The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 15 From the series The world car battle It is predicted that next year in China the sales of electrified vehicles (mainly battery-powered or hybrid) will for the first time overtake those of cars with an internal combustion engine. This development will mark a historic about turn which will put the world's biggest auto market years ahead of its Western rivals [Financial Times, December 26th]. Meanwhile, the growth in sales of electric vehicles in Europe and the United States has slowed. BYD's leap forward Another important development in 2024 was the record sales of Chinese brands in China: they rose from 38% of the total in 2020 to 56%, a sign of the maturation of the national auto industry which is now able to challenge the Japanese, American, and European manufacturers. BYD's leap forward is impressive, comparable to that of Ford Motors after the First World War, when with the Model T, introduc...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 11 The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008 has gone down in history as the symbol of the financial crisis and of the subsequent “great recession”. According to our Marxist analysis, that economic earthquake revealed above all a world power balance transformed by Atlantic decline and Chinese rise. It was a crisis in global relations and, in fact, we can also count the birth of the BRICS among its strategic consequences: the coalition of China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa began meeting annually, demanding the reform of the international order to give the emerging powers a bigger say. G7 and BRICS in the G20 The firstborn son of the global crisis was the “Group of Twenty” (G20) which, as swiftly as November 2008, met for the first time in Washington at the level of heads of State and government. We wrote in our newspaper that this was the birth of a “new balance in power relations: the old metropol...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 9 In January 2017, as soon as he took office in the White House, Donald Trump signalled the new trade policy of the United States with two immediate moves: the exit from the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and the project for a wall on the border with Mexico. These were accompanied by the threat to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That thunderous debut now seems almost moderate, compared to the flurry of arrogant announcements and orders with which his second presidency has begun. Multiple fronts In just a few weeks, Trump has deployed an impressive and omni-directional arsenal of tariffs, making no distinction between allies and adversaries. The first targets were imports from Canada and Mexico, the US’s biggest trading partners. These 25% tariffs were immediately put on hold for a month, in exchange for symbolic concessions from the two neighbouring governments, aimed at countering the suppos...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 4 “By punishing his longtime allies with tariffs, Donald Trump is encouraging other nations to form trading blocs and networks that exclude the United States”. Whilst the New York Times treats the issue polemically, it constitutes an important strand of reflection in European and Asian assessments. The duties are a “declaration of economic war”, according to Le Monde. A rapid, temporary negotiating truce followed, with tariffs suspended in exchange for tactical concessions from Canada and Mexico. Whilst the “bluff” may have yielded some transitory results, a “permanent instability” is settling at the heart of American affairs. Unpredictability as a weapon is the strategy with which the new presidency intends to tackle, and perhaps even temporarily reverse, American decline. This, though, comes at the cost of compromising the United States” credibility as the guarantor of the old order and the network of alliances which...

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Pages 1 and 2 The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in ...

This first quarter-century has seen an epochal turning point in inter-power relations, triggered by China's very rapid imperialist development. Arrigo Cervetto recognised this process from the very early 1990s: Today history has sped up its pace to an unpredictable extent. [...] Analysis of the sixteenth century, as the century of accelerations and rift in world history, is a model for our Marxist vision ( La mezza guerra nel Golfo [The Half War in the Persian Gulf], January 1991). The course of imperialism was speeding up, and China's very rapid rise was opening up a new strategic phase with the new century. The United States, the leading power in the world, is being challenged by an antagonist with comparable economic strength which, moreover, openly states that it wants to provide itself with a "world class" military force within the next decade. Favoured by the 2008 global crisis and also by the pandemic crisis, China has forged ahead with its rapid rise for ...