The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 12 In September 2001, Elon Musk discussed the possibility of private individuals launching space ventures with his former university classmate Adeo Ressi. In his biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson writes: “For a private individual it was obviously too expensive to build a rocket. Or was it? What were the necessary material requirements? The only thing really needed, he thought, was metal and fuel, which were not that expensive”. The two concluded that it warranted an attempt. Today, Musk is Tesla’s main shareholder and the owner of X (formerly Twitter). He is considered to be the richest man in the world and strongly supported the election of Donald Trump, whose adviser he will become. This article, however, will only deal with his activity as a space entrepreneur. Fail fast and try again In May 2002, Musk was already a millionaire after selling his Zip2 software company to Compaq when he acquired a small Califor...

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 From the series Elections in the USA A careful analysis of the 2022 mid-term elections revealed the symptoms of a Democratic Party malaise which subsequently fully manifested itself in the latest presidential election, with the heavy loss of support in its traditional strongholds of the metropolitan areas of New York City and Chicago, and the State of California. A defeat foretold Republican votes rose from 51 million in the previous 2018 midterms to 54 million in 2022, a gain of 3 million. The Democrat vote fell from 61 to 51 million, a loss of 10 million. The Republicans gained only three votes for every ten lost by the Democrats, while the other seven became abstentions. In 2022, we analysed the elections in New York City by borough, the governmental districts whose names are well known through movies and TV series. In The Bronx, where the average yearly household income is $35,000, the Democrats lost 52,00...

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 The fall of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, with the president, in power since 2000, fleeing to Moscow, took international chancelleries by surprise. The conflict had appeared frozen since 2020, the year of the last Russian-Turkish agreements, which marked a de facto partition of spheres of influence and territorial control in the country. Since 2023, a normalisation of relations between Damascus and the Arab capitals had been underway, to the point that just a few days before the offensive, unleashed by Islamist rebel militias supported by Turkey and Qatar, the Syrian presidency had been a guest at an. Arab League conference in Riyadh. The “death knell” of Doha The astonishment of analysts and commentators at the sudden collapse of the regime was accompanied by widespread disquiet, summed up in the formula of “catastrophic success” evoked by David Ignatius, columnist of The Washington Post and close to A...

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 From the series European news Following the European elections which took place on June 6th - 9th, the leaders of the Member States met on June 27th at the European Council. Ursula von der Leyen was nominated as president of the next European Commission, after she was chosen as the European People’s Party’s (EPP) Spitzenkandidat (“leading candidate”). The agreement also included the election of former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa as president of the European Council, and the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Subsequently, on July 18th, Parliament elected von der Leyen as president of the Commission by an absolute majority, with 401 votes out of 719 MEPs. On September 17th, von der Leyen presented her team of commissioners to the European Parliament and, two days later, the Council adopted this list of...

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Pages 1 and 2 The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in ...

There are three further aspects of the internationalist battle which require attention. The first regards our class forces. In comparison with 1967, wage-earners in the North African and Middle Eastern area which extends from Morocco to Iran, including Turkey, have risen in number from 20 to 120 million and amount to two thirds of the working population, with a quarter of them belonging to the industrial proletariat. This interweaves in the Gulf petro-monarchies with sizeable Indian and Asian immigration, often forming the absolute majority of the labour force. It is understandable that only an internationalist position can conceive of the unity of such a vast proletariat in North Africa and the Middle East, but it is also possible to glimpse the force it could express if organised and oriented by a revolutionary strategy. In 1967, Arrigo Cervetto rejected the argument that the relations of force were not favourable to the proletariat in the Middle East. Wage-earners already accounte...

This first quarter-century has seen an epochal turning point in inter-power relations, triggered by China's very rapid imperialist development. Arrigo Cervetto recognised this process from the very early 1990s: Today history has sped up its pace to an unpredictable extent. [...] Analysis of the sixteenth century, as the century of accelerations and rift in world history, is a model for our Marxist vision ( La mezza guerra nel Golfo [The Half War in the Persian Gulf], January 1991). The course of imperialism was speeding up, and China's very rapid rise was opening up a new strategic phase with the new century. The United States, the leading power in the world, is being challenged by an antagonist with comparable economic strength which, moreover, openly states that it wants to provide itself with a "world class" military force within the next decade. Favoured by the 2008 global crisis and also by the pandemic crisis, China has forged ahead with its rapid rise for ...

Internationalism Pages 12–13 In the autumn of 1895 Lenin commented on the death of Friedrich Engels: "After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. […] In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and of class domination – private property and anarchic social production – disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers must be directed against them. And every class strugg...