Today, war and misery ravage the Earth. Billions of lives are caught in the machinery of an irrational world-system that exploits and destroys without end. The project of international solidarity—of rupture with the bloody madness of the capitalist world-order—is more necessary than ever before. In the words of Amadeo Bordiga:
If it is true that the industrial and economic potential of the capitalist world is increasing and not diminishing, it is equally true that the more virulent it is, the worse the living conditions of the human mass are in regards to natural and historical cataclysms. Unlike the periodic spates of rivers, the spate of frenetic capital accumulation knows no perspective of a “decrease”, of a falling curve from the hydrometer readings, but only the catastrophe of the river banks bursting.[1]
It is imperative for the good of all life on Earth that the human species makes a global revolution. We dedicate this New International to that work. Our goal is to circulate articles of information, analysis, and critique useful to friends of freedom around the world. We believe that just as action without theory is blind, so too is theory without comprehension: and our aim is to assist that process. One hundred and twenty years ago, Jean Jaurès founded his socialist daily, l'Humanité, and published an inaugural editorial which still rings true to us:
Humanity does not yet exist, or rather barely so: every nation is compromised, shattered by class antagonism [...] Only socialism, by absorbing all classes in the common ownership of the means of labor, can resolve this antagonism and make every nation, finally reconciled with each other, a parcel of humanity [...] We would like for this newspaper to be in constant communion with the entire working class movement, both union and cooperative. To be sure, here, too, there are differences in method [...] This is why, without stopping to examine the diversity and opposition of tactics and formulas, we will be happy to receive all communications that illustrate working class life. And with our efforts we'll back up all the efforts of proletarian union and cooperative movements. In this way the breadth and movement of life will put us on guard against any sectarian temptations.[2]
We want to communicate with all those living and struggling for a better world in all their diversity: syndicalists and activists are welcome to contribute to our project alongside poets and philosophers. Our political orientation is essentially humanist, republican, and communist. We are ardent partisans of human dignity and the rights of man. The New International is independent of all political parties and factions. We welcome debate and difference of opinion.
When we survey the state of anglophone left discourse, we see many outfits ideologically confused or financially unstable. Sectarianism of the most bizarre kind, a sort of grave-digging fetish for past failures, produces defeat and defection. Opportunism born of the desire for market success inexorably leads to bankruptcy or betrayal. We have funding to publish indefinitely with our digital-first, low-overhead strategy. This tribune is a project, not a product: we will never need to churn out slop to seduce investors or get more clicks. We found this publication in order to provide an accessible and popular forum for forward-looking and serious reflections on the struggles of our time.
The young twenty-first century has witnessed genocide, ecocide, and capitalist rapine on a planetary scale. We have also lived through epochal shifts in social life: mass urbanization, network-dependency, and creolization. Atomization and alienation are opposed by new modes and orders of resistance. From the occupation of factories and universities, from the squares of Santiago to the ruins of Gaza, from mountain floods and fields aflame, we the people of Earth are handed an immense task: the liberation of all—or, in other words—the care for the common good of all that live and breathe together. We strive to accomplish that task, and we invite you to join us.
OMNIA SUNT COMMUNIA
Amadeo Bordiga, The Filling and Bursting of Bourgeois Civilisation, 1951 ↩︎
