[D66] Capitalism and the global refugee crisis

[J.N.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/21/pers-a21.html

Capitalism and the global refugee crisis
21 August 2015

According to the United Nations, there are more refugees in the world
today than at any point in recorded human history.

At the end of 2014, almost 60 million people were forcibly displaced.
This is nearly three times the number recorded just a decade earlier. On
a global scale, one out of every 122 people is now either a refugee,
internally displaced or seeking asylum. A majority (51 percent) of the
planet’s refugees are below the age of 18.

Millions have been made homeless and thrown into grinding poverty as a
result of imperialist-backed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
The world’s largest refugee crisis is centred on Syria, where the number
of those fleeing to other countries has now exceeded four million. Those
who are able to do so seek refuge in Europe. That often involves a
perilous trip across the Mediterranean, a journey that has taken the
lives of thousands of men, women and children.

Only this week, the bodies of 49 migrants were discovered inside the
hold of a fishing boat, having died of fume inhalation. This adds to the
total of more than 2,300 who have perished at sea so far this year.

Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, has reported that 107,500
migrants were detected at its frontiers last month. This is three times
as many as in July 2014.

Thousands of refugees and asylum seekers, the vast majority fleeing the
war zones of Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, attempt to reach Europe via
its southern states of Greece, Italy and Spain. Since January, a total
of 160,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in the various Greek
islands, with more than 20,000 arriving in the last week alone. More
than 100,000 have been rescued and brought to Italy this year.

This is only a small portion of those attempting to escape horrific
conditions at home. Millions of refugees from Syria, for example,
survive in massive city-sized refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey. The
refugees who attempt the trip to Europe are those who have managed to
scrape together enough money to pay one of the people traffickers
operating the boats.

This relatively small percentage of the world’s refugees is treated as
an existential threat by Europe’s ruling elite. Refugees and migrants
are routinely denounced and cast as criminals, responsible for all of
society’s ills, by governments and political parties of all stripes.

Speaking of just 5,000 migrants who live in appalling conditions at the
port of Calais, UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said, “Europe can’t
protect itself and preserve its standard of living and social
infrastructure, if it has to absorb millions of migrants from Africa.”

This week German Chancellor Angel Merkel warned in a TV interview that
the arrival of thousands of refugees to the shores of the continent
would “preoccupy Europe much, much more than the issue of Greece and the
stability of the euro.”

In Greece itself, the brutal treatment of refugees by the pseudo-left
Syriza government is confirmation, if it were still needed, of its
pro-capitalist, anti-working class character.

The right-wing bile emanating from official circles is echoed and
magnified in an outpouring of increasingly overt xenophobic hatred
hurled at refugees and asylum seekers by a hysterical media. Right-wing
and fascist bands, encouraged by this putrid atmosphere, have stepped up
attacks on refugees and asylum seekers. In Germany, for example, more
than 200 incidents, including arson attacks on migrants’ homes, have
been reported this year.

Muslims in particular face the full force of this venom. This week the
government of Slovakia, which is to receive just 200 Syrian refugees as
part of an EU relocation scheme, said it would only accept Christians.

What is being cast as a “migrant problem” is in fact a problem of
imperialist rule and of the capitalist system. There are two root causes
of the massive refugee crisis.

The first is the growing number of predatory wars being conducted by the
imperialist powers and their proxies. Indeed, the United States, backed
by its allies, has now been involved in perpetual war since 1991 that
has displaced entire populations and destroyed entire societies.

The second major factor is the control and economic destruction of the
planet by the major capitalist states that has plunged billions of
people into abject poverty.

The European powers seek to insulate themselves from the results of the
carnage they have wrought through the creation of a “Fortress Europe”.
At its June emergency summit on refugees, the EU washed its hands in the
face of growing public revulsion at the deaths of thousands in the
Mediterranean. They refused to set any quotas for countries to take in
the increasing numbers of desperate refugees, agreeing to relocate just
40,000 refugees already in Italy and Greece.

Instead, all efforts are concentrated on strengthening border controls.
Hungary’s southern border marks the edge of the EU’s Schengen Zone of
passport-free travel. The right-wing government there is building a
massive fence along its 109-mile border with Serbia. This week a prime
ministerial spokesman said that the fence would be “defended” by
thousands of police against “increasingly aggressive” migrants.

New metres-high fortified border fences, miles in length, have been
built and strengthened by Greece, Bulgaria, Spain, the UK at the Channel
Tunnel port of Calais, and by other countries.

Under conditions in which the global economy is more closely
interconnected and more complex than ever before in history, the
capitalist system, based on the outmoded division of the planet into
antagonistic nation states and private ownership of the means of
production, is creating hell on earth.

In the founding programme of the Fourth International, the great
revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote on the eve of the Second World War,
“Before exhausting or drowning mankind in blood, capitalism befouls the
world atmosphere with the poisonous vapours of national and race hatred.”

These words are as apt today as they were then.

As with all the great problems facing humanity, the only rational
solution that can prevent tens and hundreds of millions more becoming
refugees is the unification of working people internationally in the
struggle for a socialist reorganization of economic life. Socialism, a
society based on fulfilling human need, not profit, would rationally use
and develop the earth’s abundant resources to provide a life worth
living for everyone.

In pursuance of this goal and with all its collective strength, the
working class must unswervingly defend the democratic rights of refugees
and migrants to asylum and their right to live wherever they wish.

The international working class, the only revolutionary force on the
planet, must be mobilised in order to put an end to the horrors of
imperialism and the capitalist system. This task requires the building
of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world
Trotskyist movement.

Robert Stevens