Internationalism Number 86

China’s Electromechanical Champions

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 9 From the series Major industrial groups in China Analysing the WTO data for 2023, it emerges that China exported goods worth $3,379 billion, surpassing the European Union and the United States. Industrial machinery accounted for over 7% of exports and electrical machinery 9%. In the same sectors, Chinese imports did not reach 40% of the value of exports, indicating that these are among the pillars of Beijing’s export economy. Sany Heavy Industry In this newspaper we have already examined the Chinese mechanical engineering giant Sinomach. But in the field of machine construction, Sany Heavy Industry also holds a prominent position, particularly in excavators, cranes, industrial elevators, and cement machinery. The company, based in Changsha (Hunan) since 1991, was founded by Liang Wengen, who had previously been an executive at a State-owned arms factory, and is its main shareholder. Sany had a 2023 turnover...

The EU Commission Plans for Rearmament and a Clean Industrial Deal

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 From the series European news Following the European elections which took place on June 6th - 9th, the leaders of the Member States met on June 27th at the European Council. Ursula von der Leyen was nominated as president of the next European Commission, after she was chosen as the European People’s Party’s (EPP) Spitzenkandidat (“leading candidate”). The agreement also included the election of former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa as president of the European Council, and the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Subsequently, on July 18th, Parliament elected von der Leyen as president of the Commission by an absolute majority, with 401 votes out of 719 MEPs. On September 17th, von der Leyen presented her team of commissioners to the European Parliament and, two days later, the Council adopted this list of...

The Munich Soviet Republic

Internationalism No. 87, May 2026 Page 9 From the series Pages from the history of the workers' movement The Munich Soviet Republic With the Munich Soviet Republic, the German Revolution, which began on November 9 th , 1918, seemed to be flickering its last. In the Bavarian capital, after the fall of the Wittelsbachs, power had fallen into the hands of Kurt Eisner, a pacifist intellectual, member of the USPD, and contributor to the revisionist newspaper Münchner Post since 1910. Eisner had managed something unheard of in Germany – to gain the support of the farmers, in particular Karl Gandorfer, head of the Bavarian Peasants' League. Workers, soldiers, and peasants "Traditionally a stronghold of Catholicism and reaction" , Bavaria "had declared early for the November Revolution, largely because its people hated the Prussians and re...

The Four Petrochemical Giants

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 15 From the series Major industrial groups in China When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, oil extraction in the country was practically non-existent, and the country was completely dependent on imports. The exploration and development of domestic oil resources required a major effort. As Jin Zhang reports in his book Catch-up and Competitiveness in China [Routledge, 2004]: The required massive human resources were supplied by the People's Liberation Army (PLA). In 1952, Mao Zedong ordered the reorganisation of the 57 th Division of the 19 th Army of the PLA into the 1 st Division of Oil . The effort led to the discovery of several oil fields, the most significant of which was in Daqing, Heilongjiang Province, in northeastern China, in 1959. It became operational the following year, reaching a ...

Innovation Incubators

Internationalism No. 87, May 2026 Page 7 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals II South San Francisco is considered the birthplace of biotechnology. Here, in 1976, the biochemist Herbert W. Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the venture capitalist Robert Swanson founded Genentech, commonly considered the first biotech company in the world. Swanson had studied at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), then moved to San Francisco and cultivated a passion for molecular biology. Genetic engineering was about to take off in Californian universities, starting with the pioneering DNA manipulation experiments carried out by Boyer in collaboration with Stanley N. Cohen, a geneticist at Stanford University. At the time, observes Nature , leading scientists proposing involvement with industry was considered heresy . Swanson and Boyer...

The Court: From Civil Rights to Individual Rights

Internationalism No. 87, May 2026 Page 11 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism Edward Lazarus, a clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the Supreme Court in 1988–89 and chief of staff at the Federal Communications Commission during Barack Obama's administration, published Closed Chambers in 1998, an account of the work of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Lazarus considers that it is history and geography that have shaped the character of the Court. The author identifies four decisive battles in its history: in 1937, the bitter clash over the powers and economic policy of the New Deal; in 1954, the fierce battle over the civil rights of Black Americans; in 1973, the struggle for individual rights; and in 1974, the ruling that marked the end of Richard Nixon's presidency. Lazarus's supreme regionalism ...

The Social Brain and Artificial Intelligence

Internationalism No. 87, February 2026 Page 1 From the series Artificial Intelligence There is an anthropological question linked to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on human consciousness, analogous – though at a higher level – to the effects of online communication and even television. We consider three aspects of this. Physical , concerning changes in the brain’s neural connections as a social product. Functional , concerning capacities that are stunted or developed by the internet and the use of artificial intelligence. Epistemological , concerning the implications for the theory of knowledge and the very notion of an objectively defined principle of reality . The Church, as it has already done with biotechnologies capable of intervening in human DNA, is developing its own reflection on artificial intelligence and its anthropological impli...

American Convulsion and the Crisis in the World Order in Hormuz

Internationalism No. 87, May 2026 Pages 4 and 5 With the war against Iran and the naval blockade of Iranian ports in response to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the United States has plunged the energy artery of the Persian Gulf into chaos. This has triggered economic, social, and political upheavals from East to West, the full extent and uneven distribution of which have yet to be fully assessed. That the third Gulf War of American imperialism would have unintended consequences had long been written into the laws of politics. Every political action, all the more so if conducted by military means, is part of a parallelogram of forces, the result of which can never correspond to the intention of any individual actor involved. The objective each power pursues is either hindered or aided by the others. Therefore, the course of the conflict will correspond, to a greater or lesser extent, ...

Rearmament and State Policies in the Battle for Minerals

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 13 In 2025, China was the only power to respond decisively to Donald Trump's trade war, forcing him into an autumn truce through tariffs and, primarily, by blocking exports of some critical minerals. According to the White House, Beijing made a mistake in using the nuclear weapon of its near-monopoly on rare earths, as it triggered a global rush to diversify supplies. That process is indeed underway, but given its high costs and long timescales, it does not seem able to neutralise, at least in the short term, the powerful mineral deterrent established by the Chinese government. A multilateral Trump The US government's counteroffensive is underway both domestically, in an attempt to rebuild an industrial sector for the extraction and processing of these substances in the US, and internationally, through a series of agreements. Among the mo...

Revolutionary Spain

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 8 From the series Spain 1936 Spain, Marx observed in 1854 in the article Revolutionary Spain , was the first European feudal State to develop absolutism in its most unmitigated form , but political and fiscal centralisation never really took hold there. Similarly, it was Spanish caravels that opened up the era of the world market, and the Kingdom of Spain was the first great bourgeois maritime-trading empire. Yet that early and rapid rise ended up transforming itself from a favourable precondition for development into the cause of Spain's subsequent failure. In fact, the maritime overextension of the empire, combined with the failed political and fiscal centralisation of the Iberian heartland, resulted in stagnation and a subsequently inglorious and protracted putrefaction . While the economic and social arteries were becoming scl...

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