Solidarity Against Prejudice in the Working Class (Part 2)

Solidarity Is a Process

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. -- Karl Marx, The German Ideology

When you live in a capitalist society, you can't help but internalize capitalist ideas.  Every society acts that way.  Every society must build its foundation of assumptions into the masses, or else it could not recreate itself with every generation, decade, year, month, or even day.  Some of these assumptions are changed through popular struggle.  Popular struggle can make a ruling class look so weak, so behind, that the ruling class must adapt to the change or fall to a revolution.

So each individual who is interested in liberation must find within themselves their attitudes which mirror the interest of the ruling class and eliminate these root and branch, finding the source and broken logic of the prejudice and replacing it with an attitude of liberation.  This is a process.  And you know it's a long one, requiring self-discipline and self-awareness and self-criticism.  But, as with most things, the difficulty of the process only ennobles itself and people who take on its challenges.

A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any individual, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.
[...]
Communists must be ready at all times to stand up for the truth, because truth is in the interests of the people; Communists must be ready at all times to correct their mistakes, because mistakes are against the interests of the people.  -- Mao Tse-Tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

We are none of us so enlightened as to be free from this work.  You and I and everyone who wants liberation must keep vigilant, making sure we pulled every weed of division from our gardens, and making sure no more spring up.  There will be set backs and surprises as well as many victories as you come to feel more and more unity with the world's oppressed and a greater understanding of who you are and what you can become.

Solidarity Against Prejudice in the Working Class (Part 1)

A Tale of Mistaken Identity

In my years living in the US South, I have met many working class people who more or less completely agree that their bosses are useless and yet get all the money, they know the government here isn't a democracy so much as the protectors of the rich, and they almost always agree it would be a good idea to start a new government where working people had a say.  And yet, many times, after saying all of this, they will complain about Mexican immigrants.

I spoke to another worker recently who agreed to all those points above, but was very angry indeed about illegal immigrants from Mexico.  "They come here and don't have to pay taxes and they can live on less than me, so they get the jobs.  You can't tell me that doesn't hurt the average worker."

"But they are here in fear, facing brutal repression, just trying to feed their family, maybe find a better way of life.  They have nothing.  If the bosses who are paying immigrants too little and aren't hiring you at all were taken out of the picture, US workers and immigrants would have more than enough to share."

After our conversation, I realized that the whole problem was that this guy saw his differences with the illegal immigrants, not his similarities.  Those differences (or race and nation and legal status) are all from the imagination of the rulers.  Race is defined by the powerful (created and enforced by their laws which have created a racial caste system).  Nations are made up by and for the rich.  The legal statutes of the land are written up by the rich and their congressional lackeys.

As long as these fictional lines keep the oppressed from unifying against their common enemy (the bourgeoisie), we'll never be able to overpower them.

Solidarity:  a Working Class Necessity

Solidarity (the unity of all workers, impoverished, and oppressed regardless of nation, race, sex, religion, or any other imaginary division) is the only way we can overthrow capitalism.  Now more than ever, when the imperialist West controls the strongest military might in human history, when international corporations bully entire countries, when the IMF, WTO, and World Bank are more powerful than elected leaders, and when so much anti-imperialist resistance has been co-opted by religious extremists, the oppressed of the world must come together.