The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 80, October 2026, Special Issue Pages III and IV From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. IV The Prague crisis showed that the balances established at Yalta no longer had any economic basis. Just as the reflections of the early 1950s and the texts read in Argentina had suggested, the decades of post-war development had once again transformed Germany into an economic power, and the USSR was forced into a bloody defensive action. The tactic in the educational crisis, the battle over the prospects of trade unionism in wage struggles, and the crisis of imbalance This tumultuous development was one of the causes of the French crisis, which culminated in the student demonstrations in Paris in May 1968. In Italy, the decades of the economic miracle were the basis of a crisis of imbalance. The State, political parties, and ideol...

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025, Special Issue Pages I and II From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. III In the autumn of 1957, the Livorno conference of the Movement of the Communist Left marked the beginning of the crisis. Cervetto and Parodi ended up in the minority, challenged by the maximalist faction whose moral factor did not allow them to accept the core of the Theses submitted to that assembly: the forecast of a long cycle of global capitalist development that would fuel the social-democratisation of the masses rather than their radicalisation. In the contingent defeat, which reflected the impatience in the psychological time of these militants, the 1957 Theses were nevertheless a scientific success and provided a clear framework for the strategy that would guide the party for the next half-century. Everything seemed t...

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 16 In the Middle East, events that are tragic, old, new, and strange are unfolding. The tragedy is the systematic annihilation of Gaza City, where the exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees amid hunger, thirst, and disease adds to the 65,000 Palestinian victims. This mounting death toll increasingly dwarfs the tragedy of the 1,200 people slaughtered in kibbutzim during the terrorist attack on October 7 th , two years ago. The attack on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, lies somewhere between the old and the new. Israel has committed to an eighth front in its war, following those in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza. The Israeli State is counting on the divisions among the Arab bourgeoisie and their cynicism towards the Palestinians, who are used and abandoned with every shift in the wind of Middle Eastern rivalries and alliances, and this is nothing new. However, by involving the pet...

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 15 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science In his book Quantum Generations [1999], Helge Kragh, professor of history of science at Aarhus University, Denmark, writes that at the beginning of the First World War most scientists regarded themselves as members of a supranational class, a republic of culture in which nationality was less important than scientific achievements. When confronted with the reality of war, the supranational ideology broke down almost immediately and was quickly replaced by nationalism: physicists were no longer simply physicists, but German, French, Austrian, and British physicists. The same can be said of Russian physicists. The nationalisation of Soviet science Nikolai Krementsov, from the Institute for the History of Science in St Petersburg, in Russian Science in the Twentieth Century [1997] argues that, despite appearances and the myth of a totalitarian Sta...

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 14 From the series The war industry in China The grand military parade held in Beijing to celebrate the 80 th anniversary of victory in the Chinese people’s War of Resistance against Japanese aggression , attended by 26 heads of State and government from Latin American, African, and Asian countries, was first and foremost a show of force. CCTV, China’s State television, said: The parade featured unmanned intelligent systems, underwater combat units, cyber and electronic forces, and hypersonic weapons, highlighting the growing capacity of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to harness emerging technologies, adapt to the evolving character of warfare, and prevail in future conflicts ( South China Morning Post , September 4 th ). The French newspaper Les Echos commented ironically, yet with concern: The only symbol of peace was the arrival at the end of the flight of 80,000 white doves and 80,000 balloons....

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. 80, October 2025 Page 12 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism In the US Department of Defense led by Peter Hegseth, the undersecretary of defence for policy, Elbridge Colby, is in charge of revising the Pentagon’s defensive posture, which includes a different deployment of American troops and military resources abroad. It was Colby who stopped sending arms to Ukraine at the beginning of July, who put pressure on Japan to increase military spending, and who cast doubt on the commitment to supply Australia with the nuclear submarines, which is the primary feature of AUKUS – the defence and security partnership with the UK and Australia. His aim could be to pressure Tokyo and Canberra into playing a front-line role vis-à-vis China , as well as increasing their financial contribution to Washington. Many laughed at Donald Trump when he put television personalities in charge of important departments. The conservati...