"[B]y bringing to our attention the successive forms which make it possible for capital, against workers’ struggles, to foster competition among workers as the basis of their exploitation, the question of immigration shows us why, once again and on a concrete basis, the workers’ movement must lead a constant struggle against the pitfall of economism: giving the trade-unionist struggle its proper and indispensable place, it demonstrates at the same time the absolute necessity of the united political struggle of national and immigrant laborers for socialist revolution, which alone will open the possibility for the destruction of all forms of exploitation.
I will cite Lenin for a final time, from October 1917 concerning the revision of the Bolshevik party program:
Having thus concluded our analysis of Comrade Sokolnikov’s draft, we must note one very valuable addition which he proposes and which in my opinion should be adopted and even developed. To the paragraph which deals with technical progress and the greater employment of female and child labour, he proposes to add the phrase “as well as the labour of unskilled foreign workers imported from backward countries”. This addition is valuable and necessary. The exploitation of worse paid labour from backward countries is particularly characteristic of imperialism. On this exploitation rests, to a certain degree, the parasitism of rich imperialist countries which bribe a part of their workers with higher wages while shamelessly and unrestrainedly exploiting the labour of “cheap” foreign workers. The words “worse paid” should be added and also the words “and frequently deprived of rights”; for the exploiters in “civilised” countries always take advantage of the fact that the imported foreign workers have no rights. This is often to be seen in Germany in respect of workers imported from Russia; in Switzerland of Italians; in France, of Spaniards and Italians, etc.
We see here, through Lenin’s view, that it is ultimately on the terrain of political struggle and organization that workers of all nationalities can forge their necessary unity. But this unity is not spontaneously acquired, it must be won against the relations of exploitation developed by imperialism, and at the price of a difficult political and ideological struggle. More than ever, this is the primary objective of communists who, according to Marx’s slogan, “in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries…point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality”; and “in the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”
Confronted with the development of struggles led by immigrant workers in their nascent form and with all their difficulties, “left opportunism” wants to see in immigration the “true” proletariat, the realization of a mythical idea of the proletariat: it extols [exalter] the divisions, and reinforces them to the ultimate benefit of capital. On its own side, “right” opportunism denies the reality of these divisions, these contradictions developed by imperialism in the working class itself, either to leave the immigrants to their fate, or to consider that they pose a simple problem of economic, juridical, and social inequality, only calling for the betterment of the lot of the most “disadvantaged.” As for us communists, we see all the better these contradictions right in front of us, in order to identify their objective causes and limits, which every one of our actions seeks to overcome."
Étienne Balibar, "Lenin, Communists, and Immigration." (1973)
