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.

German Socialism in 1917

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the worker’s movement According to Arrigo Cervetto [ Opere , Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”. The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe . “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”. “But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in Russia and the economic, productive, and social conditions in Germany – “for ...

Militarised Scientists

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 13 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science “ The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers ” [Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto ). The Manhattan Project scientists In Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists , Robert Jungk [1913-1994] writes that the Manhattan Project was a labyrinth of winding paths and dead ends. Commenting on Jungk’s romanticised account of the first phase of the history of the atomic bomb, Edward Teller [1908-2003], often called the “father” of the H-bomb, wrote: “There is no mention of the futile efforts of the scientists in 1939 to awaken the interest of the military authorities in the atomic bomb. The reader does not learn about the dismay of scientists f...

Battle Over Times for European Rearmament

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Pages 1 and 2 In current Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, appeasement stands for cowardly and illusory pacification, as exemplified by the Munich Agreement of 1938, which conceded to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia without stopping the march towards world war. Were Shigeru Ishiba, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz really, as has been said, the Neville Chamberlains of the tariff war, accepting appeasement on the 15% tariff in an ignominious surrender to Donald Trump's blackmail? And has Trump really revealed himself in Anchorage, Alaska, to be an appeaser towards Vladimir Putin? Was it, finally, only the firmness of the Europeans at the Washington summit which convinced Trump to remain as one of the guarantors of Ukraine's security? The plague of television and social media diplomacy feeds on simplistic and propagandistic images, but also consumes and contradicts them at the pace of...

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...

“Polish Moment” at Risk

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 3 From the series European news In July, the strategic triangle of London-Paris-Berlin was strengthened with the Northwood Declaration, in which the United Kingdom and France signalled the possibility of coordinating the use of their nuclear weapons through the creation of a “Nuclear Steering Group”, and with the Kensington Treaty, an Anglo-German defence pact. These agreements complement the Franco-British agreements of Lancaster House and the Franco-German Treaty of Aachen. Although Poland signed the Treaty of Nancy with France in May 2025, it was excluded from the recent “E3” consultations, in which only the United Kingdom, France, and Germany participated. Nevertheless, the establishment of the new government led by Donald Tusk, the Civic Platform (PO) leader, in the October 2023 elections, after eight years of antagonism with Brussels under the Law and Justice Party (PiS)-dominated government, ha...

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...

Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Pages 1 and 2 The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in ...

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...

Reckless Bets on Migrants in California

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 11 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism The tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on allies, partners and opponents of the United States have opened a phase of negotiations with the affected countries and caused reactions from some key States. The legal opposition from almost all areas of the US poses a test: whether States, courts, and Congress can influence trade policy and constrain the expansion of executive powers. Amid conflicting rulings, the tariffs have been reinstated – an outcome that, The New York Times remarks, has “left Washington, Wall Street, and much of the world trying to discern the future of US trade policy”. California’s dispute with the federal government has expanded to immigration policy and the domestic use of military force. The political, economic, and power struggles overlap with the electoral dimension. The establishment remains critical of or ...

The British Link in the Imperialist Chain

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 8 Lenin often used the metaphor of a chain that binds the world to describe imperialism. The October Revolution of 1917 broke a first link in that chain and hoped to pull the whole thing loose. The metaphor was adopted in those years by all the Bolshevik leaders and the leaders of the newly formed Third International. Within a decade, Stalin's well-known formula of socialism in one country signified the overturning of that strategic cornerstone and the defeat of the revolution in Russia, in Europe, and in the world. Dates that have come to symbolise historical change act as the synthesis of previously accumulated contradictions, and, while such a sudden change does not exhaust the possibility of future contradictions, the concentration of events in 1926 nonetheless marked a watershed that revealed the true extent that the counter-revolution had reached. The great general strike in the United Kingdom that year, wh...

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