Workers of the World

There are millions refugees in the world today living in misery and hopelessness. Such is the appalling truth. Can the conscience of the capitalist world stirred so deeply that the camps can be emptied and every man, woman and child be resettled? Every country has room to spare could  open their bureaucratic doors and accept without ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ a percentage of these vulnerable human beings. However, we know from bitter experience that it is hopeless to appeal to the conscience of a society which has been directly responsible for such a monstrosity. Far better to have a world where mankind can freely to travel over its surface without the futile restrictions of nationality, passports and visas, where we can satisfy our needs from a sufficiency of wealth that only socialism can make available.

The persecution of minorities in many countries has made more acute the problem of the refugees, seeking a land where they will be permitted to live in comparative peace. But with hardly a single exception there are no countries which will freely admit the penniless wanderer, no matter how good their credentials or how great their need. One of the common arguments against offering a safe haven is that some refugees are "undesirables," but those who say this do not then go on to advocate admitting the "desirable" refugees nor indeed do they examine what does and what does not constitute an "undesirable."

The problem is, of course, obscured by arguments about unemployment. We are asked if we want foreign workers to take jobs away from British workers, and on the surface it looks like a reasonable point of view. Actually it is baseless. It is true that if an Arab waiter comes to London he may get a job in preference to a British waiter, just as hundreds of thousands of British workers have in the past managed to get jobs in America or Australia. But unemployment in the mass is not caused by the size of the population and does not increase because the population is increased, whether by births or by immigration. Capitalism everywhere normally has its unemployed, no matter what the population figures may be. If unemployment disappeared, then the workers would be able to demand more wages, and this would reduce profits to the vanishing point. Unemployment is, therefore, a capitalist necessity. The capitalist himself deliberately creates it by installing labour-displacing technology in the effort to keep costs down and profits up.

Capitalism to-day is an anti-social arrangement and produces anti-social ideas, even contradictory ones. A sensibly run community, anxious to improve itself, would welcome assistance from any quarter, but capitalism is not a sensibly run system of society, and the capitalists want to maintain capitalism more than they want anything else. Human beings intelligently carrying on the production of wealth for all to consume would welcome additional willing hands, quite apart from the natural desire to give refuge to the persecuted. Instead, the competitive struggle arising out of capitalism makes the worker shun his foreign fellow-workers in distress, and makes him welcome the wealthy idlers born at home or abroad who consume the wealth produced by the working-class without giving any help in the process of production.

As for contradictory ideas born of capitalist economic contradictions we see highlighted in the media the falling birth rate and consequent decline of population yet still opposing the entry of able-bodied, industrious refugee whose numbers would help to arrest the decline.

The World Socialist Movement describe economic migrants, asylum seekers, climate refugees simply as fellow-workers, fully worthy of our solidarity and in the words of Eugene Debs:

‘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.’

The real clamour to help refugees is not coming from Western governments, but ordinary people from all walks of life, organising as best they can, in their groups, communities, and often as individuals. For socialists, it is reassuring that so many workers across Europe refuse to see those they are rallying to support as anything other than human beings, homeless, frightened, displaced, and have refused to see them as migrants, illegal immigrants, refugees, Syrian, Libyan, Moslem, black or any of the other categories into which our species is labelled and pigeon-holed. We can only hope this solidarity grows into a revolutionary class consciousness – when these same workers demand the eradication of borders and frontiers and every other artificial boundary that divides us, realising that same solidarity can help us fashion a world in our own interests if taken a step further.

To emancipate ourselves, we, the working class must come to realise that we have no country and come together to engage in a world-wide class struggle against the capitalist class.