Defeat Capitalismās āDivide and Ruleā here ā¦ For a Communist World Without Borders here ā¦
Newport News Virginia, July 1967
History Shows We Can Defeat Capitalismās āDivide-and-Ruleā — Letās Unite to Fight for a Communist World
In July 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, three thousand Black and white workers building Navy ships at Peninsula Shipyard in Newport News, Virginia (USA) walked out in a wildcat strike. They defied an injunction, fought strikebreakers, and flipped over a squad car. Joined by their families, they looted the bloodsucking pawn shops surrounding the shipyard.
Black workers who had been deprived of state medical care and a university education joined with white workers. These workers had grown up in the Jim-Crow South. They had been forced to attend segregated schools, ride in segregated buses, and drink from segregated water fountains. This strike broke the barriers that separated them. Workers in the former capital of the enslaversā confederacy now joined together to fight as one working class.
Their militant class consciousness built on massive opposition to the US war on Vietnam and on the civil rights movement and urban rebellions of the 1950s and 1960s. It is one of many such chapters in the history of sharp multi-racial class struggle in the United States.
Indentured Laborers in Englandās North American Colonies
Most of the first English settlers were poor. Masses of people had been forced off their land by the rise of capitalist agriculture and were homeless in the cities. The English rulers worried about what they called the āburden of the poorā and āruffianlike disorder.ā They hanged thieves and sentenced beggars to ātransportationā to the colonies. Hundreds of thousands of landless farmers sold themselves into indenture (limited-term slavery) for a chance to survive on the land that England was stealing from Indigenous people.
Rich colonists got title to land for bringing over people who they forced to work for them for (usually) seven years. Laborers who survived got a gun and some supplies. They were told to move west and try their luck at stealing farmland from the Native population.
Recruiting settlers from the rebellious poor of England to use as cheap labor and shock troops in the genocide of native Americans. This was the English rulersā strategy. It created sharp divisions between rich landowners and the landless poor in the colonies. It pitted the poor settlers against Indigenous people. Poor farmers were won to fight the Native people, rather than their colonial overlords.
The Africans brought in chains to Virginia in the 1600s often worked side by side with English indentured laborers. They loved, ran away, and rebelled together. But the rulers created racist lies, customs, and laws to separate us. Soon they made slavery a question of African ancestry.
This is the birth of capitalism. Marx calls it āprimitive accumulation.ā We might call it āstart-up capital.ā Big landlords threw farmers off their land so they could raise sheep. The mass of the population became the āfree laboring poor.ā Africans were enslaved. Native Americans were subjected to genocide. As Marx described it, capital comes into the world ādripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.ā
This Racist System is Capitalism. The Solution Is Communism
We must call capitalism by its true name. This makes it clear that the capitalist exploiters attack us all. It attacks some of us harder than others, and in different ways. They will continue to do so until we finally end capitalism with communist revolution.
Some people call this āsettler colonialism.ā We disagree. That term keeps us from understanding that basic reality. It regards the English poor, fleeing prison and starvation, as the main agents of oppression of the Indigenous population. The real culprits were their rulers, who established the colonies and forced them to migrate for their own survival.
Poor white farmers were ground down by the need to work cheaper than enslaved people. Most were undernourished and barely surviving. The language of āsettler colonialismā lumps them together with wealthy enslavers who got rich from the labor of both enslaved Africans and poor whites.
Talking about āsettler colonialismā hides the true history of multiracial/multiethnic solidarity and class struggle. This history ā including the Newport News strike – points to the possibility of a united working-class communist revolution.
Black and white workers and sailors led protests in colonial America against the Stamp Act in the 1760s. Black and white dock workers, citizens and immigrants, shut down the Ports of New Orleans in 1892 and Philadelphia in 1913. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, veterans, tenant farmers and sharecroppers, housewives and unemployed workers, steel and auto workers of all āraces/ethnicitiesā fought side-by-side in struggle after struggle throughout the US.
We are one working class. The rulers have worked for centuries to divide us. Communism will eliminate the material base for racism and all other divisive ideologies and practices by ending the wage system. The fight against racism and nationalism and for communism is one fight. United, we will win!
Read our pamphlet:
To End Racism: Mobilize the Masses for Communism
For a Communist World Without Borders
MEXICO, January 2ā Human beings have always migrated. However, migration has increased under capitalism. Today, governments want an “orderly and regulated” migration, based on their capitalist production needs.
Confronting an enormous northward migrant flow through Mexico, US Cabinet officials Blinken and Mayorkas and advisor Sherwood-Randall met with the Mexican government of President Lopez Obrador (AMLO). They agreed on regulations to try to contain the wave. Mexican authorities are putting busing thousands to processing centers to apply forĀ travelĀ permits.
Mexican officials used bulldozers on December 28 to clear a migrant tent camp in Matamoros, Mexico near the US border at Brownsville, Texas after Obrador agreed to do more to curb immigration to the US.
The bosses see thousands of strong arms for their factories. We communists see thousands of people with the potential to build a new communist world without borders or exploitation.
More than half the workers in every country work for the capitalists under “informal” contracts. That is, as if we were not their employees. Yet by selling the goods that we make, they only enslave us.
Millions of us are subjected to strenuous working conditions and violence. This is one reason for escaping by migration: looking for better living conditions, the “American dream.” Many thousands of families are directly impacted by migration.
With a communist society there will be no need to leave our homes because we will all have what we need.
In the border cities, the migrants are crowded, and services are insufficient. We need to support migrants and fight xenophobia. Migrants are not the problem. The problem is capitalism. Even if one million migrants stayed in Mexico, the population would increase by less than 1%.
Governments say there is not enough money to support either migrants or locals. But officials and the capitalists they represent line their pockets with money they steal from workers.
Most of us in the world are migrants. Half the people in Latin America live in cities (in Mexico, 79% since 2020). They were expelled from the towns and rural areas by the conditions created by capitalism.
It does not change much whether it is internal or external migration. The human being seeks “better conditions” of life, in other countries or in the metropolises.
The technological development that capital constantly revolutionizes creates, above all, the cultural conditions of coexistence, the moral convictions that make possible a superior humanity.
This not only creates the material conditions for such a superior society. But most importantly the urgent need for a mass communist party that organizes a society without money (abolishing trade relations), without borders, without racism and gender prejudice.
A new communist society where everyone contributes according to their ability and commitment to the rest and receives according to their needs.
The reformists (possibilists) believe that we wage slaves have to wait for the further development of the productive forces. However, workers only need to want, as Engles said. The wealth that we as a class have produced is enough to provide the above-mentioned superior human life and to basically secure the future.
Across Mexico and worldwide, workers need to become class-conscious and build the mass ICWP to end wage slavery and borders.
Read our pamphlet:
“Fight for the Day When No Worker Will Be Called Foreigner”
here