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.

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...

Forces and Consequences of the New Strategic Phase

The new strategic phase in the world balance, with its new corresponding political cycles within powers, requires attention to the materialistic, historical and dialectical method of political analysis itself. The changing forces and basic trends need to be identified; we can make conjectures about the developments in single political battles, but the outcome of these battles will always require us to contemplate a plurality of solutions: some more probable. others less. but never Just a mechanical consequence of long-term economic movements. Many fixed points of the method of political analysis are usual tools in our Marxist elaboration, but this does not mean they must be taken for granted: it is of use to recall them, in relation to the new unknowns of the political battle. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from t...

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...

Another Kind of Politics

Donald Trump has said goodbye as befits his fame, with a tragic riotous revelry. A crowd with improbable disguises took its cue from the fake news on the Internet fomented by the presidency, assaulted the Capitol and wandered around its rooms and corridors with the aim of intimidating representatives and senators. All of this, however, taking selfies: a moment of fame on Facebook or YouTube and a trophy to show off back home in deepest America, while carousing in the local pub. His successor Joe Biden will seek a rebalance in a bipartisan collaboration, but he cannot escape from the dominant trait now characterising the political show . The swearing-in ceremony was the enthronement of a republican king, according to the rites of Hollywoodian show business: pop singers, actors, directors, and rock stars, and the new reigning couple hand in hand as they admired the fireworks in the night. Meanwhile, on the other shore of the Atlantic, a similar depressing show is going on the air with ...

1919-2019. One hundred years from the foundation of the Communist International

The Analysis of a Defeat From the special series 1919-2019. One hundred years from the foundation of the Communist International It was in Lenin’s legacy that the generation of the ’20s and ’30s could have found the theoretical tools to deal with the unprecedented Stalinist counter-revolution and execute an organised retreat for the world party. Socialism in one country? Lenin had already framed the essential characteristics of that issue in 1915: given that Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism , it could be assumed that the victory of socialism would be possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone . What that first unequivocally means is that either the socialist revolution is replicated internationally, or it is inevitably defeated. Moreover, since the revolution had begun in backwards Russia, in 1917 it was already predictable that the time given to this inception in one country would be very short. Of course, ext...

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, governm...

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...

Variations and Gradations of Democracy in China

Internationalism No. 50, April 2023 Page 10 From the series Giats of Asia : the dillemas of Chinese single-party pluralism Only the materialist analysis of the intraction between structure and superstructure can explain the variety of the political forms. Why did the entrenchment of the capitalist mode of production in China occur in populist and Maoist forms? Why does Chinese imperialism express itself in CP single-party pluralism and not, for example, in the classical multi-party system of imperialist democracy? This specific political analysis does not regard the study of the economic causes which determine China’s political struggles, a scientific investigation which is its premise, “but the way” in which these struggles present themselves in the superstructure. “By analysing basic economic facts, Marxism can identify at first the interests which find expression in the political struggle. The form in which these interests appear politically, however, is a qu...

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...

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 Internationalism

Search This Blog