From A World to Win News Service:
CPI (MLM) on the Recent Wave of Migration to Europe:
“The totality of this world system, in any form, deserves to be overthrown”
September 23, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
September 21, 2015. A World to Win News Service. The following statement by the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) is dated August 29, 2015.
The migration of millions of human beings from Africa and the Middle East to Europe has taken unprecedented dimensions. This is the biggest wave of immigration since the end of World War II. On foot, riding on trains, jammed into meat trucks, sailing by the hundreds on boats not meant for more than a dozen people, hidden in the luggage section of the aeroplanes...
This has resulted in hundreds of deaths so far. Last night hundreds of African youth were swallowed by the waves. One of the survivors said, “This path is a road to death. In a graveyard called the Mediterranean.” Two days ago, in eastern Austria, a truck was abandoned with decomposing bodies of 71 people. They had died several days back... and there is no end to this wave of death.
The recurring publication of news about the heart-wrenching death of asylum seekers has forced the European imperialists to demagogically talk about a “human tragedy.” But their first step in response to this tragedy was to intensify the policing of the borders and especially the strengthening of the armies of Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, etc., to prevent the movement of the immigrants. European police have taken some Middle Eastern immigrants and without even inquiring about their country of origin, deported them to refugee camps in Libya!
Migrants and refugees arrive at railway station southwest of Budapest, Hungary, near the Austrian border, September 19. (Photo: Gyorgy Varga/MTI via AP)
Despite these measures, this wave of immigration is so great that it has broken through borders and spilt into the imperialist bastions. A major reason behind these recent migrations is the military intervention by the U.S. and French imperialists and their other allies and rivals in the Middle East and Africa, interventions that accentuate the poverty and instability caused by their political and economic domination. All these immigrants are the victims of situations caused by the bombing of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali... Imperialists, reactionary Islamic forces such as Daesh and Boko Haram, corrupt and reactionary states in the Middle East and Africa (from Iran, Turkey and Syria to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Libya)—all are responsible for this situation. All these forces and states, in any shape and form deserve to be overthrown.
This wave of immigration is a reflection of the deep class divide and blatant national and racial discrimination in the capitalist-imperialist world where 89 percent of the world’s people live in poverty and only 11 percent of people enjoy relative prosperity, and this only in particular countries. The average annual income of an African is 400 Euros, whereas Europeans earn between 10,000 to 80,000 Euros per year. For some time now, because of chauvinist and anti-immigration laws and regulations in the EU, the number of deaths among immigrants is rising. In the last month alone, the migrants included 7,300 children with no guardians. Whatever happened to their parents is no concern of rulers of these imperialist countries.
A young Eritrean man who lives in a tent in a Parisian park says, “We escaped from corruption, poverty, suppression and Islamic groups and managed to arrive here. If it were not for the help of some individuals, we would starve to death. At night, we sleep in the rain; during the day we suffer from the sun. And there is no perspective of a way out of this situation.”
There is no doubt that some people in Europe have sympathy towards these immigrants. Some step forward to provide help. But there are also right-wing and fascist Europeans who set fire to camps and attack asylum seekers. And under the protection of the system of imperialist democracy, they organize anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner demonstrations and call for new anti-immigrant laws.
The situation we are facing is the result of the workings of a class system. Today the movement of international capital in search of more and faster profit is moving unhindered and with such cruelty that a great many of the people of the world have absolutely nothing to lose. What this horrible class system has brought about for the majority of the people in the world is unjust wars and cruel occupations, deadly poverty and inhuman inequality, the generalized subjugation and discrimination of women, the lack of future prospects as well as the collapse of morality and identity for the youth, and an accelerating environmental crisis that is threatening the Earth with destruction.
This world must be changed—this system must be overthrown. Under this system, the forces of production, the sources of material wealth, are tightly intertwined but privately owned. On the one hand there are the great majority of disposed, oppressed and exploited, including immigrants and refugees, and on the other a small minority who own the means of production and control economic, political and cultural wealth and means and privileges. The contradiction between private ownership and socialized production contains the potential for the people to move beyond exploitation, scarcity and social distinctions. This system can be overthrown. This world can be changed.
In order for the waves of the Mediterranean Sea and perilous paths to not become slaughter houses of war-ridden, hungry and oppressed masses, in order for the migrants who have survived the road not to be welcomed by bullets, barbed wires, prisons and imperialist camps, in order for thousands upon thousands of immigrant women to not become victims of international sex slavery networks, in order for the homes, jobs, existence and future of the people to not be burned in the fire of imperialist, national and religious wars, the capitalist system must be destroyed, in its totality, with all its exploitative relations of production and unequal social relations, with all its old and reactionary institutions and thinking. In order to clear the face of the Earth of all this darkness and garbage there is no other way but a violent social revolution. It is only on the debris of this world that a new one can be built with the participation of billions of toiling and oppressed women and men. A new world where people are not forced to defy the anger of seas and the fire of deserts in order to satisfy their mental and material needs.
A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine, a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.
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