2023 is culminating in a bloodbath. Most prominently in Palestine, where the IOF is carrying out ethnic cleansing on a scale surpassing the Nakba. Meanwhile, in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Ukraine wars continue at the behest of various national and international elites. US sanctions imposed on countries like Iran, Syria, and Venezuela have millions of people living under siege. Likewise, in Latin America, the War on Drugs and never-ending interloping by the United States is killing and displacing thousands of people. Here in the U.S. cops continue to kill and terrorize with impunity. They enforce evictions, harass the poor, surveil entire communities, and violently break up protests. In Atlanta, they’ve unleashed severe state repression against activists fighting the construction of a new police training center. In New York City, they patrol the subway network in pursuit of turnstile jumpers and a growing homeless population seeking shelter in the tunnels and train cars. At the southern border, militarization proceeds unhindered. The Biden Administration allows Texas Governor Greg Abbott to independently implement draconian border policies, while congress allocates billions in funding for “border security” and the Biden administration waives dozens of laws to continue building the border wall. These things are often reported as discrete issues, but they are one and the same. The massacres, the displacement, the austerity, they’re all different facets—different fronts—of a global class war.
Manifestations of the class war appear everywhere, but their common source remains obscured to many. What does this mean for socialists and their organizations? Lenin, somewhat famously, said:
the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.1
This remains our ideal now more than ever. Capitalism’s globalization and its attendant communication technology actually makes this goal more achievable. Everyone who isn’t already subject to its consequences has in their hand a portable window into the murderous hellscape of US empire and the brutal realities of capitalism. The highest priority for socialists today is to “generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation” and organize the emancipation of humanity from the capitalist world system. This is the context in which we should understand things like Biden’s willingness to institute the Trump administration’s border policy in exchange for sending more weapons to Ukraine; the ongoing genocide of Palestine funded by US tax dollars and carried out with US munitions; and comments by Mayor Eric Adams blaming asylum-seekers for his austerity budget.
Every politician tells us there is no money: no money for healthcare, no funding for schools, no debt relief, no way to pay living wages, no rent control or public housing. Mayor Adams is telling the people of New York that asylum seekers are bankrupting the city, that, because of asylum seekers, the library, the fire department, public schools, universities, public services, and whatever meager welfare still exists, must have their budgets cut.
But this is the wealthiest country on earth, it has plenty of money. Everyone knows this. The United States has money to manufacture weapons, to build border walls and detention camps and prisons, to extract oil, to give tax breaks to the wealthy, to fund the police, the military, the FBI, the CIA, as well as massacres like the one taking place in Gaza right now. There is money to create millions of refugees, but no money to help them. In fact, they claim, it is the refugees’ fault that there is no money left in state and city budgets.
This is the playbook of the future. The oil industry, agribusiness, the US military, etc. destroy the planet, precipitating ecological catastrophe after ecological catastrophe, displacing millions. Sanctions, coups, debt slavery and austerity, dismantle economies and breed political instability, displacing even more people. Meanwhile, the weapons and technologies used to carry out these crimes are sold by the same companies building walls, surveillance towers, and drones at the border to keep asylum seekers, their victims, out. Governments in the imperialist core share intelligence, technologies, and training with one another, operating as a united front against the working classes of the world.
Right now, the US government is funding, arming, and training border enforcement throughout the Western hemisphere, hoping to create an impenetrable gauntlet of violence to deter asylum seekers. The same government then blames migration for domestic austerity. It’s an inhuman cycle of violence. Capital accumulation creates refugees whose displacement creates opportunities to make further profit via the building, buying, and selling of walls, surveillance technologies, detention camps, and the establishment of a highly precarious and exploitable section of the working class (i.e. “migrant workers” living in the imperial core who arrived here “illegally” or on exploitative work permits).
We are living in the Age of Camps: refugee camps, migrant detention centers, prison camps, concentration camps. Many won’t even live to see the camps, instead they’re burned alive by US bombs, mangled in barbed wire while crossing the Rio Grande, dying of thirst in the Sonoran Desert, and drowning in the Mediterranean. The meek facade of international law and humanitarianism appears to be collapsing. In the global north, a non-negligible number of people—mostly young people—are becoming aware of the horrors of US empire and the impending (and ongoing) environmental catastrophes caused by capitalism. Posting on social media and marching through Time Square won’t be enough to change this world. Nonprofits and human rights NGOs are not up to the task of ending the horrors we are witnessing. We don’t need a different, younger, Democrat in the White House, or “a seat at the table,” or to partake in condescending humanitarianism. We need to build international solidarity. And we need to build a party, a vehicle, for exercising that solidarity against the people and institutions currently making our world a living hell.
-JR Murray
