The tens and hundreds of thousands of men, women, children (the old people can only be left to die) fleeing from the war theatres in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Central Africa, Libya, whole regions of Africa ravaged by famine and endemic poverty, who try desperately to save themselves by crossing lands and seas, often coming to their deaths among the dunes or the waves, this horrifying movement of human beings that provokes the most despicable and sickening of reactions, all this is further proof that this mode of production, capitalism, must be overthrown, in order to usher in a society in which class divisions, the race for profit, competition of all against all, the repression and oppression of peoples, the wars between imperialist crooks, to sum up, all the rot that the society of capital is immersed in, finally disappear.
Are we exaggerating? No, we are being realistic. Africa, the Middle East, whole regions of Asia (and how about Central and South America?) have been massacred by capitalist penetration, in the form first of colonialism and later of imperialism. Talk about “bringing civilization to the barbarians”! It is sufficient to be aware of the devastating effects of peanut monocultures (one of the hubs of capitalist exploitation) on whole countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Senegal – on their economies and societies and thus on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings, on the contradictory and conflict-ridden relations their ruling classes have with the one colonial-imperialist power or the other in whose shadow they have arisen; or to be familiar with the tremendous story, destined to leave its bloody trail, of how, during the whole of the 1800s and 1900s, those powers schemed to set tribes, castes or ethnic groups one against the other: the war between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, with its 800 thousand deaths, stands for all the tragedies we have witnessed.
And today? Today when obscene wars drag on in whole areas of the planet, turning the second post-war period into a single, continuous killing field of peoples? The course of capitalism on entering the phase of its structural crisis halfway through the 1970s stands behind all this slaughter: over-production, the engulfing of national economies, the delusion that financialization be the way to exit the crisis, the slump in the price of raw materials and the need to control their sources and transportation routes, excluding rivals, the various bubbles that burst one after another, all that we have been analysing and criticizing for decades as part and parcel of capitalism in its imperialist phase, this is what lies behind these huge movements. “Let’s help them at home!”, proclaimed one of the many stolid puppets of capital, former Italian Prime Minister Renzi. Well, for at least one and a half centuries capitalism has been “helping them at home”: and these are the consequences!
On the very skin of these desperate, fleeing people, the dirtiest and most rotten of games imaginable is now being played out: European funding to be grabbed, the – barely concealed – migrant business (those thousands and thousands of euros, dollars or other currencies extorted from wretched people on departure or in the work camps on their arrival nevertheless “keep the wheels of the economy rolling”, and this is the slogan of all national capitalisms), increasing inter-imperialist squabbles, ominous nationalist revanchism, idiotic populist and racist rhetoric, impotent and rhetorical do-gooders and – basically – the crude ideological, though for the time being not yet practical, preparation for a new, widespread world war. Yes, because the “immigration issue” comes in useful, and how! To pit one against the other the “indigenous” proletarians – already sufficiently hit by a crisis that no-one, quite apart from the empty proclamations of fake optimism, sees an end to –and the proletarian masses or those becoming proletarianized, which nonetheless serve the economy in its crisis (bringing down salaries and creating an enormous reservoir in the form of an industrial reserve army) but which cause alarm because – should they join the “indigenous” proletarian front – they would contribute a precious potential of anger, antagonism, the need to organize and fight. All in the imagination? But of what other use (apart from the openly and explicitly terroristic clamour about “invasion”) is the distinction between “economic migrants” and “asylum seekers”? As though the former were not the latter, too, and vice-versa! Aren’t those fleeing wars between imperialisms after having lost everything “economic migrants”? And aren’t those fleeing poverty clearly deriving from economies aggravated by the persistent crisis of over-production “asylum seekers”? A hypocritical distinction just to keep the bourgeois hyenas satisfied.
We shall return again (as we have always done) to this horrendous tragedy. In the meantime, let it be quite clear: we communists claim absolute freedom of movement for all migrants; we decry all measures of control, surveillance, containment, confinement, imprisonment, closure in camps, repression and persecution to which they are subjected; we fight against all – more or less budding – forms of verbal and practical racism; and we work for an effective union between “indigenous” proletarians and migrant proletarians from any part of the world, whatever their language, religion or ethnic group. The dreadful migrations, fruit of the imbalances characteristic of capitalism, cause other contradictions to explode on the scenario of a mode of production, which – we repeat emphatically – we must prepare to overthrow before it brings about even worst disasters for the human species.
“Proletarians of the world, unite!” is not a slogan. It is a battle-cry!
August 2017
International Communist Party
