The Future Lies in the Struggle

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. This is Karl Marx, a century and a half ago, but since then the reality of a capitalism that has grown senile — in the late maturity of imperialist society — has imbued those words with a disconcerting and practical truth. Through globalisation, capital runs the markets at all latitudes, seeking out, from two billion wage-earners, the surplus value that keeps it alive. Moreover, in the old powers where capitalism was first born, before spreading to the whole world and feeding new aspirant powers - eager to redefine the partition, the whole scaffolding of the social system could not stand without a growing share of migrants in the labour force. Described by Lenin, the analyses of parasitic degeneration and the putrefaction of a capitalism in its imperialist phase, are science, like that of Marx, and not simple moralistic invective. In Europe, America, Japan, the demographic winter impresses upon us the tangible reality of stunted societies, increasingly aged, that can literally only survive by importing young people.

Vampiric in three senses, then: at home, in the export of capital and in the import of a labour force. Such a society clearly has no future, and in the uneasiness running through public opinion, in the resentments and the populist anger, a vague premonition is felt. In addition, the shadows of new grow ever taller, China above all, making the status quo of the world order unsustainable and thereby undermining the security of assets, safeguards and protections.

A future does exist, but not in capital: it exists in those two billion salaried workers who are its contradiction. There is no area in the world that does not show, concealed or in sudden explosions, the friction and collisions of the class antagonism. There is redemption in that struggle but that alone is not enough, under penalty of seeing our class instrumentalised, seized with fanaticism and ideologies or suffocated in repression, as is happening today in Chile, Lebanon, Algeria, Iraq, Iran and India. The struggle is only the first step; only a communist and an internationalist strategy open the way to the future.

The Future Lies in the Struggle. (2020, January). Internationalism, 12.

The Works of Marx and Engels and the Bolshevik Model

Internationalism Pages 12–13 In the autumn of 1895 Lenin commented on the death of Friedrich Engels: "After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. […] In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and of class domination – private property and anarchic social production – disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers must be directed against them. And every class strugg...

Cryptocurrencies, Tariffs, Oil and Spending in Trump’s Executive Orders

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 8 Douglas Irwin, economist and historian of American trade policy, writes for the Peterson Institute that the tariffs announced by Donald Trump, if implemented, would constitute a “historic event in the annals of US trade policy” and “one of the largest increases in trade taxes in US history. One has to go back almost a century to find tariff increases comparable”. Irwin limits himself to providing us with a historical dimension to the planned duties. But the bewilderment and turmoil created, especially among Washington’s allies, derives from the fact that the tariffs being brandished are accompanied by a hail of presidential decrees and declarations that mark a profound political discontinuity, both in the balance of internal institutional powers and in the balance of power between nations. The watershed was expected, but the speed and vehemence of the White House’s assaults are setting the scene for a change of era i...

Uneven Development, Job Cuts, and the Crisis of Labour Under Global Capitalism

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The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto II

From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), soon to be published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. II “Neither Washington nor Moscow”, “Neither Truman nor Stalin”. These were slogans sufficient to rally the internationalist cause, not only against the influence of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) on one front, but also, on the opposite side, against the pro-American, “Westernist” leanings present in certain political currents of anarchist individualism. There was a unitary imperialism to be fought, of which the US and the USSR were both expressions. 1951, Genoa Pontedecimo In the ideological climate of the Cold War, heightened by the Korean War, a third world conflict was considered imminent; La guerra che viene (“The coming war”) was the title of a Trotskyist-inspired pamphlet that ultimately leaned in favour of the USSR, but reflected a widespread perception. The internation alist principle alone proved insufficient. To maintain...

The future of work in Europe

Every moment of transition presents its own complexities: for our class this means that further divisions are sown within it. Such is the present moment — one when different dynamics stack up and intertwine. Past, present and future On the one hand, there is the troubled exit from the pandemic crisis, still under the threat posed by the emergence of new Covid-19 variants. The pause on redundancies has come to an end in Italy. This, albeit partially, would have spared about 520,000 jobs in Italy up until now, according to Centro Einaudi’s estimates [ 25 th Annual Report on Global Economy and Italy , June 2021]. Company closures and staff reductions (in a mixture of arrogance and callousness) have marked the summer months, only to announce a difficult autumn, when the redundancy ban will be lifted also for small businesses and services. However, it is clear how uncertain the workers’ condition remains, regardless of any collective agreement signed, and how necessary it is always to ...

The Drone War

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 13 From the series War industry and European defence The Economist provides an illustration of how the use of unmanned and remotely piloted systems in warfare is expanding. In Africa, 30 governments are equipped with UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or drones. In 2024, they were deployed 484 times in local wars in thirteen different countries, twice as frequently as the previous year, causing 1,200 deaths. The most widely used drone on the continent is the TB2, produced by the Turkish company Baykar, which has seen a decade of extensive use in conflicts across Syria, Azerbaijan-Armenia, and Ukraine. LBA Systems and MALE drones At the Paris Air Show in mid-June, an agreement was signed to establish LBA Systems, a joint venture between Baykar and Leonardo. The aim is to produce the Akinci and TB3 drones, the latter of which will be capable of taking off from helicopter carrier decks. The aircraft wil...

The Unstoppable Force: Capital’s Demand for Migrant Labour

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 16 “Before Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s prime minister, she pledged to cut immigration. Since she has been in government the number of non-EU work visas issued by Italy has increased”. This is how The Economist of April 26th summarises the schizophrenia of their politics; and this is not only true in Italy: “Net migration also surged in post-Brexit Britain”. The needs of the economic system do not coincide with the rhetoric of parliamentarism. And vice versa. Schizophrenia and imbalances in their politics Returning to Italy, the Bank of Italy has pointed out that by 2040, in just fifteen years, there will be a shortage of five million people of working age, which could lead to an estimated 11% contraction in GDP. This is why even Italy’s “sovereignist” government is preparing to widen the net of its Immigration Flow Decree. The latest update, approved on June 30th, provides for the entry of almost ...

Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order

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The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto I

From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), soon to be published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. I Arrigo Cervetto was the founder, theorist, and leader of Lotta Comunista. From his first involvement in the partisan war in 1943-44 until his death in February 1995, his more than 50 years of political activity can be summarised in around twenty key battles. It goes without saying that those struggles - aimed at the restoration and develop ment of Marxist theory on economics, politics, social change, and international relations - are the common thread running through this selection of his writings. His memoirs, Quaderni 198I82 (“Notebooks 1981-82”), provide an account of those battles up to 1980. First battle: the factory and the partisan war The son of emigrants to Argentina from Savona in Italy, Cervetto was born in Buenos Aires in April 1927, a circumstance that would later influence his thinking about international politics. His early for...

Political Battles of European Leninism

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