In stating that “workers have no country” Marx suggests that workers have more in common as a class than they do as citizens of a nation. For example, an industrial worker in England and a shipping worker in India are both exploited for their labor by their employer, underpaid, and overworked. This statement also provides some insight into modern working conditions. An Amazon worker in the US and a factory worker in China’s lives are in many ways more similar than they are dissimilar. The structures and surveillance of their workplaces or their ability to negotiate against their bosses may even be similar. Conversely, the worker has little in common with his boss or other members of the middle class. Their work is different, their concerns are different, their habits of socialization are different, and the ruling institutions of their lives are different.

I agree with Marx vehemently. I would further state that while national lines sometimes dictate differences in the rights and protections of workers, we are often exploited by the same companies as those in other countries. On August 10th, Nabisco workers in Oregon walked out. They were joined by Nabisco workers in factories across the country in a strike responding to underpayment, overwork, and deteriorating working conditions. This strike ended with workers achieving raises in pay and additional retirement programs. Notably, Nabisco exploits workers on a global scale; their parent company Mondolez won a supreme court case regarding their use of child slaves in cocoa production in Africa earlier this year; clearing Mondelez’s record because the court deemed testimony of slavery insufficient. While US law prevents American workers from being exploited on the same scale, the fact remains that in all production the profits of the owning class are determined by how efficiently it can exploit its workforce.  

We can connect this to Marx’s earlier statements about imperialization and the constant pursuit of markets by the owning class. The history of colonialization gave rise to this change and dictated how labor relations would develop across the world. Marx expresses this on page 2* as he explains that the colonial era “the discovery of America, [and] the rounding of the Cape” gave birth to the modern bourgeoisie. Further, he states that the domination of the owning class must be global as “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” (3) This is true both because the Bourgeoise produce so much that they need new markets for their products and because of their need for more materials and more labor. In the modern age, structures that once supported colonialism outright continue to allow companies to find new labor markets to exploit for even lower wages. 

Just as capitalism is an international project benefitting one political force, the owning class, opposition to the power of the bourgeoise must also be an internationalist project. Workers have the most to gain through international class solidarity. Opposition to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated many barriers to trade may be an example of this. American Labor Unions like the AFL-CIO opposed NAFTA with nationalist logic, stating that it would lead American companies to move production to Mexico. This nationist opposition to globalization actually obscures the greater reality of power and the gains of the owning class through the agreement. It was not Mexican workers who benefitted from NAFTA, but American corporations which were able to expand their markets and find cheaper labor to exploit. This reduces the negotiating power of all workers, but American workers in the factories they maintained in the US were particularly affected by this loss in negotiating power and renewed instability in employment. An internationalist opposition to NAFTA makes more sense- it points out that these corporations make money at our collective expense. Further, instead of emphasizing the national or ethnic differences between workers which corporations have long exploited to divide the working class. International solidarity instead transforms this relationship as it brings us all together as a single and more powerful force against industry. 

*page numbers refer to hand out for class excerpting The Communist Manifesto