Sixty years of Lotta Comunista in the Workers’ Clubs

Lotta Comunista: The Origins 1943-1952

Guido La Barbera Contents 9. Preface to the English Edition 13. Preface 19. Useful dates 21. Chapter One «ONE OUGHT TO KNOW WITH WHOM ONE IS DEALING» 25. The balance-of-power theory 27. Theory and the ‘strategy-party’ 29. Chapter Two THE FOUNDRY AND THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE 31. The Savona group 39. Passion disciplined by reason 40. Never again a tool in the hands of others 41. The Genoa group 46. The Sestri Ponente group 48. The groups in Rome and Tuscany 52. The strength of GAAP: ‘only a handful’ 55. Chapter Three LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM 58. Reckoning with Bordiga...

The Unitary Imperialism Issue

Chapter Six 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 per...

Libertarian Communism: A Different Kind of Communism

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 militant...

The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto: I

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025, Special Issue Pages I and II From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. I Arrigo Cervetto was the founder, theorist, and leader of Lotta Comunista. From his first involvement in the partisan war in 1943-44 until his death in February 1995, his more than 50 years of political activity can be summarised in around twenty key battles. It goes without saying that those struggles - aimed at the restoration and develop ment of Marxist theory on economics, politics, social change, and international relations - are the common thread running through this selection of his writings. His memoirs, Quaderni 198I82 (“Notebooks 1981-82”), provide an account of those battles up to 1980. First battle: the factory and the partisan war The son of emi...

The Foundry and the Partisan Struggle

Chapter Two 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 ar...

Hand and Brain and Artificial Intelligence

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 1 From the series Artificial Intelligence In the introduction to Dialectics of Nature and in his unfinished essay The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man , Friedrich Engels outlined the evolutionary process that led from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens . The text stands out for the conceptual power of its materialist method, and from it we draw five fundamental concepts. First, for Engels, the brain is a product of labour . It is in the dialectical relationship of mutual action and reaction with labour – made possible by the articulation of the hand freed by man's upright posture, the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection – that the brain evolved to perform the most complex functions and develop self-awareness. In turn, labour is an expression of the social relations at th...

Historical Constants and Strategic Surprise

The Strategic Surprise of the Agreement between Beijing and Tehran and the Suggestion of a Six-Power Concert The agreement between Beijing and Tehran falls under the definition of strategic surprise , i.e., events that entirely appertain to the political realm and mark a change or an about-turn in the balance among the powers. New alliances, the breakdown of alliances, the overturning of coalitions, diplomatic openings or unexpected military sorties: these are the regular novelties of international politics that Arrigo Cervetto wrote about. However, if the agreement was an unforeseeable event in itself, the long-term objective economic and political trends. that have determined it and made it possible are entirely investigable. The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the end of December 1979 was interpreted by the United States as a potential threat to the oil routes of the Persian Gulf, and it was a contemporary revival of the Great Game , which had set the British Empire agai...

The EU Commission Plans for Rearmament and a Clean Industrial Deal

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 From the series European news Following the European elections which took place on June 6th - 9th, the leaders of the Member States met on June 27th at the European Council. Ursula von der Leyen was nominated as president of the next European Commission, after she was chosen as the European People’s Party’s (EPP) Spitzenkandidat (“leading candidate”). The agreement also included the election of former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa as president of the European Council, and the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Subsequently, on July 18th, Parliament elected von der Leyen as president of the Commission by an absolute majority, with 401 votes out of 719 MEPs. On September 17th, von der Leyen presented her team of commissioners to the European Parliament and, two days later, the Council adopted this list of...

Prefaces

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...

Pontedecimo, Genoa, 1951

Chapter Four 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 theor...

The Internationalism

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