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.
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Chicago: Multiracial Nurses Fight Sexist Working Conditions
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- 15 September 2017 595 hits
CHICAGO, September 13— In preparation for their planned one-day strike today, a multiracial group of nurses at University of Illinois Hospital (UIH) protested for better wages and safer working conditions. They chanted, “You save money—We save lives!”
But the strike was called off this morning. Why? The union reached a tentative contract agreement, which must still be ratified by the nurses and approved by the University of Illinois’ board of trustees. Details of the contract has yet to be released. Yet, the struggle is far from over.
The nurses were demonstrating in response to their stalled union contract negotiations with the sexist and racist hospital bosses. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades here have been supporting the UIH nurses in their struggles against the bosses. PLP aims to win workers away from the reform struggle treadmill and towards the politics of revolutionary communism.
‘Women’s Work’ of Nursing Devalued
Nursing is a majority-women profession and the ruling class always pays less for “women’s work.” The work itself is discounted and devalued simply by being done mostly by women. Sexism is why the hospital bosses think that any nurse can work any unit—the bosses think the work can’t be that hard since women do it, therefore they should be able to do it wherever and under any conditions. This is sexist garbage. Nurses are crucial to patient care, and deserve a stable working environment. Without nurses, no hospital would cease to function.
The rampant sexism also explains why the hospital bosses think they can get away with terrible the nurses’ working conditions. Their assumption is that women workers won’t stand up and fight against their attacks. They are dead wrong!
From Pakistan to Haiti, from Poland to Chicago, women workers are leading the struggle to bury capitalism and replace it with an egalitarian communist world, one where all labor is valued.
Unsafe Working Conditions = Poor Patient Care
The UIH is a state hospital where the majority of its patients are Black and Latin workers, many of which are rely on federal and state aid. The hospital is a wreck: hazardous staffing ratios force nurses to accept direct patient care on top of managing the unit, and more. The UIH bosses are using racism to attack both healthcare workers and patients alike. The unsafe conditions lead to more stress and burnout for healthcare workers, which in turn leads to poor care outcomes for those same Black and Latin patients.
While racism and sexism are two potent weapons in the capitalist bosses’ arsenal, they also expose two of the bosses’ biggest weaknesses. Historically, the most significant worker movements have occurred struggles where the workers reject the bosses’ divisions and unify across gender, race, nationality, and job titles to demand an increased living standard for all workers. It remains the task of the international working class led by the communist PLP to overcome the bosses’ destructive divisions and organize for workers’ power worldwide.
Bosses’ Hack Union Will Only Sell Nurses Out
The 1,200 nurses represented by the Illinois nurses Association (INA) are demanding a mere an annual 3 percent cost-of-living increase. The Hospital proposing paying nurses a $500 cash bonus the first year of the contract with one percent increases in each of the next two years (Chicago Tribune, 9/5). Throughout the contract negotiations with the UIH bosses, the union misleadership has only proposed the usual plea for crumbs from management, including a paltry wage increase and permission for nurses to speak with union hacks during their shifts.
It’s important for nurses to strike for better working and living conditions. The INA union misleaders only used the threat of a strike but called it off at the eleventh hour. They are not a legitimate fighting force representing the interests of the workers. If the INA actually cared about the success of a strike or the interests of the nurses instead of just collecting membership dues, they would be coordinating with other unions across a wide range of other professions to build the struggle into something much bigger. They would connect the sexist and racist attacks on nurses to the crises of capitalism and its drive towards imperialist war.
However, to do so means bringing attention to the union’s own limits. Given their reformist nature, these collaborating unions will only take the struggle against their capitalist masters so far, before it’s back to business as usual.
In It to Win It with Workers
Instead of winning workers to accept some crumbs, comrades in PLP are fighting to win workers to the idea that they deserve the entire cake. Whether it’s nurses, mechanics, sanitation workers, or teachers, it’s the international working class that truly makes the world go round. Armed with a Party organized for communist revolution, the world is ours to win. Supporting the brave UIH nurses is another step in that long struggle!
BOSTON, August 19—The City braced for a post-Charlottesville, Neo-Nazi Free Speech rally at the Boston Commons. The Progressive Labor Party contingent joined the 40,000 antiracist demonstrators, which included their co-workers, friends, and union. We held a large banner that read “No Free Speech For Fascists, Smash Racism With Multi-Racial Unity.” We distributed 1,500 leaflets.
Various unions, Black Lives Matter groups, and others planned two anti-racist protests. One demonstration was held in front of the Massachusetts State House, a quarter mile away from the speakers. The other began two miles away from the Boston Common.
The racist speakers were located in a bandstand in the center of the Common, protected with jersey barriers, fences, Boston police and tactical police, with state police support. Helicopters flew overhead, and sound cannons setup for crowd control.
Reject Republicrats
While public schools face cutbacks and school closures and working people increasingly can no longer afford to live in the city of Boston, Mayor Walsh has chosen to spend over a million dollars to protect fascists and white supremacists. By granting a permit, without even a court fight, Walsh and his capitalist puppet masters have given a victory to these racists. Students of history might remember that the Nazi party rise in 1920s Germany was accelerated after Hitler successfully rallied in left-leaning Berlin. The current crop of fascists, view this rally as a similar opportunity.
Liberal politicians like Walsh and right-wing politicians like president Donald Trump are two sides of the same capitalist coin. While Trump openly promotes the fascists, the liberals protect their ability to organize. Both types of politicians serve various factions of the U.S. capitalist class. These capitalist see their empire slowly crumbling. They are willing to use any means necessary to preserve their investments, including going to war abroad and promoting fascism at home. They fear a united working class opposing their plans. They do whatever they can to divide us along racial, gender, national and other lines. This is why we must unite Black, Latin, Asian and white working people to fight these fascist vermin and their capitalist backers. Ultimately, we must abolish capitalism, a system where eight capitalists have more wealth than half the world’s population.
Fight Back like a Worker
The fascist rally used only 45 minutes of their state-sanctioned two hours. The police escorted them out. The police were in formation and marching out to confront anti-racist demonstrators. We leafleted, spoke to friends and anti-fascist demonstrators, and learned a few things: As police were leading out the fascists, workers on the streets boldly attempted to fight them; there were 33 arrests. There were unaffiliated anti-fascists at the bandstand shouting to the 30 or so fascists. One of the racists came off the bandstand and into the crowd raising his hand in a Nazi salute. He was then punched by an anti-racist.
Unlike Charlottesville, this march had a large number of anti-racist protesters, and few to no vigilante fascists roaming about. This shows that there are many people willing to stand up against fascism.
However, we should not let down our guard. Fascist and racist groups are being reorganized under a less overt racist guise emphasizing a “clean cut” look without the skinhead image or KKK robes. More average white workers, who are victims of capitalism too, are being enticed to see racism as the answer to the problems of capitalism.
Working Class Has A Record for Smashing Nazis
We influenced many demonstrators with our leaflet, the only literature with a class analysis of racism. It made the important point that fascist and racist speech comes at a cost; which is the lives of countless numbers of workers in the U.S. and worldwide. It cost the lives of 6 million Jewish people and 60 million lives to defeat the Nazis in WWII. Racism has made life a living hell for millions of Black and immigrant people in this country. The ending of slavery came at the price of 600,000 deaths during the Civil War.
The few strides made by Black workers in this country owe as much to urban rebellions and militant confrontation against racists groups such as the KKK as to non-violent civil rights marches. PLP and other anti-racist forces have being fighting fascist and racist groups since the 1960s. Past PLP Actions have made attacking the KKK/Nazis popular! One veteran demonstrator said, “Back in the 1970s, PLP and INCAR (Committee Against Racism) terrorized the KKK in Boston. That was great.” In 1979, we led hundreds to attack the KKK Grand Wizard at Boston City Hall. This has inspired the working class to fight and stop fascist and racist groups.
Let us not cheapen these past fights by allowing the rebuilding of racist and fascist movements. Reject the liberal fascist warmongers when fighting fascists; we must build a mass movement that fights racism, sexism and imperialist war and unites workers of all races and nationalities to build a world where all work and fruits of the labor are shared. That society without wages or racism is called communism.
Santa Monica, Sept 10—A multiracial group of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends joined hundreds of antiracists to shut down Nazi disrupters at the Committee for Racial Justice (CRJ) in Santa Monica. This was an opportunity to fight racism.
The CRJ, established in 2010 after a racist incident in Santa Monica High School, is a multiracial organization committed to fight racism. They have organized vigils for the murders of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and they also fight for equity and justice for Black parents in the Santa Monica school system.
Recently CRJ was come under siege by a collection of fascists known as the Proud Boys, Red Elephants and Da Goyim Know. These groups of white men armed with bandanas over their faces and baseball caps have interrupted the CRJ meetings with racist, anti-Semitic filth and even denounced one of the white co-leaders of the CRJ as a Jewish agitator, and chanted, “Blue lives matter.” The racists were preventing CRJ from functioning.
Since the racists vowed to return with bigger numbers, we began to mobilize. We called our friends and co-workers. Fighting racism is an essential part of fighting for a communist future, so we saw this as a serious opportunity to do both. Armed with knowledge and experience of driving racists out of San Francisco and Berkeley in Northern California (see CHALLENGE, 9/13), we were ready to take on the racists in LA.
Insight with Other Groups
In an effrot to protect the 124 members in the building, CRJ had a closed meeting. Some of the PL contingent were inside and some were outside.
Trump’s presidency has emboldened the racists and is creating a base for a mass racist movement in the U.S., but many antiracist groups have emerged to fight back. There are lots of groups and individuals with whom we can dig in and build long term relationships. Through the class struggle and building political relationships, we can make in-roads with our communist ideas.
Those of us outside talked members of one group in particular called Redneck Revolt. They are a predominantly white, but multiracial (and usually armed), community organization against racism. The group claims back the word and history of “Redneck,” originally synonymous with armed working-class fightback. The mineworkers tied red bandanas around their necks during the Battle of Blair Mountain, a two week long armed multi-racial revolt in coalfields of West Virginia, earning them the lable “redneck.”.
Through conversations it was clear that the group is mainly reactionary, but the group’s existence shows that some white workers indeed know the history of working-class fightback and choose the side against capitalism and racism.
One Fight Won
Those who went into the meeting have been part of CRJ for a while. Through this mass organization, they are making connections with the community and pushing to sharpen the anti-racist fight back in the neighborhood and schools.
The meeting was able to continue as planned. The racists did not show up, but we have to be on guard for future events in this organization. They flaked out because of the huge antiracist crowd ready to take them on if need be.
The anarchists and Redneck Revolt provided “security”, but the biggest “protection” was the Santa Monica Police Department. Therein lies a big contradiction. While the CRJ is committed to standing up against racist police murder, the struggle still continues to understand the nature of the police and capitalism. We must show up in bigger masses to wage this struggle and ensure the Nazi creeps don’t show their faces again.
The timing couldn’t be worse for the 575,000 undocumented immigrants in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. Racist President Donald Trump shut down DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, effectively putting 800,000 young people at risk of deportation. This signifies the rise of concentration-camp style fascism for a section of the working class. The possible, but unlikely, action of Congress to pass a new DACA program will be an opportunity for liberal fascism via military service.
Trump tweeted, “We are a nation of laws. No longer will we incentivize illegal immigration. Make no mistake, we are going to put the interest of AMERICAN CITIZENS FIRST!”
Intensified racism, nationalism, and use of “law and order” to terrorize workers are some of the hallmarks of rising fascism.
Horrors for the Working Class
DACA was a concession by then-president Obama after hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of undocumented-led youth fought for legalization and immigration justice. Their actions included occupations, demonstrations, marches, hunger strikes, blocking deportation buses, and more. The Dreamers Movement centered around a liberal narrative of “deservingness,” which not only reinforced the racist good-bad immigrant divide, but also was patriotic and legalist in nature (analysis of the movement in future issue).
Unsurprisingly, DACA coincided with the largest deportation operation in U.S. history under the first Black president who ran on a progressive Democrat ticket. In exchange for voluntarily giving their biometrics, address, and all personal information to the government, DACA recipients were permitted to work, study, serve in the military with the promise to delay, not block, their deportation for two years.
Losing DACA is about more than the looming threat of deportation; it’s about fostering unlivable conditions, which may lead to what Friedrich Engels, called “social murder.” The prospect of being robbed of their jobs, education, right to drive, and housing is capitalist violence. Many may not be able to support their families or keep a roof over their heads. “…In Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, they would be barred entirely from enrolling in some colleges and universities” (NYT, 9/7).
War-Driven Concerns for the Ruling Class
Don’t mistake the outcry of big-time mouthpieces and politicians as compassion for the working class. Obama laid out ruling-class concerns very clearly: “’It is self-defeating— because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love’” (9/5). DACA youth are good for U.S. imperialism and their war drive. Many in the main wing of the ruling class understand that. Ostensibly, Trump does not. To some, it may look like ruling class anarchy. Within the bosses’ camp, there are deep-sown divisions and lack of centralization and discipline. This disarray flares up during a period of decline of the U.S. empire. In their infighting, blatant Nazi racism won out.
The DACA decision complicates their war plans. DACA soldiers applied to the exclusive military program MAVNI (Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest). “[It was] designed to exchange fast-tracked citizenship for crucial medical and language skills among foreign-born recruits. The program has rotated 10,400 troops into the military since 2009” (Washington Post, 9/7). One look at North Korea, Afghanistan, and China, and it’s clear they are going to need those troops.
Secondarily, they are worried about economic stagnation: “So this is a double blow to the U.S. economy; it will make everyone worse off. A cohort of relatively high-wage, highly motivated people mostly in their 20s, likely to pay lots of taxes for decades, is exactly what the doctor ordered” (NYT, 9/5).
Break the Racist Narrative
As if dividing the working class along the lines of race, gender, and nationality wasn’t enough, the rulers drive a wedge between “good undocumented immigrants” and “bad undocumented immigrants.” Part of the liberal pity over DACA is that the program was for the “hardworking, model civic citizens” who had so much “talent” to contribute to this warmongering nation. This put undocumented youth on the path of nation building, nationalism, and war.
All undocumented workers—DACA-eligible or not—must be defended by the rest of their working-class brothers and sisters. Workers migrate out of necessity because the choice is always between the degrees or types of oppression. The stateless undocumented Rohingya people choose to flee to the floods and mass poverty in Bangladesh over ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Similarly, people in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras choose possible death across the border over mass anti-worker violence in their countries of origin.
We don’t get to choose our choices under capitalism. For the millions undocumented and refugees families across the world, there is one choice to end all state violence and terror. That’s the choice of communism. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can provide a solution because they are part of the capitalist state. Thousands took the streets after Trump’s decision, and more are looking for answers. In the name of a better world, wherever we are, seek out a community organization near you or organize in your schools, workplaces, and unions to stand with, and fight with, undocumented workers. Progressive Labor Party fights for a world without borders. Join us now.
