Chronicles of the new American nationalism

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 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 ...

Beijing in the Factory

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 16 Beijing in the Factory China Shock 2.0 . This means that Beijing has long since moved beyond being the world’s factory merely for T-shirts, shoes, refrigerators, or laptops. While the capital it has channelled abroad via the Silk Road exceeds $1 trillion, China has moved up the value chain to more technologically advanced and complex manufacturing. This is evident in the global battle over cars and electric vehicles, where Chinese exports have reached seven million units. The consequences of the first shocks have by no means been absorbed; the reaction to American deindustrialisation is among the forces that brought a chaotic huckster to the White House. Today, Europe is the epicentre of the second shock . Among the large corporate groups, their lobbies, and their political parties, there...

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...

The KPD After January 1919

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 9 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The Weimar Republic took shape in the first six months of 1919, as Gustav Noske's Freikorps suppressed the revolution. The bourgeois parties of Weimar In the elections for the Constituent Assembly on January 19 th , 1919, the large corporate groups of German capital financed and steered the political forces. The four major banks alone contributed at least 30 million marks to the election funds of the various parties. At the head of the bourgeois forces were the great electricity magnates Walther Rathenau of AEG and Carl Friedrich von Siemens for the Democrats; Karl Helfferich of Deutsche Bank and Alfred Hugenberg of Krupp for the far-right nationalists; and major industrialists such as Hugo Stinnes for Gustav Stresemann's People's Party. Th...

Fox and “The Wall Street Journal” in the White House

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 14 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism The mass media empire financed by Rupert Murdoch includes, in America, Fox Broadcasting, established in 1986, the 24-hour cable news channel Fox News , launched in 1996, and Fox Business , created in 2007; the same year Murdoch acquired the prestigious newspaper The Wall Street Journal . Murdoch, who since 2020 has also owned the streaming platform Tubi, first arrived in the country in the 1970s with the tabloid New York Post . In terms of trade and foreign policy, as well as style, the group covers a wide range of positions. Fox is the TV network that has most favoured Donald Trump and most benefited from his political rise, compared to its competitors. Within the group, Fox News is the brand most in tune with the current administration: some commentators have ...

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...

Oil as a Weapon

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 12 In its editorial on May 17th, the Financial Times sounded the alarm over the looming energy crunch . In reality, the alarm has been sounding ever since Iran took full control of the Strait of Hormuz on March 4th, and even more so since the United States, despite the ceasefire of April 8th, imposed its own counter-blockade, with dozens of warships, on April 13th. Negotiations, whether genuine or feigned, Omani mediation, and American threats to finish the job — a campaign stretched on February 28th with the killings of Tehran’s leaders — have prolonged the stalemate in the third American war in the Persian Gulf. The alarm over the looming energy crisis became official on May 13th, when the International Energy Agency (IEA) published its report on the global oil market: More than ten weeks after the war in the Middle East began, mounting supply losses...

Strikes at Samsung

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 7 From the series Workers’ struggles in the world The struggle waged by Samsung Electronics workers over the last three years has a particular significance in the panorama of workers’ struggles around the world. A great deal of this significance undoubtedly derives from its having been the first ever strike at the South Korean company where, moreover, no trade union existed until a few years ago: until 2020, Samsung was strictly non-union. But it is also important because, according to trade-union sources, it was the world’s first strike in the crucial chip-production sector. Today these are fundamental and indispensable components for a myriad of products, for both civilian and military use, and they are becoming even more important with the increasing hardware needs of artificial intelligence. This struggle therefore concerns a prod...

The Internationalism