Canada: strikers welcome red solidarity
On a recent trip to Prince Edward Island, Canada, I came across a picket line of municipal workers. There are only 35 members in their union. They can boast nearly 100 percent participation by my count. The strike has lasted so far 43 days. Management of the city of Charlottetown is refusing to negotiate even though the contract improvements they see would cost only $150,000 Canadian dollars.
I spoke to two union brothers extensively. Both spoke of their impressions that the U.S. was sliding into authoritarianism and fascism, and both worried about threats made against Canadian sovereignty.
They were very upset about ICE and the attacks on immigrants here, while confessing that Canada has had a very mixed history of interactions with the First Nations (indigenous people). What they worry about is the level of support Trump appears to have from their perception of the media among people living in the U.S. I pointed out the recent demonstrations in Chicago, D.C. and L.A. and the growing resistance to rising fascism. I described the United Federation of Teachers - Retired Teacher’s chapter Labor Solidarity Committee’s efforts to increase working class solidarity and our working group on rising fascism. They applauded our efforts.
Of course, only a mass movement that liberates the workers from the stranglehold of capitalist relations of production and creates a communist society led by the workers will end our dependence on capital.
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Punda Amechoka: Workers in Kenya tired of capitalism
Before the summer of 2024, when Kenyan police’s deadly crackdown on youth protests garnered international media attention, workers here had staged a series of demonstrations to fight against crushing taxes and high inflation. The one I witnessed started on July 7, 2023, and spread across at least twenty counties. Thousands of workers flooded the streets, banging pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils, and chanting “Punda Amechoka,” a Swahili phrase meaning “donkey is tired.” This slogan compares humans to working animals to indicate taxation-induced starvation.
Kenya ranks 100th out of 127 countries in the 2024 Global Hunger Index with a score of 24.0, implying a serious level of hunger. The cause of hunger is not a shortage on the supply side, but that people can’t afford food. When the price of unga, maize flour for most Kenyans’ daily meal, goes up, the poor do not switch to cake. People cease to buy essentials when purchasing necessities at inflated prices. During the three months I lived in a migrant labor community in Central Kenya, I noticed even the few “fortunate” industrial laborers hired in adjacent factories, skipped meals and cut back on other nutrients.
In Capital, Volume 1, Marx reckons with wage as a fund for individual consumption that provides laborers “the means of subsistence, or the labor-fund, which the worker requires for his own maintenance and reproduction, and which, in all systems of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce.” (Penguin, p.713) This has been translated into the demand for “living wage” in labor struggles. However, for most Africans, wage-labor-based livelihoods no longer have any real prospects for the urban majority, and they are more like a fading dream.
The staples of life, such as food, water, sanitation, and shelter, are generated from diverse forms of the informal economy. The “rural-urban” migrant laborers I study in my fieldwork take on a range of low-paying, temporary jobs, including work in factories, garages, street vending, domestic service, waste collection, home tailoring, and crafting. “Hustling” has become the vernacular way to describe the ordinary laboring experience, the shared struggles that William Ruto took advantage of in his successful 2022 presidential campaign. The then-presidential candidate leveraged the deep frustrations caused by unemployment and social stagnation, claiming he represented the “hustler” class and framing his campaign as “hustlers vs. dynasties.”
It was clear which side Ruto stood with almost immediately. He ordered police to fire live ammunition at protesters whose demand was for the government to withdraw tax bills that would directly push up already soaring living costs. In my neighborhood, police drove fully armed vehicles and deployed tear gas to disperse my neighbors. I was rescued by a neighbor who grabbed my arm and pulled me to a labor dorm shelter amidst the chaos. Though on the margin of capitalist labor relations, the Kenyan people are nonetheless at the forefront of capitalist accumulation. Along with Zambia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Pakistan, Ghana, and other lower-middle-income countries, Kenya teeters on the edge of default on its public debt. In 2023, Kenya spent 59 percent of the nation’s revenue on debt repayment. The rhythm of public debt to repayment significantly affects Kenyan people due to the daunting level of taxes and massive cuts in public services. The pains of price spikes in staple foods, electricity, matatu [minibus] transportation fares, and other essentials dominate daily conversation. Austerity policies, in fact, make every rhythm of time in society and every productive action subject to the central time of sovereign debt repayment.
Public debt, therefore, conjures into being a national economy to which supposedly all Kenyans have obligations. As Marx notes, “the public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation.” (Capital Volume 1, Penguin, p.919) The real “hustlers” have given William Ruto a nickname that he truly earns, “Zakayo,” which is Swahili for Zacchaeus, the biblical figure notorious for being a greedy tax collector.
What options do ordinary Kenyans have left but to fight back? Contrary to the linear assumption of historical progress, people’s experiences with capitalism are nonlinear, as Black Africans who have rarely experienced Fordism (except for some rare cases in South Africa) but now find themselves fighting against full-blown financial capitalism. Kenya not only shows how public debt can cause violence in daily life, but also how people are forced to turn to loans just to get by. With the ubiquity of mobile phones even in Africa, digital loans – financed by the global surplus capital – are an irresistible allure for borrowing to put food on the table.
“Punda Amechoka”, the slogan “donkey is tired”, from this angle, I interpret as people are tired of being enslaved by public and private debts.
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To fight climate change, drown capitalism
The continuing failure of the international ruling class to respond in the interests of workers to rapidly changing conditions of the planet due to climate change is no secret. Lately the capitalist owned media has been paying less and less attention to the root causes of the problem.
Some of that can be traced to the enormous profits being made by the oil industry and the continued use of technology to extract oil from older oil fields in the United States. These technological changes have helped make the U.S. one of the leading oil producers again after undergoing shrinkage 15 years ago before the extensive use of hydro fraction (fracking).
The capitalist-owned news outlets know which side their bread is buttered on. They report individual catastrophes from time to time with virtually no connection between the dots. When you connect the dots of the individual disasters, it paints a picture of profits before people.
Communists know that science and politics must lead the response. The science of climate change is fairly well understood. Symptoms of climate change reported in the international press regularly through articles about raging floods killing thousands of people in Pakistan, India or China are just snapshots of the coming crisis. Just since June over 400 people have died in Pakistan from flooding caused by the increased intensity of monsoon rains. Flooding as glaciers in the Himalayas melt overrun flood plains in which greedy construction companies build housing.
New Scientist magazine states “Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen an extra 15 parts per million since 1960 due to the declining ability of the land and sea to soak up excess CO2.”
Deforestation, drought, and warming seas reduce the ability of the land and water to absorb the CO2 that is driving increasing global temperatures. Future articles will provide insights into the need for better climate modeling and planning. A key to a communist working-class run society envisioned by the international Progressive Labor Party is scientific planning and thorough discussion throughout society. Capitalism alienates (separates) the working classes from planning. In a capitalist society, what drives our scientific research is money and the interests of capitalists to reap ever higher profits. The government (state) is controlled essentially by the rich and wealthy. They will never voluntarily give up their money, profits or power. We want to change that. Help build the egalitarian world that is possible. Help build the revolutionary communist PLP. Join us now while there is time.
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Reject individual terror, build with masses instead
The assassination of the fascist Charlie Kirk is a reactionary act. It’s not just Kirk! It’s the whole damn capitalist system! The only way forward away from the Republican Party’s (Trump) creeping fascism is through organizing workers and others to overthrow capitalism.
Here is what Vladimir Lenin wrote about “terror” -- political assassination -- in 1894:
“The Narodnaya Volya was headed by an Executive Committee ... [names omitted] The immediate object of the Narodnaya Volya was the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy, while their programme provided for the organisation of a “permanent popular representative body” elected on the basis of universal suffrage, the proclamation of democratic liberties, the land to be given to the people; and the elaboration of measures for factories to pass into the hands of the workers.
The Narodovoltsi were unable, however, to find the road to the masses of the people and took to political conspiracy and individual terror. The terroristic struggle of the Narodovoltsi was not supported by a mass revolutionary movement, and enabled the government to crush the organisation by resorting to fierce persecution, death sentences and provocation.
After 1881, the Narodnaya Volya fell to pieces. Repeated attempts to revive it during the 1880s ended in failure -- for example, the terrorist group organised in 1886, headed by A. I. Ulyanov [V. I. Lenin’s brother] and P. Y. Shevyryov shared these traditions. After an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III, the group was exposed, and its active members executed.”
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