The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 8 From the series Spain 1936 Spain, Marx observed in 1854 in the article Revolutionary Spain , was the first European feudal State to develop absolutism in its most unmitigated form , but political and fiscal centralisation never really took hold there. Similarly, it was Spanish caravels that opened up the era of the world market, and the Kingdom of Spain was the first great bourgeois maritime-trading empire. Yet that early and rapid rise ended up transforming itself from a favourable precondition for development into the cause of Spain's subsequent failure. In fact, the maritime overextension of the empire, combined with the failed political and fiscal centralisation of the Iberian heartland, resulted in stagnation and a subsequently inglorious and protracted putrefaction . While the economic and social arteries were becoming scl...

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 6 In June 1941, Germany launched its attack on Russia, taking by surprise the army and the air force, much of which was destroyed on the ground, because Stalin had refused to believe the reports that Hitler intended to break the 1939 Pact. From that moment onwards, the war on the eastern front took on massive dimensions and was waged with unprecedented violence. In her essay Le front Germano-Soviétique (1941-1945): Une apocalypse européenne [in A. Aglan and R. Frank, La Guerre-monde , 2015], Masha Cerovic writes that about fourteen million soldiers lost their lives ; more precisely, nine million Soviets, four million Germans, and almost one million among their allies . It is calculated that the Russian population paid a price of over twenty million human lives, including the fallen and those who died of illness and starvation: hundreds of thousands of them were partisans, executed without pity. A hug...