The Fight for Migrant Rights in the U.S.: An Interview with Justin Akers Chacón

[Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg]

By Brendan Stanton

Republished from Red Flag.

Justin Akers Chacón, a socialist based in San Diego, California, campaigns for worker and migrant rights in the US-Mexico border region and is the author of “The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border.” He caught up with Red Flag to discuss immigrant rights in the US under Democratic President Joe Biden. 

Q: After the polarisation under former President Trump, what has shifted in the politics of the border and migration during the Biden era?

A: The short answer is that it’s gotten worse. There were some 400 executive actions taken by the Trump administration that affected immigration, including family separation at the border, the Muslim travel ban, expanding the border wall and ending temporary protected status for many groups. Much of this framework has been institutionalised under Biden. 

This is despite the fact that, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the whole discourse of the Democratic Party was towards dismantling the inhumane and punitive measures of the Trump regime. While Biden wasn’t on the left wing of that discourse, he characterised Trump as harmful to immigrants and refugees and promised a pathway to legalisation for migrants in his first 100 days. This shifted immediately after the Democrats won, and they quickly walked back any discussion.

It’s worth also mentioning that Biden technically ordered a month’s moratorium on deportations early in the administration. But the order was overruled by a Trump-appointed federal judge on the day it was issued. The administration used this as an excuse to abandon the promise completely, but it was quickly pointed out by immigration scholars that there were multiple ways in which the administration could have worked around that ruling to stop deportations. 

Although vocally opposing Title 42 [a Trump-era measure allowing authorities to turn away migrants at the border on public-health grounds], one of his first acts as president was using it to conduct a mass deportation of Haitians from south Texas. Even while the Trump policy of family separation at the border was stopped, the Biden administration announced that it’s going to begin the process of reauthorising family detention.

The Democrats’ real orientation around border politics was signalled by Kamala Harris when she was sent to Guatemala in 2021 to tell Central Americans, “Do not come to the United States”. This signalled the institutionalisation of Tump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which defunded the legal side of the asylum process.

This, of course, didn’t stop people from migrating. Just like under Trump, it created conditions where large populations are forced to live in overcrowded encampments, on the street and in other uninhabitable areas on the Mexican side of the borderlands. 

The Democrats played an equal or even greater role in building the immigration enforcement apparatus than the Republicans. They have no left or progressive or reformist orientation towards immigration, and they face pressure from the right when the Republican Party redeploys all the racist tropes like “our border is under attack”, or “we’re being invaded” during each election cycle. So they consistently diverge their rhetoric during elections, and after elections they converge with Republicans again. 

That’s how we’re in a situation where far more people were deported in Biden’s first year than under the previous four years of Trump.

Has there been any opposition from the likes of Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or other people who made a name for themselves calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security division in charge of deportations?

There was this interesting period in 2019, when a lot of these people on the left of the party were going to detention centres and giving speeches. Ocasio-Cortez gave a very moving account of the horrors of a detention centre, and said we have to close the “concentration camps”.

But as soon as the Democrats won, it all evaporated. She and other “left” Democrats stopped calling these horrible places “camps” and started promoting the idea that with Democrats in office, there’s going to be reform. That reform never happened, but there has still been a shift in terms of softening rhetoric or not talking about it at all. Since the abandonment of immigration reform after the election, there has been no movement within the Democratic party to change the status quo. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in campaign mode leading up to 2024, the Biden administration makes similar promises as before. But for now, it’s shifted far to the right, taking the whole party tent and the stakes to the right with it. 

A couple of months ago, a story broke about undocumented children working in quite dangerous conditions for major US corporations. Have there been any significant changes around labour protection in the wake of that scandal?

It actually created an internal conflict within the Biden administration. Some officials who were monitoring the child refugee crisis were calling the administration’s attention to how many of these children were being absorbed into the workforce as early as a year and a half ago. People higher up, like Susan Rice, one of the chief advisers of Biden, knew this was happening. They basically quashed it, said it was not a priority, and so it took outside reporters to break the story.

It’s important to understand what immigration enforcement is designed to do and what it’s not designed to do. It’s not designed to stop people from migrating or to prevent people from falling into these conditions. It creates pathways for this to happen by essentially creating systems of regulation for a growing segment of the workforce in this country. 

Being exposed for their awareness that child labour is flourishing once again in the United States is a public relations problem for the Biden administration, but it hasn’t provoked a political crisis. It’s also because the Republicans and the right don’t have a problem with this issue—they’re not going to try to make it an issue. 

Even within organised labour, it’s not clear that there’s any effort to address the issue of child labour. Like so many other things, it’s either under-reported or swept under the rug really quickly. It’s a reflection of how little opposition there is inside the US to the politics of immigration enforcement.

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How do you think socialists and leftists should understand the class dynamics of border politics?

We can walk through that child refugee scenario from beginning to end and explain how this is a political function of capitalist policy. 

Between 2011 and 2016, almost 200,000 unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, came to the United States. Two major factors played a key role in this. One is the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement first implemented in 2006. By 2010, there were radical economic changes like the opening up of these economies to unrestricted foreign capital investment and the privatisation of much of the economy. 

There was a systematic displacement of people who could no longer afford to work the land, or whose jobs in manufacturing were displaced by foreign capital. This foreign capital is invested in extreme forms of labour production associated with maquiladoras [US-owned factories], basically laboratories for increasing productivity, repressing wages and keeping unions out. 

This destroys many of the social aspects of the economy, and by 2011 we saw the first significant effects of these policies displacing people. 

Earlier, in 2007, the US initiated a region-wide security strategy called the Mérida Initiative, through which it gave money and political support to Mexican and Central American governments to expand the border enforcement apparatus of the United States further south. The US trains police and militaries in these countries to engage in the Drug War and also control migration, 

Alongside the other realities of the War on Drugs, which contributed to the growth of drug cartels, this has destabilised the region. The illegal drug industry is now one of the major industries of the Western hemisphere, and these cartels have grown in rhythm and tempo with the criminalisation of drugs and the growth of enforcement mechanisms. Instead of the cartels being contained and defeated in Mexico through this regional militarisation, they’ve been pushed further into Central America. 

In 2009, the US greenlit the overthrow of the left-of-centre president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. This set up the rule of the far right for the next several years, including Juan Orlando Hernández, a strong US ally who was also on the payroll of the cartels. While he was president, a lot of the funding and technology he received from the US for the drug war went towards repressing indigenous populations and social movements. Lots of people were displaced, and hundreds of labour organisers, socialists, LGBTQ people, indigenous organisers and other leftists were killed. 

So all that’s happening down there while we have the building up of the border enforcement apparatus, and the children who ultimately make it through to the United States end up in the workforce to survive. How do we understand the end of that scenario without understanding how every sort of step of this process is predicated on strengthening the ability of capital to exploit? 

The overthrow of a left-of-centre president in 2009 helped embolden a far-right government to destroy the left, attack all these vulnerable groups and displace countless people. When thousands of these children and teenagers start appearing in meat production facilities and construction jobs in the US, it’s a manifestation of US regional policies. It’s not necessarily a conscious act that someone masterminded, but it’s the outcome of decisions that advocate for the interest of capital. 

This creates larger and larger pools of exploitable workers, on both sides of the border, who are hard to organise, including workers who are regulated by the state. That impacts wage thresholds and impacts the whole labour economy. And when immigrant workers rise up, as they did in 2006, that leads to an increase in the repression of the state. 

In light of these border dynamics, in what direction do you think the socialist movement and the labour movement should go?

There has to be a rejection of criminalisation and border enforcement. That has to be a demand for all workers. In 1986 it actually was, when unions backed an amnesty for undocumented workers. This led to a surge in unionisation among newly legalised workers, who were much more class conscious than the rest of the population. Legalisation was a huge boost for the union movement at a time when it was otherwise declining. It also means supporting workers as they organise on the other side of the border.

I’m going to try to paraphrase Marx. He said something like, you don’t know what the problem is until a solution presents itself. In the context of the North American class struggle, capital has invested so much by shifting production south of the border and dividing production into cross-border supply chains. Therefore, the working classes in the US and Mexico have become fused together in ways that are much more apparent. More of these workers, especially workers in Mexico, recognise that class struggle is by necessity transnational, and there have been flashes of this potential and some sustained processes of a transnational labour response. 

There are some maquiladoras in Tamaulipas [a north-eastern state bordering Texas] making parts for General Motors that are going to be used for assembly in Tennessee or in Detroit, and there are also GM plants making whole cars in Mexico. 

The workers in these factories in Mexico have to be very savvy organisers, because in Mexico you don’t just organise against the employers, you organise against the fake unions that are muscle for the employers. You often have to organise directly against local and state governments and sometimes the federal government. 

In 2019, these workers in Matamoros [across the border from Brownsville, Texas], in extreme conditions, coordinated a series of wildcat strikes all at once. Rank-and-file women and men workers organising these networks got over 35,000 workers and shut down 48 factories over a month and a half. All of them won a 20 percent pay increase and a significant rise in their annual bonuses. A big part of why they won is because shutting down their factories disrupted parts supplies all across the US and Mexico, costing bosses an estimated US$50 million per day. 

That same year, United Auto Workers union members went on strike at GM, shutting down almost all production in the US and Canada, but not in Mexico. So GM decided to shift more production to Mexico to avoid further disruption and undercut these workers. In this context, workers trying to organise a union at the largest GM plant in Mexico, in Silao, Guanajuato, said that they supported the strike and the demands of the United Auto Workers in the US. They asked for the UAW to support them and bring them into the union or at least help them build an independent union so they could strike, start the process of shutting down Mexican auto production and completely shut down General Motors production. 

Unfortunately, the UAW ignored them and accepted a largely concessionary contract. But in the fallout was some recognition that they blew this opportunity. How could they not support the organisation of auto workers in Mexico, when GM is actively using these disorganised workers to undermine them? A couple of years later, the UAW began to support these Mexican workers in their unionisation efforts—they won and even expanded to other non-GM auto plants. This didn’t create equal wages. but it was a recognition by the UAW that they can’t afford not to support Mexican workers organising. 

In this process, more workers, especially militants fighting to build fledgling unions, recognise that they have to build international solidarity and engage in class struggle across the border. They recognise they’re not fighting just the employer but all of these other forces. It’s interesting to see how these workers are recognising that, as capital is operating at a North American scale, they too have to organise against it at a North American scale and not let the border divide them.

Kamala Harris and the New Imperialism

By Daniel Melo

In her recent trip to Guatemala, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke of seeking to end corruption, building trust in the region, and tackling the “root” causes of migration. But she also had a dire warning for would-be migrants—do not come to the US, you will be turned back. Never mind the fact that her remark flies in the face of international law protecting the right to seek asylum. This hard-line stance seems to be at odds with the present administration’s supposed compassionate view of migrants. In reality, it is the latest rendition of the long-standing hypocrisy within capitalism and its displacement of people, a tragically necessary result of US imperialism in Latin America.

US capitalist imperialism is central to the very conditions present in Central America today. In several texts on the issues of empire and migration, professor Greg Grandin details the US’s expansive exploitation, both in military and economic terms, throughout Latin America. This includes everything from direct military intervention, to strong-arming Latinx nations into destructive neo-liberal economic policies, to transplanting the very gangs that now hold criminal empires. This mode of imperialism actually supersedes the prior eras of colonialism. As Grandin argues in Empire’s Workshop, it replaced the old colonialism, as the latter could no longer handle the nationalistic tendencies of former colonies nor the nativist uproar they caused at home. Capitalism needed a new way of exploiting territory beyond itself, without the costly eventual repercussions of direct colonizing. Latin America became a “workshop” for the budding US empire, where it could flex both its military and economic might, a place for developing and honing the empire's machinery. Empire, says Grandin, became synonymous with the very idea of America. We are witnessing over a century’s worth of empire dire consequences--hundreds of thousands displaced, crumbling governments, and the rise of neo-facisim.

Of course, Harris has the benefit of time in masking the US’s own culpability in the displacement of people in Latin America. Time and short memory. Her comments received little contextualization in the greater arc of US relations with the Latinx world, which aids in veiling the empire’s direct role in lighting said world on fire. Recent comments by DHS secretary Majorkas echo this ignorance—“Poverty, high levels of violence, and corruption in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries have propelled migration to our southwest border for years.  The adverse conditions have continued to deteriorate.  Two damaging hurricanes that hit Honduras and swept through the region made the living conditions there even worse, causing more children and families to flee.” Not only are these remarks devoid of any historical materialist context noted above, but significantly, drive home the reality that the US has fully absolved itself of any responsibility, moral or otherwise, from the human consequences of empire.

Thus, Harris' warning to the Guatemalan people is a continuation of the nature of the new imperialism and the hypocrisy at its heart—to do as it wishes without having to deal with the direct consequences. The contradiction is even clearer when paired with her other recent remarks about the border. When NBC’s Lester Holt questioned her choice not to visit the US-Mexico border as part of her trip, she responded that “my focus is dealing with the root causes of migration. There may be some who think that that is not important, but it is my firm belief that if we care about what’s happening at the border, we better care about the root causes and address them.” What she actually means by “caring” and “addressing”  is ensuring that the “problem” of thousands of displaced people simply be relocated to somewhere away from the US border. Of late, papering over the direct consequences of a century of US foreign policy in Latin America comes in two flavors--paying others to keep the problem at bay (“monetary aid”) or direct applications of force at the border (“you will be turned back”). In other words, the ravages of capitalist imperialism are best dealt with by ensuring that they never make their way to the US in the first place.

However, hostility toward the growing desperate multitudes will do little to deter people who are fleeing for their lives. As the Italian delegates at the Socialist Congress of 1907 long ago noted—“One cannot fight migrants, only the abuses which arise from emigration…we know that the whip of hunger that cracks behind migrants is stronger than any law made by governments.”  This administration, like the one before it (and so on for 100 years), assumes that brutality is a functional means of abating the ravages of capitalism. And while oppression may momentarily suppress the movement of people, it cannot fill stomachs, reverse climate change, or repair the decades of damage done by imperialism. As Grandin notes in The End of the Myth, the horrific and historic cycle of violence at the border is a product of the impossible task of policing the insurmountable gap between massive wealth accumulation and desperate poverty. Keeping people where they are will increasingly require escalations of violence and force to hold-off the human consequences of capitalist imperialism.

In this respect, Harris and the administration’s aim at tackling the “root causes” of migration will be forever out of their reach. To do so, they would first have to acknowledge the pivotal role that the US had and continues to have in creating such conditions, and in turn, the unsustainable nature of capitalism itself. This is ultimately no more likely than them suddenly conceding power to the workers of the world. Yet, Grandin also unveils a sliver of light in the darkness of imperialism--the lesson taught by the history of US involvement in Latin America is “[d]emocracy, social and economic justice, and political liberalization have never been achieved through an embrace of empire but rather through resistance to its command.”

Daniel Melo is a public sector immigration lawyer in the American Southeast who primarily works with refugees and the son of a migrant himself. His book, Borderlines, is due out from Zer0 Books in August 2021.

The Hidden Violence of Immigration Bureaucracy

By Daniel Melo

There are obvious forms of violence in the US migration system--the longstanding brutality of Border Patrol; migrant deaths in the desert; the conditions in detention centers. These are all recognizable facets of enforcing borders and immigration restrictions. But there is a subtler, less understood violence that is pervasive in its bureaucracy, one that impacts the many thousands of people who are funneled through it.

The late anthropologist/anarchist scholar David Graeber took a compelling look into the nature of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules. This went beyond our usual disdain towards the absurdity of bureaucracy to peer inside its heart. There, he found violence. In a series of essays, Graeber lays out how deeply bureaucratized modern life has become, from one’s ability to get a bank transaction performed overseas to obtaining the ability to handle an ill loved one’s affairs, to immigration, to opening a barbershop. For him, this “bureaucratization” of daily life is “the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations . . .” which “can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.” Throughout, Graeber hones key point—no matter how innocuous or well-intentioned both regulations and regulators are, they possess significance and weight precisely because they are backed by the real physical force of the state.

Graeber goes on to argue that bureaucracy and its attendant violence have “become so omnipresent that we no longer realize we’re being threatened . . . .” This violence is so thoroughly present that it’s boring; it hardly ever enters our consciousness. He also points out that the creation and sustenance of systemic violence require very little work. In fact, incredible violence can be done to people with almost no affirmative action at all, such as the horrors of solitary confinement.

The violence Graeber identifies is present in our immigration system--preventing human movement, confining people to cages, or throwing them off “our” land. These all require force or the threat of it. The mere existence US immigration law perpetuates violence. Consider the simple example of the harm done to separated families because of visa quotas where the wait can range from years, up to decades. But statutory schemes aside, there is enough violence to go around in the pure administration of the law, independent of its unjust nature. To stretch Graeber’s analysis further--immigration bureaucracy possesses violence beyond the direct application of force on migrant bodies to more subtle, hidden forms of violence.

By way of example, consider the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the least outwardly hostile of the immigration agencies that exist under the Department of Homeland Security. USCIS is the agency charged with “adjudicating requests for immigration benefits.” In practice, this means that it reviews the common kinds of applications and processes for migrants transitioning from one form of immigration status to another, e.g., spousal green card applications, DACA applications, and citizenship, to name a few. Despite this rather innocuous, paper-pushing semblance, USCIS has real power over a migrant’s future. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of Border Patrol in its own right, a gatekeeper to forms of lawful status for many migrants both within and without the US. And in its own way, is just as violent as the officers with guns at the border.

The 18-24 months it takes to process a refugee resettlement case leaves already displaced people in life-threatening precarity. Bureaucratic mix-ups and slowness result in prolonged family separations and government detainment of children at the border. Even delays in the ability to get a work permit present a migrant with the choice of breaking the law and working without authorization or being unable to sustain herself. The same is true of denials. USCIS, under the auspices of the Attorney General, has broad discretion to deny applications, even those that otherwise meet the letter of the law. In many instances where migrants, especially the undocumented, are unable to adjust their status, a denial opens them up to the violence of removal from the country. This is of course separate and apart from how delays and denials perpetuate the precarious nature and violence of living somewhere without status. It recently reached an absurd height when USCIS began rejecting applications (including those for asylum) if every box on the application was not filled in with “N/A,” even when a question was clearly inapplicable or irrelevant to the benefit sought (e.g., a 2-year-old won’t have any children).

To argue that these are not forms of violence is precisely how the system gets away with it—it paints over the real harm inflicted by the system as purely administrative and lacking in either the significance or intensity to amount to real violence. To the contrary, much like solitary confinement or the neglect of a child, these are expressions of violence, just in their least obvious form. They impart real harm to real people and do so on a largely arbitrary basis. To Graeber’s point about the bureaucratization of life, this violence not only escapes our view but the view of almost everyone who interacts with the immigration system. It is both mundane and pervasive thus has lost significance, only jarring us every now and again when we see children in cages or a father and daughter face down in the Rio Grande having drowned in an attempt to cross.

Perhaps what is most troubling about this violence is that it is completely displaced from any one person or even one entity. There is no one to hold directly responsible for it, and in this way, all escape responsibility. Its casualness is both its alibi and its greatest weapon—-to be able to ignore the harm it wreaks on others, its lawful ability to do nothing. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book on violence—the holocausts that stem from capitalism all seem “just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.’” It is precisely because these systems appear as both “objective” institutions that produce similarly “objective” results that gives them moral and political ground to justify themselves, often as anything but violent.

Despite its perniciousness, there might be hope yet for bureaucracy. Or better said, for the creation of institutions that are accountable for how they affect people’s lives. Even Graeber, an anarchist, readily acknowledges that certain kinds of bureaucracies have done a great deal of good in the world—“European social welfare state, with its free education and universal health care, can just be considered . . . one of the greatest achievements of human civilization.” In addition to his scathing analysis, Graeber also offers up a profound critique of what is “realistic”. Drawing on Marx, Graeber notes that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” If bureaucracy, particularly the one that lays claim over migrant bodies, is a human construct, it’s time to do it differently.

India and China: Rivals or Potential Partners in Liberation?

By Ajit Singh

India and China have agreed to end a two-month long military standoff taking place in the the Doklam border region, following the withdrawal of Indian personnel and equipment from territory claimed by China. While India and China have a longstanding history of border conflicts, current tensions take place in the context of India's growing ties with the United States, and the U.S. military "pivot" to China.

Subordinate alliance with US imperialism

Following India's neoliberal economic reforms, beginning in 1991, India-U.S. relations have steadily developed closer. In recent years, following the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modia of the far-right, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), U.S. foreign direct investment in India has shot up 500 percent, coinciding with growing military collaboration. Since 2008, cumulative defense trade has increased from US$1 billion to US$15 billion as India has become world's largest importer of major arms . The U.S. and India have also designated each other "Major Defence Partners" and signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), which allows the U.S. to use India's military bases for repair and replenishment of supplies.

Stronger economic and military ties have resulted in India increasingly aligning itself with US imperialism. Most significant is India's support for the U.S. strategy of encirclement and aggression against China, which seeks to maintain U.S. unipolar, global hegemony. This has included India's hosting of the imperialist-supported Dalai Lama, siding with the U.S. position on the South China Sea issue, supporting US aggression against North Korea, and opposing China's Belt and Road Initiative. During the recent Doklam border conflict, ties between the U.S. and India strengthened as they established a new, bilateral security dialogue which will include their respective defence secretaries and ministers. The U.S. has already established such dialogues with its strategic military allies in the Asia-Pacific region - Japan and Australia.

The main concern of the India-U.S. alliance is targeting China. However, while this partnership deepens, India's capitalist development at home produces destitution for the majority. Neoliberalism and alignment with U.S. imperialism have exclusively benefited India's ruling class, now holding approximately 58 percent of the country's total wealth, and resulted in increasing inequality and impoverishment for working and oppressed peoples. Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik has demonstrated that per capita food consumption in India is decreasing and absolute poverty is rising. This has resulted in 35 percent of rural adults being undernourished, and 42 percent of children being underweight. It is clear that India's people require a new way forward, as the current capitalist, U.S.-friendly path does not meet their needs.

China and a different path for development

In 2004, socialist revolutionary Fidel Castro declared that "China has become objectively the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries." Although often portrayed as a "rival" by India's ruling class elites and corporate media, India's working and oppressed peoples do not benefit from the anti-China orientation. Rather, learning from China's experiences and developing mutually beneficial relations can support their struggle forward.

Having both been oppressed by the West for centuries, India and China have faced similar challenges of pursuing national development and addressing the needs of immense populations in the hostile environment of world capitalism and imperialism. However, they have pursued distinctly different paths: capitalism and socialism, respectively. By comparing how the two countries have responded to these challenges, insight can be gained about how the Indian people can advance their interests.

Poverty and exploitation

In India, capitalist development has left the vast majority in a severe state of deprivation. India is home to the world's largest poverty-stricken population and the figures are staggering: approximately 270 million Indians, or 21.2 percent, live on less than US$1.90 per day, and 732 million, or 58 percent, live on less than $3.10 USD per day. Private ownership of land, corporate predation, and dispossession have led to over 300, 000 farmer suicides since 1995. Further, the unemployment rate grew from 6.8 percent in 2001 to 9.6 percent in 2011 and permanent jobs are giving way to temporary and casual work . This has adversely affected workers' wages and social security, leading to India's central trade unions calling an indefinite general strike this year.

Conversely, in China living conditions are consistently improving. In the past four decades alone, China has lifted over 800 million people out of poverty , more than the rest of the world combined, as the Communist Party works to eradicate poverty by 2020. Only 1.9 percent of China's population lives below the international poverty line, compared to over one-fifth of India's population. Chinese wage growth is soaring, with hourly manufacturing wages rising 12 percent per year since 2001 . Across China's labour force as a whole hourly incomes now exceed every major Latin American state except for Chile, and are approximately 70% of levels in weaker eurozone countries. Additionally, income inequality, which is rising globally, has been steadily decreasing in China since 2010 . A 2013 Pew Research Centre survey supports these findings, r e p o r t ing t h a t 85% of China's population were satisfied with the direction of their economy, and 82% believed their children would be better off than them, both figures being the highest in the world.

Oppression and discrimination

Indian society is branded by the oppressive caste system of social hierarchy and Hindu supremacist ideology. Oppressed castes, Indigenous Adivasi peoples, and religious and national minorities face systemic discrimination and violence. The current BJP-led government, promotes violent racism and hatred , leading to increasing attacks on oppressed peoples.

In contrast, China explicitly stresses the importance of multinational unity and of combating chauvinism, particularly of the Han majority. China systemically supports the development of national minorities. For example, urban, eastern provinces send hundreds of thousands of youth volunteers and spend 3-5% of their total income supporting western provinces which are more densely populated by national minorities.

Although both countries have far to go, China is also significantly ahead of India in the struggle against patriarchy. China's adult women's literacy rate is 94.5 percent, compared with India's rate of 63 percent. China's women to men, labour force participation ratio , at 0.81, more than doubles India's, at 0.34. Similarly, Chinese women's political participation , at 24.2 percent, is more than twice India's, which is at 11.8 percent.

National development and liberation from imperialism

While India recently observed its 70th anniversary of independence from British rule, the country remains subordinated to imperialism and severely underdeveloped. India has the worst access to safe-drinking water in the world, and approximately 240 million people do not have access to electricity. One in six urban Indians lives in slums and from 2010-2014, an average of 7 structures collapsed per day killing 13,178 people.

In comparison, China has experienced unprecedented economic development and is now the second most powerful economy in the world. Since 1978, China has pursued a policy of reform and opening up of its economy, contrasting sharply with Indian neoliberalism. China's market reforms are firmly controlled by the socialist state and implemented to overcome the underdevelopment historically imposed on China by Western imperialism.

China is building a modern, moderately prosperous society, spending more on infrastructure than the US and Europe combined. One hundred percent of the population has access to electricity and China spends hundreds of billions of dollars on water clean-up projects . Further, China is committed to environmental sustainability and fighting the climate crisis, leading the world in renewable energy production and employment , powering regions on 100 percent renewable energy for one-week trial periods, and undertaking one of the most ambitious conservation projects in the world to halt environmental degradation.

Internationally, China works in cooperation with oppressed nations throughout the Global South, providing beneficial alternatives to imperialism. China offers investment, builds infrastructure, forgives debt, and abides by the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. Close relations with China have benefited revolutionary states and oppressed nations around the world, including Cuba , Venezuela , Syria , and North Korea . A key example of China's global impact is the Belt and Road initiative , which has been called "the largest single infrastructure program in human history", currently involving 68 countries and 1700 development projects.

China is the primary force building a multipolar, more democratic international order, ending 500 years of Western imperial dominance. As such, China's rise supports the liberation of all peoples oppressed by imperialism.

Liberation lies to the East

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of Chinese socialism's achievements relative to India's capitalist path in pursuing development and improving living standards. India's people would benefit substantially from ending hostilities with China, learning from Chinese socialism, and developing a mutually beneficial relationship. Accounting for over one-third of the world's population, India and China have the potential to form "the most significant bilateral relationship of the 21st century," as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stated in 2012.

Conflict with China offers nothing to India's workers, peasants, and oppressed peoples. Only by breaking with US imperialism and the domestic capitalist ruling class, will India's people begin their journey from formal independence toward liberation.

A condensed version of this article was originally published by teleSUR (August 31, 2017)

Ajit Singh is a Marxist, anti-imperialist writer and activist. He received his Juris Doctor in Law from the University of Western Ontario in 2014. Follow him on Twitter