2°)  INDUSTRIAL CAPITAL ASSERTS ITSELF OVER FINANCIAL CAPITAL, LIMITS THE OPTIONS FOR IMPERIALIST POLICIES AND CREATES THE CONDITIONS FOR NON-IMPERIALIST INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT [peaceful division].

Arrigo Cervetto, ‘A Partial Balance of the New Contention’, 9th June 1986.

(9/6/1986)

A PARTIAL BALANCE OF THE NEW CONTENTION

TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF SUPERIMPERIALISM:

  • 1.  ONE METROPOLIS DOMINATES OTHER METROPOLISES, COLONIES AND SEMI-COLONIES.

  • 2.  INDUSTRIAL CAPITAL ASSERTS ITSELF OVER FINANCIAL CAPITAL, LIMITS THE OPTIONS FOR IMPERIALIST POLICIES AND CREATES THE CONDITIONS FOR NON-IMPERIALIST INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT [PEACEFUL PARTITION].

SUPERIMPERIALISM AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR [or: INTERPRETATIONS OF YALTA]

THE ‘MIGHTY DOLLAR’ THEORY (BORDIGA =

US SUPERIMPERIALISM) (STALINISM [VARGA] TWO MARKETS THEORY. THE CAPITALIST WORLD: AS US COLONY)

3rd FRONT THEORY: NEITHER WASHINGTON NOR MOSCOW

(Initial formulations of UNITARY IMPERIALISM THEORY, a type of THEORY of TWO SUPERIMPERIALISMS.

But with CHINA and INDIA (1950) and KOREA (-) the analysis was faced with the struggle between OLD and NEW IMPERIALISMS).

UNITARY IMPERIALISM IS A DIALECTIC BETWEEN THE COMMON INTEREST OF THE ROBBER-BARONS TO EXPLOIT THE PROLETARIAT AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, AND THE COMPETITION BETWEEN THEM [SEE Lenin’S THEORY ON THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, in which WILSON’S ‘OPEN DOOR’ POLICY presents as KAUTSKY’S ‘PEACEFUL SUPERIMPERIALISM’].

The THEORY of UNITARY IMPERIALISM is based on the GENERAL INTERESTS of WORLD CAPITALISM (of which INTERNATIONAL CLASS, [national] BOURGEOISIES are LOCAL FRACTIONS) to maintain CONDITIONS that will ensure the PRODUCTION of SURPLUS VALUE, even when COMPETITION becomes WAR, and WORLD WAR (as in OUR ANALYSIS of the SECOND WORLD WAR, the GERMAN QUESTION, etc.)

  • 3.  TRUE PARTITION OF THE WORLD THEORY (vs MAOIST UNITED FRONT of 2nd and 3rd world against 1st WORLD HOLY ALLIANCE and vs GAULLIST THEORIES of the YALTA PARTITION)
  • OUR GENERAL ANALYSIS OF UNITARY IMPERIALISM IS BASED ON:
  • •  DECLINE OF BRITAIN AND FRANCE (DECOLONISING) [OVERESTIMATED]
  • •  RISE OF GERMAN FEDERAL REPUBLIC AND JAPAN [vs ‘US COLONIES’ THEORY]
  • •  FAILURE OF RUSSIAN RISE [vs PROPAGANDA VARGA AND KHRUSHCHEV]
  • •  AMERICAN DECLINE [vs AMERICAN DOMINATION THEORY]
  • WHY DID 1968 HAPPEN?
  • WHY DID THE CHANGES IN THE ECONOMIC POWER RELATIONSHIP NOT TRANSLATE INTO A CHANGE IN RELATIONS WITHIN THE SYSTEM OF STATES?
  • OUR INTERPRETATION OF YALTA
  • [ENGELS: PARALLELOGRAM OF FORCES MARX AND ENGELS: EQUILIBRIUM THEORY -]

The body of the text is organised in three points, under the title ‘Superimperialism after the Second World War [or interpretations of Yalta]’. It may be that this tide was a provisional one, however, interpretations of Yalta form the thread of the whole outline:

  1. «1. THE ‘MIGHTY DOLLAR’ THEORY

    (BORDIGA:

    US SUPERIMPERIALISM) (STALINISM [VARGAJ TWO MARKETS THEORY THE CAPITALIST WORLD AS US COLONY)

  2. 2. 3RD FRONT THEORY: NEITHER WASHINGTON NOR MOSCOW (Initial formulations of UNITARY IMPERIALISM THEORY, a type of Theory of TWO IMPERIALISMS. But with China and India (1950) and Korea (-) the analysis was fared with the struggle between old and newimperialisms).

Here follows the passage previously quoted on the definition of unitary imperialism. Then comes the third interpretation of Yalta.

3. TRUE PARTITION of the WORLD THEORY (vs Maoist United Front of 2nd and 3rd world theories against 1st world Holy Alliance and vs Gaullist theories of the Yalta PARTITION.200

We will not here reprint the entire text of the outline, which in essence constitutes the published article, and the documentary material reproduced earlier. The most interesting aspect is the order of the «interpretations of Yalta»:

  • 1)  Bordiga
  • 2)  Third Front
  • 3)  The «true partition».

As we have traced through the - sources, and in Cervetto’s references on successive occasions, this order is in the nature of a genetic reconstruction of the concept.

The genetic concept of unitary imperialism

To summarise: Bordiga and the 3rd Front theory in the 1986 outline, and the identification in the 1968 true partition article on the strategic inadequacy of ‘the coming war’ all clarify the conceptual links in the evolving concept of unitary imperialism, which came about thanks to Marx, Engels and Lenin having retrieved the concepts of uneven development and balance of power.

Over the years, it was these concepts that Cervetto added to his initial 1949 and 1950 thinking. It’s revealing that this was the direction of his thinking even at that time, and that this was the area in which his differences with Pier Carlo Masini began. The ‘Third Front’ issue was a stage in this scientific progress, but our interest in the ‘genetic’ reconstruction of this concept goes beyond the theory of imperialism.

The central point, and ultimately the meaning of what we have examined so far, is the link with the theory of the party. When we analyse the documents and the events of those first GAAP years, it is immediately evident that the need for theoretical and strategic clarification was called forth by the practical tasks of recruiting and training revolutionary cadres and establishing the points of reference that would avoid them being exposed to the influence of other forces or becoming disheartened.

In this sense the - debate provided the hard core of Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party, our What Is to Be Done?, written in 1964: here we see how, in the course of the live political struggle, recruitment via strategy is the key to the development of the revolutionary party.

This concept was confirmed in the true partition of 1968, in the face of the Prague invasion, when it became clear why the party could not have existed in the early 1950s: there was no accurate strategic vision. Instead, an inaccurate cognition of the times and of the forces of the struggle between the imperialist powers led to a mistaken view of the timescales and the tasks of strategic and tactical action, and exposed both militants and their spheres of influence to be used or taken over by other forces. Such forces ranged from an Atlanticism mobilising against the USSR (as happened to a number of anarchists) to the social-democratic variations of European imperialism (Masini’s fate) or the maximalist expression of the PCI and the Russian line (those who from 1945 on began to move back to the PCI).

The scientific view of strategy is achieved via hypothesis, correction and extrapolation. The core principle is Marx’s 1853 insight: One ought to know with whom one is dealing.

To be independent of the forces of capital is a principle that we must defend tooth and claw. This is the secret of the strategy-party.

Chapter Eleven

CONCLUSIONS

At the end of 1981, General Jaruzelski’s coup d’état in Poland had suddenly conjured up the spectre of Yalta in European and world politics. That new and dramatic freeze was the background to an outline in ‘Notebooks’ written between 1981 and 1982, a combination of political biography and record of a stage in the party’s history. Cervetto was marking the stage of his scientific achievement, the ‘true partition’ theory, and the Warsaw crisis was confirming, at the expense of the Polish proletariat, all the dishonour of Yalta, which only a minority had bitterly opposed, thanks to that same strategic vision.

An entire library, commented Cervetto in Lotta Comunista, had been written about Yalta: it had taken only a day to show up the truth more clearly than years of research. Then followed a page that laid bare more clearly than any other why Yalta had been such a disgrace for the international proletariat:

The truth about unitary imperialism is that modern-day Europe is the fruit of a division into spheres of influence made by robber-barons after the defeat of Nazi Germany, which had attempted to unify and rule the whole continent by blood and iron.

Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to divide up what Hitler had not united and, waving the banners and brandishing the illusions of democracy and socialism, they brought the infernal dynamic of the European war to completion. Yalta marks the historic defeat of Germany, Britain and France. Unable to unify itself, European imperialism destroyed itself in two huge wars and gave birth to all sorts of monsters, from genocide to Nazism. The revolutionary Marxists, heirs of the progressive destiny of the human race, sought to break free from such self-destructive barbarism by raising the banner of the October Revolution’s internationalism. They did not succeed, but the history of the human race will remember them, one day, as the unfortunate precursors of a universal value that wipes out classes and races.

Without proletarian internationalism, the division of self-destroyed European imperialism at the hands of America and Russia mould not encounter any obstacles. It mas not the first time that the victors had shared the spoils, but it mas the first time that one of the most brutal imperialist robberies and the biggest in absolute terms had spawned a huge mass ideology that justified and exalted it. The international proletariat paid a high price – moral servitude – for its loss of theoretical, political and organisational autonomy. It is paying it and will go on paying it as long as State capitalism continues to oppress the marking class in the name of communism.

Yalta mas imposed by force and mas accepted with propagandised and organised consensus. The fem internationalists that did not accept the pax of unitary imperialism mere physically eliminated. In the credit and debit of the revolutionary movement, in the double-entry accounting of history, the final reckoning still has to be made.

Yalta is the nadir of internationalism. This is why its spectre and its ideology are reappearing today».201

Yalta was the nadir, the unfinished business with those who had dragged the international proletariat into that abyss. In that December of 1981, solidarity for the Polish workers came from a Genoa march organised by Lotta Comunista’s Workers’ Clubs, the only internationalist voice in the city that was Italy’s leading city of State capitalism, and was still, though not for much longer, the organisational stronghold of the PCI. In a few more years, all that would be swept away by the collapse of the USSR and by the restructuring brought about by the world cycle of liberist imperialism. The big State groups of Italian imperialism would be ground down by the strictures of Europe: the Moscow line would collapse along with the USSR, and so would the PCI, which had shuttled between Moscow and Genoa, the city that was the Italian exemplar of State capitalism.

That was thirty years since Genoa Pontedecimo, and today it’s sixty years since this story began. The final reckoning will take place only when imperialism’s crisis and the breakdown of order among the powers calls us to once more raise the banner of 1917. In the meantime, the harbingers of things to come consist not only of the disaster the Russian party has suffered in Italy, but also of the patient reconstruction of an internationalist vision rooted in the new generations, and in the development of a strategy that guarantees its ability to move today against European imperialism and the divisions of a ‘new strategic phase’. This would not exist if in 1951 that group of young workers had decided to resign themselves to defeat. Instead, they chose to start again.

For now we will close this history at 1952, at those first ten years of the group that founded the party. Soon a new stage would begin. As Stalinism went into crisis the large maximalist current of Azione Comunista broke away from the PCI. Cervetto was sceptical, while bowing to the dictates of organisational discipline: as far as he was concerned, the attempt to stick together the Communist Left Movement was a botch-up: «an attempt to unite dissident communist groups while anticipating a return to the Ten Points of Livorno».*202

The first public meeting of the Communist Left took place on 16th December 1956, in the Dante Cinema in Milan. Here we record only a brief preliminary assessment. Apart from Bruno Fortichiari, for long a link with the PCd’I of 1921, the speakers were Onorato Damen, Livio Maitan, and Pier Carlo Masini. Theoretically and politically, Cervetto had argued with them all. In one sense the same was true of another participant, Amadeo Bordiga, who accurately and sarcastically attached the label four-leaved clover to this meeting of Maitan’s Trotskyists, Damen’s Battaglia Comunista, the libertarian communists of Masini and Cervetto, and Giulio Seniga’s and Fortechiari’s Azione Comunista.

At the close of the 1940s, Cervetto had drawn from Bordiga’s work a crucial link with Marxist theory on the social nature of the USSR and on world imperialism, even if he had at once – instinctively before theoretically – been perplexed by the liquidationist consequences of that conceptual structure, in which the superpower of the mighty dollar seemed to wipe out any possibility of action for the length of an entire cycle. The real issue, «Bordiga’s virtual withdrawal»203, could not be resolved. It was no accident that the attempts to link up were most successful with Onorato Damen – who had also picked up this contradiction at the time of the painful split in 1952 – starting with collaboration on producing the periodical Prometeo.

We have seen how important Masini’s comradeship was initially for Cervetto, but also how after 1950 the dialectic within GAAP led to increasingly marked divergences. Masini himself acknowledged this in his parting letter, in 1958:

Dissent between us already existed at the time of GAAP. Subsequently positions became radicalised. Dissent became open, unbridgeable. But this evolution took place on both sides. Ultimately we merged with Azione Comunista in order to extinguish our contradictions in a greater contradiction.204

Fundamental differences with Maitan regarding the USSR as State capitalism could not be avoided, and as early as the afternoon of 16th December Cervetto raised the issue in a core group meeting of the Communist Left.

Bordiga’s ironies on the four-leaved clover were simultaneously right and wrong. He had seen the clearly disparate nature of that meeting as far as the fundamental issues – strategic view of imperialism, social nature of the USSR – went, but he had no solution to offer, since neither was his paralysing monster, the mighty dollar an adequate response to the revolutionary passions that were mobilising in that cinema hall in Milan.

In the ‘Notebooks’ account of 1982 we may find both these contradictory elements: the liberating nature of the event for those who had previously been isolated and the strategic inadequacy of the concepts that had brought them together. Significantly, for Cervetto 1956 concluded the first stage of the road to the party, the stage of the struggle for internationalism. What bound these organisations together was the call of the ideal of internationalism, which since 1950 had been what had animated the ‘Front’ of an opposition to war. But even that simple unity around a principle was precarious, because of the lack of strategic unity.

And strategic unity wasn’t just an option, it was indispensable for the attempt that meeting of organisations was initiating. Subsequent events were to confirm that strategy depends on theoretical clarity, and that only strategy can guarantee political independence in the face of the forces and the ideologies that influence the working class. That was particularly true in 1956, when the postwar order was being shaken by winds of change, in an Italy at the crossroads between American, Russian and European parties.

The battle for strategy would be the next stage.

* This refers to the ten-point programme adopted at Livorno on 21st January 1921, at a meeting considered to be the founding of the Communist Party of Italy, and inserted into the first article of its statute.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. 1   A. Cervetto, Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party, éditions Science Marxiste 2000. First published as Lotte di classe e partito rivoluzionario by Lotta Comunista Editions and now in its 6th edition (Milan 2004). The volume gathers together articles published in Azione Comunista from April to November 1964.
  2. 2  Guido La Barbera, Introduction to the 2nd edition of A. Cervetto’s Lotta Comunista (‘The Difficult Question of Times’), Lotta Comunista Editions, Milan 2010. Reproduced in English in Our Internationalist Struggle, éditions Science Marxiste (2011).
  3. 3  Ibid.
  4. 4  A. Cervetto, ‘The True Partition of the World between the USSR and the USA’. First published in Lotta Comunista, September-October 1968. Subsequently included in Imperialismo Unitario (Unitary Imperialism), Lotta Comunista Editions, Milan 1996.
  5. 5  A. Cervetto, ‘Europe, Too, Aims at the Persian Gulf, Lotta Comunista 115, March 1989. Subsequently included in La Contesa Mondiale (The World Contest), Lotta Comunista Editions, Milan 1991.
  6. 6  Ivi.
  7. 7  Ibid.
  8. 8  ‘Marx and Engels on the Question of Inter-State Relations’, Lotta Comunista 116, April 1980. Included in Unitary Imperialism, Vol. I, p. 7-11, éditions Science Marxiste (2014), cit., with The heading ‘the marxist theory of international relations’.
  9. 9  Ivi.
  10. 10  A. Cervetto, Quaderni 1981-1982 (Notebooks 1981-1982), now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  11. 11  A. Cervetto, Ricerche e Scritti (Notes and Researches), Lotta Comunista Editions, Milan 2005.
  12. 12  A. Cervetto, ‘Il mito della resistenza tradita’ (The Myth of the Resistance Betrayed), 1964. Draft of an article that was never published, now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  13. 13  ‘La vita fortunata di Lorenzo Parodi’, Lotta Comunista 491/492, July/August 2011. English version published as ‘Lorenzo Parodi’s Fortunate Life’ in a Special Issue of Internationalist Bulletin, September 2011.
  14. 14  Lorenzo Parodi, Memorie 1944-1968 (Memoirs -), Genoa 2004. Unpublished.
  15. 15  L. Parodi, Cronache Operaie (Working-class Chronicles), Lotta Comunista Editions, Milan 1974.
  16. 16  ‘Lorenzo Parodi’s Fortunate Life’, cit.
  17. 17   Ibid.
  18. 18   Ibid.
  19. 19  L. Parodi Memorie, cit.
  20. 20   Ibid.
  21. 21   Ibid.
  22. 22  Verbal recollections of E. Ricci in July 2010.
  23. 23  T. Borgogni Migani, Introduction to the Letters of Aldo Caprini to Tristano Codignola 1940-1968. Published in Italian by La Nuova Italia, Florence 1997.
  24. 24  Pier Carlo Masini: entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Anarchici Italiani (Biographical Dictionary of Italian Anarchists). 2 volume BSF edition, Pisa 2003 & 2004. See also Biographical Profiles in this book.
  25. 25  Gruppo di iniziativa per un movimento orientato e federato (Action Group for the Establishment of a Directed and Federated Movement). Presentation given in Lazio in February 1950. Now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  26. 26  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 27th April 1949.
  27. 27  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 29th April 1949.
  28. 28  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 18th May 1949.
  29. 29  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 6th June 1949.
  30. 30  A. Cervetto, ‘Cronstadt: e dopo il silenzio...’ (Kronstadt: and Afterwards Silence...), Umanità Nova, 12th June 1949.
  31. 31  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 11th July 1949.
  32. 32  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 29th July 1949.
  33. 33  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 16th November 1949.
  34. 34  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, November 1949.
  35. 35  Piattaforma Arsinov, Introduzione (Introduction to the Arshinov Platform), translation typewritten by P.C. Masini, now in the Lorenzo Parodi Archive, Genoa.
  36. 36  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 21st December 1949.
  37. 37  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 7th February 1950.
  38. 38  Ibid.
  39. 39  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 8th February 1950.
  40. 40  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 1st March 1950.
  41. 41  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, A. Vinazza, U. Scattoni, 12th April 1950.
  42. 42  Ibid.
  43. 43  Ibid.
  44. 44  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 18th April 1950.
  45. 45  S. Motosi, account of an interview with P.C. Masini, 2nd March 1996, Bergamo. Now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  46. 46  A. Vinazza to A. Cervetto, 18th April 1950.
  47. 47  U. Scattoni to A. Cervetto, 22nd April 1950.
  48. 48  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 25th April 1950.
  49. 49  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 6th May 1950.
  50. 50  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 30th May 1950.
  51. 51  A. Cervetto, report on the Savona group, 19th June 1950.
  52. 52  A. Vinazza, report on the Sestri group, 24th June 1950.
  53. 53  L. Maitan to A. Cervetto, 13th June 1950.
  54. 54  L. Maitan to A. Cervetto, 15th July 1950.
  55. 55  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 31st August 1950.
  56. 56  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 2nd September 1950.
  57. 57  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto and others, 28th September 1950.
  58. 58  P.C. Masini, ‘Anarchici’, editorial in September-October 1950 issue of L’Impulso.
  59. 59  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 31st October 1950.
  60. 60  Quoted in F. Bertolucci, G. Mangini in their notes for a biography of Masini, in Quaderni della rivista storica dell’anarchismo (Anarchist Historical Review) 3/2008.
  61. 61  See R. Bertolucci Un anarchico a Carrara: Ugo Mazzucchelli (An Anarchist in Carrara: Ugo Mazzucchelli), 1988.
  62. 62  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 7th November 1950.
  63. 63  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 29th December 1950.
  64. 64  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 4th December 1950.
  65. 65  Ibid.
  66. 66  A. Cervetto, ‘Stages in the Struggle to Develop the Leninist Party in Italy’, August 1971. Handwritten notes now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  67. 67  A. Cervetto, ‘The Historical Experience of Crisis in the Leninist Party’, speech 28th February 1976. Handwritten notes now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  68. 68  N.I. Bukharin, ‘Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State’, 1916.
  69. 69  S. Motosi, account of an interview with P.C. Masini, 2nd March 1996, cit.
  70. 70  L. Parodi, speech on 28th February 1976, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Genoa Pontedecimo meeting. Now contained in his book Critica del sindacato riformista (A Critique of Reformist Trade Unionism)
  71. 71  Ibid.
  72. 72  Ibid.
  73. 73  National Anarchist Conference ‘For a Directed and Federated Movement’, L’Impulso November-December 1950. Draft notes for ‘Stages in the Struggle to Develop a Leninist Party in Italy’, cit.
  74. 74  L’approdo (A Landing-place) in L’Impulso 3-4, March 1951.
  75. 75  A. Cervetto, ‘Notebooks -’, cit.
  76. 76  A. Cervetto, ‘Politics of Imperialist Ideology’ in The Political Shell, p. 22. éditions Science Marxiste (2006). First appeared in Lotta Comunista 82, June 1977.
  77. 77  A. Cervetto, ‘Strategy and Tactics about the Democratic Form’ in The Political Shell, p. 104, cit. First appeared in Lotta Comunista 108, August 1979.
  78. 78  A. Cervetto, ‘The Political Forms of State Capitalism’ in The Political Shell, p. 118, cit. First appeared in Lotta Comunista 113, January 1980.
  79. 79  A. Cervetto, ‘Imperialist Democracy’ in The Political Shell, p. 95, cit. First appeared in Lotta Comunista 105, May 1979.
  80. 80  N.I. Bukharin, ‘Imperialism and World Economy’, written 1915 & 1917. First published in English International Publishers, 1929.
  81. 81  N.I. Bukharin, ‘Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State’, 1916. In Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism, ed. R.B. Day, New York 1982, p. 31.
  82. 82  Ibid. p. 13.
  83. 83  Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, Bolshevik publication edited by the staff of Sotsial-Demokrat, organ of the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labour Party).
  84. 84  V.I. Lenin to N.I. Bukharin, August 1916.
  85. 85  V.I. Lenin, ‘The Youth International’, first published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrat, December 1916. In Collected Works, Volume 3.
  86. 86  V.I. Lenin, notebook ‘Marxism on the State’.
  87. 87  V.I. Lenin to A. Kollontai, 17th February 1917. In Collected Works, cit., Vol. 35.
  88. 88  V.I. Lenin to I. Armand, 19th February 1917. In Collected Works, cit., Vol. 35.
  89. 89  V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution. In Collected Works, cit., Vol. 25.
  90. 90   Ibid.
  91. 91   Ibid.
  92. 92   Ibid.
  93. 93   Ibid.
  94. 94  N.I. Bukharin, ‘Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State’, 1916. Note on occasion of first publication in 1929 in Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism, cit. p. 33.
  95. 95  V.I. Lenin, ‘Plan for an article On the Question of the Role of the State’. In Collected Works, cit., Vol. 41, Section -.
  96. 96  V.I. Lenin, ‘Preface to the Russian translation of Karl Marx’s letters to Dr. Kugelmann’, February 1907. In Collected Works, cit., Vol. 12.
  97. 97  S.F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography (1888-1938), London, Wildwood House, 1974.
  98. 98  Ibid.
  99. 99  V.I. Lenin to G.E. Zinoviev, October 1916. In Collected Works, Russian edition, Moscow 1970, Vol. 49.
  100. 100  V.I. Lenin to I. Armand, 30th November 1916. In Collected Works, cit., Vol. 35.
  101. 101  V.I. Lenin to I. Armand, 19th January 1917. In Collected Works, cit., Vol. 35.
  102. 102  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 27th April 1949.
  103. 103  From the editorial staff of Prometeo to A. Cervetto, 27th May 1949.
  104. 104  Vercesi (Perrone Ottorino), ‘Democrazia parlamentare e democrazia popolare’ (Parliamentary Democracy and Popular Democracy), in Prometeo 9, 1948.
  105. 105  See N.I. Bukharin in Imperialism and World Economy, quoted by Vercesi in the above article.
  106. 106  G. Fabbrocino, ‘Per una critica rivoluzionaria del bordighismo’ (Towards a Revolutionary Critique of Bordiga), in Battaglia Comunista, October 1961.
  107. 107  Alfa (A. Bordiga), ‘Ancora America’ (More on America) in Prometeo 8, November 1947.
  108. 108  A. Orso (A. Bordiga), ‘Forza, violenza e dittatura nella lotta di classe’ (Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle) in Prometeo, Nos. 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10: -.
  109. 109  ‘Sulla liquidazione dello Stato come apparato di classe: Tesi Programmatica’ (On Abolishing the State as a Class Apparatus: Theory and Programme), in L’Impulso January-February 1951.
  110. 110  P.C. Masini, ‘I Gruppi Anarchici d’Azione Proletaria nella presente situazione politica’ (The Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action in the Current Political Situation), L’Impulso 3-4 March 1951.
  111. 111  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 29th December 1950.
  112. 112  ‘Progetto di linea politica per la Conferenza Nazionale del GAAP’ (Projected Political Line for the GAAP National Conference), Livorno 20th September 195O.
  113. 113  See Onorio to Alfa, letter dated 23rd July 1951. Quoted in O. Damen’s Amadeo Bordiga: Validità e limiti di un’esperienza della storia della ‘sinistra italiana’ (Amadeo Bordiga: Values and Limits of Experience in the History of the Italian Left) Epi, Milan, 1971.
  114. 114  A. Cervetto, ‘Note on theory’, handwritten spring 1952, now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  115. 115  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 6th April 1951.
  116. 116  A. Cervetto, ‘The French 3rd Front’, handwritten note, spring 1952, now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  117. 117  A. Dulphy, ‘La gauche et la guerre froide’ in Histoire des gauches en France, J.-J. Becker, G. Candar, La Découverte, Paris 2004.
  118. l18 J.N. Jeanneney, J. Julliard, Le Monde de Beuve-Méry ou le métier d’Alceste, Le Seuil, Paris, 1979.
  119. 119  See A. Dulphy, ‘La gauche et la guerre froide’, cit., p. 422.
  120. 120  Ibid, p. 426.
  121. 121  M. Pablo, La guerre qui vient, ‘Quatrième Internationale’ Publications, Paris, August 1952.
  122. 122  D. Berry, G. Davranche, ‘Georges Fontenis’, Italian translation – Federation of Anarchist Communists.
  123. 123  G. Fontenis, L’autre communisme. Histoire subversive du mouvement libertaire (Another Communism: A Subversive History of the Libertarian Movement), Editions Acratie, Paris 1990.
  124. 124  S. Ninn, letter to Libertaire, 24th August 1950. Quoted in the above.
  125. 125  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto and A. Vinazza, 24th November 1950.
  126. 126  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 9th December 1950.
  127. 127  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 19th December 1950.
  128. 128  A. Cervetto, ‘Torna la guerra in Europa’ (War Returns to Europe) in Il Libertario, 8th November 1950. Included in Unitary Imperialism, Vol I- p. 55, cit. Title: ‘From the «Asian Cauldron» to the German Stumbling-Block’
  129. 129  A. Cervetto, Il convegno dei dodici: Riarmo tedesco (German Rearmament) in Il Libertario, 15th November 1950. Included in Unitary Imperialism, Vol 1 – p. 61, cit. Title: ‘The Pleven Plan, an Episode in the Inter-imperialist Clashes’
  130. 130  A. Cervetto, L’imperialismo è indivisibile (Imperialism Is Indivisibile) in Il Libertario, 22nd November 1950. Included in Unitary Imperialism, Vol 1 – p. 58, cit. Title: ‘Imperialism is Indivisible, the USSR is Closely Linked to the United States’
  131. 131  A. Cervetto, Mosca e Washington all’assalto in Cina (Moscow and Washington on the Attack in China) in Il Libertario, 29th November 1950. Included in Unitary Imperialism, Vol I- p. 67, cit. Tide: ‘The Emergence of the «Chinese Question» as an Element Extraneous to the Cold War’
  132. 132  A. Cervetto, E chi pensa al popolo Coreano?: Muore la Corea nella stretta dei liberatori (Who’s Thinking about the Korean People?: Korea’s Dying in the Grip of Its Liberators) in Il Libertario, 13th December 1950. Included in Unitary Imperialism, Vol I- p. 67, cit. Tide: ‘Indivisible Imperialism: the Real Aggressor in Korea’
  133. 133  A. Cervetto, L’intrigo diplomatico contro la libertà dei popoli (Diplomacy Intrigues against the Peoples’ Freedom) in Il Libertario, 20th December 1950.
  134. 134  A. Cervetto, Deciso il riarmo di Germania contro la volontà del popolo tedesco (German Rearmament Decision against the Will of the German People) in Il Libertario, 27th December 1950. Included in Unitary Imperialism, Vol I- p. 64, cit. Tide: ‘The French “Fronde”’.
  135. 135  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 9th December 1950.
  136. 136  Otto punti per il terzo fronte (Eight Points for the Third Front) in L’Impulso, May 1951.
  137. 137  P.C. Masini, Contro il dispositivo imperialista terzo fronte rivoluzionario (Revolutionary Third Front against the Imperialist System) in L’Impulso, May 1951.
  138. 138  P.C. Masini, Per un III Fronte anti-imperialista e rivoluzionario fulcro della resistenza popolare contro la guerra (An Anti-imperialist III Front to Channel Popular Opposition to the War) in Il Libertario, 10th October 1951.
  139. 139  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 4th September 1951.
  140. 140  L. Parodi, ‘Memoirs -’, cit.
  141. 141  A. Cervetto, ‘Totalitarianism: a Conversation with Santillan’ from a note that can be dated as between June 1951 and April 1952. Now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  142. 142  Ibid.
  143. 143  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 10th May 1952.
  144. 144  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 13th May 1952.
  145. 145  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 19th May 1952.
  146. 146  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 22nd May 1952.
  147. 147  Second GAAP National Conference 1st & 2nd June 1952, Florence. Minutes now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  148. 148  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 4th June 1952.
  149. 149  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 7th June 1952.
  150. 150  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 4th June 1952.
  151. 151  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 7th June 1952.
  152. 152  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 18th June 1952.
  153. 153  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 5th July 1952.
  154. 154  A. Cervetto to A. Vinazza, 28th August 1952.
  155. 155  A. Cervetto, report on his visit to GAAP, Turin, 24th September 1952.
  156. 156  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto, 12th October 1952.
  157. 157  Ibid.
  158. 158  A. Vinazza to P.C. Masini, 20th October 1952.
  159. 159  P.C. Masini to A. Vinazza, 22nd October 1952.
  160. 160  See L. Trotsky to Prometeo, Constantinople, 25th September 1929.
  161. 161  Ibid.
  162. 162  See A. Cervetto, ‘The True Partition of the World between the USSR and the USA’, cit.
  163. 163  A. Vinazza to R. Peretti, 5th November 1952.
  164. 164  A. Cervetto to P.C. Masini, 11th December 1952.
  165. 165  I.V. Stalin, ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’ (‘Ekonomiceskie problemy sotsializma V CCCP’), 1952.
  166. 166  A. Calvi, Una vecchia novità (Old News), Il Mondo 18th October 1952.
  167. 167  L. Salvatorelli, Reciproco rispetto (Reciprocal Respect), La Stampa 15th October 1952.
  168. 168  G. Tomajuoli, Le ipotesi di Washington sulle ‘intenzioni’ di Stalin’ (Washington’s Hypotheses on Stalin’s ‘Intentions’), La Stampa 3rd October 1952.
  169. 169  A. Calvi, Il punto centrale (The Main Point), Il Mondo 25th October 1952.
  170. 170  R. Aron, Le Figaro 8th February 1949. In Raymond Aron: Les articles du Figaro, edited by G.H. Soutou.
  171. 171  R. Aron, ‘Stalin Speaks’, Le Figaro 11th-12th October 1952.
  172. 172  See ‘Onorio ad Alfa’ letter dated 23rd July 1951 in O. Damen’s Amadeo Bordiga, cit.
  173. 173  See ‘Alfa a Onorio’ letter dated 9th July 1951 in O. Damen’s Amadeo Bordiga, cit.
  174. 174  See ‘Onorio ad Alfa’ letter of 23rd July 1951.
  175. 175  E. Ricci, oral testimony July 2010.
  176. 176  D.J. Dallin, ‘The Big Three: the United States, Britain, Russia’. Yale University Press, New Haven (Connecticut) 1945.
  177. 177  Ibid pp. 1-8.
  178. 178  Ivi.
  179. 179  Ibid p.278.
  180. 180  A. Liebich, ‘From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921’. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1999, pp. 307-309.
  181. 181  A. Cervetto, Quaderni 1981-1982 (Notebooks -), cit.
  182. 182  A. Cervetto, The True Partition of the World between the USSR and the USA’, cit.
  183. 183  A. Cervetto, Quaderni 1981-1982 (Notebooks -), cit.
  184. 184  D.J. Dallin, ‘Russia and Postwar Europe’, Yale University Press, New Haven (Connecticut) 1943, p. 119.
  185. 185  A. Cervetto, handwritten note on D.J. Dallin’s Rusia y la Europa de posguerra, 1968, now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  186. 186  A. Cervetto The True Partition of the World between the USSR and the USA’, cit.
  187. 187  P. Renouvin, Storia della Politica Mondiale (A History of World Politics), Vallecchi, Florence, 1960.
  188. 188  A. Cervetto, handwritten notes in Imperialismo russo ed Europa centrale e balcanica (Russian Imperialism and Central and Balkan Europe), 1968. Notes to P. Renouvin’s Storia della Politica Mondiale above. Now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  189. 189  Ibid.
  190. 190  A. Cervetto, Strategia (Strategy): handwritten notes 1973, now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  191. 191  A. Cervetto, Analisi scientifica, strategia e partito in Marx-Engels (Scientific Analysis, Strategy and the Party in Marx and Engels), handwritten notes 1969. Now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  192. 192  In Azione Comunista, December 1963 and February 1964.
  193. 193  A. Cervetto, Convergenze e contrasti dell’imperialismo unitario (Convergences and Clashes in Unitary Imperialism), in Lotta Comunista 190, June 1986. Subsequently included in La Contesa Mondiale (The World Contest), cit.
  194. 194  Ibid.
  195. 195  Ibid.
  196. 196  A. Cervetto, Un parziale bilancio della nuova contesa (A Partial Balance of the New Contest), handwritten for a lecture on 9th June 1986. Now in the Arrigo Cervetto Archive, Savona.
  197. 197  A. Cervetto, Convergenze e contasti dell’imperialismo unitario (Convergences and Clashes in Unitary Imperialism), cit. Subsequently included in La Contesa Mondiale (The World Contention), cit.
  198. 198  Ibid.
  199. 199  Ivi.
  200. 200  A. Cervetto, Un parziale bilancio della nuova contesa (A Partial Balance of the New Contest), handwritten for a lecture on 9th June 1986, cit.
  201. 201  A. Cervetto, Riappare il fantasma di Yalta nella Polonia della nuova contesa (The Ghost of Yalta Reappears in the Poland of the New Contest). In Lotta Commista 137, January 1982. Subsequently included in La Contesa Mondiale (The World Contest).
  202. 202  A. Cervetto, Quaderni 1981-1982 (Notebooks -), cit.
  203. 203  Ibid.
  204. 204  P.C. Masini to A. Cervetto and L. Parodi, 2nd June 1958.

NEWSPAPERS OF THE WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT QUOTED IN THE BOOK

  • Adunata dei refrattari (L’) (The Call of the Rebels), an anarchist periodical in the Italian language published in New York from 1922 to 1971.
  • Azione Comunista (Communist Action).
  • Battaglia Comunista (Communist Battle).
  • Gioventù anarchica (Anarchist Youth), a periodical published in Tuscany in -.
  • Impulso (L’) (Impulse), the official newspaper of the Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action – GAAP (-).
  • Jeunesse anarchiste (Anarchist Youth), the official newspaper of the French Federation of Libertarian/Anarchist Youth (-).
  • Libertaire (Le) (The Libertarian), the official newspaper of the French Anarchist Federation – FA (-); subsequently the official newspaper of the French Libertarian Communist Federation – FCL (-).
  • Libertario (Il) (The Libertarian), the official newspaper of the Lombard Libertarian Communist Federation (Italy) (-).
  • Programma Comunista (Il) (The Communist Programme).
  • Prometeo (Prometheus).
  • Umanità Nova (New Human Race), founded by Errico Malatesta in 1920 as the official newspaper of the Italian Anarchist Union and banned by Fascism in 1922; it reappeared in 1945 as the official newspaper of the Italian Anarchist Federation – FAI.
  • Volontà (Will), an anarchist periodical published in Naples and then in Genoa from 1946 to 1996.

GLOSSARY

  • CGIL, Confederazione generale italiana del lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour), the main trade union in Italy.
  • CNL, Comitato di liberazione nazionale (Committee of National Liberation): the political body of the Italian Resistance, grouping together all the bourgeois and worker-bourgeois antifascist parties.
  • CPSU, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Soviet State-Party.
  • DC, developing country.
  • EDC, European Defence Community (-).
  • ECM, European Common Market (-), one of the parts of the EEC.
  • ECSC, European Coal and Steel Community (-).
  • FA, Fédération anarchiste de France (French Anarchist Federation).
  • FAI, Federazione Anarchica Italiana (Italian Anarchist Federation).
  • FCI, Fédération communiste libertaire (France) (Libertarian Communist Federation).
  • FIOM, Federazione impiegati e operai metalmeccanici (Federation of Metal Workers Employees), a trade union belonging to the CGIL.
  • GAAP, Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action.
  • Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom), an Italian political movement of liberalsocialist bent founded in France in 1929. In 1942 it founded the Partito d’Azione (Action Party), which was dissolved in 1948.
  • Gruppi comunisti rivoluzionari – GCR (Revolutionary Communist Groups) – RCG: an Italian Trotskyist organisation (-).
  • LN, League of Nations (-).
  • MLI, Movimento lavoratori italiani (Italian Workers Movement), an organisation of ‘Titoist’ inspiration, founded in 1951 by two deputies (Cucchi and Magnani) who had been expelled from the PCI; it was dissolved in 1953.
  • MRP, Mouvement républicain populaire (Popular Republican Movement), of Catholic inspiration (France).
  • NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (1949).
  • OPB, Organisation-Pensée-Bataille (Organisation, Thought, Battle).
  • PCF, Parti communiste français (French Communist Party), the Stalinist Party in France.
  • PCI, Partito comunista italiano (Italian Communist Party), the Stalinist Party in Italy.
  • PCint, Partito comunista internazionalista (Internationalist Communist Party), Italy.
  • Peace Committees, a pacifist movement organised in various European countries from 1949 on; headed by Cominform and the Stalinist Parties, it was actually one of the tools at the disposal of the Soviet Union’s imperialist policy.
  • PSI, Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party).
  • SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, United States.
  • SFIO, Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International), the name of the French Socialist Party from 1905 to 1969.
  • UAPD, Unabhängige Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Independent Workers’ Party of Germany), a German Titoist formation founded in 1950 and dissolved in 1952.
  • UNO, United Nations Organisation (1948).
  • Zimmerwald: a conference held by the representatives of the revolutionary internationalist and centrist (pacifist) fractions of the European parties of the Second International in the Swiss village of Z., from 5th to 8th September 1915, during WWI. Lenin presented a ‘draft resolution’ calling on the socialists to turn the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes. The resolution was rejected by the centrist majority; the minority that approved it formed the ‘Zimmerwald Left’.

MAPS

  1. 1.  Map of the urban districts of Genoa.

  2. 2.  Map of the region of Liguria.

  3. 3.  Map of the Italian cities mentioned or where GAAP was present.

INDEX OF PERSONAL NAMES

BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILES

  • Amendola, Giorgio (-). Son of the Liberal and Aventine politician Giovanni Amendola, he joined the PCI in 1929, becoming one of its main leaders during the Resistance and the post-WWII period.
  • Armand, Inessa Fyodorovna (-). A Russian revolutionary, responsible for women’s issues in the Bolshevik Party Central Committee (-).
  • Aron, Raymond (-). A French sociologist, a Le Figaro columnist for decades, of Euro-Atlantic bent, a theoretician of international politics, and leader of the liberal current.
  • Arshinov, Peter Andreyevich (-). A Russian metalworker, he was close to the Bolsheviks in his youth, but then turned to anarchism. During the Revolution he militated in the Ukrainian Makhnovist Movement. Emigrating to the West, in Paris in 1926 he presented the Platform that bears his name and sums up the positions of the organisational currents of the anarchist movement. He was shot after his return to the USSR.
  • Ascaso, Francisco (-). A Spanish anarchist and Secretary of the Catalonian Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) (1934), he was killed during the Spanish Civil War.
  • Attlee, Clement Richard (-). British Labour Prime Minister (-) and promoter of British nuclear armament (1952).
  • Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich (-). A Russian revolutionary and the leading exponent of anarchism in the First International.
  • Bernstein, Eduard (-). A German social democrat and theoretician of revisionism.
  • Beuve-Méry, Hubert (Sirius) (-). A French journalist and founder of Le Monde (1944).
  • Bevan, Aneurin (Nye) (-). A British trade union leader belonging to the Labour Left; Minister of Health and Housing in the Attlee government, which he left in 1951 in protest at the increase in military spending.
  • Bismarck, Otto von (-). A Prussian statesman and chancellor from 1862, he brought about the unification of Germany in 1871.
  • Blum, Léon (-). A French socialist and Prime Minister in the Popular Front governments (- and 1938).
  • Bogliani, Antonio (Ombra) [Shadow] (-). A Savonese worker and childhood friend of Cervetto’s, he fought in the Resistance by contributing to the preparation of the - strikes, and subsequently fighting in the urban and mountain partisan groups. He was one of the original group that adhered to libertarian communism immediately after WWII and that founded Lotta Comunista in 1965.
  • Bonaparte Louis (Napoleon III) (-). Prince-President in 1849, proclaimed Emperor of the French in 1852 by a referendum held subsequent to his December 1851 coup; to re-establish France in her role as a great power, he exploited the nationalism of the oppressed peoples against the dominant powers.
  • Bordiga, Amadeo (-). A Marxist theoretician and revolutionary leader. One of the founders and most representative personality of the group that led the Communist Party of Italy founded in Livorno in 1921, he was expelled from the Party by the Stalinists in 1930. His essay Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today, published in the International Communist Party newspaper Il Programma Comunista between 1955 and 1959, was a milestone in the analysis of State capitalism in the USSR and in the struggle against Stalinism.
  • Bourdet, Claude (-). A French engineer, linked to the Social Catholic Movement, he worked in the Popular Front Economy Ministry in 1939 and subsequently became one of the Resistance leaders, the editor of Combat and one of the founders of L’Observateur in 1950.
  • Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich (-). A Bolshevik leader and Marxist theoretician, he was a member of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee from August 1917, and then of the Third International executive from 1919, holding the position of Chairman from 1926 to 1929. Caught up in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, he was killed at the end of the third of the Moscow ‘show trials’.
  • Calvi, Antonio (-). A journalist and member of the Italian Liberal Movement in Milan in -, he joined the Republican Party in 1946, editing the Party’s newspaper until 1953. He collaborated with Mario Pannunzio’s Il Mondo, writing the pro-Atlanticist international political column ‘Twentieth Century’.
  • Capitini, Aldo (-). A professor of pedagogy and critic of the Concordat, he fought in the Resistance as a liberal-socialist. A believer in non-violence, he was the promoter and organiser of the Assisi peace march (1961).
  • Carr, Edward Hallett (-). A British historian and journalist, he was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and Foreign Office First Secretary in -. Belonging to the realist school, he specialised in the history of the Soviet Union.
  • Cervetto, Arrigo (-). A Marxist theoretician, founder of Lotta Comunista and its leader until his death.
  • Codignola, Tristano (-). Publisher of La Nuova Italia, an exponent of the liberal-socialist movement and leader of the Florentine Resistance, he was one of the founders of the Action Party (1942) and of Socialist Unity (1948), which would intervene in the variegated libertarian world. A PSI adherent from 1957 and the author of the ‘Appeal’ to the socialists to oppose the Craxi line, he was expelled from it in 1981.
  • Cohen, Stephen Frand (- ). A professor at Princeton University (-), scholar of Russian studies and Bukharin’s biographer.
  • Croce, Benedetto (-). A philosopher, historian and man of letters, an exponent of idealist historicism and theoretician of liberalism.
  • Cronin, Archibald Joseph (-). A Scottish novelist and author of The Stars Look Down (1935) and The Citadel (1937).
  • Cucchi, Aldo (-). A doctor, partisan and second in command of the ‘Bologna’ division. A PCI deputy, he was expelled for ‘Titoism’ and founded the Movimento Lavoratori Italiani (MLI) together with Magnani.
  • Cunow, Heinrich (-). A German social democrat, publisher (1898) and editor of the Neue Zeit (1917); as a deputy he backed the social-imperialist pro-war position.
  • Daladier, Edouard (-). Leader of the French Radical Party, minister and Prime Minister in the ‘20s and ‘30s. In 1934, together with the PCF and the SFIO, the Socialist Party, he formed the Popular Front that won the elections in 1936 and governed until 1940. In 1938 Chamberlain and he signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler. In 1952 he opposed the European Defence Community.
  • Dallin, David (-). A Russian Menshevik and member of the Moscow Soviet (-), he sought refuge first in Germany and then in the USA; the author of works on international relations, he belonged to the realist school.
  • Damen, Onorato (-). A member of the abstentionist fraction of the PSI, he was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy. A leader of the workers’ struggles against Fascism in Tuscany in 1920, together with Fortichiari and Bordiga he founded the ‘Committee of Accord’ – which grouped together the opponents of the Party’s Stalinist drift – in 1925: this was subsequently dissolved at the request of the International. Sentenced by the Fascist Special Tribunal for the Security of the State to twelve years in jail, he was expelled from the PCI during his jail sentence, as were most of the left-wing fraction of the Party. In 1943 he was one of the promoters of the founding of the International Communist Party, broke with Bordiga in 1952, and founded Battaglia Comunista.
  • Dulles, John Foster (-). American Secretary of State under Republican President Eisenhower (-), he favoured a resolute policy of Soviet containment.
  • Dulphy,Anne. A French historian at the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, Paris, and a specialist in international relations.
  • Durruti Dumange, Buenaventura (-). A Spanish anarchist and important exponent of the Federación Anarquista Ibèrica; he was one of the protagonists of the Barcelona resistance to Franco’s coup d’état and took part in the defence of Madrid, where he died in obscure circumstances, perhaps killed by the Stalinists.
  • Einaudi, Luigi (-). A liberal economist, in the ‘40s and ‘50s he was a member of the Constituent Assembly, governor of the Bank of Italy, Finance Minister and President of the Republic.
  • Eisenhower, Dwight David (Ike) (-). General and Republican US President (-) during the central phase of the ‘cold war’.
  • Engels, Friedrich (-). The founder, together with Marx, of historical materialism and scientific communism, and a leader of the international workers’ movement.
  • Ernestan (Tanrez Ernest) (-). A Belgian anarchic intellectual and exponent of libertarian and anti-Leninist socialism; a collaborator with the international anarchist press, he was interned in Breendonk, a Nazi concentration camp.
  • Fejto, François (-). A Hungarian social democrat, he took refuge in Paris in 1938. A historian and journalist, a scholar of the East European countries in the post-Yalta period, and an expert on East-West relations, he was a professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris.
  • Fontenis, Georges (-). A French anarchist and teacher, he played an active part in the underground trade union movement during the war. Leader of the Fédération Anarchiste (subsequently Fédération Communiste Libertaire) until 1956 and editor of Le Libertaire, he founded the Mouvement Communiste Libertaire in 1969.
  • Fortichiari, Bruno (-). Secretary of the Piacenza Trades Council in 1912 and then of the Milanese PSI branch. He presented the constitutive motion of the Communist Party of Italy at Livorno and chaired the new Party’s steering committee; removed from office by the Stalinists in the second half of the ‘20s, he was expelled from the Party in 1929 while in jail. Returning to the PCI in 1943, he left it in 1956 when the Russians invaded Hungary. With Azione Comunista he was one of the founders of the Movement of the Communist Left.
  • Garcia Fernandez, Sinesio Baudilio (Diego Abad de Santillán) (-). A Spanish anarcho-syndicalist, active in Spain, Argentina and Mexico, where he founded various newspapers. Secretary of the Federación Anarquista Ibèrica, he fought in the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia, where he organised the militia; Minister for Economic Affairs in -.
  • Gaulle, Charles de (-). General and statesman. Taking refuge in London after France was defeated in 1940, he became the leader of Free France and the head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (-). He founded the Fifth Republic and was its President from 1958 to 1969.
  • Gorky, Maxim (Alexei Maximovich Peshkov) (-). A Russian writer, he took part in the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions.
  • Gorter, Herman (-). A Dutch internationalist, he founded the newspaper of the Dutch social-democratic left, De Tribune (1907). He sided with the Zimmerwald Left; a supporter of councilist positions, he disagreed with Lenin over his conception of the Party.
  • Gramsci, Antonio (-). A communist thinker and leader, the founder of L’Ordine Nuovo (Turin 1919) and Secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (1924). Arrested in 1926 and sentenced to twenty years in jail in 1928, he would be freed shortly before his death.
  • Grassini, Emilio (-). A member of a well-known family of Genoese anarchists, the organiser of underground activity during Fascism, the political commissar of the ‘Malatesta’ Brigade of the Patriotic Action Squads, and the compiler of the documents of the Workers’ Single Front, he introduced Lorenzo Parodi to libertarian communism.
  • Grassini, Vero (-). Emilio’s son, he was one of Lorenzo Parodi’s workmates at Ansaldo Meccanico, Genoa Sampierdarena. He played an active part in the Malatesta Group (Genoa Pegli) and the Genoese Anarchist Federation.
  • Habsburg. A dynasty that reigned over Austria (-) and whose head was often crowned as Holy Roman Emperor (-).
  • Herriot, Edouard Marie (-). Leader of the French Radical Party and Prime Minister on various occasions between 1924 and 1932. In 1940 he abstained from the vote that gave Pétain full power and was deported to Germany in 1942. In - he opposed the formation of the European Defence Community.
  • Hilferding Rudolf (-). A Austrian social democrat, exponent of Austro-Marxism, and author of Finance Capital. An MP and Finance Minister (1923, -). Taking refuge in France, he was handed over to the Gestapo by the Vichy police.
  • Hitler, Adolf (-). The founder of National Socialism and dictator of the Third Reich.
  • Hobbes, Thomas (-). An English philosopher, one of the greatest theoreticians of the State, a supporter of absolutism and systemiser of Baconian materialism. His main work, Leviathan, was published in 1651.
  • Huxley, Aldous Leonard (-). An English writer and author of Brave New World, a critique of productivist society and the totalitarian State.
  • Jaruzelski, Wojciech Witold (-). Head of the Polish armed forces and Minister of Defence from 1965, President of the Republic from 1985 to 1990; he led the 1981 coup.
  • Jeanneney, Jean-Noël (-). A French historian, close to the PSF, Junior Minister of External Commerce in the Edith Cresson government (-) and then Junior Minister of Communication under Pierre Bérégovoy; president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (-). Co-author with Jacques Julliard of Hubert Beuve-Méry’s biography.
  • Julliard, Jacques (-). A French journalist and essayist, a historian by training and a former trade union leader; he writes for the weekly Marianne after working for the Nouvel Observateur for a long time. Co-author with Jean-Noël Jeanneney of Hubert Beuve-Méry’s biography.
  • Kautsky, Karl (-). A theoretician and leader of German social democracy and the Second International. During WWI he theorised ‘super-imperialism’ (Ultra-Imperialismus) and came to social imperialism via centrist pacifism.
  • Keisen, Hans (-). An Austrian jurist and one of the greatest democratic theoreticians of law.
  • Kennan, George Frost (-). An American diplomat, he formulated the doctrine of Soviet ‘containment’ in 1947.
  • Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich (-). First Secretary of the CPSU from 1953 to 1964.
  • Kollontai, Alexandra Mikhailovna (-). A Russian revolutionary, she joined the Bolsheviks in 1915, was active in the movement for female emancipation, and was appointed as People’s Commissar for Social Welfare after October 1917.
  • Kropotkin, Pyotr Alexeyevich (-). A Russian revolutionary, anthropologist and zoologist, militant and theoretician of anarchy. An interventionist during WWI, he clashed with the Bolsheviks.
  • Kroupskaïa, Nadejda Konstantinovna (-). A Bolshevik militant, she was Lenin’s wife and collaborator. After Lenin’s death she took advantage of her position and sought to support the anti-Stalinist opposition.
  • Kugelmann, Ludwig (-). A German doctor and fiend of Marx and Engels, he took part in the - revolution. One of Marx’s regular correspondents from 1862 to 1874 and a member of the International Workingmen’s Association in Hanover, he contributed to the diffusion of Capital in Germany.
  • Labriola, Antonio (-). A professor of philosophy, one of Engels’ correspondents, and an interpreter and diffuser of historical materialism in Italy, he was an exponent of the second Marxist generation.
  • Labriola, Arturo (-). A socialist from 1895 and a revolutionary syndicalist. Interventionist in 1915 and Minister of Labour in 1920; in exile during Fascism and subsequently a member of the Constituent Assembly of Italy.
  • Lassalle, Ferdinand (-). A German socialist and founder of the General German Workers’ Association. In - he began negotiations with Bismarck, who was seeking the support of the workers’ party against the liberal bourgeoisie.
  • Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) (-). The theoretician and revolutionary leader of the Bolshevik Party, he developed Marxist science in the imperialist epoch. He led the October Revolution and founded the Third International.
  • Lizzani, Carlo (-). An Italian film director.
  • Luxemburg, Rosa (-). A Marxist theoretician and militant, she disagreed with Lenin over his conception of the Party and the national question; an internationalist and co-founder of the German Communist Party (1918); after an attempted uprising in Berlin, she and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated by soldiers in the service of the social-democratic government.
  • Machiavelli, Niccolò (-). The theoretician and founder of political realism. Author of The Prince (1513).
  • Maffi, Bruno (-). A socialist at the end of the ‘20s, jailed in 1935, he adhered to the Communist Left while in jail; he took part in the foundation of the International Communist Party in 1943 and was a protagonist of the 1952 scission, remaining with Bordiga; from 1953 he was the editor of the Bordigist current newspaper Il Programma Comunista. A well-known translator, not only of Marx’s Capital, but also of British, American and German authors.
  • Magnani, Valdo (-). The political commissar of an Italian partisan brigade, ‘Garibaldi’, which took part in the Yugoslav resistance, and Secretary of the Reggio Emilia PCI federation, he was accused of ‘Titoism’ and left the Party in 1950. Together with Aldo Cucchi he founded the MLI and then joined the PSI. Returning to the PCI, he concerned himself with co-operatives.
  • Maitan, Livio (-). He joined the Fourth International in 1947, was one of its leaders, and founded Bandiera Rossa. Professor of Sociology at the University of Rome, he promoted the publication of many of Trotsky’s writings in Italy.
  • Malatesta, Errico (-). An anarchist, after the Paris Commune he joined the Italian branch of the International and played an active role in Italy and at an international level. In 1913 he founded the newspaper Volontà and in 1920 the first anarchic daily, Umanità Nova. Anti-militarist and anti-interventionist during the world war, he intervened in the occupation of factories; in - he published the review Pensiero e Volontà.
  • Malenkov, Georgij Maksimilianovi (-). In the ‘30s he was one of Stalin’s innermost circle. On Stalin’s death he became First Secretary of the Party and Prime Minister until Khrushchev was appointed; he then fell into disgrace.
  • Mandel, Ernest (Germain) (-). A Belgian economist and one of the main leaders of the IV International in the postwar period.
  • Mantovani, Mario (-). An anarchist and printer, he spent the twenty years of Fascism between jail and internal exile. After 8th September he was the political commissar of the Bruzzi-Malatesta Brigade in Milan. In the postwar period he was a member of the North Italian Libertarian Communist Federation, founded Il Libertario and collaborated with the Cervetto-Masini group; from 1964 to 1968 he was involved in editing and running Umanità Nova.
  • Mao Zedong (-). A Chinese statesman. He became the leader of the CCP in 1935 and led the struggle for liberation from the Japanese; he became the first President of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
  • Mariani, Giovanni. An anarchist from Sestri Ponente, during the Resistance he was one of the triumvirate that directed the clandestine committees of trade union agitation. In - he led the scission of a group of about twenty revolutionary syndicates, subsequently absorbed into the PCI, in the Sestri Trades Council, of which he would become the Secretary.
  • Marshall, George Catlett (-). An American general, Secretary of State in - and Secretary of Defence in -. His name is linked to the European Recovery Programme (1947).
  • Martinet, Gilles (-). A French socialist, ambassador to Italy (-), and one of the founders of the Parti Socialiste Unitaire.
  • Marx, Karl (-). The revolutionary head of the workers’ movement and the founder, together with Engels, of historical materialism and scientific communism.
  • Marzocchi, Umberto (-). A worker at the La Spezia Arsenal, an anarchist and Secretary of the metalworkers’ union belonging to the Italian Syndicalist Union; he took part in the - workers’ struggles, a period known as the biennio rosso [two red years]. In 1921 he was with the Arditi del Popolo, fighting in the ‘Facts of Sarzana’, one of the rare true battles fought against the Fascist rise to power, in this little town between Liguria and Tuscany. Moving to Savona, in 1922 he was forced to leave Italy for France, where he militated in the anarchist movement. A combatant in Spain and the French Resistance, in 1945 he returned to Savona and was one of the leading exponents of the Italian Anarchist Federation.
  • Masini, Pier Carlo (-). Editor of Umanità Nova and co-founder of GAAP. A historian of the anarchist movement and the author of numerous publications. In - he left Azione Comunista, joining first the PSI and then the Social Democratic Party (PSDI).
  • Mazzucchelli, Ugo (-). A commander in the Resistance and a historic exponent of anarchism in Carrara.
  • Mehring, Franz (-). One of the leading publicists of German social democracy, in 1898 he published his History of German Social Democracy and in 1918 Karl Marx: The Story of His Life. One of the exponents of the Spartacus League and the editor of the newspaper Die Internationale.
  • Molè, Enrico (-). A reformist socialist deputy (1921, 1924); after WWII he militated in the Democratic Labour Party and was Minister for Food in the Parri government (1945) and for Education under De Gasperi (-). Senator (1948, 1953, 1958) as a left-wing independent.
  • Mollet, Guy (-). A French socialist and the historic leader of the SFIO; a minister on various occasions in the ‘40s and ‘50s, he supported France’s belonging to the European Defence Community; Prime Minister from 1956 to 1957, he signed the treaties setting up the European Economic Community, gave full power to the army in Algeria, and went to war in Suez alongside the British and the Israelis (October 1956).
  • Mussolini, Benito (-). The founder of Fascism and dictator during the twenty years of Fascist dictatorship.
  • Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (-). Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815.
  • Nehru Pandit Jawaharlal (-). An Indian statesman, Secretary of the Congress Party and Prime Minister of independent India from 1947 until his death.
  • Nenni, Pietro (-). The historic head of the postwar PSI, winning the Stalin Prize in 1951, he kept the PSI tied to the PCI in the ‘Popular Front’ and was then the protagonist of the centre-left turnaround in the ‘60s.
  • Nitti, Francesco Saverio (-). Professor of Finance at the University of Naples (1898), an expert on the Southern Italy question and a partisan of State intervention. A Radical deputy from 1904, he was a minister (Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, -); Treasury, -) and Prime Minister (-).
  • Pablo, Michel (Michalis Raptis) (-). Greek Trotskyist militant and exile in France, in 1938 he took part in the foundation of the Fourth International, of which he was the Secretary from the postwar period to the ‘60s. He theorised entryism into the Stalinist parties.
  • Palmerston, Henry John Temple (-). An English statesman, first Tory and then among the Whig leaders; Foreign Secretary on various occasions (-, - and -), Home Secretary (-) and Prime Minister (- and -).
  • Pannunzio, Mario (-). An Italian journalist and liberal politician, founder of Il Mondo in 1949, and Secretary of the Radical Party from 1956 to 1959.
  • Parisotto, Piero (Alce) [Moose] (-). From Savona, he became a member of the PCI Youth Front in 1943 and in 1944 commanded the Patriotic Action Squads’ ‘Gatti’ detachment. In 1946 he left the PCI and, together with Cervetto, promoted the anarchist youth group ‘No gods no masters’. He collaborated with the anarchist press and with organisational and promotional work. He committed suicide in 1953.
  • Parodi, Lorenzo (-). A worker at Ansaldo Meccanico, Genoa, a partisan in the libertarian communist resistance, and a member of the CGIL executive (-). Founder together with Cervetto of Lotta Comunista, a theoretician, labour leader and editor of Lotta Comunista.
  • Perrone, Ottorino (Vercesi) (-). A socialist, he joined the Communist Party of Italy and worked in the federations of Triveneto and L’Aquila (Abruzzo). In 1924 he was in Milan, on the editorial staff of Unità. Taking refuge in Paris in 1926, he contributed to the foundation of the Fraction of the Italian Communist Left; expelled from France, he worked in Belgium in the printers’ union and edited Prometeo and Bilan (-). At the end of the war, he joined the International Communist Party in Brussels and stood alongside Bordiga in its 1952 scission.
  • Pinay, Antoine (-). A French statesman, economist and liberal politician. Prime Minister in 1952 and Finance Minister under de Gaulle from 1958 to 1960, he introduced the revalued franc.
  • Pitigrilli (Segre, Dino) (-). A best-selling author during the Fascist period, he denounced and led to the arrest of most of the Turin Giustizia e Libertà group. He emigrated to Argentina in 1948.
  • Pittaluga, Antonio (Tugnin) (-). An anarchist and former member of the Genoa Nervi PCI, the leader of the anarchist group to which the young Parodi belonged and of a partisan cell. He was killed in combat.
  • Plekhanov, Georgi Valentinovich (-). The first theoretician of Marxism in Russia, in 1898 he was one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. After its second congress (1903), he drew near to the Mensheviks; in February 1917 he backed the Kerensky government and opposed the October Revolution.
  • Pleven, René (-). A French politician and one of the founders of the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance (UDSR); prime minister (-, -), his Pleven Plan advocated the setting up of the European Defence Community.
  • Preobraženskij, Evgenij Alekseevi (-3 7). A Bolshevik from 1904 and an organiser in the Urals and Siberia. A member of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee in 1917 and a leader of the Unified Opposition in 1926, he was expelled from the Party in 1927 and was killed during the Stalinist purges.
  • Pressato, Aldo (-). A worker at Ansaldo Meccanico, Genoa Sampierdarena and a member of the GAAP factory cell; national leader of Lotta Comunista.
  • Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (-). A French socialist and founder of anarchism and mutualist philosophy.
  • Pyatakov, Yuri (Georgy) Leonidovich (-). An anarchist in his youth, he adhered to Bolshevism in 1910. The head of the Ukrainian soviet government (1918) and a member of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee in the ‘20s, he held a number of high-level posts. As a leader of the Unified Opposition, he was expelled from the Party (1927) and was killed during the Stalinist purges.
  • Radek, Karl (Berngardovich Sobelsohn) (-). A Bolshevik and leader of the Third International; active in Germany, he took part in the events of the German revolution until 1923. With the Opposition in -, he was tried and sentenced in 1936 and died in jail.
  • Reagan, Ronald Wilson (-). The 40th US President from 1981 to 1989 and a conservative Republican.
  • Renouvin, Pierre (-). A French historian and founder of the study of international relations.
  • Ricci, Ettore (-). A shipyard worker, he was a very young libertarian communist messenger in the Resistance. He took part in the founding of GAAP in Sestri Ponente; a member of the Genoese committee of Lotta Comunista.
  • Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (-). The 32nd US President from 1932 to 1945 and a Democrat. Together with Churchill and Stalin he took part in the Yalta Conference.
  • Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (-). A British mathematician and philosopher. Liberal and pacifist.
  • Salvatorelli, Luigi (-). A historian and journalist, in 1949 he collaborated as an editorialist with La Stampa, the Turin newspaper for which he had worked before the Fascist rise to power.
  • Scattoni, Ugo (-). A worker and Roman libertarian communist, active in clandestinity during the twenty years of Fascism and as a partisan in the Trotskyist group ‘Bandiera Rossa’ in Rome. After the congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation in Livorno in 1949, he participated in the founding of GAAP and attended the Genoa Pontedecimo Conference in 1951. Editor-in-chief of L’Impulso, he would be a member of the FIOM CGIL central committee.
  • Schumacher, Kurt (-). One of the leading exponents of German social democracy in the post-WWII period and its chairman from 1946 to 1952,
  • Schuman, Robert (-). A French politician, exponent of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP, right-wing), and a Europhile; promoter of the same-name plan for the constitution of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).
  • Seniga, Giulio (Nino) (-). He fought in the Resistance, first as a trade unionist at Alfa Romeo in 1943 and then as the political commissar of the Republic of Ossola Garibaldi Brigade. In the PCI, until 1954 when he left the Party, he was the right-hand man of Pietro Secchia, the person in charge of the Party’s organisation and propaganda section. He supported Azione Comunista, and then published anti-Stalinist material from various political sources through the Azione Comune publishing house. He became a member of the PSI in the ‘60s.
  • Sessarego, Agostino (-). A libertarian communist with Lorenzo Parodi in the Genoa Nervi anarchist group led by Agostino Pittaluga, and a partisan in the Patriotic Action Squads’ ‘Crosa’ Brigade. A worker at Aura, a Nervi-based company in the food sector, he participated in the constitution of GAAP and the Genoa Pontedecimo Conference and would follow Cervetto and Parodi into the Movement of the Communist Left and Lotta Comunista.
  • Silone, Ignazio (Secondino Tranquilli) (-). A writer and socialist, he brought the Socialist Youth Federation into the Communist Party of Italy (1921). At the head of the Party until the end of the ‘20s, he clashed with Togliatti when the latter took his cue from Stalin. Retiring to Switzerland, he remained in the liberal-socialist sphere, wrote the theses of the PSI Third Front, and was the editor of L’Avanti! and Europa Socialista.
  • Sinigaglia, Oscar (-). An engineer, chairman of Ilva (-) and of Finsider after 1945; author of the development plan for a public iron and steel industry with production concentrated in big integrated steelworks near the sea, one of them in Genoa Cornigliano.
  • Sola, Elia (-). A worker and one of Cervetto’s friends and comrades in the Villapiana district (Savona); an amateur boxing champion and partisan in the autonomous groups, he was captured by the Fascists and shot in 1945.
  • Spadolini, Giovanni (-). A historian of the Risorgimento and Giolittism, editor of Corriere della Sera (-); PRI Secretary (-), minister and Prime Minister on various occasions (-).
  • Spinelli, Altiero (-). The founder of the European Federalist Movement in 1948 and a European Commissioner in 1970.
  • Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (-). Head of the counter-revolution in the USSR and of Russian State capitalism.
  • Steinbeck, John (-). An American writer and author of realistic novels about the years of the Great Depression, including The Grapes of Wrath.
  • Stéphane, Roger (Roger Worms) (-). A French writer and journalist and a partisan in the PCF ranks, he participated in the foundation of Combat (1942) and was the co-founder of L’Observateur (1950).
  • Sweezy, Paul Marlor (-). A US economist, Harvard professor and editor of the periodical Monthly Review. Author of the essays Theory of Capitalist Development (1942) and, with Paul Baran, of Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1966).
  • Tasca, Angelo (-). A socialist and exponent of the span itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/PoliticalParty">Ordine Nuovo group, he was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy and Secretary of the Turin Trades Council. From 1926 he worked for Comintern in Moscow. Expelled in 1929, he settled in France. In - he collaborated with Pannunzio’s Il Mondo and published various political and historical studies.
  • Eto Josip Broz (-). Leader of Yugoslavia from 1945 until his death, he broke with Stalin in 1948; one of the protagonists of the ‘non-aligned’ movement.
  • Toccafondo, Vincenzo. Born in 1906, an anarchist in the Genoa Nervi group and a self-taught worker, he participated in the activity of the Libertarian Communist Federation, organised the publication of L’Amico del Popolo after the war and attended anarchist conventions until 1955. For 15 years during the Fascist period he made out a monthly bulletin, L’Antistato, which was handwritten in exercise books and passed from hand to hand.
  • Togliatti, Palmiro (-). PCI Secretary from 1927 until his death. In the ‘30s he became one of the top leaders of the Stalinist International and was its co-ordinator in Spain during the civil war. On his return to Italy, he announced the ‘Salerno turnaround’ and participated in the national unity governments from 1944 to 1947. He backed Stalinist politics in the ‘Cold War’ years, the condemnation of Tito and the Russian intervention in Hungary in 1956.
  • Trotsky, Leon (Ev Davidovich Bronshtein) (-). An internationalist revolutionary and Bolshevik leader, the creator of the Red Army.
  • Truman, Harry Spencer (-). The 33rd US President (-) and a Democrat; his name is linked with the first period of the ‘Cold War’.
  • Turroni, Pio (-). An anarchist, he fled abroad in 1923; in France he was the co-publisher of Edizioni Libertarie, and in the Spanish Civil War he fought in the Ascaso Column. He returned to Italy in 1943 and became the editor of Volontà in 1946. In 1950 he founded L’Antistato together with Gigi Damiani and shortly afterwards the same-name publishing group, of which he was the manager until 1970. In 1965 he was one of the founders of the Anarchist Initiative Groups.
  • Varga, Eugen Samuilovich (-). A Hungarian economist and one of the founders of IMEMO, the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations, he became a Stalinist.
  • Vignale Mario (-). He took part in the workers’ strikes after WWI and in the antifascist struggle in the ranks of the PCI. He joined GAAP after the 1951 Pontedecimo Conference. A textile worker in Lavagna, he was the author of shop floor correspondence in Il Libertario, L’Impulso and Azione Comunista. He participated in the work of the Leninist group within the Movement of the Communist Left and then in Lotta Comunista.
  • Vinazza, Aldo (-). A libertarian communist and worker at the Ansaldo Fossati ammunition factory in Sestri Ponente, he took part in the 1944 strikes and the April 1945 uprising. He was the point of reference for the Genoa Sestri GAAP, and carried out trade union activity in the CGIL. After the Genoa Pontedecimo Conference, he was charged with organisation and communications on behalf of the GAAP National Committee. He collaborated with L’Impulso, Il Libertario and Azione Comunista. In the following years he devoted himself to trade union activity (UIL) and collaborated occasionally with Lotta Comunista on trade union themes, under the pseudonym of Aldo Genovese.
  • Vittorini, Elio (-). An Italian writer, in 1942 he moved closer to the PCI and took part in the Resistance; editor of the periodical Il Politecnico in -, he drew away from the PCI in 1951. He worked for Einaudi and Mondadori.
  • Wehner, Herbert (-). A leader of German social democracy. A member of the German Communist Party, he fled to Moscow in 1937 and worked in the Stalinist Comintern. In 1946 he joined the German Social Democratic Party and was one of the architects of the 1958 Bad Godesberg ‘turnaround’.
  • Yoshida, Shigeru (-). A key figure in postwar Japanese politics, Prime Minister (-, -) and Foreign Minister (-, -). His policy, based on economic internationalisation while keeping a low profile as a power, is known as the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’.
  • Zinoviev (Radomyslovsky Apfelbaum), Grigory Yevseevich (-). A Bolshevik leader, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in 1901; after the 1905 Revolution he played an active role in St. Petersburg and then followed Lenin as an émigré (1907) and was a spokesman of the Zimmerwald Left together with him. Returning to Russia after February 1917, he was the party leader in St. Petersburg and head of the Third International in -. He opposed Stalin and then capitulated; he was shot in 1936.

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