cfgaussian
It’s true that immigration can have downsides for workers if a) you are in a neoliberal capitalist shithole, and b) if you have zero solidarity between native and immigrant workers such that immigrants are allowed to be abused and super-exploited as a consequence of their more vulnerable status.
The way to fight things like downwards wage pressure resulting from immigration is through worker solidarity, unionization and other forms of collective action and organization. And yes this is possible to do with people of immigrant background too; after all, in today’s day and age, with the technology available, language should be no barrier to organizing together. The only real barrier is racism.
Standing up for the rights of migrants and fighting for the rights of native workers, these are deeply interlinked struggles and the success of one will always positively affect the other. Throwing migrants under the bus in hopes of bettering native labor’s position on the other hand is always going to end up having the opposite effect: it empowers capital while it atomizes and fragments the working class.
That’s not to say that massive migration is necessarily a good thing. While migration can have very beneficial effects on the receiver country it is often detrimental to the countries of origin which experience brain drain and loss of the most highly trained labor. We also cannot forget that highly unbalanced migration is always caused by something being very wrong and pushing people to feel forced to leave their native lands, something which most people would not freely choose to do under normal circumstances.
Whether it’s war, economic deprivation or ecological disasters that are causing this migration, those causes (most of which were brought about by the same neoliberal imperialist global system that also seeks to profit from turning native and migrant labor against each other in order to better exploit both) are what we should be looking at and helping those countries to tackle. We should not merely be shutting people out because that does not fix the problem, it only causes more suffering.
We are Marxists, we have to take a holistic view on these issues and not deal with them in the simplistic, un-dialectical way that a liberal or a fascist would.
Clown village
The US is the one calling the shots. If “Israel” is doing something it’s not because it has power over the US but because the US imperial establishment wants and benefits from “Israel” doing that. Everything else is pretense and excuses. As Genocide Joe himself admitted, if there wasn’t an “Israel” the US would have to invent one. They get to do the things they do because the neocolony serves Western imperialist interests in the Middle East.
Those are allegations, i prefer to talk about facts. Fact is that Russia held normal elections verified by international observers which Putin won by a large margin. Meanwhile narco-führer Zelensky cancelled the elections in Ukraine indefinitely, banned all the opposition parties, and is now illegitimately holding onto power past the end of his term by martial law. The fact that he is also having his neonazi thugs round up every adult male they can find on the street to send to their deaths is just the cherry on top.
I don’t think things as as simple as they appear here. Undoubtedly this is a right wing party with a lot of really dumb reactionary positions, but the reasons why they are being demonized so hard by the liberal establishment has more to do with them being pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, anti-NATO, very critical of the EU, and one of the only parties in Romania who are not rabidly pro-Israel. AfD not getting along with them is more due to the fact that AfD are a bunch of slimy, opportunist liars who despite their populist rhetoric never intended to take any kind of stand against either the EU or NATO and also they are massive Zionist scumbags.
I think we need to be more skeptical of liberal mainstream narratives branding anyone who is against NATO and the EU as extremists. What the establishment parties do and stand for is no less extreme than the far right, they are unhinged, warmongering imperialists who support a genocide, and who fund and arm literal neo-Nazis. The EU is increasingly censoring dissenting voices and a lot of European countries are outright arresting people for being pro-Russia or pro-Palestine.
Pointing this out and how anyone who is vocally opposed to this regardless whether they are from the left or the right faces media demonization and state persecution doesn’t mean you support the right wing.
Time will tell.
