Vaccines and world contention

Reckless Bets on Migrants in California

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 11 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism The tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on allies, partners and opponents of the United States have opened a phase of negotiations with the affected countries and caused reactions from some key States. The legal opposition from almost all areas of the US poses a test: whether States, courts, and Congress can influence trade policy and constrain the expansion of executive powers. Amid conflicting rulings, the tariffs have been reinstated – an outcome that, The New York Times remarks, has “left Washington, Wall Street, and much of the world trying to discern the future of US trade policy”. California’s dispute with the federal government has expanded to immigration policy and the domestic use of military force. The political, economic, and power struggles overlap with the electoral dimension. The establishment remains critical of or ...

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 UNITARY IMPERIALISM ISSUE

Chapter Six In 1951 Europe, and the world, was shrouded in mist. The ‘Cold War’ ideology ruled, and the war in Korea made a world conflict between the USA and the USSR seem a real possibility. In France, Great Britain, Germany and Italy, the talk was of rearmament. Europe, at that time urged by the USA, was planning the EDC (European Defence Community) to keep step with German rearmament. The concept of a ‘ unitary imperialism ’ was the strategic choice that helped the small GAAP group remain politically independent. But translating this into an ‘Internationalist Third Front’ slogan was unfortunate. It facilitated a link with French libertarian communists, but could also cause confusion with its suggestion of a ‘Third Force’ between the USA and the USSR, which in Europe was supported by important bourgeois currents. Although opposition to unitary imperialism consolidated the internationalist struggle, the theory required to be developed and per...

LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM

Chapter Three LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM An examination of the debate within the groups that were to create GAAP (Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action) gives a vivid picture of the problems that between 1948 and 1951 had to be slowly and painfully faced. Three major confrontations, progressively more serious, took place between Cervetto and Masini in the autumn of 1949 and again in the spring and autumn of 1950. As preparations were being made for the National Conference at Pontedecimo – from which GAAP would be born – debate on the nature of the organisation and on theories of the State and imperialism began to define the characteristics of the new political group, but also revealed the differences. The first step had been to look for ‘a different kind’ of communism in anarchism. Along this road Cervetto , with an ever-surer grasp, would raise the issue that had been first posed by Marx and Lenin : our militant...

Lotta Comunista: The Origins 1943-1952

Guido La Barbera Contents 9. Preface to the English Edition 13. Preface 19. Useful dates 21. Chapter One «ONE OUGHT TO KNOW WITH WHOM ONE IS DEALING» 25. The balance-of-power theory 27. Theory and the ‘strategy-party’ 29. Chapter Two THE FOUNDRY AND THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE 31. The Savona group 39. Passion disciplined by reason 40. Never again a tool in the hands of others 41. The Genoa group 46. The Sestri Ponente group 48. The groups in Rome and Tuscany 52. The strength of GAAP: ‘only a handful’ 55. Chapter Three LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM 58. Reckoning with Bordiga...

Show Warfare?

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 16 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 t...

Forward Deterrence for European Imperialism

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 3 From the series European news The next half-century will be the age of nuclear weapons . This was the grim prediction with which Emmanuel Macron concluded his speech on nuclear deterrence, delivered on March 2 nd at the Île Longue submarine base. Standing before Le Téméraire , the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine that carries a strike force equivalent to the sum of all the bombs dropped on Europe during the Second World War , the president announced a significant evolution in French nuclear doctrine. The emergence of new threats and the realignment of American priorities make it necessary, according to Macron, not only to strengthen deterrence by increasing the number of nuclear warheads, but also to rethink the deterrence strategy deep inside the European continent . His proposal is the gradual implementation o...

The National Gamble of Poland

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 3 From the series European News In a lawsuit brought by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, the Constitutional Tribunal, which is composed of judges chosen by the government, ruled that fundamental parts of the EU Treaty are incompatible with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. This ruling thus denies the primacy of European law over national law, undermining both the political assumption of continental integration and the supranational character of the EU . Vectors of Polish history We can shed light on this event if we consider the four field vectors that cross Poland: its traditional ethnic-religious nationalism, its marked Atlantic tropism, the objective attraction exerted by the European force field, and the looming threat of Russia. The general picture is global collisions: China’s irruption and the crisis in the world order have put pressure on Warsaw to define its st...

American Unknowns in the Crisis in the World Order

Plurality of Powers and the Atlantic Crisis Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Pages 1 and 2 In general terms, the United States is [the model of] society we will arrive at in a few years . It was 1962 and Arrigo Cervetto was addressing the conference of the Movement of the Communist Left, pointing to the American script as the direction in which Italian society was developing: the accelerated disintegration of the peasant world, the growth of a vast industrial proletariat, the emergence of white-collar workers , and the wage-earning strata of the service sector. The Americanisation of Italian and European society was driven primarily by the laws of capitalist development and class change, but, to some extent, it also influenced political forms through the transformation of social psychologies. I thought Marx’s observation that the most advanced capitalist country shows the way forward to the most backward was valid , Cervetto commented twenty year...

India’s Weaknesses in the Global Spotlight

Farmers’ protests around New Delhi have been going on for four months now. A controversial intervention by the Supreme Court has suspended the implementation of the new agticultural laws, but has raised questions about the dynamics between the judiciary and the executive, and has failed to unblock the negotiations between government and peasant organisations. The assault by Sikh farmers on the Red Fort during the Republic Day parade as India was displaying its military might to the outside world — the Chinese Global Times maliciously noted — paradoxically widened the protest in the huge state of Uttar Pradesh. The Modi government has been trying to revive India’s image with the 2021 Union Budget: it announced one hundred privatisations and approved the increase to 75% of the limit on direct foreign investment in insurance companies. For The Indian Express ( IEX ) this is a sign of the commitment to push ahead with reforms despite the backlash from rural India. Also for The Economi...

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