We have no country - We have a world to win

In 1596, Queen Elizabeth issued an “open letter” to the Lord  Mayor of London, announcing that “there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie,” and ordering that they be deported from  the country. One week later, she reiterated her “good pleasure  to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande” and commissioned the merchant Casper van Senden to “take up” certain  “blackamoores here in this realme and to transport them into  Spaine and Portugall.” Finally, in 1601, she complained again  about the “great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which  (as she is informed) are crept into this realm,” defamed them as  “infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel,” and, one last time, authorized their deportation.

 Travel broadens the mind it is said but the migrant worker travels through necessity and it is often the case that foreign migrant workers suffer a double repression. Firstly, having to defend themselves against the bosses and secondly protecting themselves from the prejudices of their supposedly fellow workers. Immigrant workers are not only “flexible”, but are disposable through deportation, and therefore, controllable.



Immigration has always been a difficult issue for the labour movement. Employment is a function of the simple supply of labour  and unemployment therefore occurs because there are too many workers competing for jobs. To admit foreign workers, in such a view, adds to the job crisis. Even some on the Left will  direct blame on the need of the capitalist class to accept a measure of the free international movement of labour as one of the conditions of its own economic survival. Racism finds fertile ground. The world is never so simple, and  labour scarcities  co-exists with unemployment. There is already a labour scarcity for unskilled workers – especially in agriculture during harvests. Many in the working-class face heightened insecurities as the welfare state and job stability is dismantled through capitalist austerity. They are  particularly prone to racist anti-immigrant politics. Anti-immigrant forces have tried to draw in white workers with appeals to racial solidarity and to xenophobia and scapegoating minority communities and migrant workers. But it is a war on all workers not just foreign workers.

Over the past few decades, there has been an upsurge in migration as every country and region has become integrated into global capitalism through invasion, free-trade agreements, neo-liberal social and economic policies, and financial crises. Hundreds of millions have been displaced from the countryside in the Third World and turned into internal and international migrants, providing a vast pool of exploitable labour for the global economy as national labour markets have increasingly merged into a global labour market.

The creation of immigrant labour pools is a worldwide phenomenon. Eastern European workers supply labour to Western Europe, Central Africans to South Africa, Nicaraguans to Costa Rica,  South Asians to the Middle East, Asians to Australia, Thais to Japan, Indonesians to Malaysia, and so on. As borders have come down for capital and trade, they have been strengthened for human beings. Nations lift national borders for capital but reinforce these same national boundaries in its immigrant policies, and  they generate a nationalist hysteria with slogans of "out-of-control borders" and "floods of illegal immigrants." Although capitalism creates immigrant workers, these workers do not enjoy citizenship rights in their host countries. Denied the political and labour rights afforded to citizens, immigrant workers are forced into the underground, made vulnerable to employers, whether large private or state employers and subject to hostile cultural environments.

Socialists stress the united and indivisable organisation of the working class. The interests of the socialist movement and of the day-to-day struggle require that the workers of all nationalities and colour be united in the organisations of the working class. A socialist party, as the class conscious, organised, expression of the class, must unite all the socialists irrespective of nationality or colour. The other principal organisation of the working class, the trade unions, too must unite all the workers irrespective of nationality or colour. The struggle against nationalism and racism is an important struggle against the employers. From the standpoint of the socialist revolution, the anti-racist struggle is a matter of concern to the entire working class. The exploitation of minority workers serves to divide the working class. The struggle between the black or white, native or foreign born to sell themselves in the auction of the new slave market has, in many quarters, engendered bitter race feeling, and that they might bid the fiercer against each other the masters have fanned this prejudice into hate. Exploitation of an migrant workforce would not be possible if that workforce had the same rights as citizens, if it did not face the insecurities and vulnerabilities of being undocumented or "illegal." Granting full citizenship rights to the tens of millions of immigrants would undermine the division of the  the global working class into immigrants and citizens. That division is a central component of the new class relations of global capitalism, predicated on a "flexible" mass of workers who can be hired and fired at will, are de-unionized, and face precarious work conditions, job instability, a rollback of benefits and downward pressure on wages. "Illegals"can be disposed of with impunity and consequence, should this labor become unruly or unnecessary. And for the State it is absolved of any commitment to the social reproduction of this labour in Marxist terms or welfare education and health provisions in more clear language. The immigrant labour force becomes responsible for its own maintenance and reproduction. This makes foreign workers low cost and flexible for capital and also much cheaper for the State compared to native-born workers.

The anti-racist struggle is a struggle against the bosses and the State. Borders and nationality are used by capitalists, the powerful and the privileged, to sustain their control and domination over the global working class. Our position as socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colourless. We recognise all as brothers and sisters” The capitalists, white, black and other shades, are on one side and the workers, white, black and all other colours, on the other side. We hold that given the economic freedom from socialism, no black or brown skinned worker need ask whites for any special favours; and the  question of “social equality” will disappear. The socialist movement  battles for emancipation from wage slavery, and when the working class have triumphed in the class struggle and stand forth economic as well as political free men, the race problem will forever disappear.

When Marx said: “Workingmen of all countries unite,” he gave the concrete expression to the socialist philosophy of the class struggle. Marx issued the call to all the workers of the globe, regardless of race, sex, creed or any other condition whatsoever. Socialism emphasises the fact that the interests of all labourers are identical. In this common class interest race and national distinctions are forgotten. If this is true of socialists today, how much more will it be true when humanity is lifted to the higher plane.

 We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race or national prejudice. We are also against organising along separate lines based upon nationality or colour. We have nothing special to offer the black or Asian worker, for we cannot make separate appeals to all the “races” and nationalities. But if there be any who does not avow themselves against  ignorant and unreasoning prejudice, they lack the true spirit of the revolutionary. Socialism draws no line of exclusion. In the class struggle the equality of all workers is a foregone conclusion, and he or she who does not recognise and subscribe to it as one of the basic principles of the socialist philosophy is not a socialist, and if he or she be a party member, they must have been admitted through misunderstanding or false pretense, and will be speedily sent packing. The voice of socialism must inspire all those enslaved by the wages system. Socialism contains the only hope for either black or white. True liberty and freedom can only be attained in the cooperative commonwealth.

 Foolish and vain indeed is the worker who makes the colour of  skin or the place of  birth the foundation of  imagined superiority. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is the party of the whole working class of the whole world. We are all one — all workers of all lands. We know not colour, nor creed, nor sex in the labour movement. We know only that labour can vanquish  wage slavery and humanise the World.

AJJ