[Marxism] call for papers on Immigration/Socialism and DEmocracy

[Walter Lippmann]

While not an original paper written for this journal, I recommend
Ricardo Alarcon's talk given last year on Marx and the tasks of
the 21st Century. Four paragraphs:

The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States has
prognosticated that, as a consequence of that phenomenon, very soon
deep changes will have been produced in the cultures of several
European countries. The struggle for the rights of immigrants and
against discrimination expressed in public demonstrations that
mobilized millions of people and in the historic May Day protest--a
date that never before had been expressed in this way in the United
States--brings to the forefront a political force that now cannot be
easily ignored.

The presence of millions of people discriminated against and lacking
civil and political rights raises an essential question that goes to
the very roots of the political system that the West has attempted to
set as an obligatory model for all. There is an increasingly growing
number of those who work hard there, pay their taxes, die in their
wars, but cannot vote nor be elected. In today’s Rome the
participation of the citizens is reduced while the mass of those
excluded is constantly growing, the modern “barbarians.” In this very
building, recently, professor Robert Dahl--prominent apologist for
the archetypical capitalist--recognized in such marginalization the
principal lack of contemporary liberal democracy.

The end of that exclusion, the struggle for democracy, specifically
including the democratization of Western societies, should be a
priority for those who wish to transform the world. This is yet more
urgent if we perceive the other face of the migratory phenomenon
together with it grows, in parallel, racial hatred, xenophobia, which
feeds fascist tendencies today present in an obvious manner in those
societies.

The migratory problem reflects, thus, an aspect of capitalism today
that it is also worthwhile reflecting on. While the emigrants are
humiliated and super exploited in the countries where they end up,
there they are used also as instruments for the oppression of the
local workers. Being used as the international reserve army, stripped
of rights, and until now not organized, they serve to lower wages,
are forced to accept conditions that, as Bush the lesser likes to
say, U.S. workers do not accept.

To free the immigrants from their exploitation becomes, therefore,
essential for the emancipation of the workers in the developed
countries. To forge a union between both exploited sectors, in an
area that has had advances that are still insufficient but whose
importance cannot be underestimated, is today a task that cannot be
postponed. To rescue the role of the labor union, true bulwark of
civil society and to guarantee the rights of all workers, without
exceptions, to organize oneself is an indispensable response to a
capitalism that ever more openly casts off its “liberal” mask and
demonstrates the perverse face of tyranny.


http://www.walterlippmann.com/alarcon-05-03-2006-e.html

================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
writer - photographer - activist
http://www.walterlippmann.com
================================