In its entire 400-year-plus existence, capitalists have been hard at work decimating forests, poisoning rivers, polluting the air and exterminating ocean life. The pursuit of profit turns the life-sustaining qualities of the planet are commodities to be exploited and fought over. Moreover, the capitalist treatment of the planet mirrors its treatment of the working class. The same profit motive that drives them to ruin our environment also subjects us to the horrors of racism and sexism, brutal working conditions, and imperialist war, with its threat of nuclear holocaust.  Buying a hybrid car, recycling plastics and using more efficient light bulbs will not change the destructive tendencies of capitalism. Only communist revolution can rescue the planet, and the workers that inhabit it.
Racism Makes Super-Exploited Groups The Most Vulnerable
The racism inherent in capitalism means that Black and Latin workers are hurt most by climate change. They are systematically placed in the most vulnerable locations for flooding and housed in poorly constructed homes. The poorest workers don’t have the financial resources to protect themselves and rebuild after extreme storms and are left homeless and more desperately poor.
Sociologist Robert Bullard, discussing how environmental racism impacts people of color in Houston, writes: “They not only have to deal with flooding in their homes, but pollution in water that’s contaminated when water floods refineries and plants. You’re talking about a perfect storm of pollution, environmental racism, and health risks that are probably not going to be measured and assessed until decades later. The fact is that laissez-faire, unrestrained capitalism and lack of zoning means people with money can put protections up, and people without can’t” (Huffington Post, 8/29).
The media refers to these catastrophes as “natural disasters.” However, one thousand people did not die in Bangladesh, Nepal and India this summer only because of nature. Millions of Puerto Ricans were not left without power or water, threatened by outbreaks of deadly communicable diseases and dying from lack of medicines because of nature. Fires alone cannot be blamed for the destruction happening in Northern California, Portugal and Spain. Capitalist racism, greed and drive for profit created the conditions that allowed all of these disasters to occur.
The Future Of Capitalism-Caused Climate Change
The following facts are from “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells (NY Mag, July edition).
Barring a radical reduction in global warming, sea levels will rise AT LEAST four feet by 2100. One third of the world’s cities are coastal, so power plants, ports, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshland and rice paddies will flood.
High temperatures will end the production of many basic foods such wheat, corn and soybeans. By 2080, Europe will be in constant and extreme drought. NASA, in 2015, predicted that future droughts in the Midwest of the US would soon be the worst in 1000 years.
Global warming threatens to release potentially dangerous microbes that have been locked in frozen ground around the poles. Also, the range of the insects that spread diseases such as malaria and Zika virus could increase, meaning millions more will be exposed to these and other diseases.
Higher temperatures increase health-damaging ozone in the air. More ozone leads to deaths from respiratory and cardiac illnesses. Wildfires will increase and add more carbon particulate to the air, causing more health problems.
Capitalists Have No Answer For the Crisis
The response of right-wing “climate deniers” to these well-supported predictions represents the outlook of one segment of the US ruling class, concerned only with short-term profit and  indifferent to the deadly effects of global climate change. Other bosses realize that worsening climate change could potentially eat away at their profits. Even oil companies like Exxon-Mobil have recently been jumping on the “green wagon” and investing in renewable energy sources, because they worry that “severe weather disrupts delivery of supplies.” At the same time, the energy companies fully intend to extract tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas still below the ground, which will spew more carbon dioxide into the air and raise global temperatures, with terrible results.
Meanwhile, the liberal ruling class refuses to blame capitalism for the problem. Instead, they primarily place the blame for climate change at the feet of the working class. We’re driving too many SUVs! We’re not recycling! The New York Times even had the racist nerve to blame poverty-stricken Indians for contributing to climate change by burning cow dung for heat and cooking (12/8/2015).
The capitalist media continuously pushes the false narrative that it is the collective responsibility of workers to fix the problem. So we must change our consumption patterns while they continue to perpetuate the very things that caused the crisis in the first place. So now we have a slew of eco-friendly, sustainable, and green products preying on workers’ guilt, and peddling the false notion that consuming eco-friendly goods will solve the problem.
The bosses push these individual responses in order to avoid opposition to their system. The iron-clad rules of capitalism mean that if Boss A chooses not to exploit a particular resource due to concern about the climate, Boss B will swoop in, claim and exploit that resource, and drive Boss A out of business. This is reflected in the Paris Climate Accords. This agreement between global capitalist leaders represents the best they can do at resolving the contradiction between profit accumulation and environmental destruction. It doesn’t start until 2020, and is merely a non-binding, toothless set of “targets” for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. There are no consequences when countries fail to meet their targets. In a communist, planned economy, targets would be set and all of society would be set to the task of meeting those targets.
Communist Revolution Is the Solution to Climate Change
We are constantly reminded that “human” activities such as fossil fuel burning, deforestation, meat production and agriculture as the main culprits that release gases like methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, into the atmosphere – without connecting it to the giant corporations that profit mightily from those activities.
In order to reduce carbon emissions and prevent catastrophic climate change, it is absolutely essential to destroy capitalism and replace it with communism. While workers will die and suffer, capitalism will survive all manner of global weather calamity. What they absolutely cannot survive is communist revolution. The united working class is the only force, natural or otherwise, that can bring this exploitative and murderous system to an end. Become a part of this force today by joining PLP.

Under capitalism, a society’s first priority is profit, not people. This is all too clear for the workers of Puerto Rico as the United States, the world’s richest superpower, has refused to pull resources from the bosses’ inter-imperialist agenda and send adequate aid to people whose homes and livelihoods have been torn away, and who now face a public health catastrophe.
On September 20, Hurricane Maria, the most powerful storm there in 80 years, wreaked havoc in Puerto Rico. Even before this disaster, workers there suffered from 45 percent official poverty and 10 percent official unemployment (New York Times, 10/2), with the real numbers far worse. Three weeks after the hurricane struck this U.S. island territory and its long-neglected infrastructure, countless remain without food or shelter, or access to their bank deposits, credit card accounts, or cellphone service. As of October 10, according to the New York Times, 84 percent of the island still lacked electricity; 40 percent had no running water. Hospitals remain closed or barely functioning. For lack of diesel fuel to power generators, dialysis patients have been cut back to 75 percent of their needed treatments. According to the latest government timeline, it will be at least six months before the island’s power grid is running to full capacity (CNN, 10/1).
Given the overwhelming breakdown of phone communication, no one knows the true extent of this capitalist disaster. The official death toll of 43 seems sure to grow dramatically.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is busy expanding its Green Zone security district in Kabul as part of a multi-billion-dollar investment in permanent war in Central Asia and the Middle East (NYT, 9/16). It is clearer than ever that the ruling class values imperialist profits and control over workers’ lives.
Without communist leadership and ideas, the workers of Puerto Rico have been left divided and unable to organize to fight effectively for what they need. The working class has been left to die.
Workers Suffer, Bosses Move
With the hurricane wiping out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s coffee, plantain, and banana crops, (NYT, 9/25), manufacturing and agricultural jobs have been devastated. As per usual under capitalism, the bosses are scrambling to save themselves by firing workers, cutting hours, or simply moving their operations to places where their profits will be safer.
Collectivity Turns to Nationalism
Over the past two months, as natural disasters have wrecked working-class neighborhoods in Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida, Mexico, and Barbuda, there has been an outpouring of generosity, support, and strength from our class brothers and sisters. We are reminded that individualism is not “human nature,” and that in times of crisis, workers will help one another. In Puerto Rico, masses of workers have united to clean their streets and share electricity, medicine, and food (New York Times, 10/2).
We are also reminded, however, that spontaneous working-class solidarity is not enough to fight these disasters at their root. Capitalism is to blame for this death and destruction. Capitalism is to blame for unsanitary living conditions and hospitals. Only communist revolution can stop this carnage-for-profit.
Jones Act & Legalized Racism
It took Nazi-in-chief Donald Trump a full week to temporarily waive the imperialist Jones Act. Enacted in 1920 to protect U.S. shipping profits and fend off European competition, the law allows only U.S.-built and U.S.-operated vessels to move cargo between U.S. ports without costly tariffs and other fees.
The Jones Act is a keystone of U.S. colonialist oppression of Puerto Rico: “That outdated piece of legislation renders food prices roughly double those of nearby Florida, even though per capita income in Puerto Rico is less than half that of Mississippi, the poorest of the fifty states” (Jacobin, 10/5). Now that the U.S. has ended a 10-day waiver, the law is once again slowing the delivery of aid to Puerto Rico and driving up costs (Associated Press 9/28). In other words, it’s killing people.
Trump’s Racist Response
After a plea from the mayor of San Juan for more help, President Donald Trump attacked the working class of Puerto Rico on Twitter, playing on racist stereotypes used against Black and Latin workers: “[They] want everything to be done for them.”
Trump’s one-day visit to San Juan was steeped in racism. At a local distribution point, he launched rolls of paper towels into the crowd, then said the devastation in Puerto Rico wasn’t a “real disaster like Katrina.” In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Black working-class neighborhoods were destroyed and families left to die while the bosses focused on saving tourism and ruling-class profit mills in the city.
The Poisoning of Vieques
The U.S. plans to send 17,000 soldiers to Puerto Rico and pledges to stay until “all needs are met” (TIME, 9/30). This would not be the first time the U.S. military has taken direct control of Puerto Rico territory.
In 1941, the U.S. purchased Vieques, a small island just off the coast of the main island in Puerto Rico, to set up a naval base and conduct military exercises and test its latest bombs and munitions. Over the next 60 years, the 9,000 residents of Vieques got progressively sicker and the land more and more destroyed.
Even before the devastation of the latest storm, people in Vieques were “eight times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease and seven times more likely to die of diabetes…” (Atlantic, 9/1/16). Their health crisis has only been heightened by recent events.
Be it the “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the occupation of Haiti, or the brutal gentrification of New Orleans, the U.S. military response to “humanitarian disasters” means little aid and a lot of fascism and death for the working class.
A Call for Communist Revolution
The recent wave of disasters that have killed so many is a stark reminder of what workers are forced to endure in a capitalist world. While hurricanes and earthquakes may be unpreventable, the condition of a society’s infrastructure depends on how the society is organized. A disaster response geared to workers’ needs hinges on which class holds state power.
The rulers’ profit system will continue to devastate our class until we organize a communist revolution, under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party. Join us!

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Puerto Rico, Conquered by Racism

Puerto Rico’s strategic position in the Caribbean makes it indispensable to U.S. imperialism. Here is a short history of the territory:
The Taíno people on the island of Borinquén became targets of Spanish colonialism in 1493, when Christopher Columbus “claimed” the island for Spain. Spanish settlement began fifteen years later, paving the way for genocide of the indigenous people and importation of slave labor from Africa.
The Spanish-American war was an inter-imperialist fight between a declining Spanish empire and the rising U.S. capitalists. Upon the ratification of the Treaty of Paris of 1898, the island, now named Puerto Rico (Spanish for “rich port”), came under U.S. military control. So did Guam and the Philippines.
Puerto Rico has been strategically valuable in controlling of the Panama Canal; as an operations base for U.S. military invasions in the Caribbean, including the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), and Haiti (1994); and as a control center for naval operations and armed control of South Atlantic maritime routes, extending to the west coast of Africa.
During World War II, on an island in the Panama Gulf, the U.S. military singled out soldiers from Puerto Rico to be subjected to secret, race-based chemical warfare experiments on 60,000 U.S. troops. These Nazi atrocities were designed to gauge how soldiers from various pseudo-scientific “races” might respond differently to exposure to mustard gas and lewisite, two chemical warfare agents. Black and white soldiers, along with those of Japanese descent, were also exposed to the carcinogens (foxnews.com, 6/24/15).  
For several decades into the 1970s, the U.S. government funded a massive eugenics program to eliminate the “socially inadequate” in Puerto Rico. Administered by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, this criminal, racist program sterilized one-third of the women in Puerto Rico by 1968 (Stanford, 10/23/08).
To this day, workers in Puerto Rico are victims of extreme racist inequality. Existing political movements—for Puerto Rican autonomy or statehood—are both lethal, reformist dead-ends for the working class. The alternative is a world without national, state, or “territory” boundaries, without profit or money, without racism or sexism. The alternative is communism.

ST. LOUIS, MO, October 1—Weeks after the racist acquittal of kkkop Jason Stockley for the 2011 murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, the fires of anti-racist, working-class fightback are still raging across the St. Louis area. A small collective led by Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined this militant struggle, offering working-class solidarity and communist leadership.
Anthony, 24, had a one-year-old daughter when he was killed after a high-speed chase. Just before the legalized lynching, based on video and documents obtained by St. Louis media, the racist Stockley said, “Going to kill this m*therf*cker, don’t you know it.” The killer cop then planted a silver revolver on Anthony and claimed self-defense. Though the only DNA on the revolver belonged to Stockley, a judge still found the kkkop not guilty—an outrage that has sparked a widespread uprising and more than 120 arrests in a single night.  
Of the thousands of fatal shootings by on-duty U.S. cops between 2005 and 2015, according to a study by the Washington Post (4/11/15), only 54 resulted in officers being charged by the rigged U.S. “justice” system. Most were acquitted; the few who were convicted or pleaded guilty spent an average of only four years behind bars. In a time of rising inter-imperialist rivalry, looming global war, and gaping economic inequality, the capitalist bosses use and protect their killer cops to try to intimidate workers from fighting back. But the rulers’ state terror cannot stop the class struggle. It cannot stop us from organizing for communist revolution, to smash the thugs in blue and their criminal masters once and for all.
Reform and Revolution
Upon arriving in the city, our collective connected with a group of about a dozen people occupying the space in front of the (in)justice Center downtown. They were waiting for two people who had been jailed after the previous night’s demonstration. We learned that protestors, including a minister and a wheelchair-bound filmmaker, were both arrested and pepper-strayed.
A number of anti-racists from Lost Voices occupying the space were familiar to our collective as fighters who were active during the Ferguson uprising after kkkop Darren Wilson killed Black teenager Mike Brown. It was inspirational and instructive for us all to observe the sustained commitment in the fightback in this region. With mostly Black leadership, these workers pour their time and energy into the movement against racist cop murders, often risking their own physical safety. Their anti-racist efforts set a high standard that the entire working class can learn from.
We lent our bullhorn to those fighters spearheading the occupation, and they put it to good use. One leader of the Lost Voices group rapped on the mic and pumped up the growing crowd. Within a few hours, the kkkops had released the two fighters they had locked up overnight.
We made use of the situation to engage in some sharp conversations about reform and revolution. We encountered a point of disagreement with a number of the local fighters, who still trust that the cops and courts can be counted on to “do the right thing” if the working class applies pressure to rewrite some of the bosses’ laws.
We struggled with new and old contacts over these reform efforts versus revolutionary goals. We held our line that as long as the capitalist bosses hold state power, they will use it to defend their profit-driven interests. Only workers seizing power under a communist society will guarantee that laws are enforced to serve the needs of the working class, without racism or sexism. Workers showed interest in this line, and we were able to share contact information, CHALLENGE, and fliers.
The Battle of Galleria Mall  
These conversations made us aware of another planned anti-racist demonstration that evening, at the St. Louis Galleria mall in the wealthy suburb of Richmond Heights. The site has been a flashpoint for rallies since Stockley’s acquittal on September 15, and has seen its share of arrests and kkkop violence against protesters. The bosses were ready for our agitation, and blocked off multiple entrances into the parking lot and within the mall itself.
Although our collective was blocked from getting to the action inside, anti-racist fighters soon poured out and began marching through the parking lot to take over a nearby intersection. We instantly joined the march and joined the chants of “No justice, no profits!” and “Racism means, we’ve got to fight back!” We held the intersection for more than 30 minutes, afterwards taking the opportunity to hand out bottled water, distribute more fliers, and make more contacts.
The action at the mall represented genuine, mass multiracial fightback against racist police terror. Black, Latin, Asian, and white fighters of all different ages raised their fists against the violence of capitalism. It was a reminder that international working class unity is the only force capable of destroying this racist, sexist profit system. Each and every worker won to build our international PLP means another nail in the bosses’ coffins, and another step toward a communist world.
Still Fighting Like Ferguson
Three years ago, the international working class learned what it meant to “Fight Like Ferguson.” In nearby St. Louis, anti-racist fighters are boldly carrying on the Ferguson tradition. Communist revolution remains the only way to bury the bosses and their racism forever! Let’s build this fight!

This is the  part of in an extensive series about the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumphs, as well as the defeats, of the world communist movement of the 20th century. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.
The following illustrates Bolshevik work under the Czar before the Revolution of 1917.

Progressive Labor Party is following in the footsteps of Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in struggling to “fit the reform struggle into the revolutionary struggle,” making revolution primary. This is very hard to do when the bosses still rely on liberalism to fool the working class. But this liberalism is in the process of turning into fascism. If we have followed our line of “revolution and reform” and have prepared a base for communism among the working class, we will be prepared to turn the bosses’ fascism into its opposite—workers’ communist revolution. A look at the history of the Bolshevik party illustrates this.
In What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin denounced the tendency of putting trade union work around reform issues on an equal or even a higher footing with Party work. The “economist” or reformist outlook Lenin criticized was dominant in the Second International. It turned the German Social Democratic Party, the party of Marx and Engels, into a pro-imperialist, anti-worker party by 1914 (see Schorske, German Social Democracy). The Mensheviks, that part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party with which Lenin and the Bolsheviks split, also practiced it. The occasion for this split in 1903 was Lenin’s insistence upon the primacy of illegal Party (revolutionary) work, and on making sure that communist politics guided all reform activity.
Baku Under Russian Empire
A study by U.S. historian Ronald Grigor Suny (published in Soviet Studies, 1972) shows how Stalin put Lenin’s strategy or ‘‘revolution over reform” into practice in the oil-producing Caspian region around Baku (present-day country of Azerbaijan) from 1907 to 1910. A. V. Williams Jackson of Columbia University wrote in his work From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam (1911):
Baku is a city founded upon oil…At present Baku produces one-fifth of the oil that is used in the world, and the immense output in crude petroleum from this single city far surpasses that in any other district where oil is found.
The Czar legalized land ownership in Baku, turning it into the oil capital of the world. Between the 1880s and 1900s, Baku belonged to the Nobels, the Rothschilds and more generally to the British oil bosses. Between 1856 and 1910 Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris or New York. It is in the flashpoint of imperialism that the Bolsheviks, soon to lead the revolution in the next decade, organized class struggle.
Organize Among Most Oppressed
The workers fought hard against the oil bosses. After the workers’ rebellions of 1905-6 the oil bosses of Baku opted for liberalism, raising wages and legalizing unions. They hoped to divert the oil workers’ struggles towards reform, away from socialism at the time. The Mensheviks abandoned Party work and devoted themselves entirely to the Trade Union. Further, they organized only among skilled workers, who were mainly Russians.
A young Georgian leader in his late 20s, born into a struggling family, led the Bolsheviks who, under his urging, concentrated upon the unskilled industrial workers, who were mostly Muslim workers—most numerous, poorest, and most militant. His name was Joseph Stalin.
The bosses used racism to divide the workers: as Suny puts it, “Sometimes … workers of one nationality … were used as strikebreakers against workers of a different nationality.” The Bolsheviks insisted on fighting these racist divisions by uniting the separate unions of skilled and unskilled workers (the Mensheviks wanted to keep them separate). These workers were won to revolutionary politics and became fighters for the revolution.
Within five months of Stalin’s arrival in Baku in June 1907, the Bolsheviks had won over enough unskilled workers to capture the city committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from the Mensheviks.
Leading Class Struggle
Following their new “liberal” policy, the oil bosses offered to set up a “conference…with equal worker-management representation, to work out a general labor agreement. Stalin was “militant and uncompromising. His attitude was consistently suspicious of compromise, wary of those who expected meaningful concessions from the industrialists in a conference” (Suny).
At first Stalin held out for a general strike and a boycott of the conference. When his position was defeated. Stalin led the Bolsheviks into the “conference” campaign under the platform that the workers’ representatives be the union leaders—mainly, Bolshevik revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks won 19,000 votes to the Mensheviks’ 8,000. Confronted with a workforce united under Bolshevik leadership, the bosses called off the conference, thus showing their true colors. As a result, the Bolsheviks won even more support.
Primacy of Preserving Underground Work
Another of Lenin’s tenets was the primacy of preserving illegal, underground Party work. Throughout this period of “liberalism,” Suny writes: “Stalin, while participating somewhat in union affairs, gave most of his strength to party work, of which he was in charge.”
By 1908 the bosses had dropped their liberal facade, outlawed the unions, and arrested their leaders. Stalin stayed out of prison for almost two more years and so was able to preserve Bolshevik organization under this period repression. Suny admits, “Stalin and the Left were vindicated in some sense in the next few years as the unions practically disappeared, and as the only center of Social Democratic activity that remained was hidden “deep in the underground.”
The Bolsheviks fought for the most left politics in a period of liberalism and repression. Though they were small, they embedded themselves in the class struggle, called out lesser-evil politics of the bosses, fought against racist divisions, and organized among the most oppressed group of workers. Only through organizing day in and day out, they recruited workers to join the fight for a better world.

Next issue, we will look at class struggle forged the Bolshevik Party in Transcaucasia.