Fight For a Communist World Without Borders
Garment worker comrades in a protest against deportations and wage slavery from Los Angeles to Bangladesh in 2013.
In the 1970s, workers from Mexico and Central America fled their homes. US imperialism and local capitalists had made survival impossible. Some came to escape the US-paid death squads that had killed their friends and comrades in civil wars. Some came because capitalist exploitation had made it impossible to feed themselves or their families in the countryside or the cities. They came from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. And many of them ended up in Los Angeles.
Some of those migrants are revolutionary communists today helping to lead the International Communist Workers’ Party to fight for a world without borders, wars and exploitation. A world where no-one will be forced to flee their home to survive and no-one will be called a foreigner.
Their path brought them into contact with communist workers and students in Los Angeles in a group called the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). It was mostly made up of students who knew that workers were key to a communist revolution. They joined PLP and fought to make it a working-class party.
They led strikes in garment factories, a walk-out in a shoe factory and confronted the immigration cops in a garment factory. They fought against racist conditions in the public schools, and led other workers and students in fighting the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. They fought against apartheid in South Africa. And they built long-lasting ties among industrial workers and their families in Los Angeles as they maintained their ties to their countries of origin and encourage communist organizing there.
When PLP succumbed to reformism ten years ago, they were instrumental in the founding of the ICWP in the US, Mexico and Central America.
Today’s Migrants Can Be Tomorrow’s Revolutionaries
Forty years later, millions of workers and their families are fleeing their homes. Late-stage capitalism, with its environmental crisis, mass unemployment and violence all over the world has made survival impossible on an unimaginable scale. According to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, there are 25 million refugees in the world today. These are people in refugee camps who have crossed the bosses’ borders, running from violence, persecution, war or natural disaster.
These figures do not include those who have left their homes without crossing the bosses’ borders. And it doesn’t include the much larger numbers of people who are leaving home because the capitalist crisis has made it impossible to earn enough money to survive.
The crisis—and the hypocrisy of the rulers—is extreme. In the first ten days of December alone:
*Video surfaced of the death of 16-year-old Guatemalan Mayan migrant Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez who died, alone and unaided, in his cell near McAllen, Texas, in May. Eight migrant children, seven of them Mayan children from Guatemala, have died in U.S. custody in the last year.
*A ship carrying migrants from The Gambia in West Africa, a country looted by both French and British imperialists and rocked by corruption and unemployment, sank off the shores of Mauritania. Sixty-two people lost their lives.
*Seven hundred refugees fleeing from the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan were saved by Lighthouse Rescue, operating on the north shore of the Greek island of Lesvos,18 miles from the shores of Turkey. Over a thousand migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this year.
*Six hundred refugees from those same wars are trapped in a snowed-in refugee camp made of tents—without running water or electricity—on top of a former landfill on the northern border of Bosnia.
Sailors, rescue workers, doctors and lawyers fight for the survival of our working-class family in these horrific situations. While we applaud their efforts, even they know it’s not enough. Pia Klemp, the German captain of a boat whose crew has rescued thousands of refugees in the Mediterranean, spoke out this summer for revolution, and freedom of movement and residence for all. (See “Let’s Fight for a Communist World Without Borders” Red Flag Volume 10, Number 10.)
Our experiences from the 1970s teach us that those who have fled the worst of capitalism and imperialism, if armed with communist ideas and organized in a communist party, can be among the best fighters to end capitalism and its horrors. Communists must aggressively recruit migrant workers everywhere to hasten the fight for a communist future.
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