By Lionel Bopage –

To working people everywhere, on why solidarity across borders has stopped being a sentiment and become a practical necessity.

Look at the ordinary things around you. The clothes on your back, the cup beside you, the wires in the wall, the screen in your hand. Hardly any of it was made where you are sitting, and none of it was made by one pair of hands. A cotton grower in Gujarat, a machinist in Dhaka, a docker in Rotterdam, a miner in Katanga, a driver finishing a night shift in São Paulo: between them they assembled many of the things you use on an ordinary morning. These people have never met. They do not know one another’s names. And each of them, in a different language, is doing the same arithmetic about the rent.

The world is already joined together through work. It is separated only by its politics. Closing that gap is the great unfinished business of our time. How to close it is what this article is about.

The onslaught has not paused

Capital does not rest, because it cannot. A system that must grow or sicken will always look for somewhere new to grow into, and over the past four decades it has found plenty of places. Water, electricity, railways, clinics, schools, pensions, housing, seed stock, the care of children and of the very old: things once held in common or by the public have been priced, packaged, and sold. Every enclosure arrived with the same promise of efficiency. The results have been familiar enough. Prices set far away by people who will never use the service. Provision thinned to the margin that satisfies a shareholder. Risk pushed quietly down onto the household, where it arrives as a sleepless night.

Governments that once answered to voters now answer first to creditors. A bond market can discipline a finance minister, even a president, faster than an election can. This is not a conspiracy of wicked individuals. It is the ordinary working of a system doing exactly what it was built to do.

The same story, told in many languages

In the Middle East, war and occupation have become like the weather: a daily occurrence. Cities are built, shelled, and built again. Families are scattered across borders and across generations. In the quieter states, migrant labourers from South Asia and East Africa raise glittering towers under contracts they are not free to leave. The region’s wealth is counted in barrels and its poverty in funerals, and the same working people carry both.

In Eastern Europe, a generation was promised prosperity and handed shock therapy. Public industry was sold at a fraction of its worth to men who became billionaires inside a decade. The young left westward in their millions to clean, to nurse, to build, sending money back to towns emptying behind them. Now war has returned to the same soil, and it is again the sons of the poorest districts who are sent into the trenches on both sides of the line.

In Latin America, the cycle is well known: debt, adjustment, austerity, and dependence on whichever commodity the world happens to want this decade. Governments that lean too far toward the poor are removed by generals or, more fashionably now, by lawyers. Yet the same continent has produced the most stubborn and inventive popular movements on earth, in the shanty towns, the landless camps and the union halls.

In Africa, a continent of extraordinary wealth, people are kept poor by arrangement. Cobalt, lithium, gold, oil, and timber flow outward, and so does the money: a number of governments now spend more each year servicing external debt than on the health of their own people. A young and gifted population is offered informal work, a visa queue, or a boat.

Asia has become the workshop of the world. Hundreds of millions have climbed out of destitution. That is no small thing, and it should never be spoken of as one. But the climb has been paid for in sixteen-hour days, dormitory factories, chemical burns, garment fires, company towns, and now the algorithmic piecework of the delivery platforms, where a worker is managed by an application and dismissed by an email.

There is still room for capital to grow

It would be comforting to believe the system has run out of frontiers and must therefore fall over of its own accord. It has not, and it will not. The frontier has changed shape rather than closed. Where it once meant new territory, it now also means new depth: our data, our genomes, the atmosphere repackaged as a market in permits, the floor of the ocean, the orbits above our heads, and the last few unsold hours of a human life. Geography still offers room as well, in the interiors of Africa, across Central Asia, and in an Arctic being opened by the very warming that industry produced.

Nobody should wait for the machine to break down on its own. It will be changed by organised human beings, or it will not be changed at all.

The narrow room of the poorer countries

Here honesty serves us better than slogans. A poor country that sets out to transform itself alone runs into a brick wall. It needs foreign currency, which it cannot print or control. It needs machines, medicines, fertiliser, and spare parts it cannot yet make. Its creditors set conditions. Its capital takes flight. Its educated young are recruited abroad. If it persists, it may find itself sanctioned, isolated, and blockaded, and a country under siege makes decisions that a country at ease would never make.

The lesson is not that the goal was wrong. The lesson is that no poor country can carry it alone. Transformation needs partners: to trade on decent terms, to share technology and to offer mutual protection. Internationalism is therefore not an ornament on the movement; it is the load-bearing wall.

One atmosphere, unequally shared

The air recognises no border and asks for no passport. Yet the burden of what has been done to it falls first and heaviest on those who did least to cause it: the farmer in the Sahel watching the rains fail, the fisher on a rising delta, the labourer on scaffolding in a heat dome, the family whose house stood where the flood now runs.

Worse, the repair is being organised as another enclosure. The minerals of the energy transition are being taken from the same ground, from the same communities, on the same terms as before. Workers are told to choose between a wage and a habitable planet. That choice is manufactured. It is offered to us by people who own both the mine and the ministry. The answer is a transition that guarantees every worker a livelihood, treats energy as public infrastructure rather than private income, and sends the bill to those who profited from the damage.

What working people carry

Strip away the languages and the lives look much the same everywhere. Rent rising faster than pay. A contract that ends in ninety days. A second job. A phone that tracks your movements at work and does not stop when the shift does. Debt for a medical bill or a school fee. Care work done at night, unpaid, by women who have already worked a full day. The tiredness that has stopped feeling like tiredness and started to feel like the texture of life itself. Insecurity is not an accident of the modern economy. It is a management technique, and it works.

Running underneath it all is division between people and countries. Citizen against migrant, documented against undocumented, formal against informal, one faith, caste, colour, sex, and language against another. Every one of those lines is real to the people living on either side of it, and every one of them is useful to somebody who owns something. A divided workforce is a cheap workforce. That is why it happens.

*To be continued..