The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 7 From the series Workers’ struggles in the world The struggle waged by Samsung Electronics workers over the last three years has a particular significance in the panorama of workers’ struggles around the world. A great deal of this significance undoubtedly derives from its having been the first ever strike at the South Korean company where, moreover, no trade union existed until a few years ago: until 2020, Samsung was strictly non-union. But it is also important because, according to trade-union sources, it was the world’s first strike in the crucial chip-production sector. Today these are fundamental and indispensable components for a myriad of products, for both civilian and military use, and they are becoming even more important with the increasing hardware needs of artificial intelligence. This struggle therefore concerns a prod...

Internationalism No. 82, December 2025 Page 12 From the series Workers’ struggles in the world “Why is it that large-scale factory production always leads to strikes? It is because capitalism must necessarily lead to a struggle of the workers against the employers, and when production is on a large scale the struggle of necessity takes on the form of strikes”. What has changed since Lenin wrote these theses in 1899? The capitalist mode of production has spread throughout the world, we have entered the imperialist phase, and wage earners now make up 80-90% of those who produce goods and services, numbering over two billion. Consequently, “large-scale [...] production”, and therefore the “struggle” in “the form of strikes”, are now phenomena which are present worldwide. The strike has become a “natural economic phenomenon” of the capitalist mode of production, as Lenin wrote in 1902, and it has spread across the globe. Its regularity and diffusion ...