Socialism is the Best Medicine

Socialism is the Best Medicine

Open all Borders!

March 10, 2007

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National borders prevent people from working together to solve their common problems. Why is humanity divided in this way?

The capitalist class need national borders to demarcate specific regions of the planet they control and to divide the working class.

Because capitalists can never have enough profit, they continually push to expand their control into other nations. This inevitably leads to war, and the victors redraw the borders to consolidate their conquests.

Borders permit employers to move production to lower-waged countries. These same borders prevent workers from migrating to higher-waged countries and from uniting to improve life on both sides of the border. In all nations, forcing native-born and foreign-born workers to compete makes it easier to exploit both groups. The result is rising inequality within nations and between them.

National divisions are maintained by racism, the myth that the people on one side of a border are fundamentally different from those on the other side. This makes no sense when you consider how often borders change. As Mexican-Americans point out, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Any world map over ten years old is already out of date.

The division of the world into nations conflicts with an international economy where parts are produced in one nation and assembled in another, where the finished product may be sold in a third nation, serviced by workers in a fourth nation, and dumped as garbage in a fifth nation.

While goods and services cross borders with minimal restrictions, the workers who create these goods and services are denied the same right. 

Capitalists and their supporters go berserk at the thought of abolishing national boundaries. Their profit-driven system would collapse if they could no longer pit one group of workers against another. Instead of admitting this unpalatable truth, they warn that a tidal wave of impoverished people would flood America and drag everyone down. This is absurd.

Most people do not want to leave their homes and families; they migrate to survive. Abolishing national borders would enable us to raise global living standards, because goods and services developed anywhere could be made available to everyone, everywhere, and because the vast resources that are currently devoted to policing borders and waging wars could be used instead to meet human needs.

Competing nations can never solve international problems like war, environmental pollution, and global warming. In a world without borders, people could solve these problems.

The benefits of a borderless world will be so great that our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed ourselves to be divided for so long.

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