The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 11 We are living in an era in which the ‘Pax Americana’ is nearing an end without any substitute order taking its place . So wrote, in a 1980 report, the study group on Comprehensive national security , established by the then Japanese Prime Minister Masayoshi Ōira. According to Michitaka Kaiya, deputy editor of the Yomiuri Shimbun , this observation remains valid today, given the Trump administration’s dismissive attitude towards allies , a China that challenges the US-led order, the war in Ukraine, and the conflict in the Gulf. At the end of April, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi attended the inaugural meeting of the committee of fifteen experts tasked with conducting the review of the National Security Strategy (NSS), presented at the end of 2022, through which Tokyo has defined its rearmament. On March 31st, the operational deployment of domestica...

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 10 From the series The arms industry put to the test in the Gulf The Pentagon has dubbed the US war against Iran Epic Fury . An assessment after about 40 days into the attacks, coordinated with Israel, indicates that the Iranian political and military leadership has been decimated, nuclear programs further compromised, the Navy hit, air defence capabilities reduced, and significant damage caused to Tehran's missile and drone factories. Yet, according to The Economist , it would have been better to call the operation Blind Fury because the war did not lead to the fall of the regime, and because it allowed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz (where the daily passage of ships collapsed from 135 to 4), thus greatly harming the European and Asian allies of the US. We will not deal here with the roles of those who sought and supp...

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 9 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The Weimar Republic took shape in the first six months of 1919, as Gustav Noske's Freikorps suppressed the revolution. The bourgeois parties of Weimar In the elections for the Constituent Assembly on January 19 th , 1919, the large corporate groups of German capital financed and steered the political forces. The four major banks alone contributed at least 30 million marks to the election funds of the various parties. At the head of the bourgeois forces were the great electricity magnates Walther Rathenau of AEG and Carl Friedrich von Siemens for the Democrats; Karl Helfferich of Deutsche Bank and Alfred Hugenberg of Krupp for the far-right nationalists; and major industrialists such as Hugo Stinnes for Gustav Stresemann's People's Party. Th...

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 8 In her essay Economia di guerra e inquadramento della società in URSS ( The War Economy and Social Control in the USSR ), Rebecca Manley writes that initially the German advance in Russia was welcomed by the local population and threatened the legitimacy of the reigning power , while party leaders, officials, and factory managers often jumped ship , with the abandoned populace openly cursing them [A. Aglan and R. Frank, La guerra-mondo 1937-1947 ( The World War 1937-1947 ), Einaudi, 2015-16]. Her account goes on to describe the government's gradual reassertion of control: The cost in human lives was increasing and shortages were continuing to worsen [...] it was only with the victory of Stalingrad that Stalin and the Soviet system recovered a central role in war propaganda . Overall, according to this author, the war years saw a surge of popular patr...

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. 88, June 2026 Page 6 The conflict in the Gulf has entered its third month, marked by a precarious truce that reflects a strategic stalemate, with Tehran’s “selective blockade” of Hormuz and the US Navy’s “counter-blockade” of Iranian ports. According to the Pakistani daily Dawn , bilateral negotiations — mediated by Islamabad with the explicit support of Riyadh and the “discreet and indirect” backing of Beijing — appear to centre on the price of reopening the energy artery. For Washington, writes the Saudi newspaper Asharq al-Awsat , the negotiations should yield some kind of “tangible result” on the nuclear issue, allowing both sides to “claim victory”, given that the priority is resuming commercial traffic. To this end, granting Tehran the opportunity to collect some form of revenue has not been ruled out. Iranian “pragmatic” factions are raising the idea of maritime tr...

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Pages 4 and 5 Kolkata's The Telegraph announces "a rupture with the principle of post-War pacifism: that Japan and Germany had adhered to for decades". The West Bengal-based newspaper was founded in 1982 by Aveek Sarkar, a former protégé of Harold Evans at The Sunday Times in London. The editorial highlights certain aspects worth noting. First and foremost, there is a psychological dimension to the crises in the world order . The ideologies of the post-war order, imposed on the defeated bourgeoisies of Germany and Japan for decades, have permeated the whole of society to the point of becoming second nature that shape the German and Japanese ruling classes themselves. But today, a re-evaluation of these ideologies is in turn being imposed by an uneven development that, over the long term, has been economic, political, and military. This is a Z...