Bacteria and viruses know no frontiers. The attempts to infect public fear of the coronavirus epidemic with xenophobic and racist superstition would be pathetic, if it were not for loutish electoral speculation. Today the Chinese confront it, but should it be a pandemic tomorrow the hunt for those infected will point to migrants, who will once again be scapegoated on the pages of Facebook. Yet the bourgeoisie, in the centuries during which it still remained a revolutionary class, knew how to shed a light of clarity through the mist of thousand-year-old superstitions. Renaissance men founded the scientific method; the intellectuals of the Enlightenment changed the view of the world; pioneers of science and technology accompanied the industrial revolution in mechanics, steam energy, chemistry and electricity; heroic doctors founded modern medicine, going so far as to experiment with vaccines on themselves in order to make it possible to face terrible diseases. Finally, science married la

Politics of Science and Passion The Internationalist Youth Day conference was held in Milan on February 1 st , in piazza San Babila’s New Theatre. Below we report a synthesis of the conclusions drawn at the conference. The heightening tensions among the powers of imperialism and exacerbating social contradictions around the world have been two unmistakable facets marking the first two decades of this century. In the last few months social protest has animated the streets and squares of various regions on the world stage, in Latin America, the Middle East, Hong Kong, India and France. Albeit with their specific features, both protests and demands for better living and working conditions resounded everywhere. Essentially, those streets and squares reconfirm a well-known passage from Marx and Engels’ Manifesto – The modern bourgeois society […] has not done away with class antagonisms confirming that society is more and more splitting up […] into two great classes directly facing e