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. 85, March 2026 Page 6 From the series Sixty years of Lotta Comunista in the Workers' Clubs In recent weeks, we have been commemorating the newspaper’s 60 th anniversary throughout Italy. We publish some excerpts from the conclusions of the event held in Genoa. In 1959, Arrigo Cervetto wrote to Lorenzo Parodi, who was working at Ansaldo and developing the Genoa group: You too must study, with perseverance and method: a few hours a day, but study. It is what ultimately remains to us as most important: study and time . They were only in their early 30s and at the time were in the minority in the movement. Cervetto and Parodi are no longer with us, but that study is the newspaper you hold in your hands, and that time is also the same newspaper you hold in your hands; distributed by activists for years and decades, it has bound the second, third, and fourth generations to the party. It is study and tim...