For the international solidarity of the exploited of every race and country!

On Saturday 16 September, the SI Cobas organised a demonstration in Bologna in defence of migrants. This is the leaflet our comrades distributed there in the Italian, French, Spanish and English languages

For the adoption of a single platform of defensive demands against the common front of the capitalists and all of their States!
For a real Class Trade Union which organizes the struggle of all proletarians!
For the establishment of an Internationalist and Revolutionary Communist programme and party!

That a mass of proletarians and semi-proletarians are currently fleeing poverty, unemployment, and war is not an exceptional event but rather the umpteenth confirmation of the real, and permanent, nature of the present system, which is based on profit.

Capitalism, under which the market in commodities and capital has become fully globalized, cannot avoid the same happening as far as the labour power commodity is concerned. That waves of people in search of wages are crossing the boundaries between North and South, East and West, and clambering over State and national borders, is very sad, but it is also a progressive factor, insofar as it demonstrates the international nature of the working class, a single global class of the exploited.

Workers have no country. Capitalism has turned the proletariat in all continents into a class of emigrants. Uprooted from countries that are no longer their own, the disinherited, the wage earners and the small producers have nothing more to lose, although their loss is compounded in the West, where they live under the conditions of the modern proletariat, propertyless and living off their wages, but nevertheless with a world to win from the destruction of the most modern, concentrated and putrescent of capitalisms. History, and the revolution, often travels on foot.

The current wars – in which each State and imperialist alliance seeks to strategically position itself in view of the impending third world war, which all of them are preparing for – are accelerating this epic emigration and making it difficult to contain.

In the West so-called public opinion is cleverly manipulated – drugged and hypnotised as it is by capitalist society – and frenzied debates are whipped up between the supports of a generic humanitarianism, whether lay or religious, on one side, and racism and nationalism on the other: a bourgeois right and bourgeois left united in their opposition to and fear of genuine, organised and effective class solidarity.

The global economic crisis of capitalism, which originated in the rich countries and is concentrated there, is an irreversible crisis of over-production which is only destined to get worse. Capitalism is saturated with commodities and capital, and there is no policy of the bourgeoisie, whether liberal or statist, that can alter that ineluctable fact.

But capitalism, even in crisis, continues to produce enormous quantities of commodities and it always needs labour. Only labour power produces profit. The wealth of capitalism depends entirely on the willingness of proletarians to engage with it. This is why the boss class has a vested interest in replenishing the industrial reserve army with proletarian immigrants.

It will depend on the balance of forces between the classes whether the bourgeoisie, in order to maintain its economic regime and petty privileges, will manage to increase the exploitation of the proletariat, increase working hours, lower wages and increase the intensity of work. What weakens the working class is not “competition” from immigrant class brothers but submission to false workers’ parties and trade unions who have sold out to the bourgeoisie, because wages are regulated only by hard class struggle, and weight of numbers is a positive factor in strength terms, not a weakness.

That is why the bourgeoisie is using its countless regime-supporting spokesmen to stir up indigenous proletarians against foreigners. Racism is not a “prejudice” from which the present society can be cured, but a weapon used by the bosses to divide the workers, same as nationalism. Fighting racism in the name of a generic “humanitarianism” is impotent and dangerous since it is based on an a tacit endorsement of the division between exploiter and exploited.

The one real fight against racism is the CLASS STRUGGLE for the defence of wages, against sackings, against the division between old workers in ‘guaranteed’ employment and young workers deprived of any protection, against the super-exploitation by gangmasters in field and factory, against the use of co-operatives as a cover for exploitation, and for the generalized reduction of the working day with no reduction of wages.

Only the class struggle against the bourgeois “race” unifies the workers above ethic, national and religious differences and brings about a sense of brotherhood, leading them inevitably to direct their struggle against capitalism and to join together to overthrow it.

Only communism, after obtaining victory everywhere, can resolve the problem of how to distribute people across the planet in the most favourable way, with movement taking place not on the basis of terror or need, but of the best collective and individual development for all.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE !