The Internationalism

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 dialectic between economic weapons and weapons of war in the crisis in the world order requires specific reflection where concerns European imperialism. Dealing with monetary weapons in their book War by Other Means , Jennifer Harris and Robert Blackwill place great emphasis on the strategic success of the European monetary federation: Through forging the eurozone, Germany has also realized its century-long quest for a pliant European market for German manufacturing. Both of these were things it had previously tried (and failed) to accomplish by force. The long quotation below is from the speech Helmut Schmidt made to the Bundesbank Council in 1978 in favour of the EMS, the European Monetary System that would lead to the euro. Classified as confidential for 30 years, the text was declassified in 2008. There emerges from it a highly political vision of the German use of the monetary weapon and of the strategic weight of a single continental market: What now concerns German pol...

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...

The Analysis of a Defeat From the special series 1919-2019. One hundred years from the foundation of the Communist International It was in Lenin’s legacy that the generation of the ’20s and ’30s could have found the theoretical tools to deal with the unprecedented Stalinist counter-revolution and execute an organised retreat for the world party. Socialism in one country? Lenin had already framed the essential characteristics of that issue in 1915: given that Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism , it could be assumed that the victory of socialism would be possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone . What that first unequivocally means is that either the socialist revolution is replicated internationally, or it is inevitably defeated. Moreover, since the revolution had begun in backwards Russia, in 1917 it was already predictable that the time given to this inception in one country would be very short. Of course, ext...

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. This is Karl Marx, a century and a half ago, but since then the reality of a capitalism that has grown senile — in the late maturity of imperialist society — has imbued those words with a disconcerting and practical truth. Through globalisation, capital runs the markets at all latitudes, seeking out, from two billion wage-earners, the surplus value that keeps it alive. Moreover, in the old powers where capitalism was first born, before spreading to the whole world and feeding new aspirant powers - eager to redefine the partition, the whole scaffolding of the social system could not stand without a growing share of migrants in the labour force. Described by Lenin, the analyses of parasitic degeneration and the putrefaction of a capitalism in its imperialist phase, are science, like that of Marx, and not simple moralistic invective. In Europe, America, Japan,...

The Fourth Congress From the special series 1919-2019. One hundred years from the foundation of the Communist International The historian Branko Lazitch wrote that the IV Congress, compared to the first three, placed itself in a regressive line : while the I Congress held the perspective of working in anticipation of an imminent future world revolution, the IV Congress acknowledged that such an objective had fallen out of reach and they had to learn to conduct political activity over much longer timeframes. Arrigo Cervetto comments: In a way it is true. After having tried the revolution with a communist party, Lenin wants to prepare the revolution with a Leninist party. His job is to prepare this party . Italian fascism Karl Radek was commissioned to give a report focused on “The Capital Offensive”: the Italian events represented the most serious defeat that socialism and communism have suffered since the beginning of the world revolution . But the speaker denied that a paralle...