International

We need your support — bottom up finances to take on the system

July 13, 2021

Sarah Wrack
Priti Patel targets victims of capitalism’s ‘refugee crisis’

June 3, 2021

Rob Tetley Socialist Alternative member and support worker for child refugees
Which way forward for the revolution in Myanmar?

May 24, 2021

Anna Barnett
Stop the war: No peace is possible without a struggle against the occupation, poverty and rule of capital

May 14, 2021

Socialist Alternative
India’s Covid catastrophe – fight for healthcare and vaccines for all

May 13, 2021

Tom Barker
Belfast riots: No going back! Fight for working-class unity!

April 13, 2021

Socialist Party Northern Ireland and Socialist Alternative statement

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GET INVOLVED!

UPCOMING EVENTS

We need your support — bottom up finances to take on the system

Dear friends and supporters,

The period we have entered — the “Age of Disorder” — brings with it a massive polarization of society and presents the working class and oppressed with many dangers across the globe. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic lays bare the brutal inequalities created by capitalism. The virus continues to ravage many parts of the world, especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia, with dramatic shortages of oxygen and vaccine supplies unnecessarily exacerbating the death toll. Many advanced capitalist countries, on the other hand, have hoarded vaccines and are using those stocks to engage in ‘vaccine imperialism’. Since Biden took office, the new cold war between China and the US has in no way subsided, reflected among other things in rising tensions around Taiwan with an actual threat of military conflict. On top of this, the working class and oppressed suffer in regional wars and conflicts and through the worsening climate crisis, with the most vulnerable groups being generally the hardest hit.

At the same time, however, this period offers a large array of opportunities for the working class as a whole as well as for our revolutionary socialist organization. From the revolt in Belarus to the massive rebellions in Myanmar and Colombia and the uprising of the Palestinian people — the working class is more and more waking up and leading the way. The method of the general strike is increasingly taking center stage, people discuss strategies and tactics in popular assemblies and in most places these movements are overcoming ethnic and sectarian divisions sowed by the ruling classes. International Socialist Alternative (ISA) is active in over 30 countries across the globe and has been intervening in those movements and struggles with comrades on the ground and via social media solidarity campaigns, supporting these struggles and putting forward our political ideas.

What is our political focus? — Current ISA work in a nutshell

Our section in Israel-Palestine has intervened in the current conflict, which is marked by repeated unequal wars and ongoing state terrorism against the Palestinian people, in a very nuanced way. We call for a socialist Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a socialist transformation of Israel as part of a socialist confederation in the Middle East. Only a mass struggle for national and social liberation can offer a way out. The Palestinian youth uprising and general strike indicate how this struggle could be developed and expanded to all the Palestinian communities within the 1967 and 1948 borders and throughout the region.

Via social media solidarity campaigns our International has been able to intervene in the ongoing revolts in Myanmar and Colombia and to establish contacts on the ground.
In light of the attacks on democratic rights in Hong Kong and increasing repression in China, ISA has launched, together with our section in CN-HK-TW, the campaign Solidarity Against Repression in China & Hong Kong. The aim of this independent campaign, which opposes both sides in the cold war between the US and China, is to spread awareness about what is really happening in China and Hong Kong, to mobilize solidarity from ordinary people, workers and youth.

Other focus points of our recent work are the Kshama Solidarity Campaign to fight the right-wing recall of our Seattle council member, the campaign Youth Against Racism & Inequality in Ireland, as well as our work on the ground in Bessemer Alabama, where we have helped to build the BAmazon struggle for several weeks against dirty corporate tricks, allowing us to draw some key Lessons for the fight to #UnionizeAmazon. Moreover, we continue our socialist-feminist work, incorporating it into our everyday practice as well as specifically with ROSA International and our ROSA banners in the sections. For November, we are planning an international intervention to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and a climate campaign around it that stresses the necessity for public ownership, democratic planning and real economic strikes.

We need your support — bottom up finances to take on the system

In order to win fights and battles against the ruling classes, the working class and oppressed need their own organizations, structures and finances. In terms of financial resources we are obviously outnumbered — Forbes recently reported that the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $5 trillion during the pandemic.

But if we move collectively and decisively we can nevertheless beat them, as we demonstrated in the 2019 Seattle city council election. The candidate of our US section Socialist Alternative, Kshama Sawant, was re-elected despite corporate PACs spending over $4.1 million to buy the city council (of which Amazon alone paid $1.5 million). This was only possible through a hard-fought grassroots campaign involving thousands of volunteers, workers and ordinary people that won the support of a substantial majority of Seattle unions along with a number of major endorsements.

We are therefore asking you to support us with a financial contribution, which will greatly help us to continue to further strengthen and improve our political work and fight for a better future for all of us.

This is also the point at which we want to say thank you for all the support we have already received and are receiving at the moment: Thank you for the countless paper subscriptions, donations and the support and endorsement of our campaigns and candidates running for elected positions — all of this is of tremendous help for our political work. Now, we are launching an international finance appeal with a target of €150,000. This appeal will form part of our July political educational event — the Virtual Marxist University which is taking place July 20 till 25. Last year more than 1,500 attended this event, making it the largest gathering of the ISA to date — we expect even higher numbers this year. The appeal itself will be part of the closing rally on the 25 July, which will be broadcasted publicly on Sunday 25 July at 7 pm Brussels & Joburg time (10 AM Seattle; 01 AM July 26 China).

€150,000 is an ambitious target, reflecting our ambitious plans to intervene in struggles worldwide in this new and explosive period.

It is necessary for us to fundraise in this way to cover the costs of producing our publications and other materials, to cover the post-covid travel costs of our international organizers, international solidarity work, to support movements and struggles in various parts of the world, to pay for equipment that we need to carry out our work and to rent our office spaces among many other things.

International Socialist Alternative is different from mainstream political organisations in that we receive no financial backing from big business or wealthy donors, nor from the capitalist state. Being independent in this way is very important — we stand for the interests of ordinary, working class people, not the wealthy elite. We raise money through grassroots donations from people like you who support us and agree with our ideas.

Can you consider making a donation of [€10, €20, €50, €100 or €200] to help us reach our target and continue our work around the world in the period ahead? You can donate [here]
Priti Patel targets victims of capitalism’s ‘refugee crisis’

In recent months we have seen the so-called refugee crisis re-emerge as an issue being discussed in the British press. Last summer, the Tory government attempted to whip up xenophobia by highlighting the hundreds of asylum seekers and migrants crossing the channel. Of course, this ignored the millions of people flying into the country legally, with only those most desperate attempting to cross from Calais. Asylum seekers and refugees were once again being scapegoated – used as a political tool by the ruling class in attempts to divert attention away from the failings of their capitalist system and divide the working class.

There is a fraught relationship between refugees and migrants and the capitalist system. On the one hand, capitalists love access to migratory labour to super-exploit. On the other, they love weaponising the issue of immigration to divide workers and distract from their own responsibility for a lack of decent jobs, homes and services.

Now Priti Patel has launched (potentially wildly illegal) new plans for the handling of asylum seekers coming to the UK. These have rightly been greeted with outrage and condemnation, with even some right-wing politicians opposing the plans, along with the United Nations. Patel is proposing a system that for the first time categorises asylum seekers as either legal or illegal. This is before their claims have been heard and resolved. Services offering support to refugees will only have the ‘right’ to deal with those claimants arbitrarily deemed to be legal asylum seekers. What is more, Patel argues that any asylum seeker deemed to have passed through a ‘safe’ country on their way to the UK should be immediately deported back to said country, despite there being no clear legal basis for this.

Asylum seekers in the UK are increasingly forced to live in prison-like conditions while they face an extraordinarily long wait to get their decision from the UK. Old army barracks which have been described by former soldiers as not fit for human habitation seem to be the new norm. Napier camp recently faced a mass outbreak of Covid, almost certainly made worse by the fact that people were being forced to live in spaces not fit for purpose, living and sleeping right next to one another.

Often quoted to justify this inhumane policy is the EU’s Dublin Protocol. When this came into effect in the late 1990s, its basic principle was that those fleeing persecution should claim asylum in the first country they arrive in.

And often, this is the case. Over 80% of the world’s refugees live in the world’s most economically deprived nations, often their neighbouring country. Nearly half of Lebanon’s population is made up of refugees and not one European nation comes in the top ten global homes for asylum seekers. As imperialist wars and their ongoing consequences have devastated the Middle East, an increasing number of refugees have been forced to flee, with many attempting to reach safety in Europe. Responding to this, the Dublin Protocol has been through many agreed changes. This culminated in 2013, with the statement that the country in which an asylum seeker is processed is where they shall claim asylum. This made more sense than the original basis of the protocol but is a widely abused idea: asylum seekers are regularly processed in various European countries then packed onto trains to their neighbours.

2015 saw the complete and total breakdown of any idea of international capitalist collaboration during a period of crisis. Whilst Germany accepted over one million asylum seekers that year, other EU countries took dramatically different approaches. Eastern Europe attempted to shut its doors, whilst even the governments of countries like Denmark and Sweden began adopting the language and policies of the far right with regards to refugees and asylum seekers.

The ‘mainstreaming’ of far right rhetoric by traditional pro-capitalist (and even some former Social Democratic) parties, has had repercussions in the UK and Europe. Such politicians have used anti-migrant propaganda in their attempts to shore up a social base in the context of mass disillusionment with neoliberal austerity politics. This gives confidence to the actual far right, who have frequently targeted hostels and hotels where asylum seekers are being lodged, threatening those who have already fled persecution along with honest workers who are doing their jobs at these facilities. As Hope Not Hate noted:

“Britain First […]activists stormed into a hotel in Birmingham, currently being used to house refugees and migrants. Cameras in hand they walked down the corridors, banged on room doors and confronted residents when they opened. Similarly, BF leader Paul Golding went to Epping and harassed migrants at a hotel there which has already been the target of For Britain activists in recent months”

Patel’s new proposed policy can be seen as a kind of political extension of this far right violence. It is clearly vital that a movement is built that can defend refugees and asylum seekers against these attacks. But what can we do to better understand and try to tackle this issue now?

Firstly, Solidarity

We have to recognise that asylum seekers and refugees are members of the working class. The ruling class has always relied upon migrants to further its economic interests and boost profits. Whether it be Latin Americans travelling to the United States to provide labour on farms or in restaurants, or women from the Philippines migrating to Britain to work in care or for the NHS, international capital loves to exploit migrant labour.

Even Germany’s apparent openness in accepting one million refugees in 2015 must be seen through the prism of an ageing population and German capitalism’s need to expand and protect its reserve labour army. Employers often seek to use migrant workers in order to undercut wages or undermine existing trade union agreements, creating division between workers of different backgrounds. The fact that asylum seekers are denied the legal right to work in the UK only increases the chance that they will be forced to work in highly exploitative situations – often receiving less than the minimum wage, for example.

Instead of treating this highly exploited group as ‘outsiders’ or seeing them as competition, the workers’ movement and trade unions must instead fight to expand and broaden job security and trade union representation to all workers – demanding the trade union agreed rate for the job is paid to all and fighting to secure decent wages and conditions for every worker. If all members of the working class have access to well-paid, secure employment, including for those fleeing persecution, then the sense of resentment and mistrust the capitalists aim to foster can be undermined. After all, a worker who happens to have been born in England has far more in common with a member of the Syrian working class than with a British Billionaire. This can allow a shift in focus to the unjust and corrupt nature of the capitalist state.

The outpouring of sympathy and mass protests that followed the incredibly tragic death of the toddler Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on the beach in 2015, showed that there is huge potential to build movements in solidarity with refugees. Such a struggle must demand that refugees are really made ‘welcome’, including by being given the right to work, access to decent housing, help and support to learn English if this is required, and so on. With fresh attacks being planned by the Tories as outlined above, we need to once again take to the streets in defence of refugee rights.

Fighting capitalism, war, and environmental destruction

As socialists, we recognise that there is an intrinsic link between the destruction of the planet and human lives through the greed of capitalism.

The misery that imperialist wars and their consequences bring for the world’s poorest across the globe is horrifying. War is currently the main driver of people having to flee their homes and seek sanctuary elsewhere. And this is likely to be vastly dwarfed by a looming human catastrophe of capitalism’s making: environmental degradation.

The destruction of the environment in the pursuit of never-ending profits will cause a catastrophe that has the potential to spare no one, and yet the ruling class internationally can still not see beyond a short-sighted pursuit of profit that ruins the natural environment. We are starting to witness the effects of this as sea levels rise and volatile weather becomes increasingly normal across the globe.

In the coming years, this is likely to only get worse. More and more land will become inhospitable. If there is a presumption that we have a refugee crisis now, one can only begin to imagine what we are likely to face in the future.

Capitalism means war. Only by ending capitalism can we end class exploitation. And by ending the profit system, we end the economic conflicts of interests which drive conflicts over access to markets, land and natural resources which force so many refugees to seek safety and shelter elsewhere in the world.

As well as exploiting working-class people the world over, capitalism creates insoluble social problems. And because capitalism is a system of class exploitation, it is in the interest of all workers – whether they were born in Britain, are refugees, or are workers living elsewhere in the world – to fight to abolish it.

Only by ending the private ownership of the world’s key resources, as well as the central means of producing wealth, will we be able to establish a global social system where production takes place directly and solely to meet human need. Socialism will be based on co-operation, not on competition and conflicting interests. This is because it will necessarily be based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution, on production to meet human need not private greed. A democratic plan for production combined with solidarity across borders, would pave the way for a society without war, to end environmental destruction, and to prevent people being forced to leave their homes agains
Which way forward for the revolution in Myanmar?

More than 100 days after the start of the military coup, the revolutionary movement in Myanmar continues its heroic resistance in the face of an escalating crisis and shocking repression. April estimates put the death toll at over 700 killed by Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, and more than 3,000 detained, but the actual numbers are likely much higher. Nearly a quarter of a million people have fled the country, many crossing the border into neighbouring Thailand, India, and China. This in itself is a recipe for humanitarian disaster, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic raging through India, with a worrying surge in cases now emerging in Southeast Asia.

The coup has also had staggering effects on Myanmar’s economy, previously considered one of the fastest growing in the region. The World Bank is now projecting a 10% contraction of the economy this year while others put the figure as high as 20%. Shortages of essentials including food, fuel, and medicine are widespread and Myanmar trade unions estimate that more than 600,000 workers have lost their jobs since the coup. The UN estimates that the impact of the coup and the pandemic could push nearly half of Myanmar’s population into poverty by 2022.

Initial illusions that imperialist countries will step in have declined as the world’s major ‘superpowers’ either passively sit by or actively aid the junta. While China, Russia, India, and Israel sell arms to the military, Western powers like the US, EU, and UK have mustered only limited sanctions. Measures taken by ‘deeply concerned’ corporations have been exposed as the hollow, face-saving manoeuvres they really are, with companies like H&M recently resuming production in Myanmar in spite of the continued onslaught against protesters. The UN, looked to by many as a way out of the crisis, has failed to pass even a non-binding weapons embargo, and the recent ASEAN summit was seen as a major disappointment as the bloc resolved to pursue talks with junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing.

Attempts at ‘diplomacy’ with the junta are a slap in the face to the workers and young people of Myanmar as the Tatmadaw intensifies its reign of terror, detaining journalists, using civilians as human shields, and killing at least 43 children. Sexual violence by the military is horrifically common. Repression against workers, who have led the way throughout the revolution, has increased as well. More than 11,000 college and university staff were suspended for their participation in strikes against the coup. Hundreds of students have also been arrested and detained over the past months, many held in undisclosed locations facing brutal violence and torture by the regime.

But in the face of the escalating violence by the military, the resolve of protesters has not been crushed. Protests, strikes, and demonstrations continue throughout the country. As in many other movements around the world, working class women have fought audaciously, playing a leading role both in the workplace and the streets. Last month, the formation of the National Unity Government (NUG), a parallel government to the junta, was announced. The main force within the NUG is the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi, but it also significantly includes representatives of ethnic minority organizations. The NUG has also launched an armed wing, the People’s Defence Force (PDF), which includes many of Myanmar’s ethnic armies. Mass pressure from below is what has forced the NLD to go this far and it’s the bold and courageous mass movement, with the working class at its forefront, that is capable of carrying the revolution to victory.

Escalate the Struggle: For a General Strike Against the Tatmadaw and the Multinationals

Many young people, disgusted by the bloodshed and tired of waiting on the NUG to go beyond well-crafted statements, are looking to guerilla struggle as a way forward. At this stage self-defence is a necessity, however, there are also dangers inherent in the situation. Without a political force capable of democratically organizing self-defence in the interests of workers and the oppressed, there is a risk the situation will degenerate into civil war between opposing armies.

To be truly effective, self-defence must be controlled democratically by workers, youth and the poor, not coordinated behind closed doors by NLD politicians or the leaders of the ethinic armies. But even this would not be enough in itself – self-defence is not purely an issue of military strategy – it is a political question that must be tied to a broader program to take the revolution forward. Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, who were engaged in a power-sharing agreement with the Tatmadaw under the 2008 constitution and actively defended the genocide of the Rohingya people, have already proven that their concessionary politics are a dead-end.

The movement needs to go on the offensive, to escalate struggle through an indefinite, nationwide general strike. In Myanmar a general strike is not only a strike against the domestic and global capitalists that prop up the military, but also a direct blow to the Tatmadaw which owns a significant portion of Myanmar’s economy. A new general strike could lay the basis for a revolutionary assembly, made up of representatives from the trade unions and workplaces, ethinic minority organizations, and the youth in the movement, to democratically coordinate the strike, self-defense, and the development of a new constitution.

It’s only on this basis, rooted in the power of the working class who launched the movement, that the revolution can be successful. There can be no return to the compromises of the past. Democratic rights will not and never have been benevolently handed down by any ruling power, foreign government, or international institution, and working people have nothing to gain from struggles between imperialist powers who are in reality only jockeying for position to assert their own economic interests. To truly free workers and the oppressed from the brutal exploitation and oppression by both the military and the imperialist powers, the revolution needs to dismantle the Tatmadaw, take the key sectors of the economy under the democratic control of workers and the poor, and recognize the right to self-determination for all ethnic minorities.

Revolutionary Workers’ Solidarity with the Spring Revolution

The revolutionary movement in Myanmar provides important lessons for mass struggle around the world, revealing first and foremost the heroic determination of the masses of workers and the oppressed, but also the contradictions and challenges of the current political period. The triumphs and defeats of the movement are not isolated; as workers and young people from Chad to Palestine to Colombia stare down police and the military they are in reality facing the same opponent – the inherently violent and exploitative capitalist system.

International Socialist Alternative has launched a campaign, Revolutionary Workers’ Solidarity with the Spring Revolution, to build solidarity with the movement and make connections with activists on the ground in Myanmar. This has included solidarity photos and messages from working people around the world, including socialist feminists supporting the struggle against sexual violence and healthcare workers who have been on the cutting edge of struggle globally. Socialists, trade union and feminist activists, as well as any worker or young person who supports the revolution are encouraged to send photos or messages of solidarity.

In contrast to weak statements made by capitalist governments, international solidarity from workers and young people is immensely powerful and vitally necessary to take any struggle forward. For this reason Socialist Alternative England, Wales, and Scotland organizes on an international basis as part of International Socialist Alternative. Through our shared political analysis and method, we fight against a common enemy and for a common goal – a socialist world free from violence, oppression, and exploitation, organized on the basis of human need not profit.

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