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Vol. 79/No. 36 October 12, 2015
(Reply to readers)(feature article)
Refugees, class struggle and the
fight to unify the working class
BY NAOMI CRAINE
The Militant received half a dozen letters (see below) responding to the
editorial “Solidarity with Syrian Toilers, Refugees Key for Working
Class,” in the Sept. 28 issue. Several criticized the statement that “a
general call to ‘open the borders’” is a utopian demand that “if adopted
under capitalist rule would lead to increased competition among workers,
unemployment, lower wages and social misery.”
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
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