The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 9 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement Revolution is a dramatic and oscillating historical process, marked by brutal accelerations, sudden freezes, and deceptive moments of dead calm. Hence the need to develop the party in the preceding years, so that it can act consciously as a vanguard rooted in the masses — as the premise for the revolutionary process rather than the result . Arrigo Cervetto wrote in his article “The General Task” , now in Opere, vol. 2 : If the party does not want to fall into adventurism, it cannot regulate its conduct on accelerated and unexpected movements but must always continue in its systematic work of organisation and education of the proletariat. The more the party is able to work according to this plan [...] the more it will have the possibility of not being caught off guard b...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement According to Arrigo Cervetto [ Opere , Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”. The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe . “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”. “But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in...