After show politics and show diplomacy, have we sunk to the obscenity of show warfare? On the surface, this is true. The Pentagon’s video game-style communications, where airstrikes, missile launches, and deadly explosions are set to music for social media clips, certainly suggest so. It matters little that a hundred schoolgirls were also blown to bits as artificial intelligence took centre stage on the battlefield. In reality, war propaganda has always showcased destruction and mocked the enemy; today in Washington, in the era of the high-tech groups of television and social media democracy, the only thing that has changed is the style and the means used to inflame fanaticisms and stuff people’s brains. In Tehran, dominated by a parasitic bourgeoisie that feeds on oil revenues and is intertwined with the militias and hierarchies of the ayatollahs, the messaging is old-fashioned, carried out through public hangings of the young people who took to the streets.
Above all, it is Donald Trump’s war-mongering narcissism which is truly staggering, revealed in his compulsive urge to make constant announcements in the public arena – albeit a virtual one of televisions and mobile phones – of military offensives or negotiations. One of the disasters of show politics is that it has given a global audience to the most grotesque forms of demagoguery.
Beneath the surface, however, something much deeper is at work. Trump is a symptom, not the disease; he embodies the convulsions of the crisis in the world order. The US is alarmed by China’s irruption and seeks to shift the burden of its decline elsewhere, be it onto allies or adversaries. The Middle East and the Persian Gulf remain an energy treasure trove that sustains centuries-old feuds. Tel Aviv believes it can deal Tehran a decisive blow. Washington once claimed to be the guardian of the energy artery in the Strait of Hormuz; today it is tempted to blackmail Beijing with the weapon of oil. The Gulf petro-monarchies believed themselves protected by the United States; now they are being dragged into the conflict. Turkey and Pakistan are entering the fray. Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, and many others are watching in dismay as American strategic improvisation has precipitated a global energy crisis in the absence of any plan. China is taking advantage of this to present itself as a force for stability.
What, then, is to be done? The only possible peace is a revolutionary peace. There are 120 million proletarians in the Middle East, 200 million in Europe, and more than 2 billion worldwide. Only our class can oppose the barbarism of war. Only communist internationalism can show our class the way forward.
The situation in the Gulf, once again drenched in blood, reinforces the urgent need for an internationalist stance. The social foundations for internationalism exist in the Gulf too, in the form of a wage-earning class that has been expanding and is now estimated at around 50 million across both shores, roughly half of whom are in Iran. This figure rises to 120 million if we broaden our view to the whole of the Middle East, including Turkey.
On the Arab side of the Gulf, in particular, a substantial proportion of the workforce consists of immigrants, mainly from South and South-East Asia. In the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, stretching from Oman to Kuwait, the foreign population is estimated at 35 million, more than half the total; the proportion of immigrants in the wage-earning workforce is certainly higher. They too will inevitably be among the victims of this war.
Wage earners and immigrants: this is a cross-section of a social reality which, beyond any cultural
differences, unites the whole world and underpins the necessity and potential of internationalist class-based politics.
Rapidly ageing metropolises
In old
metropolises such as Italy, an ageing population makes immigration inevitable. Laura Zanfrini, of the Catholic University of Milan, writes about this topic in the ISMU Foundation’s 31st Report on Migration 2025: in 2022, the number of employed people aged 55 and over was already almost equal to that of those aged 35 or under; just eleven years earlier, in 2011, young people outnumbered older people by almost two to one.
It is precisely the pace of change that gives cause for reflection and makes recourse to immigration inevitable, given that even a (wholly hypothetical) demographic revival would come too late. Instead, according to INPS data, 54% of non-EU immigrant workers are under 40, compared with 43% on average.
Work as a means of integration
Graziella Romeo, of Bocconi University, laments in Il Sole 24 Ore the confusion between humanitarian migration and labour migration
[February 18th]. She too refers to an ageing population and labour shortages, noting that many European governments, even those politically hostile to immigration
, are in fact having to adopt policies of selective openness for labour
. In addition to Italy, she cites Austria, Germany, Greece, Ireland, France, Denmark, and Spain.
This analysis also revisits the criticism of the entry quota system, which has proved to be legally rudimentary and administratively ineffective
. In the case of Italy, we have repeatedly documented these quotas’ poor results in terms of actually translating into employment contracts. This leads many migrants to opt for the asylum route. However, in such instances, if their asylum application is rejected, the only option left for the migrant is undeclared work: as a farm labourer, a delivery rider, or whatever else. They will certainly always find an employer ready to welcome
them to exploit them to the full.
This is a path that many foreigners have been forced to follow, which highlights just how hypocritical the very distinction between humanitarian
and economic migrants is: all those who undertake journeys – sometimes long and often dangerous – to reach a European metropolis do so because they are driven by the necessities of life and the risk of losing it, due to wars, famines, or simple
hunger. What compels them is the existence of a global labour market, and it is surprising, to say the least, to hear those who condemn the closure of markets for goods and capital erecting walls when it comes to people moving around to seek better living conditions.
Labour migration is an unstoppable phenomenon, as the very history of Italy and other European countries demonstrates. And if the problem is how to integrate the new arrivals, the answer lies in more than a century of experience, which Romeo herself confirms in her article: Work, in fact, represents the main instrument of social integration
.
Negative selection
Here we see the strategic short-sightedness of a large section of the bourgeoisie and, above all, of political parties more concerned with gaining or losing zero-point-something
percentage of the vote in the next elections. The very placement of migrants in low-skilled jobs, even below their level of training, does indeed allow for profiting from indecently low wages: it is occupational segregation
, writes the ISMU report, which also becomes wage segregation. But it is a vicious circle, leading to what the Bank of Italy calls negative selection
: an inability, under such conditions, to attract skilled labour.
Italy is the country where placement in sectors and firms with the lowest wages has the greatest impact on wage differentials
[ISMU]. Moreover, it is also the country where the proportion of foreigners who know the language is lowest, as is the proportion of those attending Italian language courses. It is not difficult to see this as a sign of the dysfunction of the State apparatus. And from this point of view, the work of the volunteers of the Workers’ Clubs committed to teaching Italian to migrants is commendable, given that it has been shown that knowledge of the language is a key factor in finding work.
European contradictions
This is not to say that other countries have solved all their problems, starting with Europe’s largest manufacturing hub, Germany. There too, it is clear that the aim is to exploit the immigration pool to the full, without incurring a backlash from an ageing, property-owning, and fearful population.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, who is by no means particularly welcoming, now maintains that anyone who comes here should be able to work, and quickly
, because the best integration is integration into the world of work
[Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 23rd]. For this reason, he proposes that even those who have not yet been granted asylum should be allowed to work after just three months, contrary to current rules. The Frankfurt newspaper, however, is critical, as it sees the new rule as a signal
that everyone is allowed to work after three months
– a pull factor
which it views negatively.
Yet, the German think tank IFO warns that by 2050 the population in Germany will have declined by almost 5%, not 1% as previously estimated. Additionally, the influx of migrants will also be lower than forecast if the government tightens its policies in this regard: in 2025, the net inflow already stood at only 225,000, compared to the 454,000 previously estimated [Financial Times, February 18th].
The strength of our class
Handelsblatt [January 23rd] reported another IFO study, according to which the arrival of 100 refugees per 10,000 inhabitants leads to the creation of seven new businesses and 27 new jobs.
This is a figure that deserves careful consideration, as it proves that immigration does not take away jobs
, but, on the contrary, increases the numerical strength of our class. It is now up to the political struggle of our Leninist party to translate this into internationalist consciousness.