“Capitalism: The Root of the Disaster”
Need International Communist Workers’ Party for Revolution
October 5— Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico, leaving in its wake a bleak picture of destruction and death. We could paint a hellish picture with images and statistics. We must do this to sharpen the class struggle and forge the solidarity of the international proletariat.
But this is just interpreting the world. “The point, however,” as the communist leader Karl Marx wrote, “is to change it.”
To transform the world, we need to find the root of the problem. Comrades in Puerto Rico clearly identified it with a sign hung on a highway bridge: “Capitalism the Root of Disaster.”
What then is the solution? Our comrades’ banner put it subtly by signing their banner with the “Hammer and Sickle,” symbol of the international communist movement. We would have put it more directly: “Capitalism the Root of Disaster, Let’s Destroy It with Communist Revolution!”
What is needed to achieve a communist revolution? We need to organize ourselves into a Communist Party. Without a communist party there can be no communist revolution. Comrades in the US, El Salvador, India, South Africa, Mexico, Spain, and elsewhere have organized ourselves in the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP). Our motto is: One working class, one red flag, one political line, one communist party!
Comrades in Puerto Rico fight directly for communism and nothing less. They reject the fight for reforms. But they differ from us about being part of a single world Communist Party. We respect their opinion, but we will continue struggling with them to change it.
We are inspired by the Puerto Rican students, workers and intellectuals, mostly young people, who are struggling to mobilize the masses for communism. We maintain that the only true independence for Puerto Rico is communism. And who stand firm against attacks from local politicians and nationalists.
Puerto Rico – like many other places – is experiencing a pre-revolutionary situation
The masses have suffered for centuries from the racism, sexism, exploitation, harassment, humiliation, and more imposed first by Spanish imperialists, now by Creole capitalists and US imperialists.
Fiona’s disaster resulted directly from that vile capitalist-imperialist exploitation. So were Irma and María, gigantic hurricanes which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.
They left a macabre trail of deaths (5,000), houses (700,000), schools, clinics, hospitals, bridges, and roads destroyed and millions without electricity for months. Help from the US government was little or non-existent.
The racist neo-fascist Trump, then president, visited the island, showing his contempt and hatred for the Puerto Rican working class by throwing paper towel rolls at them.
Five years later, reconstruction has been minimal and preparation for future hurricanes even less. Fiona has increased the destruction and plunged the Puerto Rican working class deeper into misery. Almost half of them live below the official poverty level.
Emperor Biden – as racist as Trump – approved a “Critical Needs Assistance” program that will give households up to $700 each or $270 per person. If this pitiful sum weren’t so tragic it would be laughable.
When Biden was vice-president, President Obama created an agency to force Puerto Rican workers to pay $70 billion to Wall Street bondholders. Each Puerto Rican woman, man, and child is $58,000 in debt. With the collaboration of the governor of Puerto Rico, workers’ pensions were stolen. Schools and other government properties went up for sale, including electricity.
The workers’ hatred of capitalism-imperialism, stoked by these inhuman conditions, is boiling lava from a volcano ready to erupt. It erupted in 2017, when the Puerto Rican working class took to the streets with massive militant demonstrations that forced the then-Governor Ricardo Roselló to resign.
On September 1, two weeks before Fiona, the masses returned to the streets protesting the hated austerity measures and LUMA, the private company that was given the electric power system to administer and profit from, without investing a penny. LUMA didn’t fix the dilapidated system but raised the prices seven times since.
More rebellions will happen. A pre-revolutionary situation demands a communist party that will lead to the only solution to the disaster of capitalism: communist revolution. Let’s fight to build ICWP everywhere.