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Saturday, February 16, 2019

Compassion or Militarisation - The Wage-Slave Catchers




‘If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare.

Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be none the weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the Socialist movement while they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.’ Eugene Debs

People should have the right to work anywhere to earn a living and feed their family. Labour must have the right to cross borders. It is up to unions to organise them, as they seek to organise all non-union workers. Immigration controls are a weapon used by the ruling class against the whole of the working class.  All politicians both on the right and the left have indulged in attacks on migrants and immigration for years. It is necessary for them to have a scapegoat to blame for the ills of the political system that we live under and the immigrant, present throughout history, has always served as such a scapegoat. Whenever we have high unemployment, or cuts to the welfare states social services, those representing the interests of big business attempt to cover up their own responsibility for this situation by blaming working people. The question of house prices, rents, and long hospital waiting times and full class-rooms being the fault of immigrants is balderdash. Yet many workers do say these things and, if not exposed to the true facts, will tend to believe them. The Socialist Party is unafraid to take an unpopular position that is nevertheless a correct one. We in the Socialist Party have a job to do to educate all workers to realise the need to end capitalism and build socialism. It is the system of capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and crumbling social facilities, not to say incessant wars – not workers, be they native-born or newcomers. The rich are happiest when workers are squabbling among themselves for the crumbs. The rich feel safe as long as people argue about crumbs and not about the loaf because they know that no embarrassing questions will be asked about who made the loaf?
 We in the Socialist Party know that in capitalist society bad housing, crowded hospital conditions, inadequate transport and the like – are caused by a system of society which plans its priorities and makes its decisions in the interests of profit and a minority who benefit from that profit. We stand for the free movement of workers from country to country. We say that immigration controls are against the interests of workers everywhere.

Capitalists want to see migrants with second-class status because they form a layer of the working class that is most easily exploited—they have a much harder time fighting back against rotten conditions and sub-minimal wages. Having such a layer of workers bound to miserable conditions weakens the whole working class, since other workers face the threat of replacement by this underpaid sector of the workforce. In all capitalist societies, a tiny class of people owns the means of production and profits by exploiting the workers’ labor. United, the overwhelming tendency of the working class would be to fight for a decent life for all, which is incompatible with capitalism. Powerful united struggles of the working class would inevitably demonstrate the need to overthrow capitalism altogether. Since the working class is the only class with the power to overturn capitalism, the capitalists use every possible divide-and-conquer tactic to prevent this development. The bosses hope to keep the worst-off sections of workers—Blacks, Latinos and other immigrants—fighting with each other over shrinking pieces of a small pie instead of uniting to fight for a decent life for all.

The working-class cannot be defined by their place of birth, the place where they live, the language they talk, the clothes they wear or the colour of their skin. Our fellow-workers are the plundered all over the world and they speak a multitude of languages and have many different shades of colour to their skins. It is the common factor of their exploitation which binds them together far closer than the trivial differences of colour or language. Socialism is the antidote to racist and nationalist poison. Xenophobia is part and parcel of a capitalist system which divides people up into classes in the interests of the minority in charge of industry and finance, the
ruling class. Economic crises and social frustration are exacerbating populist reaction and parochial forms of nationalism among large segments of the population. The ranting demagoguery of the right-wing stigmatises immigrants as scroungers on the public purse and scapegoats them for the entire mess of capitalism’s troubles.

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