The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 50, April 2023 Page 12 Since the year 2000, at least 45,000 migrants have drowned along Mediterranean routes, more than 2,000 a year. This is the very same sea in which tens of millions of tourists bathe every summer, and these are the same routes followed by multi-storeyed cruise ships. Small boats and parasols, castaways and cruise passengers: it cannot be repeated often enough, this capitalist society has made barbarism a run-of-the-mill occurrence. There is more, beyond the boorish inadequacy of their politics, beyond the ferocious face of the Italian government which is hesitating about these shipwreck deaths, beyond the hypocritical scolding of the opposition parties, which behaved in exactly the same way when they were in government, sending back tens of thousands of poor wretches to their captors in Libya. In the face of utter indifference, year after year a de facto apartheid has been created, with millions of workers of foreign o...

Every moment of transition presents its own complexities: for our class this means that further divisions are sown within it. Such is the present moment — one when different dynamics stack up and intertwine. Past, present and future On the one hand, there is the troubled exit from the pandemic crisis, still under the threat posed by the emergence of new Covid-19 variants. The pause on redundancies has come to an end in Italy. This, albeit partially, would have spared about 520,000 jobs in Italy up until now, according to Centro Einaudi’s estimates [ 25 th Annual Report on Global Economy and Italy , June 2021]. Company closures and staff reductions (in a mixture of arrogance and callousness) have marked the summer months, only to announce a difficult autumn, when the redundancy ban will be lifted also for small businesses and services. However, it is clear how uncertain the workers’ condition remains, regardless of any collective agreement signed, and how necessary it is always to ...

America has decided to withdraw from the conflict in Afghanistan; during the past twenty years, there have been an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 casualties among opponent militias and the Afghan population, as well as about 5,000 Western casualties among the US mission, the NATO mission and private military contracting forces. An intervention that began in 2001 as a response to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11 th has, over two decades, turned into a war without end, in which the United States has seen its credibility as a world power and guarantor of global order put to the test. This is precisely why the decision to withdraw is controversial, in Washington and in other capitals. It has the air of a surrender in the face of domestic opinion marked by war-weariness; it is not known whether the conflict will really end; it is not known who will fill the void left by the United States and NATO, and how; the knock-on effects that the Afghan shock will hav...