Luciano Ferrari Bravo

(1940–2000) was an Italian militant and Marxist theorist active in Potere Operaio and other extraparliamentary left organizations. He taught at the University of Padua.

Vietnam Libero, Vietnam Rosso

Old and New Questions in the Theory of Imperialism (1975)

The renewal of Leninism generally ends up being performed mechanistically, as a simple annexation of the subsequent changes that have intervened on the scene of international power relations to the schema of Imperialism. This proves more and more to be a fruitless operation. Instead it is a matter of returning to Lenin by way of Marx. Today, renewing Leninist analysis in the political sense requires us to make this passage once again: to find in Marx, in his method before even in the contents of his discourse, the correct way of posing the question. In this case: what determines capital – as a political-material relation, as a relation of force – in its configuration and its international dynamics?

The New Deal and the New Order of Capitalist Institutions (1972)

The New Deal and the New Order of Capitalist Institutions (1972)

To speak of the New Deal as a huge qualitative leap in the development of capitalist institutions – a leap that, precisely because it functions at a crucial point in the plot of capitalist society at a global level, has itself a special historical importance – seems to be a statement by now generally taken to be wholly correct. The matter was already settled in the mind of its greatest protagonist and in the ideology created around him that enthusiastically founded the “myth” of the New Deal’s “revolution”; and, if every myth must have a real justification, this one lay in the effective dismantling of the system in the rapid course of a decade. No less significant, at this level, is the bitter opposition from various positions that the New Deal came to provoke; these were attitudes that then, and not accidentally, flowed back against it in a wide underlying consensus.