Paris transit strike here ♦ Imperialist War in Ukraine and the Capitalist Immigration Crisis in Europe here ♦
France, November 10: Transit workers shut down Paris Metro during a nationwide strike for higher wages and pensions in the face of inflation. The US/NATO/Russia war in Ukraine is intensifying the cost to the working class of the capitalist crisis. It has led to spikes in fuel prices, increased inflation, and workers have responded with militant strikes throughout Europe. Workers in Europe, like workers everywhere, need communist revolution.
Imperialist War in Ukraine and the Capitalist Immigration Crisis in Europe
November 15—”The capitalists invent wars to be able to amass more wealth, and we workers pay for the crises caused by these wars,” said a Chilean friend. These wars are accompanied by racism, crisis, and more slavery.
The war in Ukraine has been going on for nine months with no end in sight. Over ten million of our class have been displaced from their places of origin as the Russian imperialists and the US-led NATO fight for control of the area. And through this war the bosses promote their poisonous racism as a prelude to World War III.
In Europe right now, workers from Africa are not well received. On the Italian coasts, the fascists led by Meloni have decided to admit only 150 workers (pregnant women, children and the sick). Nine hundred more must stay in international waters. If no country takes charge, they will be treated like a “pirate” ship.
Meanwhile, many immigrants from Africa and southwest Asia have died in the Mediterranean Sea, after desperately attempting to get a job. Capitalism forces us to work for some boss to get wages that will allow us to survive.
Various European countries have welcomed many Ukrainian refugees, notably Poland with over five million. Russia received some early in the war. The US legalized 100,000 Ukrainian refugees in just five months, unlike 24,000 Venezuelans and many other immigrants seeking refuge.
The hypocrisy of capitalism and the miserable treatment of the working class is strikingly apparent when Ukrainian workers can go elsewhere in Europe as refugees and obtain residency and state aid to start a new life. Having created this war, the imperialists now promote their racist poison, making us believe that they care about the lives of refugees of similar skin color.
But there are also other aspects, like Ukraine’s trade with other European countries that import about seventy-six million tons of cereals annually, including corn, barley, and wheat. There are also the gas pipelines that run through Ukraine to the rest of Europe.
There is geopolitics: Ukraine is confronting Russia with weapons, money and people supplied by the US/NATO. Welcoming Ukrainian refugees is part of that support.
Given this, we workers do not have to be faithful to any boss that appears to be good. The mass movements need internationalist leadership. For that we must massify communist ideas by distributing Red Flag and recruiting workers to the political line of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP).
Only in this way can we build a new world where everyone will be welcomed anywhere regardless of their skin color or language, because we will not have borders, nor governments that take economic or political advantage of the suffering working masses.
We must continue to build an army that will defend the working class and not bosses or profits. Only by winning more comrades to our ranks will we hasten the path to the defeat of capitalism and the construction of the communist society that we so much need.