The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 82, December 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The role of soldiers in the German Revolution must also be considered from the perspective of the relative stability of the German State compared to the Russian one. Lenin emphasised this on several occasions: in Germany, bourgeois rule was much more firmly established than in Russia, because capitalism was more advanced and the State rested on stronger economic and social foundations. In Germany, therefore, the class party was confronted with the unprecedented task — which remains so even today — of seizing power in a mature imperialist metropolis. The German Revolution brought about the collapse of the Hohenzollern empire, but the rupture was accompanied by bourgeois forces safeguarding class dominance thanks to political forms more suited to the imperialist era. First among these forces was the Social Democratic ...

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 1 Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party is a text for the strategy-party. The socio-economic and political-state recurrences of capitalist development are set out in it, in their contradictory dynamic which can be grasped by the revolutionary party. This text anticipates the notion of consciousness brought from without , which would become the heart of the Leninist conception of the party. The Manifesto is already a text of international strategy Arrigo Cervetto would write in his study on the ‘genetic’ formation of strategy in Marx and Engels. And Marx and Engels, together with the English Chartists and the groups of the German and French labour movements, would attempt to repeat the experience of the Communist League: to give them a strategy, precisely to give the Manifesto to an existing workers’ party . Their starting point was the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in overcoming and subvert...

The collapse of French socialism at the outbreak of the First World War is considered by many historians to be the most significant case of its kind. We must go back in time to find its origins. The dramatic repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 was followed by a decade of shootings and the deportation of tens of thousands of revolutionary militants. Reactionary monarchical legitimism attributed the decline of France to the Revolution of 1789, but by then the nouvelles couches sociales , the new classes produced by capitalism, as Leon Gambetta defined them, demanded a politics free from economic, social and clerical ties. The Radical Party, a turning point of French politics, was its expression. The same taditional Catholic Judeophobia dating back to the Middle Ages — according to Michel Dreyfus’, research director at the CNRS in Paris, Anti-Semitism on the Left in France [Paris, 2009] — gradually transformed into the image of the Jews associated with money and modernity who des...