Three year-old Aylan Kurdi, lying drowned on a beach in Turkey after his family’s desperate flight from Syria, is one of millions murdered or displaced by capitalist terror. Workers become refugees because their lives are unbearable and their homes unliveable. The root cause is U.S. imperialism, a plague that devastates the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Working-class families are forced to brave suffocating containers, perilous overland crossings, and flimsy rubber rafts. They are compelled to entrust their lives to human traffickers, the callous predators who ape the capitalist bosses in putting profit first and last. Those lucky enough to survive their journey to Europe or the U.S.—mothers, fathers, children—come up against police attacks, razor wire, concentration camps, and racist abuse in places they hope might offer a better life. Women workers face sexist violence and maternal and reproductive health crises. Their children are dying en masse.
The latest refugee crisis is one more indictment of capitalism, a system that treats workers as disposable commodities. The international working class has responded by fighting back and serving the masses. All along the way, workers have greeted refugees with food, clothing, medicine, and housing. Millions have rejected the bosses’ attempts to divide workers with anti-Muslim racism or the capitalist competition for jobs, a by-product of a system that can never meet workers’ needs. The Progressive Labor Party strives to emulate their example in serving our class. We struggle to build class consciousness into the fight for a world with no refugees or imperialist war. PLP fights to win millions to the vision of a communist world, and to smash racist borders once and for all.
Imperialism Attacks Refugees Twice
Under imperialism, workers in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea are assaulted twice. Syria, which alone accounts for 4 million refugees and another 8 million displaced within its borders, is a pawn in the competition between imperialist powers to control the vast oil wealth of the Middle East. In an effort to tilt the balance of regional power and counter the influence of Iran, a Russian proxy, U.S. bosses have financed a brutal rebellion against the state-terrorist, pro-Russian Assad regime This four-year-old conflict has besieged workers with chemical weapons, routine bombings of civilians, torture and mass imprisonment. The resulting destabilization has created an opening for the murderous Islamic State, junior capitalists with their own designs on the region’s oil profits. Critical infrastructure—electrical power, clean water, distribution of food and medicine—has been devastated. Workers have no choice but to leave, by any means possible.
The second attack comes with the racist terror these workers face at every step of their route to whatever destinations will admit them. Hungary, a gateway to the European Union (EU), is busy building a fence along its 110-mile border with Serbia. Anti-immigrant vigilantes are on the march in the Czech Republic; fascist parties are gaining strength in France and Italy. British Prime Minister David Cameron is leading the racist charge among capitalist politicians to warn of the refugee “swarm.” French President Francois Hollande called the port city of Calais a “jungle” and complained that truckloads of dead refugees are hurting insurance companies’ balance sheets.
When thousands of refugees chant “Germany! Germany!” in a Hungarian train station, it reflects Germany’s relatively high standard of living—the fruit of decades of immigrant exploitation and the destruction of weaker Eurozone economies like Greece. With their profits threatened by an aging population, the German bosses hope that an influx of 800,000 refugees will keep their profits humming. Their cynical attempt to save face comes after years of neglect for economic refugees from Africa and the former Yugoslavia, where German imperialism supported the U.S. slaughter in Serbia and turned a blind eye to the refugees the U.S. bombing created.
Workers Have No Borders
Germany is the leading finance capitalist power within the EU, a free-travel zone created by the bosses for more efficient trade and exploitation of workers. But as the numbers of refugees escalate and the costs of social services climb, a number of EU countries have balked and are restoring border controls. The capitalist rulers draw national boundaries to divide the international working class. Meanwhile, capital—the profit derived from workers’ hands and brains—flows freely from one country to the next. The international working class has no need for these artificial lines.
Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, along with his brother and mother, was murdered by racist capitalism while attempting to join relatives in Canada. Thousands of others have died without any headlines. For U.S. and European bosses, the solution is more fascism and war—more air strikes, more mass murders, more refugees.
Workers must respond with class-conscious solidarity. Who are the bosses to draw borders? Who are they to say who should go where? The international working class will erase national boundaries and the racist, imperialist system that created them. We fight to build a mass international PLP. We fight for armed revolution for a communist world. To the workers of the world we say: Our class alone can build a world without nations or refugees. Join us!