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American Castling Over Caracas’s Oil Fields

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 6 With the announcement of an increase in military spending from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in 2027, Donald Trump is relaunching the United States’ primacy in the rearmament cycle. This Trumpian rearmament will have to be approved by Congress, where so far only the heads of the armed forces committees have expressed their support. Regardless of whether or not these figures will be immediately reflected in the Pentagon’s budgets, they are nevertheless indicative of the strategic scenario that Washington intends to guard against. On the one hand, with 5% of its GDP, the US would ensure that its spending over the next few years exceeds the combined total of the three runners-up — Europe, China, and Russia — and in this sense, this functions primarily as insurance against the multipolar dynamic. On the other hand, in terms of American political culture, which tends to frame international issues in ...

The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026, Special Issue Pages I and II From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. VI The reflection on the political shell – in which Cervetto returned to the fundamentals of the Marxist theory of the State – was itself a political battle, as it equipped the new generation of the party against the myths of true democracy that accompanied the reformist line and the electoral expansion of the progressive PCI into new social strata. The very title of the book recalls Lenin’s formula of democracy as the best political shell for the dictatorship of capital. However, these editorials were not limited to restoring the concepts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the theory was developed and updated to apply to contemporary forms of imperialist democracy . Alongside those crucial notions, dozens of politic...

The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Pages 8 and 9 From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. V The Leninist tactic in the educational crisis and the union tactic on the prospects of trade unionism had already produced results in Genoa that alarmed the Italian Communist Party (PCI). With the restructuring crisis , when opportunism began to side with austerity policies and the Leninists with the defence of wages, however, the reaction of opportunism became furious, following the Stalinist script of slander and intimidation. In those years, I worked to ensure that what was a tradition for my generation would become a common heritage for the new generation. We needed to select, discipline, and amalgamate. We needed to assert ourselves to do so. In 1974, the spontaneous movement of students and workers, unable to find a tra...