The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 1 Thirty years after the death of Arrigo Cervetto , we are publishing here the concluding passages of the introduction to his Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) for the series Biblioteca Giovani (“Publications for young people”), soon to be published in Italian. The 1944-45 partisan war in Italy. The political battle within libertarian communism. The Korean War, and the watchword of “neither Washington nor Moscow”. The layoffs at the Ilva and Ansaldo factories, the political battle and trade union defence in the struggles of post-war restructuring. From 1953 onwards, the crisis of Stalinism, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Hungarian uprising, the 1957 Theses and the challenge of theory and strategy vis-à-vis the tendencies of unitary imperialism. The political struggle within Azione Comunista (“Communist Action”) and the Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (“Movement of the Communist Left”). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, t...

In 1967, «Marx Is Not a Has-Been in Detroit» was a Lotta Comunista headline for a memorable event, the struggle of the black proletariat in the American automotive capital. The race issue concealed class contradiction in itself; the centre of the struggle remained the factories of the metropolises in the industrialised powers, and not the countryside which should have surrounded those cities in the then fashionable myths of Maoism and Third-Worldism. Half a century later, a lot has changed, but not that class principle. The China of Mao Zedong’s peasant populism has become an economic power playing on the same level as America and Europe; its industrial giants challenge those of the West which had once subjugated it, but hundreds of millions of Chinese proletarians have also been added to our world class. It’s been quite a while, and since the time for a modern class struggle has also come to the Asian metropolises: Marx is not a has-been in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Canton, as h...