India: Support Workers Socialist Appeal against the CAA-NRC-NPR

End the Citizenship Laws and National Borders!

Advance the struggle to build a world socialist organisation! 

Reverse the communal divide of 1947, re-unite the Indian subcontinent, and spearhead the struggle for a United Socialist Union in South Asia!

The Modi government, the agent of India's major capitalists, is busy attacking the working people's anger over the failing power of capital in the economic-political crisis. Therefore, it is making every effort to maintain the corruption and robbery of those in power with the poisonous nostalgia of ethnocentrism and Hindu supremacy, dividing the masses of the working people. To keep the politically backward sections of the Hindu majority under the rule of the capitalists, the Modi government is creating a tool for Muslim oppression. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) defines the terms of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR), under which an entire network of detention camps is being spread on the lines of Nazi Germany.

The Modi government is not alone in this desperate attempt. In the wake of the economic crisis of world capitalism in 2008, there has been a catastrophe in capitalist countries. Until yesterday, boasting of globalization on a capitalist basis, the elite rulers of these countries have joined forces to close their borders for migration and to exclude parts of the working people. Imprisoned in the tight cages of the national states, capital with its falling rate of profit, in this period of ever-increasing crisis, has become unable to provide food and employment for the people. There is only one way forward for the bourgeois governments - closing their borders and deporting large sections of the people. 

Along with the general crisis of capitalism, wars and oppression are spreading, and unemployment as well as the crisis of emigration is worsening. In this crisis of crises, capitalist rulers are closing the borders of their countries and are eager to push out large parts of the people as surplus. The United States is sealing its borders with Mexico, and Britain is pressing India to repatriate Indian migrants. These attacks, rather than solving the crisis of capitalism, are making it deeper. The capitalist rulers, targeting the crisis-stricken migrants and refugees, are using then as a pretext to dispel the anger of people suffering from capitalism's crisis and to contain it on ethnic, regional and communal grounds. And by succeeding in reducing it to a matter of religion, they are trying to protect their power from being the target of this anger.

The Modi government wants to maintain its grip on power by allowing Hindu settlements in Muslim-majority parts of the country and tightly controlling Muslim immigration into the rest of the country. Opposition parties cannot resist this poisonous communalism of Modi. All these parties, right and left in the opposition, agree with the Modi government on keeping India safe for 'Indians' only and closing it for 'foreigners'. None of the opposition parties, including the Left parties, were in favor of the Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants. We should not forget that the NRC was first implemented by the Nehru-led Congress government in the name of stopping 'foreign invaders', and before Modi, the Manmohan government had drafted it.

We strongly oppose this anti-globalist campaign, which the Modi government has tried to give a deep and clear communal color to, and warn the proletariat about this conspiracy. Perpetuating the unfortunate communal divide of 1947, igniting religious-regional enmity, the anti-people rulers of India want to maintain their power. The horrific tragedy of the communal divide of '47, in which more than two million victims were killed, victims of plunder and oppression, and more than two million were destroyed, was the largest humanitarian tragedy in the history of the world. By dividing the people on communal grounds, they put them under the grip of the bourgeoisie and destroyed the anti-imperialist revolution. From 1947 onwards, the capitalist rulers fought, constantly wiping out opposition to the communal poison, dividing the working people in the name of Indo-Pakistan and Hindu-Muslim. The whole of South Asia has maintained its sovereignty. The suffering people, like sheep, are encircled in their controlled national enclaves, by the national gangs of capitalists, putting them in hellish living conditions.

Today, all the capitalist countries of the world are engaged in a hotly contested war against one another, which is becoming increasingly violent, and the world is passing through unlimited wars, terrorism and bloodshed. Capitalism cannot unify the world, it can only divide it. The only way out of these hellish situations created by capitalism is to fight for the socialist revolution.

We reject all divisions of the world on a national, racial or communal basis. On behalf of the international proletariat we invite the dissolution of all barricades that divide the world, impose borders, restrict travel, and freedom of residence or employment. We are struggling to abolish the passport-visa state and to eliminate national boundaries, to build a World Socialist Union. In this task we have a clear goal: to re-unite the Indian subcontinent by reversing the communal divide of 1947, and to establish the United Socialist States of South Asia.

The bourgeois rule in South Asia, which is dominated by India's right-wing and Hindu-backed Modi government, is a major obstacle to achieving this goal. By overthrowing them through the revolution, by establishing Workers' Governments, South Asia can be consolidated into a socialist union and the narrow national borders and national states eliminated.

- We oppose citizenship laws, religious, communal, racial or ethnic discrimination, and all citizenship laws and national boundaries.

- We appeal to the youth, the proletariat, that 'action committees' are formed in all cities, campuses, factories, to unite in the fight, further accelerating this opposition!

- Oppose all citizenship laws!

- Oppose religious, racial, ethnic, and national oppression!

- Unite the national across borders and unite the world into a socialist union!

- Forwards to the struggle for 'South Asian Socialist Union', uniting the Indian subcontinent by overthrowing the communal divide of 1947!

Translated from https://workersocialist.blogspot.com/2019/12/caa-nrc-npr_27.html
Errors in translation are the responsibility of CWG/ANZ 

Class Struggle, No 131, Summer 2019-20

   CS 131 Summer by Dave Bedggood on Scribd

Where is Britain Going?

After 9 years of bitter austerity, how did the Tories turn an entitled, lying clownish toff like Johnson into such a winner, and an avowed parliamentary socialist like Corbyn into a weak chump? The answer lies in the failure of Labour to stand up to Johnson’s Trumpish rally to ‘make Britain great again’. Fatally, Lexiteers like Corbyn tried to meet Brexit halfway with a ‘Socialist’ Brexit, or Lexit.

The Tories were split over Brexit but the Brexiteers fought inside the party to defeat the Remainers, so the campaign was all about Brexit. Labour was also split, but refused to take a position and compromised on a second Referendum. So, Labour broke the stalemate by allowing Johnson to turn its Brexiteer working class voters into his pawns.

Never mind. Brexit is far from over, and Johnson’s hard Brexit will explode on the streets and workplaces rendering parliament impotent to stop the breakup of Britain. It will push Scotland towards independence, and give Northern Ireland every reason to join a united Ireland. This will pose for socialists the test of their ability to organise the working class against reactionary bourgeois chauvinism and for proletarian internationalism.

To understand why this election will launch an open class warfare that can only be resolved by fascism or socialism, we need to explain how Britain’s existential crisis, as part of a wider terminal crisis of global capitalism, has forced Brexit to the top of the bosses’ political agenda.

Brexit stalemate

The stalemate over Brexit is a symptom of the paralysis of the British ruling class facing the dilemma of its future as a declining imperialist power maneuvering between the US bloc and the Russia/China bloc. The rise of Russia and China threatens the waning US world hegemony. The EU is torn between the two but increasingly drawn towards Russia/China.

This poses a problem for the UK ruling class: to remain in the EU as it gets pulled away from the US towards Russia and China, or to leave the EU and stick with the US come what may. The British ruling class is split between the finance sector, the legacy of Britain’s rentier role in the world economy, and the national bourgeoisie who are now in partnership with US, EU and Asian transnationals.

Both fractions are globalist in outlook and make their profits in a multilateral world where capital and labour know no borders. Johnson in copying Trumps ‘exceptionalism’ is acting contrary to Britain’s globalist role. There is no case for abandoning the EU for the US – since Britain profits from both – unless Britain is so uncompetitive and sees no future in the EU allied to Russia/China and is desperate to gamble on the declining US. So, what part of the ruling class has an interest in writing off the 20th century and building a fantasy of reclaiming the glory days when “Britain ruled the world”?

None except a small section of British capitalists that wants to share in a US takeover and asset stripping of British assets including the remaining state assets such as the NHS. This is the Trumpist strategy to save the US that the reactionary Tories endorse.

The trade deal being negotiated with the US will reduce Britain from the status of declining imperialist power to a client lackey state. Those who stand to gain from a hard Brexit are those who blame Britain’s decline on EU membership and want to become the servile junior partner of the US. They are a tiny, backward chauvinist fraction that rejects globalism to make Britain great again. But this slogan actually means becoming mere neo-colonial compradors (agents) of US vulture capital. This is the reason that the Brexit comprador fraction needs to manufacture a populist movement of chauvinist workers and petty bourgeois social imperialists to give it parliamentary legitimacy.

Lexit succumbs to chauvinism

The left is mightily confused over Brexit when it puts itself into the camp of the comprador Brexit faction of the British ruling class. While the left propagandizes that Brexit creates a Left-exit (Lexit) for workers to take power, in practice they are acting as stooges to call on workers to side with British imperialism over German imperialism. What’s more they sign up to ‘their’ ruling class to defend Britain from all foreigners, migrants, militants, and revolutionaries to defend ‘glorious Britain’. The bankruptcy of this ‘social imperialism’ (socialism at home paid for by imperialism abroad) explains Labour’s defeat by the Brexit populists.

The problem with the Lexit position is that it takes a historical construction of the bourgeoisie, the nation state, and defends it as timeless. But since the arrival of the age of imperialism early in the 20th century, capital has known no borders. It has had to expand globally to boost profits at home. Giant monopolies backed by their nation states have gone to war to make their rivals and the world’s workers’ pay for their crises of overproduction.

Thus, excess capital is destroyed in depressions and wars, while workers’ wages have been driven down by depression and their resistance defeated by conscription to fight the bosses’ wars. The 20th century proves that workers used as cannon fodder must mutiny and unite with workers everywhere to overthrow crisis-ridden global capitalism. In the place of bourgeois nation states workers will create socialist republics that replace chauvinism with internationalism and a global federation of workers’ republics.

Fascism or Socialism

The extreme logic of bourgeois nationalism leads to the rise of fascism to smash workers refusal to pay for the bosses’ crises. This is where we are again today, in a full blown, terminal crisis of global capitalism, where new movements are beginning to rise up against global capital. And once more the bosses are encouraging fascism to raise its ugly head to smash workers struggles for basic democratic rights from Algeria to Hong Kong.

Within this framework, the situation in Britain is consistent with a declining imperialist power reverting to imperialist xenophobia, led by a reactionary comprador clique of the bourgeoisie that has been defeated by monopoly capital. In its desperation to protect its wealth it exploits the fears of workers against migrants to ape Trump in backing imperialist Britain against imperialist Germany and France. And in many European countries the same centripetal forces of national populist movements are creating the swamps in which fascism breeds.

There is nothing progressive in defending bourgeois nations in the name of the ‘left’. It leads to the enlisting of workers behind the national flag to fight workers in other countries in the interests of the ruling classes and against the interests of humanity and nature. Against the populist/fascist movements that are forming to divide and smash working peoples, the only left position that can lead to the end of capitalism, is that which unites workers across national borders into one international revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism and building socialism.