There is Only One Working Class

Racism and nationalism are used to further advantage the employing class by creating what is effectively a sub-strata of the working class, kept isolated and divided from indigenous workers. Racism and national chauvinism has been an effective means of dividing and weakening the working class.

The plea that certain nationalities should be excluded from coming to the UK should have no place in the working class movement which calls on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation. The Socialist Party opposes any policy that  requires the exclusion of our fellow workers who seek these shores with the hope of bettering their wretched condition only to be driven back. It is even more shameful to have it advocated by those who call themselves socialists and it should be done in the name of a movement whose proud boast it is that it stands uncompromisingly for the suffering and down-trodden of all the World.  Workers from abroad have just as good a right to enter here as any who now seek to exclude them.

The Socialist Party makes its stand against the specious arguments of subtle sophists who do not hesitate to sacrifice principle for votes and members and are prepared to jeopardise ultimate success for immediate gain. We will not  turn our back upon the oppressed and often brutalised  victims from other parts of world, who are lured to these shores by some faint glimmer of hope that here their crushing burdens may be lightened. Any alleged benefit that may come to the socialist movement because of such heartless exclusion would be swept away by the sacrifice of a cardinal principle of the international socialist movement, for well might the good faith of such a movement be questioned by intelligent workers if it barred its borders against the very peoples most in need of relief, and extinguishing their hope, and leaving them in despair.

There is nothing of sentimental in this adherence to the fundamental principles of the international workers movement. If socialism,  does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense.  The Socialist Party has always stoutly uphold the banner of internationalism in the matter of immigration.

Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the door in the faces of their own brothers and sisters; we will be none the weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the socialist movement while they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own arrogant superiority.

Let us stand by our revolutionary, working class principles and fight openly against all our enemies, adopting no tactics of nationalism. Afraid that the large numbers of immigrant workers may erode the ‘ national character’, too often, too many  have never been able to think or act beyond the proposition that the migrant worker belongs to the country he or she has left and therefore does not belong where he or she works. We ought to welcome the rich mixture of various cultures. We should break away from this artificial segregation of nation from nation.
AJJ