The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025, Special Issue Pages III and IV From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) , recently 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 titl...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025, Special Issue Pages I and II From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) , recently 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 emi...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 16 The Unstoppable Force: Capital’s Demand for Migrant Labour “Before Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s prime minister, she pledged to cut immigration. Since she has been in government the number of non-EU work visas issued by Italy has increased”. This is how The Economist of April 26th summarises the schizophrenia of their politics; and this is not only true in Italy: “Net migration also surged in post-Brexit Britain”. The needs of the economic system do not coincide with the rhetoric of parliamentarism. And vice versa. Schizophrenia and imbalances in their politics Returning to Italy, the Bank of Italy has pointed out that by 2040, in just fifteen years, there will be a shortage of five million people of working age, which could lead to an estimated 11% contraction in GDP. This is why even Italy’s “sovereignist” government is preparing to w...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 15 From the series The world energy battle In her speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a European supergrid project: A new plan that we will present in February aimed at reducing energy prices will remove any remaining barriers to our Energy Union [ Euractiv , January 21 st ]. The lesson of the Spanish blackout The blackout in Spain has highlighted the need for an integrated European grid. According to Stephen Magennis, Global Head of E&U (Energy and Utilities) at Expleo, an engineering services company, the supergrid is an interconnected network of high-voltage transmission lines that will allow a large-scale exchange of electricity, particularly renewable energy, across countries . A supergrid would...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 14 From the series Atoms and industrialisation of science On August 6 th , 1945, a uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and on August 9 th a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. Contradicting the American military and political leaders’ forecasts of a ten-to-twenty-year delay, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb just four years later, in 1949. According to the world’s leading nuclear scientists, and in particular Niels Bohr [1885-1962], this was not a surprise. Having worked with Soviet scientists, they understood that their science and technology was no less competent than their own. The history of Russian nuclear science For the history of Russian nuclear power, we shall mainly follow David Holloway’s 1994 work Stalin and the Bomb , assisted by Robert Jungk’s still valid Brighter Tha...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 13 From the series War industry and European defence The Economist provides an illustration of how the use of unmanned and remotely piloted systems in warfare is expanding. In Africa, 30 governments are equipped with UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or drones. In 2024, they were deployed 484 times in local wars in thirteen different countries, twice as frequently as the previous year, causing 1,200 deaths. The most widely used drone on the continent is the TB2, produced by the Turkish company Baykar, which has seen a decade of extensive use in conflicts across Syria, Azerbaijan-Armenia, and Ukraine. LBA Systems and MALE drones At the Paris Air Show in mid-June, an agreement was signed to establish LBA Systems, a joint venture between Baykar and Leonardo. The aim is to produce the Akinci and TB3 drones, the latter of ...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 12 From the series Big groups in China An important element in analysing the changes in single-party pluralism in China is the investigation of the struggle between different groups and fractions of the bourgeoisie. The study of key economic sectors can reveal shifts in internal balances and, at the same time, allow us to follow the rise of Chinese imperialism through concrete examples of companies that are projecting themselves onto the world market. One of these key sectors is construction and real estate. This is a vast field, ranging from cement production to energy, transport infrastructure, and housing. Scrolling through the ranking of the 500 largest Chinese companies, we find 29 construction companies, with $2.4 trillion in assets and 2.8 million employees in total: ten years ago, there were...