The Internationalism

Chapter Eleven 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 imp...

Chapter Ten   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 a...

Chapter Nine   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 prim...