This past July 15 at the airport in Barcelona, Spain, an airplane, bound for Senegal, Africa, failed to take off at the scheduled time. Everything went as normal until a worker from Senegal boarded the plane in handcuffs. He had entered Spain on another flight “illegally.” He was being transported in the custody of the Civil Guard (police).
As the passengers on the plane heard the worker complaining, they stood up, protesting the action of the police. They demanded that his expulsion be canceled. The flight was paralyzed for several hours, forcing the captain to finally order all the passengers to disembark.
There are other examples of solidarity with immigrants: the women in Mexico who provide food and water to the workers who try to cross Mexico on top of freight trains known as “The Beast. ” Another example is the workers in Catania, Italy, who protested the docking of the anti-immigrant “Defend Europe” boat and the Tunisian fishermen whose action stopped it.
Workers have a choice. This worker solidarity shows key aspects of the communist potential of our class. It is absolutely necessary to organize a communist revolution that puts an end to capitalism and all its evils. But it’s not automatic. Without a communist party, the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP), that struggles ideologically to fight and defeat the poisonous ideas of capitalism, our class can be won to racist-fascist ideas and to support the capitalists.
A clear example of this is what happened, the same week, in Antofagasta, Chile. Two Peruvian brothers were hospitalized after having been soaked with gasoline and set on fire by a crowd of Chilean fishermen. This racist incident is a product of increasing racial tensions fomented by the bosses’ press that incites hatred against immigrants, accusing them of being criminals and demanding their expulsion.
Unfortunately, these racist incidents are not unique. They are multiplied in all parts of the world where the capitalist crisis intensifies and the number of immigrants and refugees is increasing.
In all parts of the world the working class is being exploited, massacred and enslaved. Today there are more refugees than during World War II. About 5 million workers and their families have left Syria. Millions more in the rest of the world are forced to emigrate looking for a job in order to survive.
How did we get here? Capitalism has created this hell. Its chronic crises of overproduction lead to unemployment, homelessness and hunger. Then, to lower the cost of labor even more and divide the working class, capitalism unleashes racism, sexism and xenophobia. Moreover, imperialist competition for markets, natural resources, and the lowest labor cost inevitably ends in local, regional, and world wars.
The capitalist system is the enemy of the working class. The working class needs a change; it needs to face capitalism and defeat it. But how can we achieve it?
The answer is certain. Capitalism will be defeated with communist revolution. In a communist world, no one will be expelled from anywhere nor forced to flee to save their life or to look for a job. There will be no money or wage system. We will work collectively to meet the needs of everyone. There will not be nations, or borders, or citizenship and no one will be illegal. Once we win communism somewhere in the world, we will welcome all those who want to come—no matter where they come from, their “race,” or their religious belief.
How will we achieve a communist world? Workers must know that our enemies are the capitalists, not workers from another part of the world. To inculcate this understanding and present them with a vision of a communist world, we need to spread communist ideas. For that we need a massive ICWP.
With communist revolution, the working class will be able to put an end to all the capitalist bloodletting that exists today. The working class, led by a worldwide ICWP with dialectical materialism as our guide, and men and women worker leaders, can not only put an end to all the capitalists—local and imperialist—but also build the communist society that we so need and deserve worldwide.