The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 10 From the series The telecommunications battle Imagine that a full-screen video turns your phone into a window. You can see a vast world through this window. Douyin is a projection of this colourful world . Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok, and these words were spoken by Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of both applications. Matthew Brennan notes this in his book Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok &ampersand; China's ByteDance . The front page of the ByteDance website reads: Our Mission: Inspire Creativity, Enrich Life . A colourful and fun world, built on short videos, is also capable of generating major business. It is estimated that global users have exceeded two billion in total, mostly very young people. ByteDance is not yet listed, and its revenue is estimated by ana...

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 1 In his 1953 essay, Amadeo Bordiga argues for a very broad conception of economic structure and the means of production : The concept of the ‘economic base’ of a given human society thus extends far beyond the limits of a superficial interpretation confining it to the facts of the remuneration of labour and commercial exchange. It encompasses the entire field of the forms of reproduction of the species, i.e., family institutions; moreover, while the resources of technology and the provision of material instruments and tools of every kind form an integral part of it, its scope is not limited to that of a product showroom, but includes every mechanism available for the transmission from generation to generation of social ‘technological knowledge’. Accordingly, writing, song, music, the graphic arts, and the press, as general networks of communication an...

Donald Trump has said goodbye as befits his fame, with a tragic riotous revelry. A crowd with improbable disguises took its cue from the fake news on the Internet fomented by the presidency, assaulted the Capitol and wandered around its rooms and corridors with the aim of intimidating representatives and senators. All of this, however, taking selfies: a moment of fame on Facebook or YouTube and a trophy to show off back home in deepest America, while carousing in the local pub. His successor Joe Biden will seek a rebalance in a bipartisan collaboration, but he cannot escape from the dominant trait now characterising the political show . The swearing-in ceremony was the enthronement of a republican king, according to the rites of Hollywoodian show business: pop singers, actors, directors, and rock stars, and the new reigning couple hand in hand as they admired the fireworks in the night. Meanwhile, on the other shore of the Atlantic, a similar depressing show is going on the air with ...

Politics of Science and Passion The Internationalist Youth Day conference was held in Milan on February 1 st , in piazza San Babila’s New Theatre. Below we report a synthesis of the conclusions drawn at the conference. The heightening tensions among the powers of imperialism and exacerbating social contradictions around the world have been two unmistakable facets marking the first two decades of this century. In the last few months social protest has animated the streets and squares of various regions on the world stage, in Latin America, the Middle East, Hong Kong, India and France. Albeit with their specific features, both protests and demands for better living and working conditions resounded everywhere. Essentially, those streets and squares reconfirm a well-known passage from Marx and Engels’ Manifesto – The modern bourgeois society […] has not done away with class antagonisms confirming that society is more and more splitting up […] into two great classes directly facing ...