The Mediterranean

Since the year 2000, at least 45,000 migrants have drowned along Mediterranean routes, more than 2,000 a year. This is the very same sea in which tens of millions of tourists bathe every summer, and these are the same routes followed by multi-storeyed cruise ships. Small boats and parasols, castaways and cruise passengers: it cannot be repeated often enough, this capitalist society has made barbarism a run-of-the-mill occurrence.

There is more, beyond the boorish inadequacy of their politics, beyond the ferocious face of the Italian government which is hesitating about these shipwreck deaths, beyond the hypocritical scolding of the opposition parties, which behaved in exactly the same way when they were in government, sending back tens of thousands of poor wretches to their captors in Libya. In the face of utter indifference, year after year a de facto apartheid has been created, with millions of workers of foreign origin confined to the most thankless jobs in a regime of wage segregation. There are Ukrainian or Ecuadorian carers, Romanian and Moroccan bricklayers, African farmhands, Bengali or Senegalese manual labourers and factory workers. Then we have attendants, health workers, cleaners and drivers: migrant workers of all ethnicities and nationalities. They are an integral part of the social landscape of both the cities and the countryside. However, they are invisible in their ubiquity, with a society which pays no attention to their unequal pay, their difficulty in accessing decent housing, the ordeal of family reunification or the vexatious problems encountered in the bureaucratic process of obtaining a residence permit. Further-more, the demographic winter means that there is no other option but to resort to migrants, including for skilled jobs; ageing Western powers are already competing for imported labour. Yet their political parties are on the hunt for an easy electoral consensus, and are more than happy to stoke the flames of the most hateful xenophobic fears.

This happens in Italy, and the same fate awaits migrants in Spain, where the disgrace of barbed wire fences against migrants in Ceuta and Melilla has become an equally inhuman standard practice. It also happens in London, where even a government staffed by second-generation immigrants plans on deporting to Rwanda those who attempt to land in Britain in search of a better life. And in Paris, where over the next three years the government will double down on its securitarian migration policy, by signing an agreement with the UK, which will pay €541 million to reinforce police controls in Calais and prevent migrants from crossing the Channel. This is the reality of "civilised" Europe - and we are only scratching the surface.

We cannot accept a society that has made barbarism a banality of everyday life. Fighting for the unity and defence of our class, the struggle for a truly human society, a communist society, is the alternative between civilisation and barbarism.

Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Pages 1 and 2 The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in ...

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...

End of the Assad Dynasty in Damascus

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 The fall of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, with the president, in power since 2000, fleeing to Moscow, took international chancelleries by surprise. The conflict had appeared frozen since 2020, the year of the last Russian-Turkish agreements, which marked a de facto partition of spheres of influence and territorial control in the country. Since 2023, a normalisation of relations between Damascus and the Arab capitals had been underway, to the point that just a few days before the offensive, unleashed by Islamist rebel militias supported by Turkey and Qatar, the Syrian presidency had been a guest at an. Arab League conference in Riyadh. The “death knell” of Doha The astonishment of analysts and commentators at the sudden collapse of the regime was accompanied by widespread disquiet, summed up in the formula of “catastrophic success” evoked by David Ignatius, columnist of The Washington Post and close to A...

Chinese Rearmament Projects Itself in Asia

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 5 From the series Asian giants Trends in rearmament spending and comparisons of military equipment are increasingly set to dominate coverage of the contention between powers in the crisis in the world order . The military factor has entered the strategic debate, accompanied by a wealth of figures and technical details. The increase in military spending as a percentage of GDP represents a widespread sign of the rearmament cycle at this juncture, but spending alone cannot entirely explain the situation, given the qualitatively different natures of the arsenals being compared. Nor are comparisons between this or that type of weapon useful in themselves, because ultimately all weapons are only ever used in combination with the complex military means available to a power, either in alliance or in conflict with other powers in the system of States. Therefore, while it is difficult to assess the real significa...

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...

The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto I

From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), soon to be published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. I Arrigo Cervetto was the founder, theorist, and leader of Lotta Comunista. From his first involvement in the partisan war in 1943-44 until his death in February 1995, his more than 50 years of political activity can be summarised in around twenty key battles. It goes without saying that those struggles - aimed at the restoration and develop ment of Marxist theory on economics, politics, social change, and international relations - are the common thread running through this selection of his writings. His memoirs, Quaderni 198I82 (“Notebooks 1981-82”), provide an account of those battles up to 1980. First battle: the factory and the partisan war The son of emigrants to Argentina from Savona in Italy, Cervetto was born in Buenos Aires in April 1927, a circumstance that would later influence his thinking about international politics. His early for...

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

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 16 Uneven development is a fundamental law of capitalism. We have a macroscopic expression of this in the changing balance of power between States: Atlantic decline and Asian rise are the key dynamics behind the political processes of this era, including wars caused by the crisis in the world order. But behind all this there is a differentiated economic trend, starting from companies and sectors: hence the differentiated conditions for wage earners. And this is the element to keep in mind for an effective defensive struggle. It’s only the beginning The electrical and digital restructuring imposed by global market competition affects various production sectors. The car industry is the most obvious, due to the familiarity of the companies and brands involved. We have already reported on the agreement reached before Christmas at Volkswagen, which can be summarised as a reduction of 35,000 employees by 2030. Die Zeit [De...

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 ...

Battle Over Times for European Rearmament

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Pages 1 and 2 In current Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, appeasement stands for cowardly and illusory pacification, as exemplified by the Munich Agreement of 1938, which conceded to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia without stopping the march towards world war. Were Shigeru Ishiba, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz really, as has been said, the Neville Chamberlains of the tariff war, accepting appeasement on the 15% tariff in an ignominious surrender to Donald Trump's blackmail? And has Trump really revealed himself in Anchorage, Alaska, to be an appeaser towards Vladimir Putin? Was it, finally, only the firmness of the Europeans at the Washington summit which convinced Trump to remain as one of the guarantors of Ukraine's security? The plague of television and social media diplomacy feeds on simplistic and propagandistic images, but also consumes and contradicts them at the pace of...

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