The Girls of Kabul

F**k that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it. This is what eleven years ago Joe Biden, an advocate of an unconditional withdrawal from Kabul, told Richard Holbrooke who feared for the Afghan women who had been pushed back into the darkness. Today, newspapers around the world are wringing their hands over the bad impression made by the liberal order and its values, and weeping crocodile tears for the girls of Kabul, who have been kicked out of schools and handed back to a dark, reactionary fanaticism. But the commander in chief of a West which claims to be an alliance for democracy has always considered freedom and human rights in Afghanistan to be myths for the deluded, not worth the lives of its soldiers. A hypocritical and impotent Europe has followed him, and today seems to fear only receiving a new wave of refugees.

Let us take notes and learn this lesson. The bourgeoisie has written glorious pages, when its revolutions swept away the old aristocratic and feudal regime and the torch of Enlightenment illuminated the path of humanity. However, with the 20^th century of imperialism and with the last anti-colonial revolutions, that epoch has ended forever: the circle has closed; capitalist development has embraced the whole globe; bourgeois nation states have become imperialist powers always in struggle for the partitioning of the world; the proletariat has become a real global power and the only revolutionary class.

For every instance of freedom and emancipation, as for the national aspirations which remain unresolved, woe betide relying on capital and on the array of powers in struggle; anyone who does that is destined to be utilised in this power struggle and then thrown away like a puppet. What is happening today in Afghanistan has already happened in Syria: the girls of Kabul have been deceived, used and then betrayed like the girls of Kobane in the Kurdish insurrection. The Greater Middle East, from the Mediterranean to Central Asia, is the living proof that every solution in national, ethnic or religious particularism is a dead end, while a modern proletariat is now counted in cohorts of tens or hundreds of millions. The only force that can oppose oppression and exploitation, and thereby liberate the whole of humanity, is the world proletariat. Not only does Kabul display the ideological bankruptcy of the liberal myth — through the crude disclosure of imperialism’s power-politics logic — it is also the confirmation that communist internationalism is the only way forward and the only solution.

The Girls of Kabul. (2021, August-September). Internationalism, 12.

The British Link in the Imperialist Chain

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 8 Lenin often used the metaphor of a chain that binds the world to describe imperialism. The October Revolution of 1917 broke a first link in that chain and hoped to pull the whole thing loose. The metaphor was adopted in those years by all the Bolshevik leaders and the leaders of the newly formed Third International. Within a decade, Stalin's well-known formula of socialism in one country signified the overturning of that strategic cornerstone and the defeat of the revolution in Russia, in Europe, and in the world. Dates that have come to symbolise historical change act as the synthesis of previously accumulated contradictions, and, while such a sudden change does not exhaust the possibility of future contradictions, the concentration of events in 1926 nonetheless marked a watershed that revealed the true extent that the counter-revolution had reached. The great general strike in the United Kingdom that year, wh...

German Socialism in 1917

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the worker’s movement According to Arrigo Cervetto [ Opere , Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”. The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe . “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”. “But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in Russia and the economic, productive, and social conditions in Germany – “for ...

The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto II

From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), soon to be published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. II “Neither Washington nor Moscow”, “Neither Truman nor Stalin”. These were slogans sufficient to rally the internationalist cause, not only against the influence of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) on one front, but also, on the opposite side, against the pro-American, “Westernist” leanings present in certain political currents of anarchist individualism. There was a unitary imperialism to be fought, of which the US and the USSR were both expressions. 1951, Genoa Pontedecimo In the ideological climate of the Cold War, heightened by the Korean War, a third world conflict was considered imminent; La guerra che viene (“The coming war”) was the title of a Trotskyist-inspired pamphlet that ultimately leaned in favour of the USSR, but reflected a widespread perception. The internation alist principle alone proved insufficient. To maintain...

Militarised Scientists

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 13 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science “ The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers ” [Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto ). The Manhattan Project scientists In Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists , Robert Jungk [1913-1994] writes that the Manhattan Project was a labyrinth of winding paths and dead ends. Commenting on Jungk’s romanticised account of the first phase of the history of the atomic bomb, Edward Teller [1908-2003], often called the “father” of the H-bomb, wrote: “There is no mention of the futile efforts of the scientists in 1939 to awaken the interest of the military authorities in the atomic bomb. The reader does not learn about the dismay of scientists f...

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...

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 Chinese Dragon Does Not Wait for American Rearmament

From the series News from the Silk Road According to The Washington Post , through the federal budget the White House has opened negotiations with the Senate that include long-term competition with China. The figures — $6 trillion, including infrastructure and family welfare plans — will vary in the negotiations, and will be centred on three directives. One demand is common to various proposals of expenditure: they must have a positive impact on the American productivity vis-à-vis China on the open fronts of industrial, energy and technological restructuring, or on the efficiency of welfare systems. In the case of welfare, the competition is also vis-à-vis Europe. Another calculation, attributed to Biden’s administration and the Democrats, is the enlargement of the electoral coalition in view of the next mid-term elections. Finally, there is a need to direct military expenditure, within the framework of a greater increase in the other items of discretionary expenditure, not absorb...

Science Against Time

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 14 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals The surge in China’s biopharmaceutical industry over the last decade is part of its broader scientific and technological ascent and therefore deserves our attention. Such growth presents a challenge to other imperialist powers. The Biosecure Act’s intention, to reduce the ties between American and Chinese biotech firms, has been branded by The Economist as “old-fashioned protectionism”. The British weekly recognises, however, that the clash goes well beyond a trade war. The stakes are higher. In a lengthy cover story [“The rise of Chinese science”], it writes that “China is now a leading scientific power”. Just five years ago, this was still considered only a possibility. The current question is whether this is “welcome or worrying” [June 15th, 2024]. Unity and scission The viewpoint of that publication, an authoritative voice of one of the power-houses of imperia...

Political Battles of European Leninism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 1 Thirty years after the death of Arrigo Cervetto , we are publishing here the concluding passages of the introduction to his Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) for the series Biblioteca Giovani (“Publications for young people”), soon to be published in Italian. The 1944-45 partisan war in Italy. The political battle within libertarian communism. The Korean War, and the watchword of “neither Washington nor Moscow”. The layoffs at the Ilva and Ansaldo factories, the political battle and trade union defence in the struggles of post-war restructuring. From 1953 onwards, the crisis of Stalinism, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Hungarian uprising, the 1957 Theses and the challenge of theory and strategy vis-à-vis the tendencies of unitary imperialism. The political struggle within Azione Comunista (“Communist Action”) and the Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (“Movement of the Communist Left”). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, t...

Socialism and Nationalism in the History of France

The collapse of French socialism at the outbreak of the First World War is considered by many historians to be the most significant case of its kind. We must go back in time to find its origins. The dramatic repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 was followed by a decade of shootings and the deportation of tens of thousands of revolutionary militants. Reactionary monarchical legitimism attributed the decline of France to the Revolution of 1789, but by then the nouvelles couches sociales , the new classes produced by capitalism, as Leon Gambetta defined them, demanded a politics free from economic, social and clerical ties. The Radical Party, a turning point of French politics, was its expression. The same taditional Catholic Judeophobia dating back to the Middle Ages — according to Michel Dreyfus’, research director at the CNRS in Paris, Anti-Semitism on the Left in France [Paris, 2009] — gradually transformed into the image of the Jews associated with money and modernity who des...

The Internationalism

Search This Blog