The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 8 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement In Germany, following the events of Christmas 1918, the Independent (USPD) ministers left the Ebert government. Gustav Noske, Rudolf Wissell, and Paul Löbe took their place. With even the mild scruples of people like Haase, Dittmann, and Barth now removed, the Social Democrats showed the face of repression more explicitly. Noske stated his mission without any pretence: One of us must act as executioner . The leaders’ indecision On December 29th, a crowd accompanying to the cemetery the coffins of the sailors who had been killed, held a banner on which was written: We charge Ebert, Landsberg, and Scheidemann with the murder of sailors . On the same day, the SPD organised a counterdemonstration with the watchword: Down with the Spartacus League’s bloody dictatorship . Both sides were preparing for civil war. The masses were in ferment, but w...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 7 From the series War industry and European defence European arms industry sales amounted to €183.4 billion in 2024, with a 13.8% annual increase. This information comes from the latest report of ASD (Aerospace, Security, and Defence), the sector's industrial association, which also includes the United Kingdom, Norway, and Turkey. The report adds that the land defence sector earned €65.3 billion, with a 14.3% annual increase. The world's top 100 armaments groups listed in the chart drawn up by SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) registered a 5.9% increase in revenues in 2024, reaching a record figure of $679 billion, but the 26 European groups among them had double that rate of growth, amounting to 13%. SIPRI points out that Rheinmetall, with a 47% increase in turnover, and KNDS, with a more than 40% increase in orders, are among the companies with the most rapid gr...

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 ...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Pages 4 and 5 At the time of writing, bloody repression seems to have quelled the mass protests in Iran that began in late December and spread to nearly 200 towns and cities across all of Iran’s 31 provinces. The dynamics of these protests recall those that erupted in 2017 and 2019: both were similarly marked by rising living costs and subsidy cuts, abuses by the religious police in enforcing the veil on women (especially students), and the involvement of ethnic minorities. According to international estimates, the victims of those previous waves of repression amounted to 400 and 550 respectively, while there is still uncertainty about the scale of today’s massacre, with estimates ranging from 2,000 to 20,000 victims. Iranian government sources, quoted by Reuters , mention 2,000-5,000, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, in a speech on January 17 th , speaks of thousands of deaths and enormous damage c...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 3 From the series European news The irritation expressed by Denmark on December 21 st , after Donald Trump appointed a special envoy for Greenland, turned into widespread alarmism across Europe within a few weeks. Especially after the American military intervention in Venezuela on January 3 rd , Europeans have been wondering how far the Trump administration will push its claim for hemispheric dominance. The day after the raid on Caracas, the American president declared: We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security . The White House then made it known that it would not rule out the use of military force to grab hold of the island, a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, despite it being part of the Atlantic Alliance. The first formal European reaction was the statement of January 6 th , signed by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spai...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 2 We have often reflected on the memorandum that Charles de Gaulle submitted to American President Dwight Eisenhower in September 1958, at the beginning of the Fifth Republic. Referring to the recent events of the Suez crisis of 1956 and the ongoing confrontation in the Taiwan Strait with Beijing’s bombardment of the Quemoy Islands, De Gaulle considered NATO’s organisation and area of responsibility limited to the North Atlantic to be insufficient. This strategic horizon was too narrow, as if what was happening in the Middle East or Africa did not immediately and directly concern Europe, and as if France’s indivisible responsibilities did not extend to Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific . The proposal was for a three-member directorate comprising France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The directorate would have discussed and taken joint decisions on political issues concerning global sec...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 1 In the introduction to Dialectics of Nature and in his unfinished essay The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man , Friedrich Engels outlined the evolutionary process that led from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens . The text stands out for the conceptual power of its materialist method, and from it we draw five fundamental concepts. First, for Engels, the brain is a product of labour . It is in the dialectical relationship of mutual action and reaction with labour – made possible by the articulation of the hand freed by man's upright posture, the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection – that the brain evolved to perform the most complex functions and develop self-awareness. In turn, labour is an expression of the social relations at the basis of specific socio-economic formations across successive modes of produ...

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026, Special Issue Pages III and IV From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. VII In this chapter, we offer a selection of writings on the Italian cycle, in both politics and in social and economic change, taken from three books that collect articles written over a 40-year period, from 1950 to 1991. Il ciclo politico del capitalismo di Stato ( The political cycle of State capitalism ) spans from the post-war period, at the beginning of the 30 years of the accelerated development of the economic miracle, until 1967, when the first signs of the struggles of workers’ spontaneity had already appeared, but before the explosion of the autunno caldo ( hot autumn ) of 1969. These are articles that appeared in Libertario , l’Impulso , Agitazione (the internal bulletin of the GAAP), Azione Comunista , Prometeo an...