“If Socialism,
international, revolutionary 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 and its profession a delusion and a snare. Let those desert us
who will because we refuse to shut the international door in the faces of their
own brethren; 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” Eugene Debs,
1910
Another proposed “crackdown” on immigration is being
proposed. Depriving those who have studied and graduated in the UK of the right
to stay on in the country for a short period to find a suitable job for their
newly acquired UK academic qualification. Yet even Kenneth Clarke, the former
Tory Cabinet minister admits that immigration does not cause housing shortages
or pressure on hospitals:
"At the moment the politics of the country, because of
anger, because of reduced living standards, because of the recession, are very
susceptible to people telling them 'oh don't bother with all this complicated
politics, it’s foreigners, let's get all these foreigners to go home'."
Immigration for survival has been going on from the
beginning of time. When most people are on earth are dealt such a bad hand, to
try to stop them from bettering their condition seems heartless decision. Allowing
someone to get a job is not charity nor welfare. Human beings from the
beginning were looking for a place where their basic needs would be met. At the
time there were no countries or no borders. Sovereign nations today attempt to
control all entry into their territories through comprehensive passport
regimes, but this is a recent development. Prior to 1914, the world’s borders
were largely open to migration. Early America did not control immigration at
all. A newcomer simply got off the boat and started a new life. Victorian Great
Britain, too, had open borders. As the British Secretary of State put it in
1872, “by the existing law of Great Britain all foreigners have the
unrestricted right of entrance and residence in this country”. The
International Emigration Conference in 1889 affirmed “the right of the
individual to the fundamental liberty accorded to him by every civilized nation
to come and go and dispose of his person and his destinies as he pleases.” Ordinary
people actively choose to move around the world to seek better lives for
themselves, but that these are not abstract choices made on a whim. Those
determined to move will not be stopped by any border regime because people are
not passive objects. This is being realistic about people as agents of their
own destinies.
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In terms of population density, the UK is nowhere near the
top of tables. Current population density is 650 people per square mile: well
below Japan (836), Belgium (889), the Netherlands (1259) and utterly dwarfed by
places like Hong Kong or Singapore (18,000+) - all places without social
problems significantly worse than the UK. England is not "full up",
and that 700 million people could fit here with a population density similar to
London. Of course, there would be an impact of accommodating a population increase,
however, the real problem, is an unwillingness to expand the housing stock or
invest in infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. There is already a
housing shortage and widespread homelessness, and there always has been,
regardless of the population. This is due to housing being constructed largely
for profit than for need. It is not profitable to build housing for people who
can't afford it! And of course scarcity of housing is vital for the
profitability of house building as it pushes prices up. Even if there were no
immigration, the population will still rise.
Some critics of immigration merely play the nationalist card
and assert there will be an erosion of a sense of shared values. We simply
don’t all currently have identical views on our culture and nor do we agree
with one another on very many perspectives but nevertheless we can still share the
same geographical space with them, live and work alongside one another without
conflict. We always have the choice to freely associate or socialize with
whomever we please, so we can surround ourselves (as most of us do) with people
with whom we do share values, and it's great that we have the opportunity to do
so with people from different backgrounds, from different countries and
different ethnicities.
National borders, in particular, have separated humanity
into distinct communities, defining wage structures, access to welfare and
standards of living. While borders are permeable to some privileged people,
they are impermeable to most others. Migrants who cross national borders
without permission are often criminalized and de-humanized, frequently lose
their social, economic and political rights and, as a consequence, experience
disproportionate exploitation and abuse. Some people see a policy of open
borders as extreme. Others realise that a truly internationalist position can’t
settle for anything less. Genuine socialists insist on workers absolute freedom
to travel and take up residence wherever they choose. The ugly open secret of
migration policy is that migration controls in the industrial “democracies” of
North America and Western Europe are draconian, effective, and exclude the vast
majority of mankind from places where they would be likely to flourish.
At the root, the problem for immigrants is capitalism, a
system that exploits the poor to benefit the rich. Capitalism needs workers
with no rights on both sides of the border. What we need is a system of planned,
nonprofit production and distribution under workers' control. We will have no
use for national borders; people will not be forced to uproot their entire
families from their homelands just to survive. Movement from place to place
will be the free choice of free people. A socialist world would be one without
passports and borders, never mind detention centres and deportations. A
democratic socialist world plan of production would be able to harness the
enormous science and technique created by capitalism, and the world’s natural
resources, to meet the needs of the population in every part of the world.
Those deciding to move to other parts of the world would therefore do so out of
genuine choice. Only by fighting for a socialist world is it possible to overcome
the barriers of the nation state and to create a world without borders.
From the beginning socialists have always emphasised
international solidarity. The 1st International played a practical role in
building workers' solidarity. The 1866 Instructions for Delegates of the
Provisional General Council of the International drafted by Marx established as
one of its main objectives: “to counter the intrigues of capitalists always
ready, in cases of strikes and lockouts, to misuse the foreign workman as a
tool against the native workman.” The working-class struggle could not be actively
promoted, Marx insisted, if confined by national walls when faced with a
capitalist system that expanded globally.
Ever Marx and Engels gave voice to the interests of the
proletariat over a century ago, the socialist working-class movement has been
recognised as an internationalist one. Despite an era of the most intense
nationalist conflicts, despite the failures of repeated attempts to forge
organisational unity in the now defunct Internationals, this spirit of
internationalism remains alive wherever workers raise the banner of socialism.
It remains alive because capitalism is international; so socialism must be. Humanity
needs revolution where people work and struggle together for the common good;
where everyone contributes whatever they can to society and gets back what they
need to live a life worthy of human being; where there are no more divisions
among people in which some rule over and oppress others, robbing them not only
of the means to a decent life but also of knowledge and the means for really
understanding, and acting to change, the world. Real socialism is a new
economic system based on rational planning, and social cooperation—where
production is carried out to meet social need, to overcome all oppressive
relations and divisions and to safeguard the ecosystems of the planet. The dream of human freedom is as old as class
society itself. So long as one section of society has been held down and
exploited by another, some men and women have dreamt, spoken and written about
the possibility of a new kind of life and
have fought to break the chains of domination that have shackled them to
a life of wage-slavery, drudgery and misery.
One time socialism was associated with people who resisted
the horrors of the factory system and demanded a new society of equality,
justice, freedom and prosperity for all, but now “socialism” has become
identified with monstrous, bureaucratic regimes that deny even the most
elementary democratic rights. The so-called 'socialist states' reproduces the
same kind of alienation and dehumanisation denounced by the earliest critics of
capitalism. The socialist vision has always been that it offered for the first
time in the history of humanity a realistic means of overcoming alienation and
exploitation, inhumanity and misery, violence and war. But for most people of the world today, nowadays,
the word 'socialism' has become a source of confusion, a word appropriated by
so many different contradictory causes that it threatens to become meaningless
while the workers’ red banner is now a flag of convenience for every elite
seeking power and privilege.
We ask ourselves why the question of socialism is rarely
discussed among those activists who claim that another world is possible.
Socialism is by no means dead, except in the minds of much of what passes for
the Left. Reorganising and developing
the world's productive forces to feed its people, to protect its environment
and to put an end to class oppression and human misery, are tasks only can
world socialism can meet. Socialism will ultimately have to be international
too, with co-operation on a global scale for the benefit of all rather than the
profits of multinational companies. The answer to imperialism is not
nationalism and reactionary regimes - it is international social revolution,
destroying all national, religious, racial barriers. Socialists do not enthuse
about revolutions which are mounted in order to bring to power another set of
rulers. Breaking with nationalism is, central to breaking with capitalist ideas. We have learnt from history! The past we
inherit but the future we build through socialism.
We know that the future belongs to us, the workers. We know
socialism is possible. We know that only the workers can bring socialism about.
We need to build a society where we all own the factories, the land,—a society
where there will be no borders for the working class. Socialism is the only
answer for the working class.
Nationalism of any sort has no place in the workers'
movement. It sets us against one another and reduces the possibility of us
uniting to fight together around the real problems which we face: shortage of
housing, low wages, job losses and crumbling public services. The slogan is
"Workers of the World Unite!" not "Workers of just little bits
of the World Unite!”
One World. One Struggle.
Demolish the walls the fences, Knock down all the closed
doors and gates in our global village. For a world without borders!
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