Defend the Immigrant Refugee Workers and their Families
Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism
Apparently frustrated by the lack of direct actions initiated by the power of the broader labor movement, Willem Van Spronsen took action against the ICE machine in the tradition of one of his heroes John Brown and his fate was the same. The response of the State is quicker than in the pre-civil war days of Bloody Kansas. Van Spronsen never made it to the armory in Harpers Ferry nor was it his intention to mobilize armed detachments of labor a la John Brown, whose intention was to arm slaves to free themselves. Van Spronsen did not attack individuals, he attacked the ‘cogs in the machine’. His actions were individualist, heartfelt, driven by compassion and solidarity. Some among the anarchists will memorialize him, whereas the Marxists’ task is to guide the movement away from individualist methods and show how to win against the racists’ anti-immigrant paroxysm!
There may be frustrated people who follow this anarchist’s method of individual commando style action. Such actions appear heroic but are actually counterproductive and do not mobilize the masses. They give the state justification for repression and provide red meat for the Trump base, FOX and other capitalist network media-feeds to further their attacks on the movement.
To defend immigrant refugee families we need to redirect moral outrage into working class methods of struggle. With the ebb in labor organizations’ membership and the leadership’s accommodation to the anti-worker legal landscape many workers feel powerless. To regain our power as a class mass organizing efforts in all the new centers of production must be launched. This means in all unorganized work places, especially those where low income black, brown and immigrant workers find employment of last resort (Home Depot, WalMart, FedEx, Fast Food outlets, and the thousands of construction companies muscling in on the previously unionized sectors that dominated the construction industry: which today is in resurgence, building towering skyscrapers with unorganized labor on two-gate sites by the hundreds in all the major cities.)
We should not emulate methods of individualism. This is the method of anarchism which attracts “liberals with guns” or other weapons to “the propaganda of the deed,” although this is nowadays a minority position within anarchism, having been swamped by an anarcho-pacifism-on-principle ideology. Individualism is the method of the petty bourgeoisie which has no faith in the agency of the working class. In this political scene the “AntiFa” development is a defensible anomaly. Rather than organizing a workers revolutionary movement with armed detachments of labor, black and brown self-defense guards, Van Spronsen took individual action. This is not the method needed to Stop Trump’s ICE raids. Mass actions that grow over into General Strikes and Occupation of the Ports and work places are how we can stop the Gestapo like role of the state.
Police executed Van Spronsen: We say no to individualist violence. Our guide is Trotsky….,
“In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education.“ – Leon Trotsky, “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism (1911)”
For Class Struggle Defense of Immigrant Rights!
We are appalled at the “movement’s” lack of imagination and class struggle reflexes! In place of individual martyr action easily stopped by police assassination we call for effective mass picket action to prevent the lawless state’s racist anti-brown-people activity. This means Teamsters making sure those ICE buses don’t roll, with the gates blocked around the clock by sympathetic pickets mobilized by the whole trade union movement. Failing this Teamster-led effort, or not waiting for it, many proletarian majority forces who have lately been in street action against the state around sectoral concerns, such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, #NeverAgain, Stonewall Anniversary Marchers, the United Farm Workers and others could make a beginning to prevent the Trump policy from being effected. Such action could easily be coordinated if bourgeois politicians with their electoral games and ambitions are excluded!
Victims of the nazi concentration camps and FDR’s Japenese internment (concentration) camps, childen then but elders now, are speaking out on behalf of the incarcerated families and children. It is worthwhile to recall that union and intellectual Trotskyists fought the U.S. immigration restrictions against jews and other nazi victims when this was unpopular before World War Two. This is our labor tradition! We fight the Muslim Ban and the Central American Bans today!
The deplorable conditions of the camps and the utterly piggish behaviors of the CBP have recently been exposed in the press. A private CBP Facebook group was revealed as hosting racist memes and degrading misogynist content, even rape threats, and there are mainstream media reports that there are more than one such group. Former Agent Jenn Bud says the agency itself is a racist group (!)
Activists worldwide have faced arrest, prosecution and imprisonment for providing humanitarian aid to refugees. The June trial of American Scott Warren, who faced 20 years for “allegedly providing food, water, beds and clean clothes to undocumented immigrants”, ended in a deadlocked jury. The U.S. state prosecutors have stated they will retry him. German boat captain Pia Klemp also faces 20 years in Italy for saving migrants from drowning. We say, Hands Off Immigrant Rights Activists! Drop All Charges-Free Them Now!
Understand that for decades US imperialism has been forcing workers from the Global South to migrate north by CIA interventions and military coups, such as Honduras 2009 initiated by Obama, Biden and Clinton. Drought driven by climate crisis has made much of the subsistence and small farming in Latin America unsustainable. NAFTA and the “New NAFTA” and foreign aid slashing threaten millions’ way of life and even their lives; hence the migration. Liberalism would have you believe the great propulsive force is gang violence, though this is an after-the-fact effect, NOT THE CAUSE! Additionally, Obama began the mass deportation and family separations and contracted the private for profit prison firms who run the state’s concentration camps today. These policies prepared the ground for Trump’s “Know Nothing” scapegoating of refugees now in full swing.
At the core, it is not individual politicians or policies, but the imperialist system and the “Free Trade” super-exploitation of the International Working Class that drives workers to migrate.
“The implementation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Central American Free trade Agreement (CAFTA) increased U.S. imperialist exploitation of Latin America. While NAFTA did create 800,000 jobs in the Maquiladora zone in Mexico, income inequality and poverty have risen as nearly two million campesinos in Mexico were uprooted off traditional subsistence farmlands while the real wages of workers have fallen by about 20 percent. Now Trump thinks this is not nearly a big enough bite, and his policy generally can be called one of autarchy and abrogation, overruled only by the cautions imposed by the Federal courts. Despite Trump’s new tariffs, capital is still moving to capitalist China where raw exploitation of workers is even greater. These trade agreements furthered the bosses’ assault on workers in the U.S. and throughout Latin America, and the administration believes it can get even more one-sided deals at the semicolonies’ expense.
Capitalism is a world economic system; National divisions are maintained by the capitalists so that Capital can control its sources of wealth and in the imperialist club expand their exploitation beyond their borders. It was Marx that predicted that capital would seek to commodify the world and that despite capital being national in origin, it acts on an international basis, remaking the world in a manner in which it can exploit labor, thereby uniting all workers in an international class confrontation. The main enemy is at home and it is American capitalism, the capitalist ruling class and their Democratic/Republican political parties, not our working class sisters and brothers! We say workers of the world unite! There are no borders to capitalist nations which workers are bound to respect! The system is international, our class is international and the struggle is international!” – CWG-USA, “Immigrant Rights are Workers’ Rights! No Somos Illegales, Somos Trabajadores!”
We need working class, politically independent United Front Actions around the following Slogans and Demands:
- For Mass Labor Led Actions and political strikes to Shut the Ports, the Airports and Highways to crush the ability of the State to carry out Mass Deportations!
- Kick ICE/CBP “unions” out of the labor movement! Abolish ICE and the CBP (Border Patrol)! COPS AND PRISON GUARDS ARE NOT WORKERS!
- For Mass Labor Action to Liberate the Kidnapped Children and Unite the Families Now! Down with Trump’s Muslim Ban! No One is Illegal! Tear Down the Wall! For Free Movement Across Borders! For Full Citizenship and Employment Rights for All Refugees and migrant workers!
- Immigrants built the U.S.A.! The computer power and resources exist to reunite families overnight and find them sanctuary and welcome relocation! We have always stood by the slogan ‘No somos ilegales! Somos Trabajadores!’ To fight imperialism we call for Jobs For All! Same Unions, Same contracts! Same Expiration Dates!
- For mass labor-led humanitarian caravans! Confront the rightist cowards and ICE racists who smash the desert emergency food and water provisions. Smash that racism with truckloads of food and water and armed pickets on both sides of the border!
- Drop all charges against humanitarian activists, for labor defense of immigrants’ defense centers! Denounce racist attacks by fascist border patrol agents on non-white personalities!
Political strike actions should be extended to sympathy strikes in other sectors such as transit, airlines, and the ports to shut down the capitalists’ profit system. Mobilizing mass labor actions in the defense of immigrant rights would go a long way towards starting to organize a real fight against Trump’s social reaction and would be worth far more than tens of millions of votes for the Democrats or Friday night candles.
For decades labor activists have allowed the Democrats to control the unions and have taken their leadership from “Political Action Committees” whose only response to the crisis of capitalism is to elect more Democrats. This is a dead end policy which denies the workers their own agency, putting faith in capitalist politicians and legislative reforms that never come. When such reforms do come they are quickly turned around when the pendulum swings to the right. The “leadership” of the labor bureaucracy is not alone to blame for the hopeless feeling. No left pressures them to be internationalist, to build a fighting labor party, to adopt a Transitional Program to humanity’s socialist future, nor to support the permanent revolution to permit the achievement by the peoples of all the subject and semi-colonial nations of all their national-democratic rights. No left does this in more than holiday speechifying, while daily falling back to a minimum, democratic program.
To defend the immigrants, Free the Children and Unite the Families the workers must take control of our unions away from the Democratic Party hacks. Trade unionists and socialists are social beings and have the right to ask and get the answer to the question ‘HOW DID THESE CRUEL, MONSTROUS DACHAU STYLE CAMPS COME TO BE?’ The answer is the succeeding legal permissions and funding supplied by the twin bourgeois political parties. Trump’s ICE mouthpiece Cuccinelli tries to downplay the raids claiming that Trump’s ICE has deported fewer than Obama did. Trump, always jealous of those with bigger numbers wants to wear the crown. He wants to deport millions, ‘Make America White Again’ so he wins the crown of “Deporter in Chief’ previously worn by Obama.
