Skip to main content

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, governments and local authorities are accusing each other of being unprepared and bickering over who’s to blame; miserable scoundrels cultivate denial rumours and swindlers of parliamentarism sniff out the opportunity to woo petty-bourgeois discontent.

Then there is our class, divided and fragmented by the pandemic; millions on the front line or exposed to the crisis in conditions of maximum fragility, Old and new challenges add up to the hard condition of those who work, or the drama of those who have lost their jobs: immigrants may meet death in the English Channel in the pursuit of the European dream after having escaped war and pandemic and even simple daily chores become painful for vulnerable people, especially during the second lockdown. Our workers’ clubs have known for decades, door to door, the reality of the large neighbourhoods; it is time to speak deeply to our class. It is time for concrete solidarity, and for a newspaper that is a truthful voice in the fog of confusion and demagogy.

In the Depth of Our Class. (2020, November). Internationalism, 12.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

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...
Read more

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...
Read more

The Party and the Unprecedented crisis in the World Order: A Crucial Decade

This first quarter-century has seen an epochal turning point in inter-power relations, triggered by China's very rapid imperialist development. Arrigo Cervetto recognised this process from the very early 1990s: Today history has sped up its pace to an unpredictable extent. [...] Analysis of the sixteenth century, as the century of accelerations and rift in world history, is a model for our Marxist vision ( La mezza guerra nel Golfo [The Half War in the Persian Gulf], January 1991). The course of imperialism was speeding up, and China's very rapid rise was opening up a new strategic phase with the new century. The United States, the leading power in the world, is being challenged by an antagonist with comparable economic strength which, moreover, openly states that it wants to provide itself with a "world class" military force within the next decade. Favoured by the 2008 global crisis and also by the pandemic crisis, China has forged ahead with its rapid rise for ...
Read more

European Imperialism and Imperialist Scission

Internationalism No. 50, April 2023 Pages 1-2 The postwar vicissitudes of European imperialism - from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 to the Treaty of Rome leading the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, and then to the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union in 1992, the euro federation in 1998 and the institutional Treaty of Lisbon in 2007 - provide an exemplary charting of the dialectic of unity and scission of unitary imperialism. The big concentrations of capital, and the powers in their grip, demonstrate the aspect of the unity of the global imperialistic system in its common interest to guarantee the production of surplus value and the conditions for exchange and circulation connected with it, together with the class rule on which it is premised. At the same time, the shares of the world’s social capital and the powers are permanently divided by the scission of the struggle to share out surplus value, markets and sources of ...
Read more