Internationalism Number 71

No. 71, January 2025

Title	Author	Page
Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order		Pages 1 and 2
European news The EU Commission Plans for Rearmament and a Clean Industrial Deal		Page 3
End of the Assad Dynasty in Damascus		Page 4
The Syrian Crisis Reveals the Limits of the Russian Power		Page 5
Pages from the history of the worker’s movement The SPD Faces the War		Page 6
Principles of Marxism Marx’s Logic		Page 7
Elections in the USA Democratic Defeat in the Urban Vote		Page 8
Trump Relaunches the Tariff War		Page 9
Chronicles of the new American nationalism States and Courts Counterbalance Trump		Page 10
Jakarta Gives Priority to the BRICS Invitation		Page 11
Elon Musk: Space Entrepreneur		Page 12
Korean Crisis and Japanese Flexibility		Page 13
Industry and pharmaceuticals Science Against Time		Page 14
The world car battle Toyota Chases Tesla and Aims for Supremacy		Page 15
Crisis in Europe’s Auto Industry: Labour Struggles, Class Conflict, and the End of Social Partnership		Page 16
Europeanists in Combat Boots		Page 16

Other issues

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...

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...

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...

Crisis of the Order and European Question

The dialectic between economic weapons and weapons of war in the crisis in the world order requires specific reflection where concerns European imperialism. Dealing with monetary weapons in their book War by Other Means , Jennifer Harris and Robert Blackwill place great emphasis on the strategic success of the European monetary federation: Through forging the eurozone, Germany has also realized its century-long quest for a pliant European market for German manufacturing. Both of these were things it had previously tried (and failed) to accomplish by force. The long quotation below is from the speech Helmut Schmidt made to the Bundesbank Council in 1978 in favour of the EMS, the European Monetary System that would lead to the euro. Classified as confidential for 30 years, the text was declassified in 2008. There emerges from it a highly political vision of the German use of the monetary weapon and of the strategic weight of a single continental market: What now concerns German pol...

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 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 ...

Historical Constants and Strategic Surprise

The Strategic Surprise of the Agreement between Beijing and Tehran and the Suggestion of a Six-Power Concert The agreement between Beijing and Tehran falls under the definition of strategic surprise , i.e., events that entirely appertain to the political realm and mark a change or an about-turn in the balance among the powers. New alliances, the breakdown of alliances, the overturning of coalitions, diplomatic openings or unexpected military sorties: these are the regular novelties of international politics that Arrigo Cervetto wrote about. However, if the agreement was an unforeseeable event in itself, the long-term objective economic and political trends. that have determined it and made it possible are entirely investigable. The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the end of December 1979 was interpreted by the United States as a potential threat to the oil routes of the Persian Gulf, and it was a contemporary revival of the Great Game , which had set the British Empire agai...

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...

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...

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 ...

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