The Internationalism

Before capsules and pods, there was freeze-dried instant coffee powder, which of course tasted nothing like a real espresso. Now: for some time we have been following the vicissitudes of sovereigntists and populists with the idea that their political future depended on their Euro-solubility . Referring to the law-and-order, xenophobic and immigrant-hostile traits that have become common currency in European debates, we wrote that a Europe that protects could use the anti-immigration rhetoric of the sovereigntists to keep them on the leash of the pro-European strategic consensus. No sooner said that done. In Italy, as in France and other European countries, that phenomenon is in full swing. In Italy, the Five Star Movement has already embarked on its path to conversion a year and a half ago, entrusted with no less than the direction of Italian diplomacy. And even the Lega, believe it or not, has become a pro-European party overnight. In France, a similar process has seized Marine Le P...

In 1967, «Marx Is Not a Has-Been in Detroit» was a Lotta Comunista headline for a memorable event, the struggle of the black proletariat in the American automotive capital. The race issue concealed class contradiction in itself; the centre of the struggle remained the factories of the metropolises in the industrialised powers, and not the countryside which should have surrounded those cities in the then fashionable myths of Maoism and Third-Worldism. Half a century later, a lot has changed, but not that class principle. The China of Mao Zedong’s peasant populism has become an economic power playing on the same level as America and Europe; its industrial giants challenge those of the West which had once subjugated it, but hundreds of millions of Chinese proletarians have also been added to our world class. It’s been quite a while, and since the time for a modern class struggle has also come to the Asian metropolises: Marx is not a has-been in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Canton, as h...

Bacteria and viruses know no frontiers. The attempts to infect public fear of the coronavirus epidemic with xenophobic and racist superstition would be pathetic, if it were not for loutish electoral speculation. Today the Chinese confront it, but should it be a pandemic tomorrow the hunt for those infected will point to migrants, who will once again be scapegoated on the pages of Facebook. Yet the bourgeoisie, in the centuries during which it still remained a revolutionary class, knew how to shed a light of clarity through the mist of thousand-year-old superstitions. Renaissance men founded the scientific method; the intellectuals of the Enlightenment changed the view of the world; pioneers of science and technology accompanied the industrial revolution in mechanics, steam energy, chemistry and electricity; heroic doctors founded modern medicine, going so far as to experiment with vaccines on themselves in order to make it possible to face terrible diseases. Finally, science married l...

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 ...