“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.” So reads the The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels, who described a process that we see today: the erosion of conditions for those who once considered themselves as middle class, as capitalism pushes this layer of society down into the working class.

Last week, October 9th, marked one year since the serene valley of Swat was suddenly overcome with pain and anguish at the bestial attack on Malala Yousafzai and other schoolgirls in the van taking them home as it rounded at an army checkpoint in the midst of a fundamentalist insurgency. Lal Khan of the Pakistani MarxistsThe Struggle discusses the wider politics behind these event and the hypocrisy of the subsequent media coverage.

We publish here an article by Andrea Davolo of the Italian Marxists, who looks at the latest tragedy involving the case of hundreds of North African migrants who died recently due to a capsized overcrowded boat off the coast of Lampedusa, an Italian island, and who analyses the wider question of immigration under capitalism.