Mexican strikers show working class answer to capitalist reaction at US-Mexico border
17 January 2019
At the US-Mexico border, the two chief social classes under capitalism—the capitalist class and the working class—are demonstrating the two alternatives for the future of mankind.
The capitalist class has mobilized thousands of heavily armed US soldiers, who are stringing barbed wire across the desert and shooting tear gas at refugees asking for asylum. Immigrants who chanted “we are international workers” as they marched thousands of miles from Honduras as part of last year’s migrant caravan are now huddled in disease-ridden tent cities just yards short of the US border.
To protect the nation state and block the flow of workers seeking to escape poverty and violence, border agents are grabbing the children of immigrant workers from their parents’ arms and locking them up for months, with fatal consequences for some. The bodies of thousands of people lie scattered in the barren desert.
The US government shutdown centers on what the Republican and Democratic parties call “border security,” with both sides pledging to build barriers, fly drones and arm more agents to keep immigrants out.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are missing paychecks because the two parties say they have differences over how many billions to spend fortifying the borders and how many hundreds of miles of wall to build. Trump—the most degenerate representative of US finance capital—has threatened to shoot immigrants on sight, declare a “national emergency,” and eliminate due process and the right to asylum.
The working class, on the other hand, is beginning to advance its opposition to this repulsive reality. In the Mexican border city of Matamoros, 70,000 workers have…