Attack our class enemy, not our working-class family
SOUTH AFRICA—Recently, there have been attacks by some South Africans against workers coming from other African countries, particularly Nigeria and Zimbabwe. They started in Pretoria and spread to Johannesburg. The African immigrants have been attacked physically as well as having their small shops and homes vandalized. Seven people were killed!
Some people from Nigeria and other countries have responded here in South Africa as well as in other countries. The Zambian national soccer team cancelled a friendly match against South Africa. Nigerians have begun to attack South African businesses and threaten those from South Africa living in their countries with violence, exacerbating the working class’ divisions.
The crisis of capitalism, with its increasing exploitation and unemployment, is creating massive suffering for the working class worldwide. Capitalism’s exploitation of workers does not make exceptions based on skin colour. It only benefits the capitalist class at the expense of the masses. The capitalists compete with one another but have in common the exploitation of the working class.
Their need to compete and to divide the working class led them to create borders and modern countries. African borders were drawn up at the Berlin Conference in Germany by leading capitalist imperialists 130 years ago.
Capitalist crisis and exploitation have forced working people to move to other areas or countries to sustain their families. No country escapes this exploitation. The hardships are getting worse everywhere, albeit with varying degrees. This leads to migration.
There are 2.3 million immigrants in South Africa. Most are workers from other African countries, the majority from Zimbabwe. Capitalist propaganda wants the domestic (native born) workers to think the immigrants are different simply because they come from somewhere else—to divide the working class against one another while diverting the causes of hardship to “foreigners.”
This propaganda has been pushed so that workers think they do not have jobs because “these foreigners” took them. This pushes workers to fight with one another in an ugly way, like the recent violent xenophobic attacks here.
Solving this issue means destroying nationalism, borders, and nations. The root cause is the vicious capitalist wage system which pits workers against each other to compete for fewer jobs for lower wages. Their automation means that fewer workers produce more goods while mass unemployment soars.
To fight against these attacks, we need to fight against capitalism. Workers need to unite against the bosses for a communist society without exploitation, where the means of production are owned collectively. All workers will be welcome everywhere to help plan, produce, and distribute everything the masses need. No one will be a “foreigner.”
This necessitates cooperation, not division, collectivity not wages or money. The possibility and the need for a united working class fighting exploitation exists now. Workers have more in common than we have differences.
Seeing that the capitalists’ racist, xenophobic propaganda is a lie is critical to ending capitalism.
The ICWP invites workers to join us in ending capitalism by fighting for a communist revolution. We are mobilizing the masses by distributing workers’ communist ideas and struggles through our Red Flag newspaper everywhere possible. The advances made in many countries show the potential of the international united working class.
In South Africa we are fighting these xenophobic attacks and capitalist propaganda by recruiting foreign students. One student from Lesotho is part of our collective reading of the Red Flag. We seek to recruit our working-class brothers and sisters from other countries like Zimbabwe. A couple read Red Flag.
We condemn the violence directed at working people! We call for it to be directed on our class enemy, the capitalists. That starts with joining the struggle for communism.
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