Only the workers’ struggle against capitalist exploitation will overcome the social subjugation of race, nationality, gender, religion

Industrial development and the exploitation of wage labor inevitably lead to the development of large industrial and service concentrations. Here the production process concentrates human masses from which it draws the workforce that alone generates surplus value.

In this way, the districts where proletarian families live, made up of active workers, pensioners, and the unemployed, are segregated in the cities: in all the metropolises of the world, the division between bourgeois and working class is also expressed in the occupation of territory.

The residential neighborhoods of the bourgeoisie are opposed to the working-class neighborhoods and shantytowns where the unemployed, those who live on irregular jobs, and the underclass are housed.

Sometimes immigrant neighborhoods are formed, divided by country of origin: in the United States the ghettos of Asians, Irish, Latinos, Blacks.

But often, in the proletarian neighborhoods, families of different skin colors or nationalities are mixed. In Latin America the separation of the proletariat according to race is not the rule as in North America.

Racial differences have their social weight among members of the bourgeoisie and part of the petty bourgeoisie, but in the proletariat they count for little because it is largely a mixed population with a significant presence of Blacks and natives.

In the Caribbean a large population is black, as in Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Curaçao, Grenada, Guyana, as well as in some regions of Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

In Central and South America there is also a large presence of crossbreeds of whites, blacks and natives.

In countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay the indigenous population is significant.

In most countries on the American continent, the supply of labor significantly exceeds demand.

In addition to the unemployment measured by statistics there is the hidden unemployment of workers in the so‑called ”informal economy”.

This is why wages are low: the bourgeoisie has huge reserve armies of labor in America that allow it to pay the ”minimum wage” and even much less.

Here the social conflict arises, mostly because of the competition between a country’s indigenous wage earners and immigrants. Even workers from different regions of the same country may compete for jobs.

The same commodity in different containers

This contrast between employed and unemployed proletarians is a structural component in the functioning of the capitalist system, which allows the bourgeoisie to keep wages low and defend its profits.

Everything is instrumental to divide the labor supply market by opposing class brothers and sisters: gender, race, nationality, religious faith, age, political opinion, etc.

The bourgeoisie encourages and exasperates every slightest difference within the labor force commodity.

They apply unequal wages and working conditions while saving on costs. This also delays unitary organization and union struggle.

The bourgeois media never fails, on the other hand, to superimpose a particular non‑class motivation on every proletarian struggle. If farm workers in northern Mexico strike for better wages, the press paints them as natives in revolt.

The opportunist parties, the current regime unions, the media, the church, the film industry, the entire capitalist superstructure impose an ideology that pushes the proletariat towards division and economic and social submission.

Traditions of history, ethnicity and nationality are superimposed onto physical characteristics to create the myth of racial difference. But in the increasingly interconnected capitalist society these racial and cultural determinations would tend to lose more and more importance.

If this does not happen, if on the contrary the division is often exasperated by forcing us to relive ”a past that does not pass”, it is for precise class interests, for social reasons.

If capital had an interest in treating men with red hair, which is a hereditary characteristic, as it treats Black people in the United States or the Rohingya in Burma, there would be the race of the red‑haired.

This even if for the functioning of the mode of production and for the accumulation of capital race and nationality are irrelevant. What is relevant is that one social class has control of the capital and means of production, and another has only labor-power to provide in exchange for a wage.

The workers, male or female, child or adult, with any skin color, of any ethnicity or nationality, are all carriers of the same commodity, but for capital everyone has their “price”.

What is the class answer?

Against this capitalist monstrosity that has reduced man to a commodity, the ideal and material revolt of the working class must impose itself, which in the end, in a communist society that is no longer a wage society, will disclose the banal evidence that a person, without mercantile mediation, is simply a person.

Today, instead, the bourgeois and false working-class parties and the regime’s trade unions do nothing, if not recriminations, to overcome these divisions of the proletariat.

Several times in the history of the workers’ movement, in the phases of weakness and dispersion of the general class organizations, movements have arisen aimed at the defense of workers of only a certain race or nationality, to oppose mistreatment, harassment and exploitation by the bourgeoisie and their state.

In addition to strictly trade union defense, there are inter-classist associations for the protection against police harassment or the defense of the interests and rights of, for example, Black communities in the United States, or Native Americans, or immigrants.

Clearly, a trade union that thus arises separately by ethnic group, by company, by branch of industry, by trade, is totally inadequate to deal with the general class of bosses, just as a trade union that leaves out the retired and unemployed.

A class union tends to group together all workers without distinction of race, nationality, occupation, gender, religious faith or political opinion. And it is organized by location and not by company, so as to embrace the entire class of workers.

The International Communist Party, among its militants and in its worldwide organized structure, knows no distinction and is composed of communists without any other specification.

The party promotes action of the united proletariat above all borders against the bourgeoisie, and tends to resolve the reasons for division in the ranks of the working class, from economic struggles to the political struggle for power.

And the party denounces as opportunist and counter-revolutionary any other party that calls itself worker or communist but admits the clash between workers for religious or racial differences, or national differences for the defense of the homeland.

Must we communists be indifferent to the mobilization of Blacks, immigrants and indigenous people in the face of repression and oppression by bourgeois governments? The answer is certainly no; we are not indifferent to these expressions of resistance against cowardly and odious discrimination, which are always instrumental in preserving the present regime.

In the case of purely workers’ movements, even if guided by opportunism and used to give vent to pacifist, democratic, inter-classist ideologies, the party must engage with its militants and give its clear direction that, without denying any struggle, even weak and partial, opens it to the prospect of mobilization and general class union organization.

In this we know we will clash with all the positions that distort the struggle of the proletariat and keep it trapped in dispersed actions by distracting the workers from the central confrontation with the capitalist masters and their governments.

Instead, in the face of real movements, of the inter-classist type, against equally real subjection, such as that of Blacks in the United States – which are limited to the demand for civil rights and respect for the constitution, and for democracy against fascism, for some legal or electoral reform or a different president or parliament – the party, depending on the circumstances, may feel that it does not have to oppose and fight them, when mobilizations are really directed against the harassment of the present regime. But the party keeps strictly outside, in its clearly distinct and visible structures, and invites the workers not to join them, and those involved to leave them, to organize themselves independently in their exclusively proletarian formations.

This attitude of the party derives from its century old experience: inter-classist parties and political groups, no matter how subversive or even violent they may appear, in the end will never yield to proletarian views and needs, and when confronted with the decision on which side of the struggle is to be supported, they inevitably, and also obviously, choose the bourgeoisie. But in the meantime they will have diverted precious proletarian energies from the real struggle. Which after all is the historical function of opportunism.

The party must therefore be ready, from its firm working class stance, to orient towards communism, and to thrust against the bourgeois regime, any real movement, even if interclassist but provided it is a consequence of actual social submission, such as those of women or of national or ethnic minorities.

Only with the resumption of the defensive class struggle will it be possible to oppose, in the working-class environment, racism and xenophobia and all expressions and movements of division and mutual distrust.

But only with the overthrow of the political power of the bourgeois class and its state, and in the communist society that will be able to emerge from it, will all hostile sentiment of man towards man be definitively overcome.