What an image of the misery of the world’s working class under the rule of imperialism: the unseaworthy boat abandoned or sinking, with thousands of migrating workers left to starve or drown, and hundreds of thousands lined up to follow them.
The boat pictured above was in the Mediterranean Sea, where African and Middle Eastern workers seek in Europe work and refuge from war and famine.  It could also be in the Andaman Sea, where workers flee Myanmar and Bangladesh for work in Malaysia or Indonesia. And earlier, it could have been in the Caribbean Sea, where starving workers sailed in rickety boats from Haiti to find work in Florida.
Even Basic Necessities Impossible Under Capitalism
This year alone, 25,000 have crossed the Andaman Sea from Myanmar and Bangladesh. In the Mediterranean, that “moat” protecting the European castle, 170,000 migrants were rescued from the sea in 2014, and nearly 500 have already drowned in the first quarter of 2015. Meanwhile, Malaysia has found 28 illegal trafficking camps where the workers were brutally managed like caged animals. Mass graves were also found in these sites. The cruelty of labor migration shows the reality of capitalist terror against the working class.
As of May 27, Indonesia and Malaysia have reluctantly agreed to take in up to 7,000 migrants for up to a year. Thousands are now being held detention centers and camps. The workers from Bangladesh who are considered “economic migrants” will be deported back to Bangladesh, where their punishment for trying to flee poverty awaits them. Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina degraded those seeking to flee the country as “mentally sick” and blasted them for “tainting the country’s image in the international arena,” declaring they “should be punished.” The Rohingya migrants from Myanmar are considered to be seeking asylum and may be settled in a different country.
While the capitalists were busy with their war plans (see editorial, page 2), it was the working class who stepped up to help the migrants at sea. Workers in an Indonesian village provided food and water to hundreds of migrants. “We treated them like family,” said one villager.
Communists work for the day when workers throw off their chains and win power, knowing their duty is to make a civilization which outlaws forever capitalist exploitation and all its cruelties. Those migrating workers now abandoned to the sea are the very ones who will become the gravediggers of imperialism.
Workers migrate at such peril to their lives from their original countries, devastated by imperialism, knowing what racism and repression await them at their destinations. Ultimately, labor migration profits the capitalists, who welcome the surplus of labor to keep racist wages driven down. For the bosses, the migrant families dead at sea or at camps are just “business as usual.”
Migrant Workers: Potential Revolutionary Force
The international working class refuses to accept a world where murder of Black and brown workers is the order of the day. Communists believe that these migrating workers are a key element in abolishing capitalism and that we have a duty to unite them with the workers they leave behind and the workers they find in the new places — to build on them as a base for a newly conscious internationalism among all workers. They are not mere victims but workers who, if they become politically conscious, hold in their own two hands the key to ending not only their own misery but every worker’s who is exploited by global capital. PLP’s  attitude is that labor migration is a seed of international working-class revolution.
These migrant workers have a deep knowledge of the capitalist system from their own experience, and possess deep pride in their own collective power to endure and survive. The militancy and determination they bring with them to the workers they join in their destination countries, and the knowledge they send back with their remittances to those they left behind, is our key to seizing power.
Someday, this reservoir of knowledge and passion in the hearts of migrating workers will flow into the communist philosophy of armed revolution. Our communist Party will grows to become capable of remaking the world in our image. Then we will have the answer in blood and fire to the atrocities we see today. Every new migrant’s death impels us to continue the international fight for workers’ power. PLP in every region, from Pakistan to Los Angeles to Colombia, should organize solidarity actions with workers in Southeast Asia.