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 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...

In the Depth of Our Class

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Democratic Defeat in the Urban Vote

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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...

The Unstoppable Force: Capital’s Demand for Migrant Labour

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The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment Strengthens the ‘European Party’ in China

From the series News from the Silk Road “Chinese people treat [US democracy] as a variety show which is much more interesting than House of Cards’ [...]”. Beijing does not feel the same embarrassment as the old democracies of the West faced with the grotesque scenes of demonstration against the Capitol organised by the president of the United States. Zhao Minghao from the Chongyang Institute spelled out the obvious in his analysis some time earlier: “the political farce by the incumbent president and some Republican lawmakers is reflecting the profound crisis on US domestic politics.” The Global Times is serving a hefty bill to the ideologies of liberal interventionism: “the ‘beacon of democracy’, and the beautiful rhetoric of ‘City upon a Hill’ [...]” are undergoing a serious debacle or in other words, a “Waterloo of US international image”. It will be a while before the US can “interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs with the excuse of ‘democracy’[...]”. Attention is also...

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

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Indo-African Opposition at the WTO

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