Communism Will Get Us All Moving
LOS ANGELES, USA—“It’s nice to see you. How have you been?” asked the Red Flag distributor to an MTA bus operator getting off her shift.
“Not so good, I hurt my hand helping a wheelchair passenger onto the bus. My hand got pinned by the wheelchair. The doctor is still evaluating my injury. I hope it hasn’t caused permanent damage. I need surgery but MTA denied my claim,” she answered.
“I’m so sorry to hear that. Wheelchair-related accidents seem common. Another driver told me that manually operating the W-wheelchair lift injured his shoulder. The hydraulic system wasn’t working,” said the comrade.
“Tell me about it! Recently it happened to me. It didn’t work on my bus either. I did it manually three times. It was really hard,” added the operator.
A retired bus operator explained, “MTA’s normal procedure is to deny operators’ claims, especially
if they have no lawyer. However, if the mechanism was cleaned and lubricated daily, this problem wouldn’t exist. Also, installing a winch by the fare box would enable operators to raise the lift without getting into health-hazardous positions when done manually.”
“Why isn’t the hydraulic lift cleaned and lubricated daily?”
“Because,” continued the retired operator, “management does it to save money, pitting drivers and mechanics against each other. They make both responsible for the inspection but don’t allocate enough time for either to do an adequate job.”
Undoubtedly, many drivers and mechanics have tons of ideas about how to make things easier, safer and more pleasant for drivers and passengers. But, MTA and its capitalist masters are not interested in this.
If they were, they would replace the 263 million cars, clogging US roads and streets, with a good, safe massive transportation system. This would greatly improve the physical and mental wellbeing of over 222 million drivers, especially bus operators.
It would, however, eliminate the huge profits of oil, automobile, tire, and construction companies. “Profits before people,” is the capitalists’ logic and they won’t act against their logic.
“For them, we are not human beings… we are just a number,” said a driver at a different division. Another driver from yet another division commented, “We are just wage slaves carrying wage slaves from their homes to the plantation and then back to their homes.”
They are totally right— and no reform can ever change this. Wage slavery robs our humanity. To gain it back and develop to our fullest human potential we must destroy wage slavery and money, the chain that binds us to the capitalists. Only communism can do this.
Transporting people and goods is a social need which we will plan and implement collectively. Helping those in need to get on or off the transporting vehicle will be done collectively. The attitude
on the buses or trains will be “We’re all here together helping each other get on and off to get where we need to go.”
Communism will develop a massive multi-faceted system with lots of different kinds of transportation to meet people’s different needs.
Operators of mass transit will be able to show the care, love and appreciation of their passengers that they would like to, but that capitalism prevents them from doing. We will develop better ways to transport everyone—especially people using wheel chairs.
With no wage slavery or money to dictate how we live and die or how we relate to each other, we will be able to fully develop the communist social relationships that will allow us to treat each other with respect, dignity and love. Like our ancestors did for tens of thousands of years in pre-class communism – on a higher level.
Front page of this issue
