“An injury to one is an injury to all.”

 

Mutual aid is basic to human nature.  Most of us think that no one goes without food, healthcare, or housing. Human beings are born compassionate. Altruism and charity are strong traits that build communities,

There is only one world. The capitalist economy is truly global. Economic booms and slumps spill over national borders and ripple around the globe in synchronous waves. So do revolutions. Working people  must unite across borders to defend their common interests. Despite language barriers and cultural differences, our similarities are overwhelming.  Our lives are remarkably alike. National borders exist to maximize profits. Jobs are allowed to migrate to cheaper locations, while the people who work those jobs are blocked from re-locating to higher-paid regions.

The accepted solutions to these problems is generally posed as either free trade or protectionism. However, both policies benefit the capitalist class. Protectionist policies shield weaker industries from global competition, while free-trade policies enable stronger industries to penetrate foreign markets. A more effective strategy is  for workers to defend all jobs as if these borders did not exist. he solution is to include all workers in an industry into unions that do not stop at national borders and to demand wage parity across the globe. This is a pro-worker antidote to the divide-and-rule profit policies of employers. One union long ago recognised this - the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies.

While many capitalists promote the mobility of capital to cross frontiers for free trade, few support opening borders to the free movement of workers. Demarcated national borders control and to divide the working class. In all nations, forcing native-born and foreign-born workers to compete makes it easier to exploit both groups. The result is rising inequality within nations and between them. National divisions are maintained by racism, the myth that the people on one side of a border are fundamentally different from those on the other side.

The way humanity is divided by nationalism and sovereign nation-states prevents people from working together to solve their common problems such as climate change and pandemics. Competing nations can never solve international problems like war, environmental pollution, and global warming. In a world without borders, people could solve these problems. Because capitalists can never have enough profit, they continually push to expand their control into other nations. This inevitably leads to war, and the victors redraw the borders to consolidate their conquests.

While goods and services cross borders with minimal restrictions, the workers who create these goods and services are denied the same right. Borders allow corporations to move production to lower-waged countries. The same borders prevents workers from migrating to higher-waged countries. The answer is uniting to improve life on both sides of the border. The division of the world into nations conflicts with an international economy where parts are produced in one nation and assembled in another, where the finished product may be sold in a third nation, serviced by workers in a fourth nation, and dumped as garbage in a fifth nation.

Most people do not want to leave their homes and families; they migrate to survive. Abolishing national borders would enable us to raise global living standards, because goods and services developed anywhere could be made available to everyone, everywhere, and because the vast resources that are currently devoted to policing borders and waging wars could be used instead to meet human needs. The benefits of world socialism will be so great that our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed ourselves to be divided for so long.  Enough is enough. It’s time to end the division of humanity into have-lots and have-nots. However, capitalism is not about sharing.

The work that we do each day should provide for human needs: feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, treating the sick, and raising living standards. Instead, the surplus-value  produced by working people is confiscated by the bosses to accumulate capital to support the profit system that deprives the majority of what they need.

By standing together, we can claim the abundance that rightfully belongs to all. That is the Socialist Party message to all to hear.  Our planet can produce more than enough to meet everyone’s needs. The myth of scarcity has one purpose: to justify not sharing the social wealth. There is no evidence that society cannot meet human needs. On the contrary, the resources spent on war alone could provide everyone in the world with a good life. The myth of scarcity is used to dismiss the possibility of a world of plenty for all and instead legitimize fabulous wealth for a few and falling living standards for the rest of us. The myth of scarcity is necessary to reconcile the obscenity of growing wealth alongside growing poverty regardless of the incredible potential of technology and robotics.