Pakistan, September 2—In August 2025, vast stretches of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Kashmir were swallowed by raging floods. Nature provided the rainfall, but it is capitalism—with its ruthless exploitation of land, reckless construction, and refusal to invest in protective infrastructure—that turns rain into mass destruction. The working class in these areas needs help and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is organizing relief efforts. But we know only a communist revolution will bring the change the working class needs.

Heavy monsoon rains, intensified by global warming, combined with decades of reckless capitalist development has unleashed destruction on an enormous scale. By the end of August, more than 1,000 people had been killed nationwide. In Punjab alone, over 1,600 villages were submerged, more than 2 million people were caught in the floodwaters, and nearly half a million were driven from their homes. Crops across thousands of acres were ruined; bridges, schools, and hospitals collapsed; and waterborne diseases spread rapidly through crowded camps and submerged neighborhoods.

Capitalists use and overuse fossil fuels to increase profits

The ruling class insists on labeling this a “natural calamity.” But nothing about this catastrophe is natural. PLP emphasizes that disasters of this kind are the direct product of capitalism. 

Imperialism makes the chain of capitalist misery even tighter. The bosses in the big imperialist countries have burned fossil fuels for centuries, heating the atmosphere and intensifying monsoon cycles while the working class around the world suffers the consequences.

In these conditions, relief efforts were not charity but solidarity—workers protecting one another when the capitalist state refused to act. PLP coordinated with local unions, student organizations, shopkeepers, professionals, charitable groups, and even some international NGOs to provide tents, food parcels, and hygiene kits. It was ordinary people who stepped forward. PLP members and supporters mobilized rapidly across Pakistan. With limited resources but coordinated efforts, PLP managed to reach people in difficult situations. These contributions saved lives. Yet even the best relief work is constrained under capitalism. Aid eases suffering temporarily but cannot prevent the next flood.

As PLP comrades explained while meeting people in flood-hit areas, under capitalism disasters are class war. The rich retreat to their safe homes and demand bailouts. The poor drown in their fields, their schools, and their villages. When the waters came, the capitalist state proved useless. Paltry compensation, token suspensions of officials, and staged visits by politicians could not hide the reality that the rulers had abandoned the masses. In flooded areas, families spent days without food or clean water. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, entire districts were cut off as cholera and hepatitis spread unchecked.

While fighting for international communist revolution, PLP also demands urgent survival measures. Displaced families need shelter and compensation now. Empty luxury properties must be used to house the homeless, rent collection must be suspended, and direct cash aid delivered. Workers must be protected—no layoffs in flood zones. Instead, public works jobs should employ locals to rebuild their communities. 

Farmers need immediate relief: debts canceled, fresh seeds and livestock supplied, and communal grazing lands restored.

Keeping the fight for communism central to the struggle

Fighting for reforms isn’t enough. Profit must give way to planning. A communist economy would meet human needs: flood-safe collective housing, restored forests and rivers, modern flood-control systems accountable to communities, renewable energy to replace fossil fuels, and universal, people-run warning and evacuation networks.

The drowned villages of Punjab and the collapsed bridges of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not signs of “mismanagement.” Only a revolutionary transformation led by the working class under the red banners of PLP can protect the masses and heal the environment. The existing state is built to defend property, not people—it cannot be reformed. Workers and peasants must organize in the international revolutionary communist PLP to overthrow it and build a state of their own under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which expropriates the exploiters and puts production under collective control.

The floods of 2025 are both a tragedy and a warning. PLP calls on the working class to organize in their workplaces, campuses, and villages to build an international communist party — PLP and to link the struggle in Pakistan with the global fight for communism.