Vol. 79/No. 36 October 12, 2015
The editorial made it clear that the Militant is against the deportation of Syrians and others who make their way to Europe, or to the U.S. for that matter. “It’s a pressing question for the working class today to fight to organize these men and women as part of the class struggle, in whatever country they end up,” we said.
But unlike the liberals and petty-bourgeois left who seek a universal slogan and focus on refugees and immigrants as poor, suffering victims, communists see fellow workers, potential revolutionaries. We start with the class struggle reality within the countries where we fight and how to unify the working class along the road toward revolutionary struggle to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and open the road toward building socialism.
The Sept. 28 editorial explained the need to fight to organize and unionize all workers — regardless of where they were born, what language they speak or what papers they do or don’t have. The chauvinist refusal of the labor misleadership in the U.S. and other imperialist countries the world over to do this is one of the largest obstacles for our class to overcome today.
We promote the fight against every attempt to deny political rights and equal treatment, on and off the job. We join the fight to stop immigration raids and deportations, including the latest move by the German government to speed up removals of those they say are “economic migrants.” And we oppose the fences, internment camps and troops deployed by the capitalist rulers.
The line of march of the working class is toward overturning the dictatorship of capital and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat — a struggle that takes place within national borders in some 190 different countries today. “Working men have no country,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. But, they immediately add, “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy … it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.”
Position of Bolsheviks
We stand on the position the Bolsheviks led by V.I. Lenin successfully fought for at the 1907 congress of the Socialist International in Stuttgart, Germany. That gathering decisively rejected a proposal by the Socialist Party of the U.S. to restrict immigration by workers of the “yellow race,” which it said had no other aim than “to destroy labor organizations, to lower the standard of living of the working class and to retard the ultimate realization of socialism.”It is simply a fact that mass immigration intensifies competition among workers. The resolution adopted by the Stuttgart conference explained that the bosses seek to take advantage of this and the only counterweight to falling wages and worsening job conditions is to organize immigrant workers along with all others and fight against all attempts by the bosses to discriminate, illegalize or deport them. That remains true today.
But we don’t campaign for the abstract demand “open the borders” as an immediate goal — as an editorial in the Sept. 21 Militant and recent statements by Socialist Workers Party candidates and from the Communist Leagues in the U.K. implied — much less as a way forward to “solve” the crisis. It is not only utopian, but an obstacle to laying out a concrete, fighting road forward for uniting workers and advancing the class struggle.
The hundreds of thousands who have found their way to Germany, Sweden, Hungary and elsewhere in Europe over the last year are a small minority of the more than 11 million people in Syria alone, roughly half the population, who have been forced from their homes first and foremost by the brutalities of the Bashar al-Assad regime and, to a lesser extent, by Islamic State. They are largely those with resources to afford a “coyote” to take them out in hopes of a better life.
Some 7.5 million are “internally displaced,” still living in Syria, and millions more are in Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey. Their eyes are on how to move forward where they are and they do not consider leaving the region either a personal option or a way to advance their interests or those of their families and fellow toilers.
Not a repeat of 1930s
Contrary to what is presented in much of the bourgeois press, the current refugee crisis — both in scope and in the conditions of the refugees — is not a repeat of what faced Jews, Communists, Social Democrats, unionists, Roma and others fleeing Hitler’s national socialist regime in the 1930s and during World War II.Millions died in the pogroms and Nazi concentration camps. As many as 250,000 prisoners were murdered or died on forced marches out of the camps during the last 10 months of the war in Europe, up to one-third of them Jews.
Many of the millions of refugees throughout Europe at the end of the war were near death from starvation, a sharp contrast to the refugees in Europe today, however harsh their current circumstances.
Under those conditions, the Socialist Workers Party and the world communist movement demanded the capitalist rulers open their doors to refugees from countries and regions where working people faced devastating consequences of wars, counterrevolutions, anti-Jewish pogroms and holocausts. In November 1938 the National Committee issued a statement in the party’s press, then the Socialist Appeal, titled, “Let the Refugees into U.S.! Open the Doors to Victims of Hitler’s Nazi Terror.”
But this has not been the political demand raised by communists in most wars, social crises or sharp class battles under capitalism. Instead, internationalist solidarity with their struggles and demands for imperialist hands off have been the watchword. Crisis-wracked capitalism will continue to push millions of people to leave their homelands, driven by economic conditions as well as wars and political repression.
Communists fight for working-class solidarity, and to organize our own proletarian political parties that can lead the fight to take power out of the hands of the capitalist class. Workers who hail from Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mexico, Poland and elsewhere who find themselves in the imperialist centers will be part of these battles — not as a category of immigrants or refugees, but as part of the class struggle.
Related articles:
Letters
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home