On February 22, nearly a thousand workers met in an Assembly in San Juan to demand that the colonial capitalist government and the Fiscal Supervision Board (JSF) not approve their proposed changes to the retirement systems. Also, they demanded that the Board revoke approved measures that negatively affect current and future pensioners.
An 8.5% reduction in pensions is the most recent measure ratified by JSF. The JSF is the parallel non-elected government that has greater power than the elected government. It was created by the US Congress to guarantee at all costs the interests of Wall Street and its Puerto Rican lackeys.
An agreement between the government and the bondholders will be presented in a US government court, designated by the US Congress to implement the Promesa Law (Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act). This law created the JSF.
This agreement guarantees that bondholders receive payment of 75% of the investment, regardless of the current value of the bonds in the stock exchange, and that the lawyers participating in the negotiation receive $400 million. The Assembly demanded the elimination of the Promesa Law.
The Assembly also rejected the measures the government wants to impose on the workers of the University of Puerto Rico. These would change their pensions from a system of defined benefits to one of “defined contributions.” With the first, retired workers receive their defined pension beforehand. With the second, workers’ contributions are treated as a savings account to be invested in the stock market.
Therefore, the benefits that pensioners receive will depend on variations in the capital markets. That is, their pensions will depend on the Wall Street lottery.
Capitalist governments – be they “colonial”, “third world” or imperialist – adopt anti-worker measures to pay the debts that they have irresponsibly issued with the endorsement of and for the benefit of the bondholders.
These attacks have caused massive worker protests in Chile, France, Greece and other countries. This reflects that capitalism is a global system and that the workers’ struggle is also global. The working class has no borders. Neither does capitalism.
But this fight should not be for reforms such as demanding the elimination of the PROMESA Law or that the JSF does not approve or repeal anti-worker measures. The struggle must be for communism: a society without money where we collectively produce everything and distribute it according to the needs of each. Communism will meet the needs of everyone from the cradle to the grave.
There will be no banks, nor bondholders. Nothing will be sold or bought, thus eliminating capitalist wage slavery: the material basis of racism, sexism, and other poisonous capitalist ideologies and practices. In a communist world there will be no borders or nations that divide us.
When the Europeans came to this continent they found many native communities living like this. The sailors, wage slaves superexploited by nascent capitalism, first saw this form of community in the Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico (called Borinquen by the indigenous Tainos).
This ignited their imagination. They understood that their dreams and aspirations were not vague illusions, but that “another world was possible.” Here and on their return to Europe, they organized revolutionary movements fighting for that world that they longed for and needed and that they now knew was possible.
Millions of natives of this continent were exterminated fighting to maintain “their world”. Over the centuries, tens of millions of workers have given their lives fighting for a similar world free from exploitation.
In capitalism, the capitalist class exists to exploit the working class for its own benefit. Let’s fight to eliminate social classes. This will only be achieved by building a communist society.
Today – thanks to the successes and failures of the old communist movement, especially in Russia and China – we are closer than ever to win that scientific communist world that humanity and the environment need.
Join the struggle! Long live communism! Long live the Internationalism of the working class! The working class has no border!
All over the world before the invention of class society, humans lived in a communist manner. This is a water-color of the village of Pomeiooc, an Algonquian village in what is now North Carolina, USA in 1585.
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