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	Australasian Spartacist No. 227	Spring 2015

Imperialist Mayhem Fuels Refugee Crisis

Europe: Racist Clampdown on Immigration

OCTOBER 27—Over the last several months hundreds of thousands of people have fled the imperialist-wrought carnage of countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria into Europe. The desperate efforts of so many people to get into Europe, the U.S., Australia and elsewhere are a direct consequence of the imperialist subjugation of the neocolonial world. With their systematic looting of wide swaths of the planet and devastating wars, or proxy wars, from Afghanistan to the Middle East to Africa, the advanced capitalist powers impose bloody terror and inhuman conditions on the vast majority of humanity. The UN estimates that there are now some 60 million people worldwide displaced by war and persecution, the highest number since World War II. With the mass inflow of refugees into Europe (only a tiny percentage of the world’s total), the European Union (EU) has ramped up repressive measures to block entry and hasten deportations.

The thousands of immigrants who have died in the attempt to reach the gates of “Fortress Europe,” and, for that matter, Australia, were murdered by imperialist powers that have militarily devastated their countries, ravaged their economies, robbed them of their livelihoods and then callously left them to die. The collapse of the Soviet degenerated workers state in the early 1990s removed a major historic obstacle to imperialist free-booting. The first Iraq war of 1990-91 was quickly followed by U.S. military intervention in Somalia and a host of other imperialist adventures. Over the past decade, the U.S., Britain and Australia have been involved in wars and/or occupations from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria and Libya while France has repeatedly sent troops to protect its economic interests in Ivory Coast, Mali and the Central African Republic.

The 2011 bombing of Libya by the U.S., Britain and France led to the toppling of the bonapartist Gaddafi government and a state of utter collapse and anarchy. With various military strongmen, imperialist puppets, Islamist reactionaries and tribal forces slaughtering each other, the unguarded Libyan coast became a destination for many of those from Asia, Africa and the Middle East seeking to gain entry into Europe. Those people who do manage to make it into Europe are often thrown into brutal detention centres, like Britain’s Yarl’s Wood, whose inmates have protested against being treated “like animals or less than animals.” Such are the normal workings of the global capitalist system in which the rulers are driven by cold economic self-interest and political calculation.

In September the heart-rending image of the tiny corpse of three-year-old Kurdish-Syrian Alan Kurdi, who drowned on the way from Turkey to Greece, prompted a cynical show of concern over the plight of refugees by imperialist governments. Kurdi was hardly the first child to die in the treacherous journey from the Middle East to Europe. In part his death was highlighted because his family were fleeing the Kobani area of Kurdish Syria, where Kurdish nationalists have been helping coordinate imperialist airstrikes against ISIS cutthroats. No such outpouring of sympathy has been extended by the capitalist rulers to the many Pakistani or Afghani children who have been slaughtered by the imperialists’ relentless bombing of those countries. Around two weeks after Kurdi’s death the imperialists began a renewed bombing campaign in Syria, including by the Australian airforce.

Notwithstanding liberal pleas in the face of the refugee crisis today rocking Europe, the capitalist rulers in Europe, and the world over, have no intention of allowing unrestricted immigration. Whatever they do will not be out of any kind of altruism. To the extent that German chancellor Angela Merkel has postured as a great humanitarian offering to open the door to hundreds of thousands of migrants, it is because Germany has a falling birth rate and is in need of manpower in certain sectors of its economy. Once these jobs are filled, the door will again be slammed shut. Indeed, with upwards of 10,000 people a day pouring into Germany, the German government quickly introduced controls at the Austrian border. More recently Merkel visited Turkey to press President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to stem the flow of migrants into Europe. Other European countries, which have different labour needs, have been much less inclined to take in refugees. When Merkel and French president François Hollande attempted to force other EU member states to “share the burden” and accept mandatory quotas of refugees there was uproar within the EU, highlighting its instability. In Britain, where the ruling Conservatives vie with the racist, anti-immigrant “euro-sceptics” of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Prime Minister David Cameron refused to accept a quota.

The EU’s vaunted passport-free internal borders were never an obstacle to the mass deportation of those deemed undesirable by the capitalist rulers, e.g., Roma (Gypsies) expelled from France. Recent events have now made a complete mockery of any such pretensions. Hungary erected razor-wire fences on its borders and passed legislation making illegal border-crossing punishable by up to five years in jail. A Bulgarian border patrol shot and killed an Afghan refugee. EU leaders came up with yet another round of tough anti-immigrant laws. In Germany, the Bundestag passed new legislation to speed up processing and deportation and is debating whether to create refugee “transit zones,” which have been likened to concentration camps.

As for the deeply racist Australian Liberal/National Coalition government, fostering anti-Muslim sentiment, they declared that, of the tiny number of 12,000 Syrians they agreed to allow into Australia, the majority would be Christian. At the same time reports continue of the horrendous conditions experienced by those incarcerated in Australia’s hellhole offshore immigrant detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. We say: Those who make it here should have the right to stay here—full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations! Shut down the detention camps!

The Apostles of “Humanitarian” Imperialism

Internationally, various reformist left groups have been promoting illusions that the rapacious imperialists who are responsible for what has been labelled a “humanitarian catastrophe” will “do something” to help their victims. Earlier this year ControCorrente, the Italian group affiliated to the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), represented in Australia by the Socialist Party, demanded that “an international maritime assistance plan must be re-established in international waters and, if necessary, in Libyan national waters. Assistance must be guaranteed to every human being” (socialistworld.net, 27 April). The CWI holds up as a model of “success” the Italian government’s now defunct Mare Nostrum program, describing it as a “military and humanitarian mission whose principal objective was maritime assistance and the rescue of migrants.” In fact, the declared objective of the Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue program was to provide a “deterrent effect” against immigration. And the handfuls that “humanitarian” Italian imperialism does rescue are liable to be thrown into overcrowded camps—as were the 27 survivors of the mass drowning of some 1,200 people in April.

The British Workers Power group is another typical example of reformist cheerleading for “human rights” imperialism. Lecturing British prime minister Cameron & Co. that the “highest priority should surely be placed on saving the lives of people driven to desperate measures by consequences beyond their control,” Workers Power demands: “We need to open the borders of the EU to all who seek asylum or work within it.” They continue: “We need to tear down the walls and transform Fortress Europe into Refuge Europe” (workerspower.co.uk, 22 April). Such views are echoed by the Laborite left in Australia with Solidarity and Socialist Alliance (SA) bleating that the imperialist rulers from Australia to Europe should “Open the Borders.” As well as pleading to the government to “Let the Refugees In,” Socialist Alternative (SAlt) have headlined a recent issue “Tear down Fortress Australia” (Red Flag, 14 September). Readers of the latter are left wondering who SAlt thinks will do this tearing down—perhaps the bourgeois Greens who SAlt urged people to vote for in the last federal elections?

Like Workers Power in Britain, these groups acknowledge on some level that the exploitation and wars carried out by the imperialists are the underlying causes for the mass emigration of desperate people to Europe and elsewhere. What they do not acknowledge, unsurprisingly, is their own role. In their own small way SA, Solidarity and SAlt helped prepare the ideological ground for the imperialist bombing of Libya by hailing the anti-Gaddafi opposition who would later act as spotters for the British and French bombers. In 2011, in an article on “Libya and the Left,” SAlt cadre Corey Oakley chastised those on the left who “undermined the revolution and attempted to depict it as a reactionary movement in alliance with US imperialism.” The rag-tag Libyan opposition, acclaimed as “revolutionaries” by SAlt and Solidarity, were feted as “heroes” by U.S. Republican Senator John McCain. They included such reactionary pro-imperialist elements as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which was founded in the early 1980s with funds from the CIA and Saudi Arabia.

After promoting pro-imperialist reactionaries in Libya, SAlt and Solidarity soon discovered more “revolutionaries” in Syria, giving support to the imperialist-backed “rebels” while simultaneously saying they opposed air strikes on the country. Rejecting the Marxist position that the bloody communalist civil war in Syria is reactionary on all sides, for years they have insisted that what was unfolding was a “revolution” against the Assad regime. Both groups have touted the “Local Coordination Committees” (LCC) as key to this mythical Syrian revolution. In fact, the LCC have openly called for U.S. imperialist intervention (see “Imperialists Hands Off Syria!” Australasian Spartacist No. 221, Spring 2013). Falling into line behind their “own” ruling class, Solidarity and SAlt view Assad as the main enemy in Syria. SAlt’s Alex Chklovski shamelessly whitewashed the imperialist intervention, railing that “The fundamental root of the problem in Syria—the cause of the millions of refugees, the growth of ISIS, the hundreds of thousands dead—is Assad. Not US bombs, not Western intervention: Assad” (Red Flag, 12 October).

While Marxists have no side in the squalid civil war in Syria the international working class does have a side in opposing the imperialists and their allies. It is the imperialists who are responsible for the bloody chaos in Iraq, Syria and beyond. They are the worst enemies of humanity, and any blow to the imperialist forces and their foot soldiers, even on the part of forces as repugnant as ISIS, would thus serve the interests of the international working class. Marxists place themselves militarily on the side of ISIS in clashes with the imperialist forces and their lackeys without giving the least political support to these reactionaries. We demand all imperialist forces out of Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa! While our main opposition is to the imperialists, we also oppose all other capitalist powers currently involved in Syria (including Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and call for them to leave (see “U.S. Out of Afghanistan and the Near East!” Workers Vanguard No. 1076, 16 October). We look to the proletariat of the Middle East as the force with the social power to lead the oppressed masses in the revolutionary overthrow of their capitalist rulers. This perspective must be linked to the fight for workers revolution in the imperialist countries.

That SAlt and Solidarity should be aligned with imperialist-backed reactionaries is hardly surprising. Throughout the 1980s, as then members of the Cliffite International Socialist Organisation, they backed every imperialist-sponsored anti-Soviet force and grotesquely celebrated the capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR in 1991-92, which ushered in mass unemployment, starvation and nationalist fratricide. The destruction of the bureaucratically degenerated workers state in the USSR emboldened the imperialists, centrally the U.S., to carry out a series of bombings, wars and occupations against weaker countries and has decisively shaped the world of war and immiseration we live in today.

“Open the Borders”: Utopian and Reactionary

The call to “open the borders” is both utopian and reactionary. All variants of this call amount to advocating the abolition of national states under capitalism—an impossibility. The modern nation-state (or multinational state dominated by one nation) arose as a vehicle for the development of capitalism and will remain the foundation of capitalism until the whole system is overthrown through a series of workers revolutions. Every capitalist corporation, no matter how far flung its international operations, is ultimately reliant on the armed forces of its home country. No capitalist ruling class will voluntarily relinquish control over its territory.

For revolutionary Marxists, it is axiomatic that the capitalist nation-state, together with private ownership of the means of production, are fetters on the further development of the forces of production, which are social and international in character. Only with the advent of a global, classless communist society and the withering away of the state will there be no borders. To argue otherwise is to deny the iron necessity of socialist revolution for the further advance of humanity and serves only to fuel illusions in the reformability of a potentially “humane” capitalist system.

If promoted as a general principle, the demand for open borders under capitalism is reactionary. As the history of Zionist Israel amply demonstrates, unlimited mass immigration is a threat to the right of national self-determination. The major powers have the means to throttle the flow of refugees and immigrants into their countries when they need to; not so smaller and weaker peoples. While the imperialist states (at the behest of the Zionists) closed their borders to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and to the survivors of the death camps, they compelled hundreds of thousands of European Jews to go to Palestine, where they ended up displacing and expelling much of the Arab population.

As the epoch of imperialism shows, insofar as a great power can force a weaker, economically backward state to open its borders, this allows for increased penetration by imperialist capital, effectively eliminating any degree of national sovereignty of the weaker country. The EU capitalist club is committed to the free movement of capital. Immigrant workers from poorer EU states are used as a pool of lower wage labour and the capitalists seek to manipulate immigration to suit the needs of the labour market in their own countries. Originating as an economic adjunct to the U.S.-dominated anti-Soviet NATO alliance, the EU has always been a mechanism for the capitalist rulers to maximise the rate of exploitation of the working class of the region. The EU is an inherently unstable bloc aimed at improving the competitive edge of its dominant members, chiefly Germany, vis-à-vis their imperialist rivals, centrally Japan and the U.S.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty set the framework for the EU of today. It laid down the conditions for joining the single currency. Member states signed up, agreeing to limits on their budget deficits in exchange for cheaper loans, larger inflows of capital and freer trade within Europe. The euro is an instrument for economic domination, chiefly by Germany, over the poorer EU states. Moreover, as the current EU crisis shows, a single currency shared by different countries is unviable in the long term.

The International Communist League has opposed the EU since its inception, from the standpoint of proletarian internationalism. To see how our sharp opposition to the EU and the single currency has been vindicated, one need only look at the economic devastation visited upon Greece, or at the fate of the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, which have been turned into vast reservoirs of exploitation by (mainly) German and French capital.

With most of the liberal and reformist left peddling illusions in this reactionary imperialist alliance, the main beneficiaries of growing opposition to the EU have been ultrareactionary to outright fascist parties, from UKIP in Britain and Italy’s Northern League to the National Front in France, Pegida in Germany and Greece’s Golden Dawn. These racist forces, along with the fascist United Patriots Front in Australia, aggressively scapegoat immigrants for the destitution wrought by recurrent economic crises that are endemic to the capitalist mode of production.

For International Socialist Revolution!

If nothing else, the current crisis in the EU exposes the myth that Europe can be peacefully integrated under capitalism. In his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution V.I. Lenin ridiculed a version of the same argument then proffered by Karl Kautsky, describing it as Kautsky’s “silly little fable about ‘peaceful’ ultra-imperialism.” As Lenin explained, imperialism represents the final stage of capitalism, when the world has already been divided up by the major powers and the export of capital by those powers predominates over the export of goods. Imperialism is marked by huge financial monopolies extending their grip over the world economy and the subjugation of weaker peoples while the stronger powers fight each other for control of markets and resources. The system itself necessarily leads to wars of neocolonial aggrandisement and, ultimately, interimperialist wars. Imperialist domination prevents any substantial economic growth of the countries of belated capitalist development, miring most of them in destitution.

In the semicolonial countries, where the capitalist rulers are tied by a thousand threads to the dominant world powers, the only way to overthrow the imperialist yoke is the seizure of power by the proletariat leading the oppressed masses. This task is inseparably linked to the need for proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, which will open the road to the development of socialism. In contrast to the liberal plea for “open borders,” which reduces workers in the semicolonial world to passive victims, we fight for the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. Within this internationalist perspective, immigrant workers have a central role to play, by acting as a human bridge to link the proletariat in the imperialist centres to their class brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Mass migration is an integral feature of imperialist capitalism. As we wrote in the ICL Declaration of Principles (1998):

“Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction.”

Indeed those who do manage to get into imperialist countries serve precisely the purpose outlined above. With the aid of the trade-union bureaucracy, the capitalists constantly seek to set the most backward layers of the indigenous working class against immigrants, threatening to replace native-born workers with lower-paid foreign workers. In this way, the bourgeoisie seeks to depress wage levels for the working class as a whole.

What is needed is joint struggle by all workers against the wage-slashing, union-bashing capitalists: to fight for the unionisation of all immigrant workers, who are often compelled to work for non-union contractors, and for equal pay for equal work; to fight to divide all existing jobs amongst all the available workforce, with no reduction in pay but with a significant reduction in working hours. Against protectionist, anti-immigrant chauvinism, workers must be won to the understanding that they share a common class interest with the workers of all countries and all nationalities against the capitalist class enemy. To foster the unity, solidarity and fighting capacity of our class, we seek to mobilise the labour movement in defence of immigrants, including by championing full citizenship rights for all and opposing deportations, roundups and detention centre hellholes.

There can be no progressive immigration policy under capitalism, and it is not the business of communists to propose policy alternatives. Our aim is to organise the social power of the proletariat to smash this capitalist system and establish workers rule. The international character of the working class gives it potentially enormous superiority over the bourgeoisie, whose system of production for profit works by anarchistic methods that fuel national conflicts and constantly create social inequality and economic crisis. To realise its revolutionary potential, the proletariat needs an international party to unite the class across national and other divisions and to coordinate the interdependent struggles of workers of every country. It is for this purpose that the ICL fights to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.

Following the example of the Bolshevik Party that led the Russian Revolution in 1917, we aim to act, in the words of Lenin, as a “tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression” and “to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat” (What Is To Be Done? [1902]).

Our program is for proletarian revolutions to expropriate the capitalist exploiters. In Europe this means fighting for a Socialist United States of Europe. The economic unification of Europe under workers rule has been an urgent need for more than a century. Together with proletarian revolutions in the U.S., Japan, Australia and in the more backward countries that today suffer imperialist subjugation, the creation of a socialist Europe would lead to a vast expansion of the productive forces in an international planned economy. Workers governments in the advanced countries would devote enormous resources to the development of Asia, Africa and Latin America, helping pave the way to an egalitarian world order in which people will choose to move around the world for pleasure and enlightenment, not out of fear of physical and economic insecurity.

Adapted from Workers Hammer No. 231, Summer 2015