The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 16 We left off last month at the strange head of the pro-Palestine march, seized by Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer. Heirs to the colonial rule that carved up the Middle East in the early 20 th century, the French president and British prime minister have now become supporters of the recognition of a Palestinian State. They have aligned themselves with Bin Salman, and his double — or triple — game: while the Saudi prince negotiates his petrodollars with Washington for the Abraham Accords , he reassures Paris with a display of support for the Palestinian National Authority and, with Islamabad, he secures himself Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. It has since become clear that France and Britain sought to insert themselves into the folds and gaps of the American peace plan — twenty points that London helped to formulate through the back-room bargaining between former prime minister Tony Blair and Jared Kushner,...

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 14 From the series The world car battle Electrification of Everything – Accelerating Electrification is the title of a document by Siemens AG. For the German electric group, electrification is the necessary step to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The global grid According to the International Energy Agency, electrification means replacing technologies or processes that use fossil fuels, like internal combustion engines and gas boilers, with electrically-powered equivalents, such as electric vehicles or heat pumps . These replacements are typically more efficient, reducing energy demand, and have a growing impact on emissions as electricity generation is decarbonised. The grid is a single integrated mechanism of continental dimensions, owned by dozens of different companies and managed by operators who balance thousands of producers with different energy sources in real-time. A new electrical devic...

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 14 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals The trade dispute between the United States and the European Union also affects the pharmaceutical sector, with a likely direct impact on the cost of treatment on both sides of the Atlantic. With the Joint Declaration of August 21 st , the White House and the European Commission announced that pharmaceutical products will also be subject to a maximum tariff of 15%. Generic drugs, including their chemical ingredients and precursors, are excluded and should not be subject to duties. Generic medicines, which are no longer protected by patents and are much cheaper than branded ones , make up the majority of medical prescriptions in the United States. A 2023 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) report estimated their share at 91%. Tariffs will therefore only affect branded products, which are more innovative, expensive, and still enjoy patent protection. The producti...

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 13 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism With the slogan America First , Donald Trump evokes the past of American imperialism, more or less consciously recalling both the forces that, in the 1930s, advocated a foreign policy of hemispheric restraint and the era of undisputed American global primacy. He does so while bargaining with partners and adversaries alike over the degree of trade openness that the United States is willing to maintain, and while negotiating security guarantees with allies in Europe and Asia, without renouncing unilateral demonstrations of force in all directions. This aggressive posturing ranges from renaming the Pentagon the Department of War, to military operations against Iran and in Latin America, to increasing a military budget that is already by far the largest in the world. Kurt Campbell, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), inspirer...

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 11 Ursula von der Leyen justified the concessions made to Donald Trump in the Turnberry agreement at the end of July with two main arguments: it was a necessary move to avoid worse tariffs, and the EU has other cards to play. While the United States is the primary destination for European trade , wrote the president of the Brussels Commission in Le Figaro , it accounts for only about 20% of our exports of goods. That is why Europe will continue to strengthen and diversify its trade links with countries around the world . America and Asia This attempt is underway. On September 3 rd , the von der Leyen Commission proposed to the European Council, the intergovernmental body of the 27 States, to ratify both the trade agreement with the Latin American bloc, Mercosur, and a modernisation of the existing agreement with Mexico. In the EU, the Commission has centralised trade policy in a federal power that negotiates ...

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 11 The global economic landscape features rapidly changing scenes and moods. Donald Trump’s tariff war seems to have stabilised, but challenges and truces have become the norm between the United States and China; in Europe, the search for new trade agreements is intertwined with the start of a powerful rearmament; expectations raised by epochal technological innovations such as artificial intelligence are attracting hundreds of billions in investment and, with the same fervour, fuelling fears of a bubble that will pulverise investors if it bursts; the muscular posture of the United States reveals its senility in its wavering and grotesque movements, in the paralysis of shutdowns , and in the decline of the dollar, while gold reaches unthinkable heights. Optimism and pessimism alternate, between fabulous profits and huge debt exposures from which unexpected crashes emerge — and all this i...

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 10 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement In the Publisher’s Introduction to the writings by Paul Frölich, Rudolf Lindau, Albert Schreiner, and Jakob Walcher collected in Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Germania ( Revolution and counter-revolution in Germany ) [Pantarei, 2001], three fundamental themes characterising the German revolution are identified. The first theme focuses on the counterrevolutionary role of Social Democracy , and the counterrevolutionary awareness of men such as Ebert, Scheidemann, Noske, and other members of the government , who initially acted to appease the revolutionary attempt and then, when that proved insufficient, to crush it in bloodshed. The second theme is that of the generous energies expressed by the German proletariat . Here, the emphasis is on the spontaneous nature of the revolutionary wave, which er...

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Pages 8 and 9 From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. V The Leninist tactic in the educational crisis and the union tactic on the prospects of trade unionism had already produced results in Genoa that alarmed the Italian Communist Party (PCI). With the restructuring crisis , when opportunism began to side with austerity policies and the Leninists with the defence of wages, however, the reaction of opportunism became furious, following the Stalinist script of slander and intimidation. In those years, I worked to ensure that what was a tradition for my generation would become a common heritage for the new generation. We needed to select, discipline, and amalgamate. We needed to assert ourselves to do so. In 1974, the spontaneous movement of students and workers, unable to find a tra...