It’s barely three years since racist killer cop Darren Wilson murdered teenager Mike Brown in cold blood, in the streets of Ferguson. Now workers in the St. Louis area, and all over the world, have witnessed kkkop Jason Stockley get acquitted for the racist murder of 24-year-old unarmed Black father Anthony Lamar Smith. The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP)stands in working-class solidarity with the anti-racist fighters of St Louis, with the revolutionary message that justice for victims of fascist police terror will only be gained by smashing this racist and sexist capitalist system worldwide.
The Working Class Will Always Fight Back
Prior to announcing the verdict on September 15, that cleared Stockley for the 2011 murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, the bosses were already preparing for a working-class rebellion. They built barricades around the courthouse and increased their police presence. They were determined not to let workers take the offensive as they had before in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Minneapolis. The sight of mass multi-racial fightback terrifies the bosses everywhere, and rightfully so. Revolutionary working class unity threatens their very own parasitic existence.
But despite the bosses’ efforts, workers throughout the area have risen in rebellion to honor of their murdered working-class brother. Since Stockley’s acquittal, anti-racist fighters have taken to the streets day and night to condemn and fight back against this racist profit system. At least 100 fighters have been arrested so far, as the bosses’ attack dogs brutalize them with military-grade weapons, tear gas, and pepper spray.
Regardless of the violence that they face, workers in St. Louis continue fighting back, being a beacon of anti-racism for workers everywhere. They provide a glimpse of the potential for revolutionary change possible only when the working masses organize long-term in their class interests to fight for and build a better world.
Destroy Bosses’ Government – Fight For Working Class Power
Make no mistake: the institutions of the police and the courts exist, and have always existed, to protect and enforce the rights of private property of the capitalist class and their ability to continue making profit through the division, terrorization, and exploitation of the working-class. ‘Reform’ makes the kkkops and courts look nicer, but they continue to serve their capitalist masters. A world without racism and sexism means communism, when workers run all aspects of society.
The bosses’ need for increasing police state fascism in the streets is connected to their need to boost their military budget for their imperialist oil wars worldwide. The countless attacks on workers, from deportations to racist police murder, from sex trafficking to mass incarceration, all need to be recognized as problems of capitalism and destroyed through communist revolution.
Organizing the international working class into a mass Progressive Labor Party of millions remains the only way to permanently abolish the cops, courts, jails, or any other oppressive state institution. Only by organizing our class to destroy inequality, racism, and sexism at their capitalist root can we ever hope to achieve justice for Anthony Lamar Smith and countless others. Only by establishing a worker-run egalitarian communist society in which we make all decisions based on our needs not on making profits, can we ever expect racist police murders to be a nightmare of the past. Join the Progressive Labor Party and build this fight now.

The ability of a society to respond to natural disasters is primarily a political question. Communism is the exact opposite of the hopeless self-serving mantras of modern capitalism. While Cuba has long ago given up socialism in favor of becoming the next vacation hot spot, the ideology and practices have hung on to some degree, both in the state’s priorities and the outlook of the people.
Cuba’s reaction to Hurricane Irma gives us a fading look at what has been lost as the communist movement has declined over the last 50 years as well as a small glimmer at what is possible in a society fully dedicated to serving the needs of the great masses of people.
Hurricane Response After the Socialist Revolution
Shortly after the socialist revolution in 1960, Cuba developed a sophisticated hurricane response system in the wake of Hurricane Flora, a 1963 storm that killed 1,750 people in Cuba. The system included standing evacuation plans for every household and frequent drills. The whole preparation and response to hurricanes was organized under a civil defense system that organized people throughout the island to participate in the readiness, evacuations and immediate response. The Civil defense system has hung on, at least for now, even as socialism has been abandoned by the Cuban rulers.
[T]hey save enormous numbers of lives by massive evacuations. … this time they evacuated a million people. And even though the infrastructure is poor and many of the houses are very poor, [the state’s] focus is on saving lives.
…[the civil defense organizations] have all the neighborhoods mapped. They know exactly who lives where. They know who the vulnerable people are, and they know who the elderly people are and where they live. And a couple of days before the hurricane hits, they evacuate them all. They start with those people. Pregnant women get put in hospitals. People with infirmities get also put in hospitals. Others get taken to either shelters or with family or friends who are living in more secure houses. But everybody in Cuba knows what they’re going to do if a hurricane hits.” (Democracy Now, 9/22).
Compare what happened in Cuba, where 10 lives were lost in one of the places hardest hit by Irma to the situation in Florida where 11 people died at a single site as a result of the failure of the nursing home administration and State authorities to evacuate the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills. After Hurricane Irma knocked out their power “residents …spent three days sweltering in stiflingly hot rooms despite the fact that a fully functioning and air-conditioned hospital is right across the street”(NBC 9/21).
Perhaps even more sickening than the complete abdication of responsibility by those in-charge of the care of the nursing home patients is how the profit system makes an honest evaluation of what went wrong in Hollywood Hills impossible to assess as the finger pointing has begun.
A critical issue—whether administrators from the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills in Broward County made distress calls for help to Gov. Rick Scott’s private cellphone — will probably not be cleared up soon. On Sunday, the Florida governor’s office revealed the four key voice mails from the center have been deleted…
The center’s administrators maintain the calls to Scott were seeking “immediate assistance.” Scott’s office, however, says the calls never indicated an emergency, and that the information was passed on to the appropriate state agencies. But now the voice mails are gone (Washington Post 9/25).

Imperialism and Capitalist Exploitation at Heart of Myanmar’s Destruction of Rohingya Community

MARCH TO MYANMAR EMBASSY

SEPTEMBER 30, 4PM, 1747 Columbia Rd NW, WASHINGTON, DC.

The imperialist rivalry among China, India, and the US is embedded in the destruction of Rohingya villages, the murder of Rohingya people by the military and racist vigilantes, and the forced migration of at least 400,000 refugees into neighboring Bangladesh. These attacks are mainly portrayed as an attack on Muslims who have been denied citizenship in Myanmar, and labelled in the mass media as a religious issue. But is religious persecution at the root of this human crisis?  Or is it a storyline meant to mask the true cause: displacement of peasant farmers by capitalist and imperialist interests in order to exploit a strategic, resource-rich region?

For the last 20 years, groups such as Human Rights Watch have documented land grabs by Myanmar’s military regime that have displaced the rural poor indiscriminately across all of the country’s 135 ethnic groups. For example, in Keren province on the border with Thailand--viewed as a prime spot for tourism, industrial expansion and agricultural development—rural populations have had their homes and farmland confiscated without compensation, and been arrested for trespassing when they continue to work the land.

Western sanctions against Myanmar’s military government were in place throughout its rule, up until the 2015 elections, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) prevailed. But despite the election victory, Myanmar remains largely under military control. Current aggressive military actions against the Rohingya and other ethnic groups in the area may lead to a reinstatement of sanctions. The brutal response to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)’s attack on local police stations is being labelled by Myanmar’s government as a “security issue”, while the UN and Western nations portray it as “ethnic cleansing” of a large section of Rakhine province. The value of the territory now being cleared of Rohingya villages and others derives from China’s interest in building a $7.3 billion deep sea port at Kyaukpyu on the Rakhine coast and developing a $3.2 billion industrial park nearby. This is part of China’s $900 billion Belt and Road Initiative in Asia and would give China a foothold in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.  India also seeks to strengthen its role in the Bay of Bengal through its deep water port at Sittwe.

With so much at stake, it is clear that the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi is as meaningless as that given to Obama—or Henry Kissinger, for that matter. Human rights are easily overlooked in the blinding glare of profits from pipelines and industrial development. Some of the country’s Buddhists, who are impoverished themselves, nevertheless have been won over to carry out ethnic and religious persecution and are helping the military, similar to the way some poor white workers in the U.S. blame their poverty on immigrants and Black people. The only solution to this problem, which is emblematic of others taking place worldwide, lies in class struggle and multiracial, multiethnic unity. The fight against anti-Muslin prejudice in the US and worldwide is part of the antiracist struggles necessary to build the unity needed to destroy the capitalist system worldwide.

The Progressive Labor Party is an international revolutionary communist party with organizers in 27 countries. We support the struggles of Myanmar’s workers and farmers against the government’s efforts to drive people off the land and impoverish them in slave-labor industrial development. We condemn the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and call upon the many oppressed Buddhists and others to join in demanding that the military cease and desist their attacks on the Muslim population and other groups in the area.  We need to build a world where workers run the society, not the military and fake Nobel laureates.  Fight for communism!

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The devastation of mass flooding in South Asia, West Africa, and the U.S. has exposed the anarchy of capitalism, a failed system that magnifies destruction instead of preparing society to get through the storms.
Under capitalism, resources are invested where the greatest profits can be made. In general, capitalist bosses have little interest in keeping themselves in check—partly out of greed, but mainly out of fear that other capitalists will get to those profits first.
This profit-driven pathology leads to ever growing chaos as development, pollution, and overcrowding into unplanned cities outpaces the minimal resources the rulers allot to manage the problems.
This is a world crying out for the sanity of communism, a world built around the needs of the masses of people, the international working class. A system based on workers’ needs—not the bosses’ profits—would channel the massive resources now hoarded by the capitalists to be used instead for the good of society.
Under capitalism, mass destruction is barely addressed once the news cycle moves on. This is most apparent when the people suffering are Black, Latin, or Asian. Racism becomes a tool used both to hide what is happening and to justify the mass poverty that generates poor housing and subsistence living standards for hundreds of millions of people across the globe.
Under communism, problems of development would be dealt with in open and honest struggle. Once again, the needs of the working class would be primary.
South Asia: Stripping the Hills
Flooding across India, Bangladesh, and Nepal killed over 1400 people and left more than 40 million homeless or without the basic means to sustain themselves. “Across flood-affected parts of Bangladesh, India and Nepal, millions of people have lost their main source of income, whether it be from destroyed crops and dead livestock, damage suffered to local businesses or because they are displaced” (Independent, 9/7).
Hardest hit were families that “live in bare mud houses and rely on subsistence farming....Those farms are now underwater, and thousands of people are stuck living under plastic tarps in camps for displaced people where disease is beginning to spread (New York Times, 8/29).
South Asia is struck by monsoons every year, often with flooding, but capitalism has vastly worsened the problem through the race for profits that leads to unplanned farming and industry that wreaks havoc on people’s lives. The latest siege of floods in India was aggravated by barren hillsides, stripped to accommodate industrial farming. As the hillsides collapsed and riverbanks disintegrated, floods crashed into densely populated communities. According to N. Biren Singh, chief minister of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, hills in the neighboring state of Assam “in particular have suffered from deforestation besides conditions influenced by climate change” (Hindustan Times, 9/10).
Sierra Leone: Routine Disasters
A similar situation has unfolded in Sierra Leone in West Africa, where unsafe housing is routinely swept away during the rainy season. Just outside Freetown, the country’s capital port city, flooding last month led to a mudslide that killed more than 400 people, with another 600 or more missing (Al Jazeera, 8/19). The disaster struck the outlying town of Regent, a settlement of over one million people. Because of massive poverty, they are forced to build homes on a steep hillside while seeking work in the capital.
“There is little to no urban planning going on in the city at all levels of society.… There is a chronic housing deficit in the city and the issues only get discussed on an annual basis when flooding happens and [it] comes into the spotlight.  Although the government has relocated some communities from informal housing [squatter communities], these are often forced resettlements which leave residents on the outskirts of the city so many soon return to their original homes” (The Guardian, 8/14).
Texas: Bosses’ Incompetence
In Texas, Hurricane Harvey damaged or destroyed over 185,0000 homes, leaving more than 40,000 people in shelters (ABC News, 9/1). The bosses’ decision not to evacuate left thousands stranded in the rising waters. The capitalists proved once again that they have no ability to quickly and safely redirect resources to serve workers’ needs in emergencies.
In 2005, when Houston was evacuated during Hurricane Rita, hundreds of thousands of people who left to evacuate on their own were jammed and stalled on highways to nowhere. People were trapped without food or water. An illegal bus carrying nursing home residents exploded, killing 26 people.
Twelve years later, the continued haphazard growth of Houston has left the city no closer to an effective evacuation plan, even when there is ample warning of an impending disaster.
Racist Media Coverage
While there has been extensive reporting on the flooding in Texas and Florida, news coverage of the monsoons that have ravaged millions of Black, Latin, and South Asian workers around the world have barely been covered by the 24/7/365 /news networks, which compete for the most ridiculous celebrity gossip to fill their air time.
Additionally, the news barely referenced the fact that most people forced into shelters in Texas and now Florida are poor Black and Latin workers without resources to evacuate.
Resources Toward Profit
As the Washington Post (8/29) noted, Houston’s flooding was made exponentially worse by the area’s rampant overdevelopment, which has paved over wetlands and other areas that once served as a natural drainage system for floodwaters:

Growth that is virtually unchecked, including in flood-prone areas, has diminished the land’s already-limited natural ability to absorb water, according to environmentalists and experts in land use and natural disasters. And the city’s drainage system — a network of reservoirs, bayous and, as a last resort, roads that hold and drain water — was not designed to handle the massive storms that are increasingly common.

Capitalism is about profits above all else. In a world where the bosses spend trillions of dollars on war, build skyscrapers on manmade islands, and send tourists into space, billions of people live in mud homes or tin shacks or in cheaply built housing tracts in known flood paths. Capitalism is incapable of effectively guiding society. As long the bosses’ profit keep rolling in, they do not care if workers live or die.
But after workers seize power under communism, and abolish money and profit, resources will be shared according to the needs of our class. Floods, monsoons, and earthquakes will be prepared for. Development will be governed by safety and rational planning. The unnatural disasters of capitalism will become relics of the past.