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 offensive and drive a wedge between the EU and Beijing; Europe has laid the blame precisely on British and American protectionism; China, and to some extent Russia too, are always on the offensive in offering their vaccines. But those offers are a drop in the ocean of the billions of doses which are required. India, which aspired to be the world's pharmacy and a supplier for Africa and Asia, has been dragged into the maelstrom of its worst crisis since independence - one that is casting a shadow over its viability as a state and its ambitions as a power. It is now acknowledged that the world population must be vaccinated, but there remains a gulf between words and deeds. Furthermore, how many millions of deaths, in the end, will the deadly mixture of a lack of foresight, the struggle between capitals, the struggle between powers and the inability to unite efforts towards a collective goal have cost?

We can only repeat the same thing: the pandemic simultaneously shows the enormous potential of the productive forces, but also the fatal contradiction of which they are prisoners — that of a society divided into classes and the contention between states. Communism is a necessity for humanity: that is where the commitment to a truly humane society lies.

Engels in the New Century. (2021, June). Internationalism, 12.

Collaboration and Nationalism in Ukraine and Belarus

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 8 In her essay Economia di guerra e inquadramento della società in URSS ( The War Economy and Social Control in the USSR ), Rebecca Manley writes that initially the German advance in Russia was welcomed by the local population and threatened the legitimacy of the reigning power , while party leaders, officials, and factory managers often jumped ship , with the abandoned populace openly cursing them [A. Aglan and R. Frank, La guerra-mondo 1937-1947 ( The World War 1937-1947 ), Einaudi, 2015-16]. Her account goes on to describe the government's gradual reassertion of control: The cost in human lives was increasing and shortages were continuing to worsen [...] it was only with the victory of Stalingrad that Stalin and the Soviet system recovered a central role in war propaganda . Overall, according to this author, the war years saw a surge of popular patr...

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 struggle...

Electoral Upheaval and Turmoil Inside Labour

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 3 From the series European news As Henry Kissinger wrote in his book Leadership (Penguin, 2022), in the British political system, parties are "rigorously institutionalized": "An electoral victory functions first to empower a party in parliament and, as a consequence of that, to install a new premier". Unlike presidential systems such as the American one, "the British system elevates members of the cabinet to the highest echelons of their party". The prime minister's authority "rests primarily on the maintenance of party discipline" because "the dissent of an influential clique, or the machinations of a single magnetic personality, can limit the premier's ability to pursue desired political objectives". "In extraordinary circumstances", warns Kissinger, ...

Beijing, Ambivalent About the G2, Opts for Temporary Stability

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Pages 4 and 5 Kolkata's The Telegraph announces "a rupture with the principle of post-War pacifism: that Japan and Germany had adhered to for decades". The West Bengal-based newspaper was founded in 1982 by Aveek Sarkar, a former protégé of Harold Evans at The Sunday Times in London. The editorial highlights certain aspects worth noting. First and foremost, there is a psychological dimension to the crises in the world order . The ideologies of the post-war order, imposed on the defeated bourgeoisies of Germany and Japan for decades, have permeated the whole of society to the point of becoming second nature that shape the German and Japanese ruling classes themselves. But today, a re-evaluation of these ideologies is in turn being imposed by an uneven development that, over the long term, has been economic, political, and military. This is a Z...

Multiple Games in the Third Gulf War

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 6 The conflict in the Gulf has entered its third month, marked by a precarious truce that reflects a strategic stalemate, with Tehran’s “selective blockade” of Hormuz and the US Navy’s “counter-blockade” of Iranian ports. According to the Pakistani daily Dawn , bilateral negotiations — mediated by Islamabad with the explicit support of Riyadh and the “discreet and indirect” backing of Beijing — appear to centre on the price of reopening the energy artery. For Washington, writes the Saudi newspaper Asharq al-Awsat , the negotiations should yield some kind of “tangible result” on the nuclear issue, allowing both sides to “claim victory”, given that the priority is resuming commercial traffic. To this end, granting Tehran the opportunity to collect some form of revenue has not been ruled out. Iranian “pragmatic” factions are raising the idea of maritime tr...

Strikes at Samsung

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 7 From the series Workers’ struggles in the world The struggle waged by Samsung Electronics workers over the last three years has a particular significance in the panorama of workers’ struggles around the world. A great deal of this significance undoubtedly derives from its having been the first ever strike at the South Korean company where, moreover, no trade union existed until a few years ago: until 2020, Samsung was strictly non-union. But it is also important because, according to trade-union sources, it was the world’s first strike in the crucial chip-production sector. Today these are fundamental and indispensable components for a myriad of products, for both civilian and military use, and they are becoming even more important with the increasing hardware needs of artificial intelligence. This struggle therefore concerns a prod...

The EU Commission Plans for Rearmament and a Clean Industrial Deal

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 From the series European news Following the European elections which took place on June 6th - 9th, the leaders of the Member States met on June 27th at the European Council. Ursula von der Leyen was nominated as president of the next European Commission, after she was chosen as the European People’s Party’s (EPP) Spitzenkandidat (“leading candidate”). The agreement also included the election of former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa as president of the European Council, and the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Subsequently, on July 18th, Parliament elected von der Leyen as president of the Commission by an absolute majority, with 401 votes out of 719 MEPs. On September 17th, von der Leyen presented her team of commissioners to the European Parliament and, two days later, the Council adopted this list of...

The KPD After January 1919

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 9 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The Weimar Republic took shape in the first six months of 1919, as Gustav Noske's Freikorps suppressed the revolution. The bourgeois parties of Weimar In the elections for the Constituent Assembly on January 19 th , 1919, the large corporate groups of German capital financed and steered the political forces. The four major banks alone contributed at least 30 million marks to the election funds of the various parties. At the head of the bourgeois forces were the great electricity magnates Walther Rathenau of AEG and Carl Friedrich von Siemens for the Democrats; Karl Helfferich of Deutsche Bank and Alfred Hugenberg of Krupp for the far-right nationalists; and major industrialists such as Hugo Stinnes for Gustav Stresemann's People's Party. Th...

An Italianised Europe

Internationalism No. 88 - June 2026 Page 2 In almost four years in government, Italy’s renewed stability has been a key asset for Giorgia Meloni, also encouraging the European adaptation of the italian-style immigrants . However, the backlash from the referendum defeat, a real own goal, has opened a glaring rift that runs through both the end of the current legislature and the prospects for the next. There is debate over the political exhaustion of her government, forced to navigate the narrow path of budgetary statistics and under the threat of what the Financial Times has termed a “coming energy crisis” triggered by the blockade of the strait of Hormuz. At the referendum polls, the left-wing broad coalition “discovered” that it could compete with the centre-right, but no poll shows any substantial changes in the balance of power. The scenario of a “deadlock”, or a narrow majority for one...

Lotta Comunista: The Origins 1943-1952

Guido La Barbera Contents 9. Preface to the English Edition 13. Preface 19. Useful dates 21. Chapter One «ONE OUGHT TO KNOW WITH WHOM ONE IS DEALING» 25. The balance-of-power theory 27. Theory and the ‘strategy-party’ 29. Chapter Two THE FOUNDRY AND THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE 31. The Savona group 39. Passion disciplined by reason 40. Never again a tool in the hands of others 41. The Genoa group 46. The Sestri Ponente group 48. The groups in Rome and Tuscany 52. The strength of GAAP: ‘only a handful’ 55. Chapter Three LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM 58. Reckoning with Bordiga...

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