The Fifth International: International or Global?

Worth welcomes Amin’s call for a renewal of Internationalism, but he is critical of the “significant shortcoming of understanding an internationalist strategy around a traditional collection of national struggles.” Recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s contributions to the second International at the 100th anniversary of her brutal murder, he notes: Luxemburg … condemned any form of nationalism as a tool used by the bourgeoisie in order to divide the proletariat….[F]or Luxemburg, the whole notion of dialectical materialism should be understood not through the development of existing structures but as a process where new structures emerge and develop over time. Likewise, Internationalism should not be something restricted by structures of the present, nor by pre-existing norms such as national sovereign, but instead be understood as a mechanism that could move beyond the confines of the present towards the realms of the ‘possible.’”