The Internationalism

In 1967, «Marx Is Not a Has-Been in Detroit» was a Lotta Comunista headline for a memorable event, the struggle of the black proletariat in the American automotive capital. The race issue concealed class contradiction in itself; the centre of the struggle remained the factories of the metropolises in the industrialised powers, and not the countryside which should have surrounded those cities in the then fashionable myths of Maoism and Third-Worldism. Half a century later, a lot has changed, but not that class principle. The China of Mao Zedong’s peasant populism has become an economic power playing on the same level as America and Europe; its industrial giants challenge those of the West which had once subjugated it, but hundreds of millions of Chinese proletarians have also been added to our world class. It’s been quite a while, and since the time for a modern class struggle has also come to the Asian metropolises: Marx is not a has-been in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Canton, as h...

Bacteria and viruses know no frontiers. The attempts to infect public fear of the coronavirus epidemic with xenophobic and racist superstition would be pathetic, if it were not for loutish electoral speculation. Today the Chinese confront it, but should it be a pandemic tomorrow the hunt for those infected will point to migrants, who will once again be scapegoated on the pages of Facebook. Yet the bourgeoisie, in the centuries during which it still remained a revolutionary class, knew how to shed a light of clarity through the mist of thousand-year-old superstitions. Renaissance men founded the scientific method; the intellectuals of the Enlightenment changed the view of the world; pioneers of science and technology accompanied the industrial revolution in mechanics, steam energy, chemistry and electricity; heroic doctors founded modern medicine, going so far as to experiment with vaccines on themselves in order to make it possible to face terrible diseases. Finally, science married l...