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MIGRATION: A Window Onto the Oppressive Capitalist System
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- 13 May 2016 171 hits
click image to download pamphlet The news is full of tragic, shocking stories of the flight of refugees from the Middle East and Northern Africa. In Syria alone, more than four million workers and their families have fled during four years of civil and imperialist war. More than eight million are internally displaced, trapped between the Syrian government and ISIS—capitalists fighting capitalists. As these migrants look for safety, U.S. and Russian bombs continue to fall in the big powers’ ongoing struggle to control Middle Eastern oil and profits.
From its beginnings, capitalism has treated workers’ labor power as a commodity to be bought and exploited. Individual workers are discarded when they no longer serve the bosses’ needs. Borders are ignored whenever they get in the way of profit. When Saddam Hussein becomes an unreliable petro-dollar partner, the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq. The Soviet Union annexes Crimea to reclaim strategic naval bases. China builds unmapped islands to dominate shipping lanes and host missile bases in the South China Sea.
With a call to arms against “terrorists,” real or imagined, U.S. finance capitalists—the most murderous gang of terrorists in the world today—use their media and politicians to demonize refugees and immigrants. Once again, the bosses are blaming their victims. Refugees are workers forced to leave their homes because of capitalist crimes against the working class: inter-imperialist war, mass poverty and unemployment, racist and sexist violence. As workers, we must show our solidarity with refugees and unite with them in struggle, regardless of where we happen to live within the artificial capitalist lines called borders.
Five hundred years ago, millions of Black African workers and their families were kidnapped and shipped to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands died in the horrific conditions of the ocean crossing. Brutal slavery awaited those who survived. Merchants and bankers in London and New York financed this genocidal slave trade. Their high return on investment became the basis of many early capitalist fortunes.
Once their ill-gotten fortunes were consolidated, the U.S. rulers’ next step was to expand their control across the North American continent. A genocidal military campaign drove millions of Native Americans from the land they had lived in for centuries, with small numbers of survivors pushed into reservations without the means to sustain themselves. In Central and South America, expedition forces from European centers of capital forged a similar path of destruction.
Capitalism has never stopped moving workers by force, violence and wars of aggression. From colonial Europe to 21st-century inter-imperialist rivalry, the bosses’ competition for profit has continually redrawn the boundaries of the globe. In the bloody process, countless millions of workers have been terrorized, pushed out, shipped out, kidnapped, and driven far from their places of birth.
During World War II, representing the interests of German capitalists like Gustav Krupp[1], Nazi rulers ripped millions from their homes and moved them to concentration camps, where most were either killed outright or worked to death in another racist genocide. Meanwhile, U.S. rulers illegally forced up to 120,000 workers and children of Japanese descent—the majority of them U.S. citizens—into “internment camps,” concentration camps by any other name. Japanese rulers of the era were no less barbaric, driving millions of Korean, Chinese and other Asians from their homes, often in murderous death marches.
Since 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed his mass incarceration bill into law, the U.S. criminal injustice system has seized from their communities millions of workers, mostly Black and Latin men. Generally caught up in minor drug offenses, these kidnapped inmates are exploited by a prison-industrial complex. Their slave labor feeds the profits of private-sector detention corporations like GEO and CCA, popular investment firms like Vanguard and Fidelity, Dell Computers, and Victoria’s Secret. Industrialized food companies like Aramark receive millions for supplying maggot-infested meals. The current prison and jail population in the U.S. stands at 2.2 million, by far the largest in the world—58 percent higher than the per-capita detention rate in Russia, and nearly six times the rate in China.[2]
While racism has played a leading role in modern capitalist slave oppression, sexism is close behind. Each year, millions of women and young girls are kidnapped by sex traffickers to generate profit from the depravity of the rich and powerful.
Agricultural Imperialism
Imperialism devastates the economies of poorer countries and drives farmers and workers from their homes in a desperate struggle for survival. Subsistence farmers are driven out of business by cheap, subsidized, mass-produced imports from imperialist countries. Farmers are forced into the cities in search of scarce jobs; the resulting labor surplus allows the capitalist bosses to cut wages even more. In China alone, 300 million agricultural workers—nearly the size of the U.S. population—have moved from the country to the cities over the last 30 years. Another 350 million may do so in the future, desperate to seek even underpaid jobs in vast international factories.5 Meanwhile, Chinese factories are closing as international corporations shift to even cheaper labor sources, like Vietnam or Central Asia.
In recent years, corporate giants like Monsanto have flooded poor countries with genetically modified seeds to increase farming “efficiency” in the short run. Over time, however, the new seeds bankrupt subsistence farmers who cannot afford them. They, too, become a part of the ever-growing, worldwide, unemployed reserve army of labor.
Millions of these ex-farmers have emigrated to the U.S. and Europe. Even when able to find work, they are subjected to racist scapegoating. Once again, capitalist politicians and their media blame the immigrants for the oppressive conditions produced by capitalism.
Fighting Back
Throughout the history of capitalism, the bosses’ kidnappings, enslavement and exploitation have been met by working-class resistance. Hundreds of slave revolts, the Underground Railroad, and the multiracial raid on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry inspired the Union troops who ended open slavery in the South. Despite limited weaponry, Native American populations fought back against capitalist expansion and won many battles.
PLP supports immigrant struggles worldwide, welcoming our brother and sister workers as we fight to overthrow the capitalist system that oppresses us all.
Capitalist Impoverishment and the Migration Crisis
Today, the entire world is capitalist. That includes Russia and China, where early attempts to build communist societies made tremendous progress in liberating workers from exploitation, but ultimately failed for reasons explored in other PLP literature (see Road to Revolution III at www.plp.org). The capitalists have merged and consolidated to the point where the 500 largest multinational corporations account for up to 40 percent of world income. By 2016, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population is projected to amass more wealth than the other 99 percent.
Corporations, aided by government policies dictated by the bosses, strive to lower wages by any means necessary. Over the last twenty years, with the collapse of the socialist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, the number of workers available for “free market” exploitation has more than doubled, from 1.5 to 3.3 billion. This “over-supply” of workers (from the bosses’ point of view) has allowed them to lower wages until 630 million workers now earn less that than $1.25 a day, while another 205 million are unemployed. Accelerating impoverishment has impelled growing numbers of workers to migrate, internally or internationally.2
CAPITALISTS NEED RACISM AND NATIONALISM
For capitalists to retain the loyalty of workers amid deepening oppression and poverty, the populace must be weakened and divided by racist and nationalist ideas. Every nation preaches patriotism, the concept that workers must be loyal to their own country’s rulers. Instilled from earliest childhood, patriotism helps the bosses exploit the working class and fight wars with worker-soldiers while minimizing resistance. It teaches workers to regard their working-class sisters and brothers in other countries as enemies. The logical unity among workers of all nations is undermined by nationalist ideology.
Racism and religion are used to further divide workers, both within their own country and between countries. By fostering divisions between Black and white, Shiite and Sunni, Hutu and Tutsi, Catholic and Protestant, Dominican and Haitian, Arab and Jew, bosses mislead workers into blaming—even killing—each other over the problems caused by capitalism. Meanwhile, the capitalists are generally willing to unite when their interests are threatened. A case in point: The alliance of ten Western and Asian nations that attacked the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution. Another: The alliance to fight Nazi Germany between Western capitalist governments and the socialist Soviet Union.
RACISM, NATIONALISM AND MIGRATION
Racism and nationalism define the current refugee crisis. Nations are artificial creations that would not exist under communism. Eventually we will have one world where the working class rules in its own interest and shares all resources, according to need. When goods cannot be produced locally, they will be shared and distributed equitably. By contrast, wealthy capitalist nations today sell their resources at a profit to the highest bidder, or to manipulate alliances. In addition, they control the resources of poorer nations, often through deals with local ruling classes. Or they simply seize those resources directly, as in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
National boundaries are very useful to capitalists. When workers are forced to move by capitalist-created conditions, the bosses’ politicians and media portray them as a foreign and frightening horde, an image that feeds patriotism and the bosses’ push for inter-imperialist war. In the current period, capitalist propaganda in the U.S. and Europe stokes fear of Muslim workers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, in particular.
The refugees are fenced with barbed wire, beaten and mistreated, abandoned in squalid camps, and forced to live without work or services or rights. Sometimes these atrocities gain the backing of a misguided portion of the native working class, though many workers do what they can to aid and welcome refugees.
Most discussions distinguish between external migration, from one country to another, and internal migration within a country. But the distinction is artificial. National borders are inventions of the ruling class, developed over thousands of years of class-divided societies to separate peoples with different languages and religions. Today, borders are used by the capitalist classes to divide workers from each other. They foster antagonisms that impede our unity to fight for a better life, and, eventually, to overthrow the bosses of all countries.
As of the end of 2014, 59 million migrants were forcibly displaced by conflict, violence, human rights violations, and natural hazard-induced disasters—the highest level ever recorded.[3] Of that number, 19 million were refugees, migrants who’d fled to another country—14 percent more than in 2013. (For perspective, there were 2.4 million refugees worldwide in 1975.) In 2015, according to the United Nations, forcibly displaced workers and children likely “far surpassed” 60 million, including 20 million refugees fleeing war—most notably in Syria—and persecution.
Flight from conflict is in itself deadly. Since 2000, the International Organization for Migration has recorded 40,000 migration-related deaths. It’s become routine to learn of overcrowded boats sinking and drowning hundreds of refugees, to see photographs of bodies washing up on the shore.
Tens of millions of workers have been displaced by development projects, including dams, roads, mining, urban clearance or deforestation. (An estimated 10 million a year are forced to move by dam projects alone.) These migrants, estimated at up to 100 million in the 1990s, usually remain in their home country but are rarely, if ever, adequately compensated. The number forced to flee natural and man-made disasters is unknown. A study by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that 3.4 million have been physically or economically displaced by projects funded by the World Bank, their lands seized and their livelihoods obliterated.
By 2020, according to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, there will be 50 million climate migrants.6 Drought will force millions to flee their land to the slums of large cities. A rising sea level will make coastal lands uninhabitable. Storms will destroy homes and farmland in many parts of the world.7
EFFECTS OF MIGRATIONS IN SPECIFIC AREAS
The Middle East
Today’s news is dominated by the plight of Syrian refugees. The civil war in Syria, part of a broader competition between the U.S. and Russia, has displaced more than half the country’s pre-war population and created more than 11 million refugees. More than 4 million have fled to Europe, with the rest left in Syria under horrific conditions. While the capitalist bosses define the conflict as one between democracy versus dictatorship and terrorism, it actually began—and continues to be—over oil. Syria’s geography is critical to pipelines that can carry oil to the Mediterranean and Turkey and then to Europe. Imperialist nations have plunged Syria into a nightmare of civil war and terror. The Syrian working class finds itself forced to choose between living in a war zone and crossing dangerous waters to refuge—only to be denied food, water and shelter by many European countries.
How did all of this come about? The present conflict in Syria traces to 2011, when the U.S. began funding rebels against President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia and Iran. The Russian alliance planned a gas pipeline from Iran’s giant South Pars field through Iraq and Syria, with a possible extension to Lebanon, and eventually to Europe, the target market. Meanwhile, U.S. and European oil bosses had proposed a competing pipeline from Qatar through Syria and northward to Turkey, but Assad opposed it. These competing pipelines became the basis of the proxy war now raging in Syria and victimizing millions of working-class men, women and children.
Since September 2015, Russia, the only foreign power with military assets openly deployed in Syria, has been waging an intensive air campaign at the request of Assad’s government. Most the strikes by the Syrian government are against rebel militias backed by the U.S., Turkey and the ruling sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, though some strikes have targeted ISIS and Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, ISIS receives funding from a network of private donors in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. The result is a frontless proxy war with tens of millions of workers caught in the middle.
In sum, the forced displacement of Syrian refugees results from the objective needs of the capitalist profit system. This is the recurrent nightmare of imperialism. It will continue until capitalism is smashed.
THE UNITED STATES
As of 2012, the U.S. contained 41 million people born in other countries, or 13 percent of the total U.S. population. Nearly half of these immigrants were naturalized citizens. Of the 22 million non-citizens, 11 million were undocumented. It is estimated that half of the undocumented have overstayed their visas, with the rest crossing borders illegally.8 While these numbers may seem large, we should note that the U.S. had a proportionately larger immigrant population—nearly 15 percent—in 1890.
In 1960, 75 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population came from Europe, as compared to 12 percent today. The largest current bloc of immigrants (26 percent of the total) comes from Mexico, followed by other Latin American countries and Asia. Contrary to capitalist media propaganda, fewer than one in five immigrants live in poverty. They use social services no more than the native-born population, and have a significantly lower crime rate.
In 2013, of the 11 million undocumented U.S. immigrants, 52 percent were from Mexico, down from 57 percent in 2007. Of these, 62 percent have been living in the U.S. for 13 years or longer, 88 percent for more than five years. They are employed at a higher rate than the general population. Hundreds of thousands have citizen relatives in the U.S. but would have to leave and wait 10 years before re-entering the country to qualify for a green card. Nearly 4 million have children who are citizens and 20 percent have a spouse with citizenship or legal status.9
Right-wing politicians and media, along with state-protected militias like the Ku Klux Klan and Minutemen, use naked racism against immigrants to build loyalty to the U.S. and create antagonisms within the working class. By blaming crime, unemployment, failing schools and terrorist threats on the undocumented, they scapegoat the most vulnerable workers and protect the real enemies of workers everywhere: the capitalist bosses.
But even more dangerous are mainstream liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, whose job is to mislead workers while serving the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. In his first term as president, from 2009 through 2012, the Obama administration removed more than 1.5 million immigrants, either stopping them at the border or deporting them from inside the U.S.10 Nearly all (98 percent) were Latin American or Caribbean nationals.
In response to an angry backlash, the Deporter-in-Chief promoted the DREAM (Development, Education, and Relief for Alien Minors) Act. Stalled—at least temporarily—by Republicans in Congress, Obama’s legislation would have offered a path to citizenship to younger undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and agreed to enlist in the military or complete at least two years of college. (For many, the latter option would be a practical impossibility.)
In the meantime, the Obama administration initiated an executive policy called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which offers approximately 2 million undocumented immigrants renewable two-year work permits and exemption from deportation. Despite the superficial anti-racist appearance of the DREAM Act and DACA, they were created to meet a desperate need for the capitalist ruling class: an expanded pool of cannon fodder for the broader imperialist war the rulers are actively planning.
Further, the super-exploitation of immigrants, as well as of women and Black and Latin workers in general, is essential to the capitalists’ pursuit of maximum profits. Black, Latin and women workers get paid less than 80 percent of white male workers’ wages for comparable work—an annual ruling-class theft of $4 trillion a year,11 or about 20 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN
More than 40 percent of all immigrants to the U.S. are from Latin America, including Mexico. During and just after World War II, an acute shortage of farm labor threatened profits in the American West. More than 400,000 workers from Mexico, along with smaller numbers from the Caribbean and Honduras, were employed legally under the Bracero Program, which guaranteed growers a basic supply of labor. It also stimulated a sharp increase in super-exploited, unauthorized immigration, due to the dramatic wage gap between the U.S. (where agricultural workers lived in poverty) and Mexico (where they might be starving). In 1965, when the Bracero Program ended, the U.S. bosses engineered a new law to limit legal immigration from the entire Western Hemisphere to 120,000 a year. When this number proved inadequate for the growers’ requirements, illegal immigration increased dramatically.
In the 1970s, a U.S. recession closed hundreds of unionized industrial plants and spurred the growth of a low-wage, no-benefit service economy. As global capitalism entered yet another crisis, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund bosses imposed austerity on Latin American workers, creating even greater pressure for immigration—increasingly of whole families.8
In 1994, passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) spurred even more immigration from Mexico to the U.S. Subsidized American corn flooded and undersold the Mexican market, driving two million Mexican farmers out of work. Mega-corporations like Walmart opened shop in Mexico to take advantage of new tax and duty exemptions, forcing small local businesses to close. NAFTA generally lowered wages near the border, leading many families to send members into the U.S. interior to seek higher wages.12 The “free trade” widely hailed in the bosses’ media was free only for the capitalists. NAFTA intensified wage slavery for workers in both Mexico and the U.S.
Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. protected corporate investments in Central America by orchestrating the rise of violent military dictatorships in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Protest movements were crushed. In Mexico, Central America, and the Dominican Republic, with the cooperation of their junior capitalist partners, the U.S. erected huge assembly plants called maquiladoras to manufacture goods using raw materials from the U.S. This accelerated the loss of better-paying industrial jobs in the U.S. and expanded low-paying jobs in the target countries. By 1990, poverty rates in Central America reached nearly 60 percent. In 2006, U.S. rulers passed the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, widening the scope of NAFTA-type policies and super-exploitation. As a result, more than 200,000 displaced workers have been forced to move into the maquiladora zones. At the same time, prices of food and other essentials rose by up to 16 percent. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of Central American migrants in the U.S. grew to 3.1 million, almost as many as the number from Mexico.
Another immigration factor is the “war on drugs.” Originating in the 1980s under Republican President Ronald Reagan, it was driven by CIA-promoted drug use in U.S. inner cities, which generated profits to fund the fascist death squads in Nicaragua. . In the 1990s, under Democratic President Bill Clinton, the so-called war on drugs was used to justify the mass incarceration of unemployed workers, disproportionately Black and Latin. (During Clinton’s eight years in office, the federal/state prison population rose by 673,000.[4]) Internationally, the U.S. bosses pushed their “enforcement” policies into the Caribbean and as far south as Colombia, enabling them to tighten their military control over those countries. In 1994, at the same time that NAFTA was displacing thousands, the U.S.-Mexico border was heavily militarized. Since that time, more than 6,000 people have died trying to cross. More recently, the Mexican ruling class has fortified their southern border, making emigration from Central America even more hazardous. But while the “war on drugs” succeeded in terrorizing workers, it failed abjectly in its stated mission. Drug consumption in the U.S. is now estimated at 62 percent of the world market; opioids (including heroin and prescription pain relievers) killed more than 28,000 people in 2014.[5] The drug cartels have grown even more powerful and violent; the murder rate in Central America doubled between 2000 and 2012. The surge in violence explains the recent wave of unaccompanied young immigrants risking their lives to come to the U.S., desperate to escape drug gang recruitment and killings.13
In 2010, after Haiti was struck by a disastrous earthquake, the U.S. temporarily halted deportation of 30,000 Haitian immigrants but barred any additional newcomers. Despite millions pledged in aid, little has been built in Haiti except for new maquiladoras. Tens of thousands fled to look for jobs in the Dominican Republic, which is busy deporting them—along with more than half a million Haitians who have lived in the DR for decades but now find themselves targeted by blatant racism.15 During the Clinton administration, Haiti was coerced into lowering its tariffs on imported food, which displaced thousands of Haiti’s rice farmers. After the earthquake, when food prices skyrocketed, it was impossible for the country to feed its people.
AFRICA
Of the approximately 17.8 million refugees and displaced persons from Africa as of December 2014 (according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), 55 percent have migrated within the continent, often from landlocked areas in conflict, to coastal areas in a search of jobs and security. The most common destinations are South Africa, Ivory Coast, and Kenya. Most internal migrants in Africa lack legal protection. They are subject to human rights and sexual abuse, and suffer from poverty and exclusion from the main society.
As in other parts of the world, the crisis in Africa stems from a long history of imperialist exploitation. By 1914, 90 percent of Africa was controlled by various European powers: France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Britain. Although most states gained formal independence after World War II, they remained economically dependent on their former colonial masters. In the 1990s, the World Bank intervened increasingly in Africa; in the 2000s, both China and the U.S. made big investments in the continent. AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, was established in 2007; its first operation was the coup in Libya. While there is only one acknowledged U.S. military base in Africa, a 2013 investigation by TomDispatch found military involvement in 49 of 53 nations, including the offshore islands.16
Petroleum reserves in Libya, Sudan and Nigeria led self-serving national governments into alliances with Western and Chinese oil companies, to the detriment of local populations. In 2011, when oil prices were cresting and the Chinese capitalists were maneuvering for a bigger share of the pie, the Libyan government was overthrown by a U.S.-inspired coup. Three years later, according to the UNHCR, there were nearly 400,000 Libyan refugees and internally displaced persons. Although there is no more work to be found in the shut-down Libyan oilfields, migrants from the south still come, hoping to reach Europe from the northern coast. Smugglers charge extravagant fees for transport on flimsy, overcrowded boats, and thousands have drowned. In 2014, 68,000 North Africans arrived in Sicily, primarily from Eritrea, Mali, Nigeria, and Gambia.17
The Horn of Africa, containing Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, is of vital importance to U.S. energy interests. Beyond being one of the largest unexplored regions for oil and gas, it borders the Red Sea, which connects the oil-rich Persian Gulf nations to Europe and Asia. This explains U.S. involvement in wars in Somalia and Ethiopia since the 1970s. Most recently, resurgence of conflicts in the Central African Republic, Mali, northern Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan have displaced millions, pushing more young men north toward Europe. Recent mayhem in northern Mali threatens to tip the country back into civil war, while camps in Mauritania and Burkina Faso overflow with refugees from a previous round of fighting.18
Global warming, a pathology of capitalism, also plays a role. The Sahel, an east-to-west strip south of Libya and Algeria, has been suffering the most severe drought of the past 100 years. As many as 2.5 million people have been driven to migrate, mostly north through Libya.19
ASIA
According to the United Nations, Asia accounts for 3.5 million refugees, 1.9 million internally displaced people and 1.4 million stateless people. The majority are from Myanmar and Afghanistan,22 which was left divided and unstable by the 2001 U.S. invasion. By mid-2014, Afghani refugees numbered 1 million in Iran and 1.5 million in Pakistan. Another 700,000 are internally displaced. In Iraq, even before the recent siege by ISIS, 1.9 million Iraqis were either transborder refugees or internally displaced.23
One of the largest 20th century migrations occurred in 1947-8 between India and the newly created state of Pakistan (then East and West Pakistan, but now Bangladesh in the east). People of different religions and cultures had coexisted in the area for centuries. But when the Indian rulers gained nominal political (though not economic) independence from Britain after World War II, more than fifteen million people migrated, with Muslims rushing north as Hindus fled south. Ethnic and nationalist passions were whipped into a frenzy of bloodshed; as many as two million died.24
Today, the U.S. is still the world’s leading super-power, though China and Russia are gaining. U.S. capitalist bosses continue to manipulate the rulers of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for cheap labor and markets and to “fight terrorism” in U.S. interests. Poverty has led at least 12 million Bangladeshis to migrate to India in search of better pay. By 2005, at least 25 million Indians had migrated to Europe, England, the U.S. or Asia.26 By 2015, 8 million Pakistanis had fled violence, persecution or poverty. Twenty-seven percent of the population said they wished they could leave.27
JOIN THE PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY
Migration is just one manifestation of the misery that world capitalism rains down upon the workers of the world. Without wars between competing ruling classes and their proxies, without racist and sexist exploitation of labor, there would be far less migration. In decades to come, life as we know it may well be destroyed by the next big war between imperialist superpowers. We have no choice but to overthrow the profit system, seize state power and impose a dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what we call communism, a society based on equality, sharing and production for workers’ need rather than bosses’ profit. We must be prepared for struggle with revolutionary potential to erupt anywhere in the world. And we must build smaller struggles along the way, to train ourselves as active participants, as leaders and as thinkers. Always we must emphasize working-class unity.
We have a world to win—a world without borders. without racism or sexism, without migrants or refugees or deportees.
- Raul Delgado Wise “The Migration and Labor Question Today: Imperialism, Unequal Development, and http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/
- Forced Migration,”Monthly Review 64, no. 2 (June 2011)
3. New York Times, 6/24/15
4. http://www.forcedmigration.org/
5. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175959/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar,_inside_china's_%22new_normal%22/
6. Harsha Walia, https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-making-of-the-migration-crisis/, 6/20/15
7. Michael Klare http://www.opednews.com/articles/Michael-Klare-Post-Apocal-by-Tom-Engelhardt-120807- 134.html,
8. David Guttierez http://www.nps.gov/history/heritageinitiatives/latino/latinothemestudy/immigration.htm
9. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/report/2014/10/23/59040/the-facts-on-immigration-today-3
10. Washington Post, 4/21/14
11. Bureau Labor Statistics, Sept 23,2014, Economic Releases, Table 3 at bls.gov
12. Tanya Golash-Boza, http://www.scribd.com/doc/28994034/The-Immigration-Industrial-Complex-Why-We-Enforce-Immigration-Policies-Destined-to-Fail-Read-Version-above-for-better-quality-http-www-scribd-c
13. Justin Akers Chacón, http://sandiegofreepress.org/2014/07/central-american-refugee-children-forced-on-a-dangerous-journey/
14. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/other-side-fence-changing-dynamics-migration-americas
15. http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/400-Haitians-Deported-from-Dominican-Republic-in-September-20150913-0019.html
16. Nick Turse, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/us-military-bases-africa?page=1
17. The Guardian, 1/16/15
18. The Economist, 3/31/14
19. Anthony Watts, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/12/climate-change-blamed-for-dead-trees-in-africa/
20 Mnar Muhawesh, http://www.mintpressnews.com/migrant-crisis-syria-war-fueled-by-competing-gas-pipelines/209294/
21. http://al-awda.org/learn-more/faqs-about-palestinian-refugees/
22. http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e487cd6&submit=GO
23. http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/refugees
24. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the- great-divide-books-dalrymple
25. Ali, Tariq, The Duel –Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Scribner, New York, 2008, pp 29-34].
26. Daniel Naujoks, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/emigration-immigration-and-diaspora-relations-india,
27. Huma Yusuf, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/world/90118/pakistan-terrorism-emigration-ISI,
[1] Gustav Krupp was the only German to be accused as a war criminal after both World War I and World War II. He was indicted at Nuremburg but never tried, and died of natural causes in 1950.
[2] World Prison Brief, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All.
[3] Global Trends Report: World at War, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
[4] Los Angeles Times, 2/19/01.
[5] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
From Ferguson to Flatbush
At 27 weeks pregnant, my partner and I packed up our car in Buffalo and headed to NYC to join in the May Day festivities. A couple of friends new to political activism, but eager to stand up for fellow workers joined us on the trip. Donned in all red, we arose from the subway at Flatbush and Nostrand. We walked towards the chanting and were soon greeted by a few of our PL comrades, who we’ve built quite a strong bond with over the last year, since first meeting during protests in Ferguson.
Our group of four from Buffalo ended up holding the leading banner at the front of the march, which read “Long Live Communism!” We each grabbed one of the custom screen-printed “Revolt Don’t Vote” shirts.
A flatbed truck with over 20 speakers pulled up and positioned itself at the front of the march. We got pumped up when we realized the speakers would be bumping some classic hip-hop and dancehall instrumentals througgout the march, as comrades chanted in unison to the beat. My partner and I absolutely love the idea, and first used music during protest a couple years back in Buffalo to commemorate Fred Hampton. Music is as powerful as the people who create it and can change the entire dynamic of an action, centering and energizing the people.
It was a beautiful sight to behold. With Mom and Dad side by side, screaming “Koupé tet!” [“cut off their heads” in Haitian Creole], my unborn child, right at the front of the march, got his first taste of uprising. With swollen ankles and smile on my face, I pushed on to the end and finished off the two-mile journey at Prospect Park. The crowd remained and listened intently to voices championing the power of the people. The revolutionary spirit was truly in the air.The crowd was rejuvenated by the speeches and at their conclusion all were welcomed to enjoy a May Day picnic in the park.
We were asked to do a quick interview at the conclusion of the march for an upcoming PLP video. We offered our perspectives on first meeting the PLP in Ferguson, growing our relationship with the Party, and how impactful these developing bonds have been in our lives, both personally and politically.
Later that evening, I shared some of the images from the day with friends back home, one of which was a shot of my garishly swollen ankles. One concerned person remarked, “that can be a sign of toxemia!” I assured them I was fine and just needed rest, and that the only thing toxic to my baby’s health was capitalism. Walking a couple uncomfortable miles is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the lengths my growing family will go to see the fall of the bosses and the rise of commUNITY.
★
Bronx Experiences at May Day
This year, students and education workers took a bus from the South Bronx to Brooklyn. Our bus ride was spirited and militant as we shared our reasons for coming to May Day and sang songs together. Here are a few reflections about May Day from our group.
My first May Day march was a great experience. I like how people reacted to the march sympathetically. I think it’s great to fight for our rights and against the injustice that is going on.
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I had a great experience at May Day. There were so many different groups of people. It was a beautiful experience to see a wide range of working class people come together and fight against the ruling class. In the moment, I felt that me and everyone else felt a sense of invincibility. Before going to May Day, I had my doubts about the working class becoming powerful enough to overthrow the wealthy class. After May Day, I believe that united we can change the system and make a world that works for us.
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The march was well organized and synchronized before and during the journey to the park. I liked seeing people of all ages, mothers and parents with their children, young women and men. It was really exciting to see all these people united, chanting, waving flags and their hands to show their lack of conformity with the system.
Moreover, I was impressed how drivers honked and people through windows in the building made signal of support and agreement all the way to the park. At the beginning of the march, I saw people enthusiastic but as it progressed there was more joy! I enjoyed the way people behaved before and during the march.
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I loved the sound truck. The group was dynamic and moving as they led chants and beats through the streets of Flatbush. I knew some of the women on the truck and know that they had lost a family member at the hands of the police. It was truly an inspiration to see and hear them on the sound truck!
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Salute to the Fierce Women on the May Day Truck
The Brooklyn May Day march this year was inspiring beyond words. On the truck were Black and Latin women whose loved ones—sister, brother, daughter, son—were murdered by the despicable kkkops. These women are living proof that kkkapitalism is a murderous system and that our loved ones deserve communism, nothing less.
This one woman in particular led me to tears. As she screamed the names of each youth murdered, and we responded with “Shut it down!” I felt the anger in her voice. The music paused. Her raw voice echoed down Flatbush. It was the sound of a woman who has to face the fact that capitalism murdered her sister—and no amount of police reforms will bring justice for Shantel Davis. It was the voice of a woman who still dares to fight back.
I salute this working-class woman. She is my hero, as are all the other working-class women in and around the Party who model how to fight, how to respond to crisis, and how to spread the fierce working-class love for a communist world.
I’ve seen many organizations, many countries, and many people. Only in Progressive Labor Party have I witnessed such a staunch example of anti-sexism. Only in PLP did I get a glimpse of what women will be like under communism.
I had joined PLP for many of the obvious reasons—a world without racism and sexism, no borders, no war, and no money. A world where everyone gets what they need and live their lives to potentials never dreamt of in our current material reality.
But there’s another reason that I joined. This reason is one I get to witness in my lifetime. I joined PLP because of the way the Party treated Black workers, especially Black women. I grew up in a capitalist culture where I learned anti-Black racism before I learned to speak English. I was taught to be thankful that at least I am not Black, though I always got hurt for being “too black, too dark, too angry.”
I saw how women are beaten, degraded, and exploited until they have internalized the racist sexism of this society. I’ve witnessed women rise against this sexism, their resolve to continue fighting day in and day out, but still lost without a communist vision. That’s what global capitalism does to the working class.
So to witness an atmosphere where Black workers, Black women workers, give leadership—that’s powerful, to say the least. I am grateful to be part of this international communist movement. Being part of PLP showed me how resilient and inspiring the working-class is. Today reminded me of the PLP song, “Streets of London,” the line that goes like this: “so how can you tell me you are lonely and say for you that the sun don’t shine.” One day, every child, woman, and man in every corner of the earth will bask in the glory of the red sun.
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Another Smashing May Day
Another smashing May Day! The workers of Brooklyn welcomed us in grand fashion.
My first May Day march was 70 years ago in 1946 in New York City — 250,000 workers and youth streaming down 8th Avenue in Manhattan from 34th Street to 17th Street and then east to Union Square.
That one was organized by the old Communist Party. But just as they accommodated themselves to capitalism and abandoned the fight for communist revolution, they also abandoned May Day marches by the early 1950s.
However, in 1971 it was Progressive Labor Party that picked up the banners of the international working class as part of the fight for communism and has celebrated and marched on May Day ever since — an achievement to be proud of. PLP truly represents the future. Congratulations comrades!
BROOKLYN, NY, APRIL 30—For those few hours, the streets belonged to the working class. The Progressive Labor Party led a march of over 500 people down Flatbush Avenue chanting, “This Whole Damn System — Shut it Down!” to the beat of “Murder She Wrote.”
Workers from delis, salons, and stores put their fists in the air and chanted along. A number joined our march and gave us their phone numbers to be contacted. Every person — over 3,000 in all — along the two-mile route bought CHALLENGE, anti-racism/anti-sexism buttons, or a “Don’t Vote — Revolt” T-shirt. The long line of communist flags flooded the streets red.
Marchers hailed from all five New York City boroughs, Buffalo, NY, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Boston and were led by middle school, high school and college students. The marchers’ multiracial composition was received enthusiastically in the predominantly Black and Latin working-class Brooklyn neighborhood.
A sound truck with a DJ playing beats at the lead maintained the chants loud in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole, and the atmosphere militant! Drivers honked their horns in salute. Before the march, speakers described many of their struggles, including those against racist deportations and the fight for higher wages at Columbia University. A family member of Tyrone West, a Baltimore Black man murdered by the racist kkkops in July 2013, described the weekly protests they’ve organized in the struggle for justice against racist police murder.
Lastly, a young Russian-Latin woman described why she recently joined the Progressive Labor Party:
When I entered college six years ago, I wanted to become a politician. I wanted to help people, and I recognized politics as the primary driving force of the world. I abandoned this aspiration by my sophomore year. It became clear to me quickly that politicians do not help people, they just talk a lot of hot air and do their best to stay in office. I resigned myself to tuning out politics. Without the ability to make change, political engagement with the world felt like nothing but a depressing burden.
I worked my ass off, I played by the rules and still came out a loser. Meanwhile the CEO of Apple gets rich off of virtual slave labor, people can’t afford basic health care, and innocent workers are being slain by drone strikes every day. Where the hell is all that change and hope Obama promised us?! I’m committed to PLP because it offers everything that politicians don’t: clarity, support and hope. We in PLP fight to expose the root cause of the international working class’s suffering: capitalism, a system founded upon mass exploitation of workers in order to maximize profits.
Fighters Against Kkkops Join Reds
As our march proceeded past intersections where the police have murdered Black youth, a group of mainly women led the marchers’ chants to “shut this racist system down!” The only answer to these racist police murders is to join PLP and help us continue to build a fighting international, revolutionary Party. From the Americas to Africa and Asia, working-class women, men and youth involved with PLP are spreading this communist struggle across the globe.
On the sound truck, one of our chant leaders was the sister of Shantel Davis, a 23-year-old woman killed by the racist NYPD in June 2012. Since her sister’s murder, this emerging communist working-class leader has responded to PL’s urgent approach towards agitation and our patient approach towards base-building. She’s overcome many illusions about getting justice for her sister from the bosses’ political system and has rejected the anti-communist lies from politicians and preachers.
Other family members of our working-class brothers and sisters murdered by the kkkops also joined with, and gave leadership to our march, including families of Kyam Livingston, Eric Garner and Tyrone West. Each of these families in the march is a precious steel nail in the coffin of capitalism.
Bosses Can’t Erase Our Militant History
The spirit and militancy of the march showed that PLP is a real alternative to the false promises the bosses’ politicians make every four years, when it’s time to elect a new imperialist-in-chief. Our May Day march marks the day we review our forces in our fight to become a mass working-class Party, organizing with the goal of communist revolution! Our future is bright: marchers and some workers on the sidewalk raised their fists as we chanted, “What do we want? COMMUNISM! When do we want it? NOW!”
At the conclusion of the march, the keynote speech given by a Black transit worker connected the current conditions of the international working class and the need to fight for communism. He began:
What a time to be alive! We have just finished another successful May Day march, a tradition that goes back to 1886, when our bothers and sisters were murdered by the cops for fighting for the 8-hour day. The fight and killing of our predecessors is motivation for communists to overthrow the bosses’ society and build the system of communism.
The bosses rule society through a violent and coercive state. They spend billions to legitimize their murderous system, yet every dollar they have spent has fallen short of covering up the inherent flaws of their system.
From the beginning of capitalism, racism and sexism have been the key tools the bosses used to divide and conquer the working class and today is no different. Today they sell the myth to ALL workers, but especially to Black and Latin workers, that white workers are responsible for hundreds of years of their exploitation under capitalism.
Meanwhile, they sell the myth to white workers that they are protected from exploitation and the bosses’ terror because they are “privileged,” thereby they have more in common with slave-owners and war-makers than their fellow workers.
The truth is that from the very inception of capitalism historically workers have fought alongside each other. The bosses, politicians, universities, media coerce us away from seeing that the only group who’s responsible for, and benefits from racism is the ruling class.
Who benefits when the bosses pay white workers a little more than Black workers or pay men more than women?
It’s not the white workers or men! It’s bosses who reap the difference! They’re the only group that wins from a divided working class.
One major challenge for us is the pessimism built about the possibility of unity between Black and white workers, women and men. Living under the bosses’ system, they have tried to erase our class’s memory of a time when Black and white, women and men workers lived and fought together against capitalism and for a better world.
After citing examples of global fightback, he ended this inspirational speech by saying: “The fight for communism can’t stop, won’t stop because workers can, workers did, and workers will continue to fight back! Long live communism! Power to the workers! Join PLP!”
We then sang the Internationale, the communist anthem, in both Spanish and English. We ended this amazing day with a picnic in the park with delicious box lunches. Some sang Creole songs around a drum circle in the park.
PLP is a fighting international Party, and our fight to build a mass, multiracial communist movement is growing. This May Day in New York City, in the belly of the U.S. imperialist beast, was both a celebration and a call to refuse to vote in the bosses’ elections but instead to join the revolutionary fight for communism by joining Progressive Labor Party!
Oakland, May 1—More than 40 members & friends of PLP had a well-organized and enthusiastic contingent in this year’s May Day March. Annually, a coalition of immigrant rights and community groups organizes for May Day. We represented the multiracial, multi-generational, international working class.
Our banners and chants in English and Spanish put communism up front. We shared chants with other groups, and some joined in with ours. “Fight for communism, Power to the workers!” (more next issue).
HAITI, May 1—Revolutionary greetings to all May Day marchers from PLP and our friends in Haiti! The Progressive Labor Party here has given communist leadership at a march in the capital, organized a workers’ study group in another provincial city, and concluded with the Internationale in Creole and calls to join the fight for communism.
This May Day, PLP continues to create confidence in the working class, strengthening and enlarging our base of communist fighters and friends. Marching in Port-au-Prince, the capital, with several trade unions, we led the marchers with chants such as “Down with capitalism, long live communism!” and “We workers have nothing to lose, let’s march on the bosses!”
The main demand of the unions’ march was to increase the minimum wage to 500 gourdes/day (9$USD). Our leaflet took a sharp look at the conditions workers here and worldwide are facing, concluding that the international working class needs an international revolutionary communist party, the PLP. We said that workers must unite in a single struggle and build the Party that will lead workers to victory, to communist revolution and an egalitarian society that will meet the needs of workers who create all value. “Workers, unite, as one class, we have the same problems and must have the same struggle.”
Elsewhere, in a provincial city, PLP organized a meeting with about 30 people, rural and unemployed workers, students and professionals. Our mission was to see that we are part of a single class. We talked about the history of May Day, showing how the bosses give their watered-down idea about this historic day to try to erase from our memory the long history of struggle—often victorious—of the working class.
Down with Capitalism! Now What?
We talked about different workers’ struggles around the world and showed how capitalism is what links them together: we are all fighting the same enemy. We also unmasked the role of capitalism in underpinning the bourgeois state. The participants criticized the capitalist system and came to the conclusion that it must be overthrown. Of course, once this was agreed upon, the next thought is to question how to do this. A PL’er noted that this was the question Lenin asked in his book What Is To Be Done?
Some friends replied that we need solidarity between workers to struggle against the bourgeoisie. One PL’er went further, calling to build a revolutionary communist party that fights for an egalitarian society, without different social classes, a society based on providing for the needs of workers, a society without money.
Another comrade added that we shouldn’t be fearful of communism and invited the participants to continue to organize activities that will sharpen the contradictions between the bosses and the working class, and to join the PLP! After the meeting, comrades and friends continued the day with a dinner, some sharp discussions and the singing of the Internationale in Creole—the first time for all of us, singing the same words as workers around the world, in our own language.
In all, our modest contribution to May Day has inspired us to keep on fighting and building the PLP.
