Eternal migrant worker

When Karl Marx wrote that “proletarians have no fatherland,” he did not proclaim loud slogans, but simply stated a fact that was quite obvious at that time.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution and bourgeois reforms, millions of people left their homes and went to foreign lands in search of work. Note that “foreign lands” meant not only other countries, but also other provinces of “their” state, the differences between which in some places remain quite significant to this day.

Emigrant workers, or guest workers, formed a significant part of the working class in all rapidly developing industrial and agricultural regions. The Irish who fled the famine became part of the English proletariat. And today you can see the influence of the Irish language in the slang of the working-class neighborhoods of the east of Britain. About a third of the Viennese workers were Czechs, which greatly irritated the young Adolf Hitler. In Budapest, the skilled workers were Germans, while Slovaks and Hungarians were employed in less complex jobs. The Norwegians were a true “guest worker” nation - two-thirds of the population growth of this country emigrated in search of a better life. It seems that in terms of labor migration, the world of the 19th century was more global than our current reality. So, every year thousands of Italians, called “migratory swallows,” went to Argentina to work in the seasonal harvest. The price of third-class steamship tickets made such trips quite profitable. Western Ukrainian peasants traveled en masse to Canada, Australia and Brazil, dreaming of a mythical “peasant kingdom” in the South American jungle.

Not speaking local languages, constantly migrating in search of work, indifferent to the nationalist rhetoric of the local bourgeoisie, these were truly people without a fatherland. It is not for nothing that the language of class hatred of the bourgeoisie of that time constantly combines the rejection of the “dirty Morlocks” from the workers’ basements and hostility towards strangers. Socialist and anarchist propaganda was viewed as “imported from outside” and “alien to national traditions.” And the favorite way to fight against labor activists in the USA, Argentina and other countries was to deport them as unwanted aliens.

In turn, for the Social Democrats, the slogan of international workers' solidarity was a necessary precondition for successful political activity. In most cases, general working and living conditions (in working-class areas and towns) contributed to the formation of a unified class consciousness. In addition, groups of workers of different nationalities occupied separate niches in the labor market. People from Northern England tended to work in the mines, Norwegians and Pacific Islanders crewed ships, Jews worked in the textile industry, the Irish worked in heavy labor, and so on. Problems arose when workers of different religions, nationalities, and races had to compete for the same jobs. In Northern Ireland, South Africa and the USA, this led to national, religious and racial conflicts between the workers themselves.


But what was the situation in Russia? I will upset our fighters against those who have come in large numbers. And under the Tsar-Father, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers worked in Russia, coming both from the national outskirts of the empire and from abroad. In 1889, the government, interested in the development of oil fields in Baku, allowed visa-free entry into Russia for Iranian citizens. Thousands of Persian workers flocked to Russian Azerbaijan. “This poor man, having crossed the border, ... goes to the goal of his dreams (to earn money), hungry, ragged, earning only his daily bread along the way,” they wrote about them at that time. In addition to emigrants from Iran, Armenians, Germans, Russians, Poles, and Jews worked in the Baku oil fields. In 1915-1917, more than 150 thousand Chinese workers were brought to Russia to replace Russian workers who had gone to the front. The working class of St. Petersburg-Petrograd was also multinational. The Vyborg side was inhabited by immigrants from Finland. Back in the early 1920s, few of the Finnish Railway workers spoke Russian. In addition to Finns, Germans, Latvians, and Poles worked in the city's factories. For example, people from Latgale, the eastern region of Latvia, specialized in road work: paving streets, building railways.

As in other countries, in Russia, some migrant workers came only to earn money, others stayed in a new place, started families and new friends. Brutally exploited, guest workers of the early 20th century did not suffer from a lack of morale. It was not for nothing that the Black Hundred press wrote about “foreigners” leading true Russian people astray. Well, the Latvian and Chinese regiments during the Civil War became a terrible legend for lovers of crispy French bread and “The Russia we lost.”

After World War I and the Great Depression, labor migration declined sharply—but it never completely disappeared. Thus, during the unsuccessful revolution of 1968 in France, Spanish emigrant workers who worked at the Citroen and Renault automobile factories played a significant role. And in the left and communist movement in Germany, people from Turkey and Kurdistan are active.

Today, when the working class of Russia is replenished with immigrants from the countries of Central Asia, the Far East, the Caucasus and other regions, our duty is to welcome new comrades. It is they, and not the Moscow “bobos” (“bourgeois bohemians” - a term introduced by the American journalist David Brooks to describe the layer we call the “creative class”), who are the future of the left and communist movement in Russia. We face the same tasks as the social democratic activists of the early 20th century - to integrate new class brothers into our lives, educate them and organize them. The strike of Don-Stroy workers in 2005 and the recent strike of cleaners in the Nevsky district of Leningrad show that we can achieve success on this path. Before us is a huge virgin land, from which iron cohorts of class war fighters can rise. So let's sow it, forcing the bourgeoisie to reap the grapes of wrath.