Brazil: Amazon Fires Spark Discussion of Why Workers Need Communism

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL, September 21, 2019—Protest against police murder of Agatha Felix and other children in the favelas.

October 7 — “Fires in the Amazon means genocide and hunger in the favelas,” a Brazilian comrade who works in aerospace told his coworkers.

This very lively and heated discussion involved lots of coworkers, friends, and neighbors. It concluded with clarity and urgency that capitalism is a murderous system. It can only be replaced with a communist society that will eliminate the profit system that causes havoc on our lives.

The comrades and friends in Brazil referred to a campaign of genocide launched by the fascist Bolsonaro government. In Rio de Janeiro, over 600 youth (mostly black) have been gunned down by the police. Using the pretext of fighting drugs, heavily militarized police with helicopters, drones and on horseback gun down residents of all-black urban neighborhoods known as favelas.

The Brazilian capitalist class seeks to profit enormously from the deepening trade war between Chinese and US imperialists. US farmers and the meat industry provided soybeans, corn and pork to a growing Chinese market. Now with the raging tariff war, the Chinese bosses are taking their money and power to Brazil, Argentina and South Africa.

Producing pork, soybeans and corn requires large swaths of fertile land. This is up for grabs in the Amazon. Armed gangs, supported by corporate farmers, clear-cut pristine rainforests for timber. Then they set fires that burn until the charred land is ready to be tilled for dollars, reals and yuans.

Brazilian fascists justify the destruction of the Amazon by telling the masses that the new land will provide jobs to a very large unemployed population.

They are unemployed because of the global crisis of capitalism. Enormous quantities of goods produced by the workers remain unsold. Too many cars, airplanes, too much oil, cotton, corn, cows, pigs and poultry. The capitalists’ response is to produce even more, with fewer workers. This creates an army of the unemployed worldwide.

The capitalist bosses’ drive to maximize profits is creating their own mass graves. But this will not happen until millions of workers join the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) in burying capitalism and the bosses forever.

Our friends and coworkers in Brazil are seriously thinking about joining ICWP. But we face very serious ideological obstacles. Many believe that communist society will never allow racist murders and the destruction of the environment. But they feel capitalism is too strong, fascists and their terror too overwhelming, to be defeated.

This way of thinking that capitalism is eternal, and fascism will allow it to exist forever, is wrong. It runs counter to our collective knowledge of how human societies change.

The bosses are increasingly resorting to fascism everywhere because of weakness, not strength. The rise of fascism is an obstacle but also a potentially huge opportunity for us to recruit masses for communism.   We will continue to address this contradiction in the months leading up to our communist conferences next year.

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