WASHINGTON STATE (US), April 19—While farmworkers’ Covid-19 cases spike, growers and reformist worker advocates have been wasting precious time talking to state agencies. Today, the state issued useless guidelines. For example, they recommend workers stay six feet apart “when at all possible.”
Thousands more migrants will be coming by summer. They will be forced into close quarters at housing camps, often in bunk beds, shared kitchens and bathrooms.
Communism will mobilize masses of workers—like those now unemployed—to help with essential food production. There will be no loopholes for profit-hungry growers. In fact, there will be no profit hungry growers. The masses will assure that safety for all involved will be our top priority.
Washington State Blueberry Pickers April 2020
“No, you can’t pick them. Let them rot.”
About 40 years ago a group of us were in the San Joaquin Valley visiting farmworkers and offering them a communist paper. At one house an older woman told us this: “After they deported a bunch of farmworkers, there was no one to pick the crops on a farm near us. There were potatoes growing in one field and they were starting to rot. I went to ask the farmer if me and my friends could pick them and give them to people who needed them. He said, ‘No. Let them rot.’”
That was the murderous logic of capitalism. It still is.
Capitalism: sell it or let it rot
Today in the US, restaurants and schools are closed due to the coronavirus. As a result, food is being produced that is not sold. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 un-hatched eggs a week.
Yet across the country people are lining up at food banks that are empty or next to empty. Thousands wait at a food bank in LA. 10,000 were waiting in San Antonio, Texas and in a miles-long line in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Others, refugee seekers, huddle across the border in Mexico.
Hundreds of thousands of hungry mouths that lack one thing – money! And the capitalists today in effect tell them what they said 40 years ago: “Let them rot!”
It’s world-wide. On beautiful Greek islands Syrian refugees stuffed into overcrowded camps starve because European capitalist say in effect, “Let them rot.”
In India, there are warehouses (Godowns) full of grain owned by the government, while millions are starving in the streets. And the Modi government turns its back on them.
At one Godown in Delhi, there are 73,000 tons of grain – enough to feed Delhi for ten months – but only those with ration cards can get them. Thousands don’t qualify.
Capitalists produce for profit, not human need. They would rather plow the food under or dump the milk than give it away and cheapen their product. Plowing unsold food underground is legal. Taking it to feed a hungry family is criminal. The cops, the courts and the jails defend private property and private profits.
The things, or commodities, capitalist markets have two sides to them. One side is their exchange value – or the price they cost. The other side is their use value – or how useful they are to us. For the capitalist farmer the price, or profit (exchange value) is all that matters. For the farmworkers, the food and feeding your family and others (the use value) is the main concern.
In communism we will produce to meet the masses’ needs
Communism rejects the ideas of exchange and exchange value. We can build a society where we distribute and share things because other people need them or can use them. After a communist revolution there won’t be money, profit or private property. The masses will determine the most useful foods and produce and distribute them. Our motivation, our societies’ motivation, will be to meet our collective needs.
To capitalists it’s a dangerous idea. The very idea of communism even haunts them today. Suppose those people who are starving begin to read Red Flag and agree that producing things for exchange value (price or private profit) is inhuman and anti-social. Suppose that they organize, or support those who organize, going to the farms and directly getting and distributing food to those that need it. Food that would otherwise be destroyed.
That very idea can excite those in the food lines. That very communist idea is a nightmare to the capitalists. They know that ideas, once seized by the masses, become a material force. They will be screaming and crying at the very thought of their falling profits. And we, the masses, will build ICWP communist collectives; we will raise the Red Flag and reply: “Profits? Let them rot!”
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