Since the early 1970’s, the capitalist oligarchs at the head of the world’s largest corporations have significantly changed the character of the world’s economy.
After two world wars that pitted one nation’s capitalists against another’s, they scuttled their system of protected national and colonial markets (as in the British Empire).
Leaving their colonies in the hands of cooperative local elites, they began knocking down tariff barriers and expanding their corporations worldwide. Cheap goods from the dominant countries flooded the markets of their ex-colonies, destroying local manufacturing.
In recent years, the world oligarchs have quickened the process — putting millions of people on the road as their livelihoods are destroyed.
Mexico and Central America are a case in point. Using NAFTA and CAFTA (the free-trade agreements), global capitalists have scuttled the longstanding tariffs that protected Latin American farmers.
That has enabled them to flood Latin American markets with cheap North American corn, undermining local farmers and forcing them to migrate for work.
But while the global oligarchs have removed barriers to global trade, they have not removed barriers to global migration. By leaving those barriers up — even strengthening them — they maximize their profits and buy time against the coming uprising.
Militarizing borders with walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints — thus turning honest, hardworking migrants into “illegals” — the world capitalists divide and conquer. Borders encourage workers to fight among themselves based on nationality. And that drives down wages until workers worldwide are reduced to near slavery.
To meet this capitalist offensive, the world’s workers must first understand that we are now a global class, and then we must unite in our own interest, not that of the oligarchs.
Happily, that is already under way. The revolt of the 99% has been at once local and global, moving from the Middle East to Europe to the United States itself — where fair treatment of migrants is a clearly stated goal.
When the Occupy movement spread across the United States, the people in more than a hundred countries held demonstrations of solidarity. You could almost hear them sighing with relief that “finally, the Americans are standing up!”
Workers of the world, unite.
