The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026, Special Issue Pages III and IV From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. VII In this chapter, we offer a selection of writings on the Italian cycle, in both politics and in social and economic change, taken from three books that collect articles written over a 40-year period, from 1950 to 1991. Il ciclo politico del capitalismo di Stato ( The political cycle of State capitalism ) spans from the post-war period, at the beginning of the 30 years of the accelerated development of the economic miracle, until 1967, when the first signs of the struggles of workers’ spontaneity had already appeared, but before the explosion of the autunno caldo ( hot autumn ) of 1969. These are articles that appeared in Libertario , l’Impulso , Agitazione (the internal bulletin of the GAAP), Azione Comunista , Prometeo a...

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026, 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. VI The reflection on the political shell – in which Cervetto returned to the fundamentals of the Marxist theory of the State – was itself a political battle, as it equipped the new generation of the party against the myths of true democracy that accompanied the reformist line and the electoral expansion of the progressive PCI into new social strata. The very title of the book recalls Lenin’s formula of democracy as the best political shell for the dictatorship of capital. However, these editorials were not limited to restoring the concepts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the theory was developed and updated to apply to contemporary forms of imperialist democracy . Alongside those crucial notions, dozens of politic...