Mother’s love knows no borders: Why multinational unity is essential

On May 11, which was Mother’s Day this year in the U.S. and several other countries around the world, millions of working-class families woke up missing members of their family. Whether it is mothers missing children or spouses, or children and spouses missing mothers, the emotional impact is devastating.

Within the U.S. alone, this reality extends from refugee families from places like Palestine where genocidal or otherwise violent conditions are ongoing to Black and Brown families who have family members taken by police violence; immigrant families who have been torn apart by ICE and Border Patrol to families struggling with accessing resources like health care to keep a loved one alive.

In addition, there are circumstances such as struggles with addiction or mental health when families are driven apart because of the failure of U.S. society to help them avoid painful or tragic outcomes.

No matter the reason, family — however it’s defined — is important, and the loss of loved ones is a pain that cuts deep across all backgrounds. While we cannot escape pain and death entirely, the resources and technology exist in this world to dramatically cut a huge amount of it.

Here are three specific examples of harm, followed by how it could — and should — have been prevented.

First off is a local case study of migrant families. As covered in a recent article in Workers World, on May 4 and 5 and later May 9, organizers from across Western and Central New York traveled to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Batavia, New York, where several migrant farmworkers are detained.

President Donald Trump and his ilk celebrate horrible events like this while feeding our class the racist lie that migrant workers are somehow an “invasion force” and are “stealing” white workers’ jobs.

Migrants are being placed in what are literally concentration camps. Access to food, water, medical care, sleep, etc. is severely curtailed. Families are being split up. People inside these camps are being tortured and beaten. Whatever state the farmworkers who were detained are in, they are certainly traumatized, and their families are devastated. These families just want a shot at living a normal life away from whatever turmoil has been stirred up by the U.S. ruling class in their original homelands.

One cannot call oneself “pro-family” and support the tearing apart of a Latine family — or any family.

The farmworkers were doing the hard work needed to feed us. Standing and bending in the hot sun, ripping through a field picking crops; it is physically demanding work. These workers are literally essential for life, yet their labor is treated by those in power as disposable.

Food is plentiful yet people are hungry

According to a 2021 report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), agricultural workers globally produced an estimated 9.5 billion metric tons of food in 2021 alone.

Just looking at rice as an example of a stapleod, and doing some quick calculations, shows that one kilogram of rice equals about 2,060 calories, the approximate average amount of daily calories needed to live. One metric ton of rice is about 2,060,000 calories, and 9.5 billion metric tons of rice is 195,700,000,000,000,000 calories. If the average person needs 730,000 calories a year that means there are enough calories for 2,680,821,917 (over 2.6 billion) people. Remember this just uses rice as a simple example, other food stuff like grains, meats, soy, potatoes, etc. all have different amounts of calories with some even higher in the amount of calories per kilogram.

In that same report, and in other reports like it from the World Food Programme of the U.N., experts have calculated that the world’s agricultural workers produce more than enough food globally to feed every single person on Earth — yet hunger prevails. Why? Because there is one group who does not perform labor, whose business is actually the exploitation of those who do: the big bosses, i.e., the capitalist ruling class. They are using the labor and products of working-class folks to hold the entire world hostage via their greedy desire for endless profits.

To distract us from this, the ruling class needs to divide the workers against each other. Instead of helping folks work on any racialized or gender-based prejudices so they can be on good terms with their fellow humans, the capitalists foment bigotry for their own benefit, bringing nothing but pain and stress to the masses.

The exploitation and pain does not end here.

Health care for profit kills

For the next example, I am going to tell the story of a deceased friend of mine. For the privacy of his family I will refer to him as DJ. My friend DJ was a gentle and caring soul who loved anime and would have long chats with me that took up half the day. He was a Black man living with diabetes and working at Panera Bread. He struggled greatly with food insecurity, poverty and with managing his diabetes. I used to have to crowdsource thousands of dollars to help him afford his insulin, because his paycheck wasn’t enough, and because he made a few hundred dollars more than the state upper income limit to qualify for Medicaid.

I remember many times when I had to call out from work or school to drive to the hospital, because he was struggling with a diabetic emergency. Most of those times, he was at work and the Panera bosses refused to allow him to get any of the leftover food – even when it would otherwise go in the trash – so he could maintain his blood sugar, which would periodically skyrocket and crash.

I loved DJ like a brother, and I lost my brother a few years ago to complications related to high blood sugar — an entirely preventable death. DJ’s mother, spouse and siblings were devastated, and no one in his inner circle could believe that he was gone. He, like everyone else who died from failures of the profit-driven medical system, is a casualty of the capitalist ruling class. This is not an abstract statement. The CEOs and other managers of these big medical firms are actual people who make decisions every single day that maim and kill people — tearing apart families and friend groups — all in the name of profits. Yet again, the violence continues.

Racism and transphobia are deadly

For the final example I need to tell the story of another deceased friend/co-worker from back when I used to be a sex worker. Once again, for the privacy of her family I will not use her name and instead will refer to her as C. Back in those days I was living in a row house in Baltimore with a few other trans folks. To pay my rent I worked retail during the day and did various forms of sex work at night. While I only worked the streets for a short time before switching to being a cam model (person who takes monetary tips in exchange for performing sexual acts on webcam), I met a number of people, including C, who helped show me the ropes (so to speak).

The area where C worked was roughly two to three blocks from where I lived and on occasion I would chat with her while waiting for clients. She was a Black trans woman who proudly took her sisters — like me — under her wing. She taught me about the horrible things police often do to trans women — especially trans sex workers — who they arrest. When I told her about how I had been sexually assaulted by a cop while I was homeless and living out of my van about a year before our conversation, she showed me a few tips for how to defend myself if it ever happened again.

The night she died I was working a late retail shift, and right after I arrived at my home, I heard a loud bang which scared me but which I thought was a car’s exhaust backfiring. The Johns Hopkins University police units which patrolled and harassed people in our area were nearby and did not even flinch at the sound. The next morning I found out that C had died. One of her clients murdered her, and allegedly both the JHU security and the Baltimore police were aware of the incident and responded slowly to the scene, because they believed she “deserved to die.”

I threw up on my bed as I read the Facebook post describing what had happened and detailing how that sound was actually the sound of my sister’s murder. While she was estranged from her family, I remember hearing from friends who knew her mother that when her mother heard the news she collapsed on the floor in tears. Even to this day, as I remember and write this, my hands shake and I feel a sharp pain in my chest. I can only begin to imagine the complex depths of pain her mother — and others in her inner circle — must still feel.

Multinational unity is essential

In the title of this article I state that “multinational unity is essential” and for good reason. Each of these examples of pain and sorrow and the millions more that could be added to the list could be severely cut down if all the workers and oppressed — regardless of culture, language, place of origin, age, gender, color of your skin, ability, etc. — united against the tiny percentage of capitalists and their supporters who literally hurt us all for their own benefit. In each of the cases above, the working-class person in question had their labor treated as disposable. In each case, the capitalists or their police defenders directly contributed to the deaths of members of our class.

The working class needs to stop listening to the racist lies which are used to turn white workers against Black and Brown workers. Our class needs to stop believing that some labor is superior to other labor. Our class needs to stop believing that trans and gender non-conforming people are not deserving of dignity.

Real, unfettered love has no boundaries and no borders and socialist revolution is our key for unleashing this love.

Guevara:

1. “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. … We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.”
2. “The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.”