Return to Marx

In 1967, «Marx Is Not a Has-Been in Detroit» was a Lotta Comunista headline for a memorable event, the struggle of the black proletariat in the American automotive capital. The race issue concealed class contradiction in itself; the centre of the struggle remained the factories of the metropolises in the industrialised powers, and not the countryside which should have surrounded those cities in the then fashionable myths of Maoism and Third-Worldism.

Half a century later, a lot has changed, but not that class principle. The China of Mao Zedong’s peasant populism has become an economic power playing on the same level as America and Europe; its industrial giants challenge those of the West which had once subjugated it, but hundreds of millions of Chinese proletarians have also been added to our world class. It’s been quite a while, and since the time for a modern class struggle has also come to the Asian metropolises: Marx is not a has-been in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Canton, as he is not in the other immense urban concentrations of the new Asian powers. In the USA, fifty years of social mobility have made a black bourgeoisie and a black middle class grow alongside the black proletariat, but this has not changed the fact that discrimination because of the colour of one’s skin continues to disguise class oppression. In the districts of the American metropolises it is social discrimination that links the new flows of immigrants born abroad to the Afro-American proletariat and the stratifications of white wage earners. Finally, the metropolises in Italy, Spain, France or Germany have also changed their faces: the most thankless jobs and the lowest steps on the wage scale have been entrusted to the immigrant proletariat, and also old Europe, which had even known the monsters of genocide, has rediscovered the shame of racism and xenophobia.

So then «Black lives matter»: no doubt about it, but woe betide the hypocritical denunciation of racism only in other people’s homes. The lives of the desperate who continue to drown in the Mediterranean Sea matter; the farmhands forced to live in inhuman conditions matter; and the millions without legal protection on construction sites, in factories, warehouses and hotels matter. The pandemic of the century crisis has only shown openly what was there for all to see but that no one wanted to see. So then, to fight every oppression and every exploitation means returning to Marx. It means rediscovering the principle of class unity in the scientific consciousness of communism.

Return to Marx. (2020, July). Internationalism, 12.

The Defeat in Afghanistan — a Watershed in the Cycle of Atlantic Decline

In crises and wars there are events which leave their mark on history because of how they make a decisive impact on the power contention, or because of how, almost like a chemical precipitate, they suddenly make deep trends that have been at work for some time coalesce. This is the case of the defeat of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, which is taking the shape of a real watershed in the cycle of Atlantic decline. For the moment, through various comments in the international press, it is possible to consider its consequences on three levels: America’s position as a power and the connection with its internal crisis; the repercussions on Atlantic relations and Europe’s dilemmas regarding its strategic autonomy; and the relationship between the Afghan crisis and power relations in Asia, especially as regards India’s role in the Indo-Pacific strategy. Repercussions in the United States Richard Haass is the president of the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations; despite having ...

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...

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 ...

Leapfrogging: The Chinese Auto Industry’s Leap Forward

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 15 From the series The world car battle It is predicted that next year in China the sales of electrified vehicles (mainly battery-powered or hybrid) will for the first time overtake those of cars with an internal combustion engine. This development will mark a historic about turn which will put the world's biggest auto market years ahead of its Western rivals [Financial Times, December 26th]. Meanwhile, the growth in sales of electric vehicles in Europe and the United States has slowed. BYD's leap forward Another important development in 2024 was the record sales of Chinese brands in China: they rose from 38% of the total in 2020 to 56%, a sign of the maturation of the national auto industry which is now able to challenge the Japanese, American, and European manufacturers. BYD's leap forward is impressive, comparable to that of Ford Motors after the First World War, when with the Model T, introduc...

Engels in the New Century

Friedrich Engels memorably describes the poor sanitary condition of working-class neighbourhoods in mid-19 th century England. At a certain point, typhus and cholera epidemics began to threaten bourgeois neighbourhoods, and only then was the government forced to take remedial action. Well, with the pandemic of the century , it is as if Engels had entered the 21 st century, and the same contradiction was laid bare for the whole world. The Covid-19 catastrophe in India shows an elementary truth: Europe, America and China are completing colossal vaccination plans, but they will never be truly safe if the rest of the world, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, remains at the mercy of the virus and its mutations. And yet, even in the face of the evidence, the contention between powers to take advantage of vaccine diplomacy does not cease. The United States has put forward the promotional idea of suspending the patents of the pharmaceutical giants, perhaps in order to counter the Chinese off...

‘Two Hands’ and ‘Two Roads’

From the series News from the Silk Road The international tensions which China will face on the seas in the next fifteen years could find a buffer in the expansion of China’s influence on land in Central, Southern and Western Asia. Wang Jisi is the dean of the School of International Studies at the University of Beijing and a major figure of the American party in China. His unexpected foray into ‘geopolitics’ has reignited the old clash between different American currents — a phenomenon we analysed more than twenty years ago. At the time, Robert Manning, the author of The Asian Energy Factor and adviser to the State Department in 1991, viewed Asia’s growing dependence on the Persian Gulf for its energy requirements in the light of geoeconomics and geostrategy and foresaw a possible convergence between the USA and China. From a geoeconomic standpoint, both trade and the funding and development of the infrastructure necessary for Asia’s energy needs were more important than terri...

In the Depth of Our Class

The pandemic of the century is a storm that does not subside; it returns to its rampage after 40 million infections and more than a million official victims, perhaps two million according to estimates on the excess deaths. In the contention between powers, China stands as the winner: it seems to have tamed the virus, and industry and services are up and running; the USA and Europe, on the other hand, are moving towards a new wave of infections that casts yet more shadows on the economic cycle. Political structures and health systems are at the height of tension. In America, the elections have judged Donald Trump’s rash demagogy on the basis of the opposite reasons for containing the pandemic and the intolerance of small and large producers; in Europe the executives are attempting to steer between the surge in infections, increasingly stringent confinement measures and the threats of fiscal jacquerie in the tourism and catering sectors. Almost everywhere, in the Old Continent, governm...

Speculative Race for Charging Stations

From the series The world car battle If at the beginning of the 21 st century electrification had technological limits in batteries, both in terms of cost and range, these are now partly overcome, because electric cars have a range of 240-450 km, more than enough for 95% of journeys of less than 50 km. The major obstacle remains the construction of a network of charging stations and their integration with the electricity grid. The race between China, Europe, and USA UBS Evidence Lab, a team of UBS bank experts working in 55 specialised labs to provide data on investment decisions, predicts that cost parity between electric and internal combustion cars will be achieved in 2024 [ Inside EVs , October 20th 2020]. By then, the development of car electrification will be self-sustaining without government subsidies. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), in its report Electric Vehicle Outlook 2020 , estimates that by 2022 carmakers will have 500 different models of electric cars avai...

Europe Follows the USA and China in the Strategic Use of Space

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 9 From the series The war industry and European defence Next Spring SpaceX will be 20 years old. The company founded by Elon Musk has rapidly achieved a key role in international space activity. The first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket has recently been recovered, reconditioned and reused for the tenth time. SpaceX has already repeated this type of reflight 70 times or so; it allows for substantial savings when compared to the losses incurred in the first stages of a traditional rocket launch. It is for this reason that it is being considered as the standard for the future. According to NASA’s calculations, the average cost of launching a satellite into orbit has fluctuated around the level of $18,500 per kilogram for the whole period between 1970 and 2000. SpaceX has reduced this figure by seven times. Internet constellations In recent missions Falcon 9 rockets have put a total of 60 Starlink satellites ...

The Internationalism

Search This Blog