On September 9, a fire destroyed the squalid Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, the largest migrant worker concentration camp in Europe. Moria crammed 13,000 women, men, and children into space built for 3,000. While it’s still unclear who set the blaze, we know that workers boldly organized against their deplorable living conditions and were targeted by fascist crackdowns. These displaced members of the international working class are fleeing famine and war. While their plight is extreme, they represent hundreds of millions of workers whose lives have been upended by intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and a worldwide crisis of capitalism.
As the U.S.-led liberal world order crumbles amid the chaos of a global pandemic, an ascendant China and resurgent Russia are making inroads with regional capitalist bosses in countries like Greece and Turkey. Migrant workers—the most vulnerable members of our class—have long been pawns in this brutal profit system game. But they are also learning to struggle and fight back! Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stands in solidarity with the refugees who are leading the fight against the rulers’ vicious racism and rising fascism. United, workers cannot be defeated!
We are not animals, we are workers
Even before the recent fire, life at the Moria camp was unbearable. Acute overcrowding, a disgraceful lack of health care, and an absence of clean water or sanitation made the site a ticking time bomb for Covid-19 (Human Rights Watch, 2020). A single poorly supplied emergency medical provider was assigned to care for a camp population that swelled to more than 20,000 earlier this year. As the Guardian painted the appalling scene last winter: “Thousands of vulnerable workers sleep in makeshift tents elevated on wooden pallets to try to prevent the cold from the freezing ground seeping into their bodies. The unlucky ones, with no pallets, include a four-day-old baby. The refugees, 40 percent of them children, confront violent stabbings, outbreaks of meningitis, giving birth without proper care, extreme panic attacks, PTSD hallucinations and flashbacks, sleep disturbances, and sexual violence” (2/9).
A mental health care worker for Doctors Without Borders told of the appalling toll these conditions took on children at Moria: “They stop playing. Sometimes they stop communicating and they look at the ground. They refuse to talk” (Atlantic, 11/2019). Some became so traumatized that they began cutting themselves.
Leading up to the fire, the many demonstrations were met by racist suppression by Greek police and violent right-wing forces. Earlier this year, racist vigilantes attempted to burn down a coronavirus facility used to treat workers at the camp (Doctors Without Borders, 2020). Though the anti-immigrant racists would be logical suspects in the September 9 fire, the kkkops have charged four refugees with arson.
After being moved to a hastily constructed campsite, more than 200  migrant workers in Lesbos have tested positive for the coronavirus,  a number expected to balloon in coming weeks (infomigrants.net, 9/22). Zekria Farzad, a 40-year-old worker from Afghanistan, said, “We are living like animals….Actually, we are struggling to be alive” (Washington Post, 2/23).
Migration crisis driven by imploding liberal world order
Refugees are created by capitalism. Most of the concentration camp inmates in Moria came from Afghanistan, Syria, or Somalia, countries in the crosshairs of the imperialists’ struggle for control over oil in Central Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa. Energy is a critical source of profits for the big capitalist bosses. Even more important, oil will be needed for the inevitable war between the U.S. and its challengers for global supremacy.
Afghanistan has been gripped by decades of inter-imperialist conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), and China, with regional powers like Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia also adding to the instability. According to the Brown University Costs of War project, 2.4 million workers fled Afghanistan between 2012 and 2019, “the largest refugee population in the world.” Large numbers were admitted by Iran, but the coronavirus pandemic and a U.S. maximum pressure campaign shut that door. After a deal between the European Union and Turkey broke down, thousands of desperate migrant workers were forced to seek refuge in Greece.
In Syria, meanwhile, Russia has kept in power its war criminal proxy, President Bashar al-Assad, while regaining a strategic naval base in Tartus. After eight years of civil war that followed the CIA-backed Arab Spring revolts, “more than half of Syria’s pre-war population has been displaced, totaling some 13.3 million people” (Brown University). Cross-border refugees surged with the rise of U.S.-funded militias that have murdered and mutilated their way across Kurdish-controlled areas (The Intercept, October, 2019). Many of these refugees found their way to Moria.
Somalia sits near the strategic Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, where four million barrels of oil pass each day. Under Bomber in Chief Barack Obama, the U.S. rained carnage on the country, murdering and displacing masses of workers. Under mass murderer Donald Trump, these bombing campaigns have continued to slaughter and terrorize civilians. By the end of 2019, “approximately 4.2 million Somalis had been displaced within the country (3.4 million) or beyond its borders as refugees or asylum seekers (800,000)” (Brown University). With China establishing its first overseas military base in neighboring Djibouti, the U.S. bosses have ample incentive to continue to sow death and destruction.
Workers of the world, unite!
As the imperialist powers sharpen their knives to prepare for global war, more and more workers will be killed or displaced. There are no good bosses! Choosing between the U.S., China, Russia, or their puppets is a lose-lose proposition. The international working class must stand in solidarity, like the workers in Mexico who provided food and shelter for Central American migrants. Or like the workers in Germany who took to the streets to declare, “We have space!”, in opposition to government and fascist forces claiming otherwise (Ruptly.tv/en, 9/20). Our Party’s mission is to fight alongside these advanced workers and to inject the communist politics that will liberate our entire class from the deadly stranglehold of imperialism.
Communist revolution will smash all borders, the arbitrary lines that divide workers and set off the bosses’ wars.  The international working class knows no borders! Fight for communism! Join PLP!