The Internationalism

There are three further aspects of the internationalist battle which require attention. The first regards our class forces. In comparison with 1967, wage-earners in the North African and Middle Eastern area which extends from Morocco to Iran, including Turkey, have risen in number from 20 to 120 million and amount to two thirds of the working population, with a quarter of them belonging to the industrial proletariat. This interweaves in the Gulf petro-monarchies with sizeable Indian and Asian immigration, often forming the absolute majority of the labour force. It is understandable that only an internationalist position can conceive of the unity of such a vast proletariat in North Africa and the Middle East, but it is also possible to glimpse the force it could express if organised and oriented by a revolutionary strategy. In 1967, Arrigo Cervetto rejected the argument that the relations of force were not favourable to the proletariat in the Middle East. Wage-earners already accounte...

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 8 Lenin often used the metaphor of a chain that binds the world to describe imperialism. The October Revolution of 1917 broke a first link in that chain and hoped to pull the whole thing loose. The metaphor was adopted in those years by all the Bolshevik leaders and the leaders of the newly formed Third International. Within a decade, Stalin's well-known formula of socialism in one country signified the overturning of that strategic cornerstone and the defeat of the revolution in Russia, in Europe, and in the world. Dates that have come to symbolise historical change act as the synthesis of previously accumulated contradictions, and, while such a sudden change does not exhaust the possibility of future contradictions, the concentration of events in 1926 nonetheless marked a watershed that revealed the true extent that the counter-revolution had reached. The great general strike in the United Kingdom that year, wh...