Listening to the World's Pulse from Nineteen Countries
The July 2026 Issue of Unity and Struggle, Told to Young Comrades
Listening to the World's Pulse from Nineteen Countries
The July 2026 issue of Unity and Struggle, told to young comrades
Dear Young Comrades,
To introduce a journal is, in fact, to introduce a way of looking. In our hands is an issue in which nineteen articles, written in the same months by Marxist-Leninist parties and organisations from nineteen countries of the world, looking at the same world, have been brought together: Unity and Struggle (Birlik ve Mücadele – Unité et Lutte – Unidad y Lucha), the organ of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (CIPOML). It is published in Turkish, English, Spanish and Portuguese; in Turkey it is printed as a special issue of the socialist theory and politics journal Teori ve Eylem. On its cover stands Marx's eleventh Thesis: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
In this piece we will open the cover of the issue and look inside together. Our aim is not to produce a summary; it is to show which article is seeking an answer to which question, how those answers bind to one another, and what a young comrade organising in Turkey today should take from these 129 pages and what they should discuss. It will be a long piece; because the journal is long too, and in every line of it a real struggle is going on somewhere.
Why is this journal a different kind of thing?
You can read a hundred articles on a subject written from the perspective of a single country; they all carry the same blind spot. The distinctive quality of Unity and Struggle is this: a communist in Germany looks at militarisation from inside the Bundeswehr, a Danish communist from the investment of a pension fund in an arms company, a French trade unionist from a foundry in Brittany converted to the production of artillery shells, and a communist from Turkey from the twenty-fifth day of the attack on Iran. When these perspectives sit side by side, something none of them could see alone becomes visible: how the imperialist system works as a whole.
The second gain of reading the journal is to see the "living" state of the concepts. Imperialism, finance capital, fascistisation, the labour aristocracy, the popular front, the reserve army of labour... These are not frozen words in textbooks; in every article of the issue they are applied to the concrete events of a concrete country. The best way to learn Marxism is to watch how a concept explains an event; this issue provides exactly that.
The spine of the issue: four axes
It is possible to gather the nineteen articles on four axes. This grouping is not the journal's own order; it is our reading suggestion.
Militarisation and the war economy. The article by the Organisation for the Construction of a Communist Workers' Party of Germany, "Germany's path to war and the new, young anti-war movement"; the article by the Communist Workers' Party of Denmark (APK), "The Danish war economy in which the state is the key partner"; the article by the Communist Party of the Workers of France (PCOF), "The struggle against militarisation in France and in Europe"; and the article by the Labour Party (EMEP), "The imperialist attack on Iran and what it has shown". Read together, these four articles produce a complete map of Europe's shift into "war-economy mode" and of the class cost of that shift.
Fascistisation and hostility to migrants. The article by the American Party of Labor (APL), "The rise of intolerance"; the article by the Organisation of the Communist Party of the Proletariat of Italy, "The struggle against reverse migration"; the article by the Communist Party of Mexico (M-L), "Fascism and fascistisation"; the article by the Communist Party of Peru M-L, "From presidentialism to parliamentarism"; and the article by the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Venezuela (PCMLV), "The process of fascistisation continues to advance worldwide". Here a chain is built from the definition of fascism (Dimitrov) to Trump's hunt for migrants, from the "remigration" bill in Italy to Congress taking over the executive in Peru.
The theory of imperialism and the new powers. The article by the Communist Party of Spain (M-L), "Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism"; the article by the Workers' Party of Tunisia (PTT), "The Chinese economy in the light of the Leninist features of imperialism"; the article by Norway's Revolusjon, "Techno-capitalism's digital death ride"; and the article by the Pakistan Workers' Front, "History's merciless verdict". This axis shows how Lenin's definition of imperialism still works a hundred years later, and how it is applied to China and to the technology monopolies.
Revolutionary organisation, youth and history. The Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil (PCR), "A fundamental task: Winning the working class for revolution"; the Communist Labour Party of the Dominican Republic (PCT), "Revolutionary work among the youth in today's world"; the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (PCMLE), "The revolutionary movement of the masses"; the Communist Party of Colombia (M-L), "An assessment of the Gustavo Petro government"; the commemoration of Vijay Singh by India's Organisation for Revolutionary Democracy; and Communist Reconstruction of Uruguay, "The experience of socialist Albania and the present". This axis seeks today's answers to the question "what is to be done".
Now let us take, one by one, the points from inside these axes that most determine the agenda.
Leading item 1: The attack on Iran and the rejection of the "neither this nor that" stance
The article from Turkey in the issue is EMEP's assessment of Iran; it was written on the twenty-fifth day of the attack, on the basis of developments up to that day. Let us recall the event: on the last day of February, while talks between the two countries had been postponed to the beginning of the week, the United States and Israel attacked Iran with a heavy air bombardment. The justifications came afterwards: Trump's words "if I had not hit Khamenei he would have hit me", the nuclear programme (it is recalled that the party that withdrew from the 2015 agreement in 2018 was Trump), the threat "do not kill the demonstrators".
The real strength of the article is in its refusal to reduce Iran to Trump's personal recklessness. The embargo since 1979, the directing of Saddam onto Iran, the 1984 list of "state sponsors of terrorism", the 2002 "axis of evil", last year's Twelve-Day War: Iran is the target of American imperialism, not of Trump. The reasons it is a target are also class and material: oil and natural-gas reserves, command of the Strait of Hormuz, its being, as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the foothold of China and Russia in the region. China imports 80 percent of Iran's oil and gas and sends more than 60 percent of its exports to Europe and Africa through the same waterways. So the real target of the United States that is striking Iran is China, against which it has been falling behind.
The most instructive section of the article for young comrades is the question of stance. In Turkey and in Europe, "bashful Americanists" and liberal leftists try to "balance" the condemnation of imperialist aggression with the condemnation of the Iranian regime, and in the end they either remain without a position or, saying "but the mullahs too…", bashfully approve the attack. The article's answer is clear: "In the face of imperialist attack a 'neither this nor that' stance cannot be taken and cannot be defended!" That a regime is reactionary justifies neither an imperialist attack upon it nor the approval of that attack. Iran's right to defend itself is legitimate. But this is not a defence of the regime: the article defines the mullah regime as a "bloody dictatorship", a monopolist domination that recognises no right of labour, of women or of oppressed nations. To grasp that two things can be true at once is one of the first steps of class consciousness: it is possible to be against both the regime and the imperialist attack, and under conditions of attack "the sharp end of the spear" is turned on imperialism.
The second warning is also important: not to be sucked into the whirlpool of contradictions among imperialists. Iran's alliance with China and Russia is known; but "not to harbour the slightest illusion about Russian and Chinese imperialism" is decisive. This is the same stance we also defended in BRICS Behind the Curtain: we are not obliged to choose one of two blocs of capital.
The twenty-five-day balance sheet of the war is also striking: Iranian missiles can this time make "precision hits"; American radar and missile-defence installations in the Gulf were damaged; the carrier Lincoln was withdrawn out of range, the G. Ford was taken into repair in Crete after a thirty-five-hour fire; an F-35 was brought down. With the closing of Hormuz, Brent oil passed 115 dollars in a few days; the Pentagon asked Congress for a supplementary appropriation of 200 billion dollars. Among the conclusions the article reaches, note two in particular. First: in conditions in which softenings such as "imperial" have become widespread, the world witnessed again in Iran "imperialism in all its majesty". Second: the lack of foresight in the thesis defended since Khrushchev that "the nuclear balance of terror makes world war impossible" was seen once more in Iran after Ukraine. And a bitter finding: the weaknesses of imperialism have been demonstrated, but the international revolutionary workers' movement is not strong either; "the weaknesses of imperialism are not yet strengthening the proletarian revolution."
Turkey's stance is summarised in the article in a single sentence: a government that says not a word against the United States, that officially blames Israel, but whose two American bases in the country provided intelligence for the attack. In the statement published in Riyadh with the participation of Arab countries, Turkey, Pakistan and Azerbaijan, the names of the United States and Israel do not even appear; only Iran is blamed.
Leading item 2: Fifty-five thousand students in Germany and the "2029" tale
The Germany article carries the most hopeful news in the issue. On 5 December 2025, against the new conscription law providing for the gradual return of compulsory military service, 55,000 students across Germany went into the streets in a lesson boycott; boycott committees were formed in more than ninety cities. On 5 March 2026, when the subject had dropped off the media agenda, 50,000 students from more than 130 cities were in the streets again. The next date was set as 8 May, the day of liberation from fascism.
The banners show how open the class perspective is: "Merz, go to the front yourself", "We will not fight in your wars", "The rich want war, the young want a future". In Munich, tram workers who refused to drive trams carrying Bundeswehr advertisements took the platform. The manifesto of the nationwide conference attended by 250 students representing more than sixty committees says that conscription is "part of Germany's struggle for power over markets, resources and trade routes in the world" and points to the soaring share prices of arms companies such as Rheinmetall, ThyssenKrupp and KNDS. There are five demands: no to conscription and to compulsory service; a budget for education, social services and the environment instead of armament; the Bundeswehr out of the schools and conscientious-objection counselling for graduating classes; a boycott committee and the right to boycott in every school; disarmament instead of armament.
The theoretical gain of the article is the anatomy of war propaganda. It is documented that the year 2029, constantly repeated as the deadline for Germany to become "war-ready", is, as even political scientists accept, "above all a communication tool". Carlo Masala's "unscientific" book imagining Russia's ambush of NATO in 2028 sold 100,000 copies in a year. In the "Russian drones" hysteria of autumn 2025, the drone that closed Frankfurt Airport turned out to belong to a hobby pilot, the one in Vilnius to cigarette smugglers; but the corrections never approached the attention of the first reports, and in December a new aviation-security law was passed. A threat narrative is built like this: first fear, then the law.
The class calculation behind this is also written openly. Germany alone is an economy one-sixth the size of the United States, one-quarter the size of China; yet a "United Europe" (19.8 trillion dollars) under the leadership of German capital can catch up with China. Article 41(2) of the EU Treaty forbids military spending; the EU gets round this by framing armament programmes as "industrial support" (abbreviations such as EDIP, ASAP, EDIRPA). The target is that by 2030 50 percent, and by 2035 60 percent, of defence investment be made inside the EU; that is, to create large European arms monopolies. Read this picture together with AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation: It Is the Bill of a Two-Hundred-Year Line and Thirty-Five Years of Dispossession: militarisation and racism are two faces of the same capital strategy.
Leading item 3: Out of whose pocket does the war economy come?
The Denmark and France articles complete the question the Germany article left missing: who pays the cost, and what are the unions doing?
In Denmark the government used almost the whole of the 365.1 billion Danish kroner set aside for the rearmament of the "defence forces" by 2033 in February of this year. The Military Construction Act gives the Minister of Defence, unilaterally, the power to set aside other legislation for the sake of war production. The most striking detail: the state pension fund ATP invested more than a billion kroner of workers' retirement savings in Terma, the country's largest military company; Terma's CEO sees in this "a great inner beauty". APK's comment is sharp: the union leadership and the labour aristocracy support the war economy on the grounds that it "creates employment", "socially balanced armament budgets" are made through tripartite talks, and this is a repetition of the Second International's betrayal of 1914. The article also explains the class character of inflation: unproductive military spending creates a chronic budget deficit, the deficit is closed by intensified exploitation and social cuts; inflation is "the expression of intensifying exploitation". And one more observation: once the war economy settled at the centre, "green capitalism" withered away; the discourse "for the sake of the environment" was replaced by "for the sake of security".
The France article tells the hardest test of class trade unionism. France in 2024 was the world's second-largest arms exporter; around ten armament monopolies and 4,000 subcontractors employ hundreds of thousands of people. CGT General Secretary Sophie Binet's greeting of the conversion of the Brittany Foundry to artillery-shell production as "a victory proving the usefulness of trade unionism" won praise from the factory manager. PCOF's stance is two-sided: on the one hand it rejects "moral condemnations" coming from outside the workers' movement (those who have only labour-power to sell cannot choose their bosses or the character of production); on the other it says that the idea of "arms production for defence purposes only" is a dream; even France's own parliamentary report says "such an industry cannot stand on national orders alone". The examples shown as a way out are concrete: the dockers of Fos-sur-Mer refusing to load machine-gun parts bound for Israel; the international strike of 6 February 2026 in around twenty ports in Italy, Greece, Spain, Turkey, France and Morocco under the slogan "Dockers do not work for war"; CGT-STMicroelectronics investigating and exposing the company's Israel connections for months. Anti-imperialist consciousness is built like this, not with an abstract slogan.
Leading item 4: Techno-capitalism or techno-feudalism?
For the readers of this blog the closest article in the issue is Norway's Revolusjon's piece "Techno-capitalism's digital death ride". The article's main thesis is the thesis we too have been defending for months: "We are not facing a new feudal mode of production, but the most destructive form of monopoly capitalism." Varoufakis's claim that "capitalism died in 2008, we have entered techno-feudalism" is characterised as "wrong and premature; therefore dangerously distracting"; because the only answer Varoufakis can offer is "decentralised markets" and "self-management", that is, a repetition of reformist illusions. (Let us recall that we used this concept for a while in our July pieces and openly abandoned it in September; the journal's reasons overlap with ours.)
The article's contribution is to apply Marx's theory of rent to the "cloud". Data centres collect ground rent and monopoly rent both from the land they stand on and from the server park. In Norway in August 2025 there were 73 registered data centres (a 25 percent increase on the previous month); Google's facility in Skien at full capacity will swallow 5 percent of Norway's electricity consumption; in Narvik the agreements were signed "in secret in the middle of the night". This is the digital repetition of the enclosure movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the internet, once a common, is being enclosed by "cloud barons". Users are "unpaid tenant farmers": they pay both money rent (the subscription) and labour rent (the data that feeds the algorithms). Volkswagen's charging a monthly fee for full engine power, AI agents taking a screenshot every few seconds, are concrete examples of this picture. Peter Thiel's 2014 words "Competition is for losers" are quoted as the confession of monopoly logic.
The bubble warning is also in place: AI investment alone accounts for 40 percent of US GDP growth and 80 percent of share-price growth; according to MIT research, 95 percent of the largest 300 AI companies have so far delivered zero return. The article answers Musk's promise that "in ten to fifteen years work will be optional" with Marx's tendency of the rate of profit to fall: without living labour no new value can be created. The concluding section could have been our closing sentence too: artificial intelligence offers enormous possibilities for a society without capitalists; "what is missing is the subjective consciousness of what is necessary." We recommend that you read this article together with From Futurism to Techno-Fascism and The Declaration of Techno-Fascism: The Palantir Manifesto and the Dialectic of Class Struggle in the Digital Age.
Leading item 5: Is China an imperialist power?
Hamma Hammami's article from the Workers' Party of Tunisia is the issue's most systematic theoretical examination. The method is simple and instructive: he applies Lenin's five features of imperialism (monopolies, finance capital, the export of capital, international monopolies, the partition of the world) to China one by one.
Monopolies: China in 2024 stood immediately behind the United States (139) on the Forbes Global 500 with 133 companies. The private sector represents 60 percent of GDP and 80 percent of urban employment. With 814 billionaires including Hong Kong it is ahead of the United States (800). Labour's share of national income fell from 57 percent in 1983 to 37 percent in 2005; 200 to 300 million impoverished peasants migrated to the cities. Finance capital: four of the world's ten largest banks belong to China and are run by people in key positions in the party and the government. Export of capital: at least 1.1 trillion dollars in credit to developing countries; 679 billion dollars under the Belt and Road between 2013 and 2021 (against the United States' 76 billion); interest reaches 4 percent, terms do not exceed ten years, repayment is conditioned on the sale of foreign exchange and natural resources; 70 percent of Sri Lanka's Hambantota port was taken for ninety-nine years; dozens of people lost their lives in clashes with the local population at the MMG copper mine in Peru. BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: "Contrary to widespread opinion this group, like the others, is in the class sense a capitalist bloc" and "does not and cannot constitute a progressive alternative." Military power: a budget of 250 billion dollars in 2025, 600 nuclear warheads, third place in the world.
The conclusion: China "has become an imperial power" and this is dragging it into conflict with the United States. What matters for young comrades is the method by which this conclusion was reached. Approaches that count China as "socialist" or "progressive" generally look at intentions, at discourses, at the colour of the flag; the Marxist method looks at production relations, at property, at the movements of capital. Read the article together with BRICS Behind the Curtain; the two pieces arrive at the same conclusion by different roads.
Leading item 6: Migration, "remigration" and the definition of fascism
The Italy article tells what the project called "remigration" (reverse migration) in Europe and the United States is: "a project of mass forced exile" on an ethnic, cultural and social basis. The concept was born in the French far right in the 1990s, fed by Renaud Camus's "Great Replacement" theory; today it lives in the AfD's slogan "only remigration can save Germany", in the FPÖ's 29.2 percent in Austria, in General Vannacci's "National Future" party in Italy and in the "Remigration and Reconquest" citizens' initiative bill headed by CasaPound. In the United States, ICE has turned into "an armed militia force of racist and fascist character"; in December 2025 in Los Angeles Keith Porter, in January 2026 in Minneapolis Renée Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Prett were killed by ICE agents. The number of international migrants rose from 150 million in 2000 to more than 300 million in 2024; in Italy migrants make up 10.5 percent of the labour force.
The class core of the article is in this sentence: the real aim of the advocates of remigration is "to put ethnic conflict in the place of class conflict" and to create a labour force "more intensively exploitable, more open to blackmail". The task is "to target the companies that obtain high profits through the cheap labour-power of migrant proletarians" and to defend migrants as "the weakest, most blackmailable and poorest section of the proletariat". Lenin's 1913 article "Capitalism and Workers' Immigration" is the foundation of this framework. It is not possible to read this discussion without setting it beside the campaigns running in Turkey over Syrian and Afghan migrants; the European version of the mechanisms we set out in Why Do Workers Vote for the Right? is here.
The Mexico article gives the concept needed to name these facts: fascism, in Dimitrov's 1935 definition, is "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital." The article rejects Hannah Arendt's liberal interpretation that equates fascism and Soviet communism under "totalitarianism", because it ignores the class character of the two states. The role of big capital's conscious decision in the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany (the petition of industrialists asking Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor) is recalled. The most important concept is "fascistisation": the transition process between bourgeois democracy and open fascist dictatorship; the phase in which the state strengthens its apparatus of repression, restricts rights, and encourages a reactionary ideology that divides the masses. And the objective role of social democracy in this process: when it abandons the interests of the working class and supports militarisation it "objectively opens the road to reaction and fascism." And a datum: according to a study examining twenty economies and more than 800 elections over 140 years, far-right parties increase their vote by an average of 30 percent in the five years after a financial crisis.
The Peru article shows the institutional form of fascistisation: Congress, by abolishing the vote of confidence, making impeachment easier and seizing all appointments from the Constitutional Court to the electoral bodies, is building "oligarch parliamentarism"; this is an order "designed for the bourgeoisie to govern without winning elections, without social consensus". The Venezuela article, in a self-critical tone, tells of the Delcy Rodríguez government's submission to the United States after the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife on 3 January, and of how "the petty bourgeoisie's vision of war" (contenting itself with militia alone instead of a people's army) paralysed the resistance.
Leading item 7: Winning the class, winning the youth
Three articles from Latin America in the issue ask the same question: how is an organisation built? The Brazil PCR article, drawing on Lenin's 1897 pamphlet "The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats", confesses the fundamental weakness: "our work among the labouring masses." Bourgeois propaganda glorifies machines and spreads the thesis that "the working class has disappeared"; but "no technological invention or artificial intelligence has a magical power that will change this situation." The article's warning to trade unionists: becoming "excellent trade unionists" by remaining with economic agitation and neglecting political agitation, and losing the revolutionary perspective. It is recalled that in Brazil both the PCB's rise after 1945 and the PT's birth in 1980 came from the same place, from the factory workers of São Paulo's ABC industrial belt.
Oscarina Martínez's article from the Dominican Republic speaks directly to you: "There is no single type of youth"; there are precarious young workers, indebted students, landless peasant women, migrants, and they all come from the same root, the oppression of capitalism. The lie "believe in yourselves" is sold to the young; whereas "what they need is collective justice, and entrepreneurship is imposed on them as an individual way out." Revolutionary work is "not merely recruiting into the ranks or speechifying from the platform, but walking with them"; turning anger into consciousness, consciousness into organised life. The digital field is also a trench of battle. "Youth is not the future; it is the present that breathes, fights and holds itself up."
The Ecuador PCMLE article maps the class: the working class, poor and middle peasants, teachers ("workers of ideas"), the self-employed, the semi-proletariat, students; the advanced, middle and backward sections of each. The concrete structure of the Popular Front (UGTE, FEUNASSC, UNE, FESE, FEUE) and the United Workers' Front (FUT) is set out. The lesson: the masses cannot be won "as a whole"; first one relies on the advanced sections that are discontented and in struggle. The Colombia article too assesses the four years of the Petro government with a critical balance sheet, from sixty-two changes of minister to the UNGRD corruption, from the new US base in Cauca to the vote condemning Iran at the UN, and, even if the People's Mandate has been betrayed, calls for the broadest popular front against Uribismo and the Trumpist right in the 31 May elections.
Two lessons from history: Vijay Singh and socialist Albania
The article from India commemorates Vijay Singh (1946-2026), founding editor of the journal Revolutionary Democracy. A history teacher at the University of Delhi, radicalised at Cambridge, returned to India in the 1970s, a communist who, when the CPSU archives opened in 1991-92, learned Russian and translated the documents himself. His work on the law of value and socialism (his identification of the 1958 sale of the Machine-Tractor Stations to the kolkhozes as the breaking point at which the means of production were commodified in the USSR), his research on the People's Democracies, and his defence of the 1951 programme for India are recounted. The side of the article that is an example for us is the honesty of the commemoration: the author also writes that Singh's method carried a "Rankean" attachment to the document and that he rarely applied his own method to the contemporary world. To commemorate a comrade is not to declare him a saint; it is the exact counterpart of the principle we defended in From the Ugly King to Yol: Reading Yılmaz Güney Through Class and in The Melodious Heart: Telling Ruhi Su to Young Comrades. Singh's polemical style is also instructive: to argue without humiliating one's opponent, showing only that their claim is not based on the facts.
The Albania article from Uruguay tells with figures how a small, mountainous, semi-feudal country built socialism in less than fifty years: from a population a little over a million, 28,000 martyrs, 70,000 partisans; with land reform the share of the great landowners falling from 52.4 percent to 16.4 percent; the state's share in industry rising to 89 percent in 1946; between 1950 and 1985 agricultural output rising from 201 thousand tonnes to 887 thousand tonnes, industrial output from 442 million lek to 16 billion; self-sufficiency in bread grain in 1976. The article's thesis, stressing that it does not pursue a "nostalgic-folkloric" aim, is this: Soviet, Yugoslav and Chinese aid cannot be belittled, but socialism was built on the principle of "relying on one's own strength", and Albania, unlike the other people's democracies of Eastern Europe, was the only country that did not stop at the democratic stage but passed to the socialist stage. Read this article, young comrades, as a thesis open to discussion; when it is read together with the Vijay Singh article in the same issue, a fine discussion of the concept of people's democracy follows.
The bourgeois narrative and the journal's answer
| The narrative you often hear | The answer this issue gives |
|---|---|
| "Russia will attack NATO in 2029, we have to arm." | 2029 is "above all a communication tool"; German capital's strategy of making the EU a world power through arms monopolies. (Germany) |
| "The arms industry creates jobs, the unions should support it." | The war economy produces profit shares financed by workers' pension funds; civilian investment in rural regions should be demanded. (Denmark, France) |
| "We can produce arms for defence only." | The French arms industry cannot stand without exports; "defence" is a dream. (France) |
| "The attack on Iran is Trump's madness / Israel's imposition." | A target of American imperialism since 1979; the real aim is to close the region to China. (Turkey) |
| "The mullahs are bad too, let us stay neutral." | A "neither this nor that" stance cannot be taken; the sharp end of the spear towards imperialism. (Turkey) |
| "The nuclear balance makes world war impossible." | It collapsed once more in Iran after Ukraine. (Turkey) |
| "Capitalism is dead, we have entered techno-feudalism." | The most destructive form of monopoly capitalism; rent has not replaced profit, they have interpenetrated. (Norway) |
| "China and BRICS are a progressive alternative to the West." | By Lenin's five criteria China is an imperialist power; BRICS is a capitalist bloc. (Tunisia) |
| "Migration is a problem, migrants drive down wages." | Remigration puts ethnic conflict in the place of class conflict; the target is the companies that profit from cheap labour. (Italy) |
| "Fascism is the messianic madness of some leaders." | The open terrorist dictatorship of finance capital; fascistisation is a process. (Mexico, Venezuela) |
| "Fascism and communism are the same totalitarianism." | The class difference between a state destined to protect exploitation and a state that aims to abolish it cannot be erased. (Mexico) |
| "The working class has disappeared, artificial intelligence has changed everything." | The only class that expands capital is the working class; no invention can change this. (Brazil) |
| "The young are apolitical, they should believe in themselves." | The lie of individual entrepreneurship; youth wants collective justice and when it rebels the rulers tremble. (Dominican Republic) |
Looking from Turkey
When this issue is read in Turkey one must stop at three places. First, the picture of Turkey in EMEP's Iran article: a government whose two American bases provided intelligence for the attack, that signed the Riyadh statement in which the United States is not even named, that is bound to American strategy through Syria. This picture shows the real content of Turkey's claim to be a "regional power". Second, in the American Party of Labor's article, Turkey's northern Syria operations (2016-2019) being given as an example of "ethnonationalist narratives as a means of legitimising regional revisionism and military escalation"; in the France article too Turkey is counted among the regional powers filling the vacuum of the French withdrawal in Africa. Communists looking from outside see Turkey this way, and this look is a chance of correction for those of us looking from inside. Third, the hopeful side: ports in Turkey also took part in the international dockers' strike of 6 February. The working class of Turkey is not outside internationalist action.
Critical notes
To introduce a journal is not to be obliged to praise it; class consciousness requires critical reading. Let us drop three notes.
In EMEP's Iran article there is a paragraph which, in explaining the special US-Israel relationship, lists the owners, CEOs and families of American technology and finance companies by name and notes that they are Jewish. Although the article tries to reject claims of the "Jews run the United States" type as unverified, this list carries the risk of putting an ethnic-origin count in the place of an analysis of finance capital. For a Marxist explanation there is no need for this: US support for Israel is explained by the interpenetration of the two countries' financial-capital groups and by Israel's strategic function in the Middle East; the religious or ethnic identity of the capitalists adds nothing to this explanation, and on the contrary opens the door to racist discourse. Young comrades, read this paragraph as a warning: the place one slides to when one strays for a moment from class analysis is clear.
The Pakistan Workers' Front article is the weakest link in the issue. Formulations such as the "wounded snake and the ants" analogy, "history's merciless law", "the wheel of rise and fall" put a cyclical philosophy of history in the place of class analysis; its presenting BRICS as "the foundation of a new system in which the centre of power has shifted to Beijing, Moscow and Tehran" openly contradicts the Tunisia article's assessment of BRICS in the same issue. That such contradictions exist inside a journal is natural; the reader's task is to notice them.
The third note is more general: women's labour and women's struggle are almost absent from the issue; apart from a few sentences in the Dominican and Colombia articles, the specific effect of militarisation, migration and techno-capitalism on women's labour is not discussed. This is a lack, and it is to be hoped that later issues will make it good.
How to read: an order for young comrades
You do not have to read the journal from beginning to end. We suggest the following order. First read the Dominican article; it is short, warm and written directly to you. Then Mexico's fascism article; it gives the conceptual equipment. Then the Germany and Turkey articles one after the other; one shows hope, the other danger. Set aside a weekend for the Norway and Tunisia articles, and read them with a pen in your hand; their theoretical load is heavy but you will learn most from these. The Italy, Denmark and France articles are for those doing union work; the Ecuador, Brazil and Colombia articles for those building organisation. Leave the Vijay Singh and Albania articles to the end; it is more fruitful to return to history after one has felt the weight of present problems.
Concrete tasks
There are things that can be done after reading this issue.
Form a reading group. Three or four people are enough. One article a week; one question at every meeting: "How does the mechanism in this article work in Turkey?" What is the counterpart in Turkey of the "2029" narrative in the Germany article? Which fund, which company, is the counterpart here of the pension-fund matter in Denmark?
Read the five demands of the student movement in Germany and rewrite them for Turkey. What would students who oppose the Bundeswehr entering the schools have to say in the face of arms-industry promotions, Teknofest and similar events entering schools and universities in Turkey?
Research the dockers' strike of 6 February. Which ports took part, which unions issued the call, how long did it last? How much was this action reported in Turkey? Share this knowledge in your own circle.
Try applying the method in the Tunisia article, that is, Lenin's five criteria, to another country. Where does Turkey itself stand by these criteria? This exercise teaches the difference between memorising concepts and using them.
After reading the Norway article look at your own telephone: how many subscriptions are you paying, which data are you giving to which "cloud"? The concept of rent becomes intelligible when it becomes visible on your bill.
Subscribe to the journal and have a friend take out a subscription too. An annual subscription is 500 lira, a prison subscription 100 lira (with a gift of books). One can write to aboneteorieylem@gmail.com for a subscription. A journal lives by its readers' subscriptions; the printing in Turkish of an internationalist publication is a gain in itself.
And make the paragraph in our critical notes a subject of discussion: when and how does class analysis slide into ethnic explanation, and how do we notice it? Learning to talk this question among ourselves is more important than learning to defend it outward.
Closing: nineteen windows, one building
Dear Young Comrades,
When you finish this issue, what will remain in your mind will probably not be the articles one by one but the connection among them. The sixteen-year-old student who comes out against conscription in Germany and the docker in Fos-sur-Mer who refuses to load machine-gun parts, the municipality in Norway that has lost its waterfall to a data centre and the peasant in Peru who resists a Chinese mining company, the migrant who takes to the street against ICE in Minneapolis and the worker in Tehran who is against both the regime and the bomb, are looking from different windows of the same building. The building is imperialist capitalism; the windows are nineteen countries.
The journal's name is not "Unity and Struggle" for nothing. Unity is those looking from these windows seeing one another; struggle is their setting out to change what they see. Marx's eleventh Thesis stands on the cover; the 129 pages inside tell what it means today.
Read, discuss, pass it on. And in every article you read, do not forget to ask this question: what does this mean for us?
For more beautiful futures, all together.
Comradely.
Knowledge belongs to everyone.
Sources
- Unity and Struggle / Birlik ve Mücadele, July 2026 issue (special issue of Teori ve Eylem), organ of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (CIPOML). Contact: teorieylem@gmail.com; subscriptions: aboneteorieylem@gmail.com.
- Articles in the issue and their signatures: Organisation for the Construction of a Communist Workers' Party of Germany; American Party of Labor (APL), John M.; Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR, Brazil), Luiz Falcão; Communist Workers' Party of Denmark (APK); Communist Labour Party (PCT, Dominican Republic), Oscarina Martínez; Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (PCMLE), Pablo Miranda; Communist Party of the Workers of France (PCOF); Organisation for Revolutionary Democracy (India), CN Subramaniam; Communist Party of Spain (M-L), Carlos Hermida; Organisation of the Communist Party of the Proletariat (Italy); Communist Party of Colombia (M-L); Communist Party of Mexico (M-L); Revolusjon (Norway); Pakistan Workers' Front (Mazdoor Mahaz), Shaukat Ali Chaudhry; Communist Party of Peru M-L; Workers' Party of Tunisia (PTT), Hamma Hammami; Labour Party (EMEP, Turkey); Communist Reconstruction (Uruguay); Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Venezuela (PCMLV).
- Principal sources cited in the issue: V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916); The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats (1897); Capitalism and Workers' Immigration (1913); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913); G. Dimitrov, report to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International (1935); K. Marx, Capital Volume III (the chapters on rent); Y. Varoufakis, Technofeudalism; M. Funke, M. Schularick, C. Trebesch, "Going to Extremes: Politics after Financial Crises, 1870-2014", European Economic Review 88 (2016); H. A. Turner Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (1985); SIPRI arms-export data (2024).
- Related pieces on Bilgi Müşterekleri: BRICS Behind the Curtain; AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation: It Is the Bill of a Two-Hundred-Year Line and Thirty-Five Years of Dispossession; From Futurism to Techno-Fascism; The Declaration of Techno-Fascism: The Palantir Manifesto and the Dialectic of Class Struggle in the Digital Age; Why Do Workers Vote for the Right?; Against Whom Is 'Physical AI' Arming?.
