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...

This first quarter-century has seen an epochal turning point in inter-power relations, triggered by China's very rapid imperialist development. Arrigo Cervetto recognised this process from the very early 1990s: Today history has sped up its pace to an unpredictable extent. [...] Analysis of the sixteenth century, as the century of accelerations and rift in world history, is a model for our Marxist vision ( La mezza guerra nel Golfo [The Half War in the Persian Gulf], January 1991). The course of imperialism was speeding up, and China's very rapid rise was opening up a new strategic phase with the new century. The United States, the leading power in the world, is being challenged by an antagonist with comparable economic strength which, moreover, openly states that it wants to provide itself with a "world class" military force within the next decade. Favoured by the 2008 global crisis and also by the pandemic crisis, China has forged ahead with its rapid rise for ...