The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 13 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, it was clear that, without connection to a victorious revolution at the international level, starting with Germany, the revolution in Russia was doomed to isolation and therefore to failure. The two halves of socialism As confirmation of how false the later Stalinist lie of socialism in one country would be, in the article On ‘Left-Wing’ Childishness and Petty-Bourgeois Spirit , published in Pravda in 1918, Lenin wrote clearly: Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. [...] And history [...] has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have becom...

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...