Migrant Tragedies here ♦ Ohio Train Derailment here ♦
Migrant Tragedies Call Us to Mobilize for a Communist World Without Borders
As we distribute Red Flag to hundreds of immigrant workers at the Los Angeles Apparel garment factory, I realize that their faces are hardened by a lifetime of fighting to survive under an exploitative capitalist system. They are the ones who have survived the long and dangerous journey to the US.
Multitudes of our siblings worldwide do not survive that terrible journey that they were forced to take from their birthplaces.
Near the coastal city of Crotone, Italy, 59 migrants, including 11 children and a newborn baby, died when their overloaded boat sank.
Near Sofia, Bulgaria, 18 people, including a child, were found dead in an abandoned timber transport truck.
More than 800 migrants died trying to cross the US-Mexico border in 2022, the deadliest year on record. Thousands more disappeared during the journey; their fate is unknown.
Fascist Trump’s presidency featured attacks on immigrants and candidate Ron De Santis is following suit. One Trump-era policy denies asylum requests at the US border, forcing desperate people to apply from a so-called “safe” third country like Mexico. The Biden administration plans to reinstitute this vicious policy when Covid-era Rule 42 ends.
There’s nothing safe about the border regions of Mexico! Coyotes stoned two migrants to death on the border in February. A seven-year-old boy died the same day his family was scheduled to cross the border. He couldn’t get the medical treatment in Mexico that would have saved him in the US a few days earlier.
A relative of a Red Flag reader was raped by coyotes in Mexico and then denied asylum in the US. At least she has not been deported. Many garment workers have similar personal tragedies.
Politicians of all stripes bicker about immigration reform, but none of them will effectively change the situation for the migrants who cross vast oceans and deserts to escape the horrors of capitalism.
We need more than the spontaneous efforts of outraged individuals and liberal organizations to help the few immigrants they can. We need to understand that capitalist social relations of production are the real cause of the crisis, and that communist social relations are its solution.
Private ownership of the means of production means that workers are expendable wage slaves whose survival depends on finding work. Labor-power becomes a commodity which comes under the exclusive control of capitalists who drive down its cost to maximize their profit. With private property come nations, borders, war, starvation, and all the horrors associated with them.
Communist social relations, in contrast, include public ownership and control of the means of production by the working masses. We will abolish money and borders. Our labor power will be used collectively to produce for the needs of all.
This requires mobilizing the masses for a communist world to destroy the criminal and inhuman capitalist system.
Communism will free our class to destroy the last vestiges of xenophobia inherited from the old system. Workers from anywhere will be able to work and socialize with other workers everywhere.
Garment workers who read Red Flag in Los Angeles today, with their siblings worldwide, will bury deadly capitalism and create the communist world we all deserve.
Help us take this message to the streets on May Day, International Workers’ Day!
— Comrade in Los Angeles (USA)
Read Our Pamphlet:
“Fight for the Day No Worker Will be Called Foreigner”
Behind the Ohio Train Derailment: Flames of an Imperialist Toxic System!
The derailment of a Norfolk Southern train on February 3, 2023, in East Palestine (on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania) is another capitalist system catastrophe.
The capitalists, cutting jobs for their ambitions to maximize profits, are indifferent to the suffering of the working class, the impairment to our global climate, and the harm that continues deteriorating the environment.
The lack of US media coverage for the first week can be described as complicit of a rotten system. Major shareholders of Norfolk Southern include the Vanguard Group, Black Rock Advisers, and State Global Advisors, some of the same shareholders of CNN, Fox, ABC, and CBS news networks.
Due to the bosses’ massive job cuts, the train industry–which at its height had a million workers–has been reduced to just shy of 200,000 workers.
With fewer mechanics and other essential workers, the train conductors are forced to operate larger loads. Inspectors are told to cut corners. In early 2023 there have been twelve additional train derailments just in the USA alone.
Stephanie Griffin, who worked for Union Pacific in 2016, said her manager told her that it was okay to skip inspections.
“Most railroad workers are fighting against an entire system that only exists as a money-making apparatus to the wealthy,” she declared. “Those trains run through our towns, but they do not run next to rich folks’ homes, nor next to our politicians’ homes. This is a top-down problem.”
The Ohio derailment involved 3 locomotives that were hauling a total of 150 cars, equal to more than 2 miles long. Around 20 cars carrying hazardous materials were among 38 that came off the tracks.
Eleven other cars contained hazardous loads that created immediate explosions, directly affecting a nearby community of about 5,000 people. The cargo of some cars was intentionally breached.
Given the media’s silence when these flames erupted to the skies, the truth could be far worse.
An Environmental Protection Agency investigation could last from 18-24 months. Meanwhile, the outcome for the residents of the nearby regions will be unknown.
The burn-off immediately after the derailment sent toxic gases like those used in World War I into the atmosphere. The exposure to these harmful substances creates serious consequences to the environment and well-being of every living thing. Already hundreds of thousands of fish have died due to the chemicals that have spread in the Ohio river.
We must spread real communist ideas to our working class brothers and sisters in Ohio and throughout the world to stop the imperialist bosses’ devastation and their plans of preparing for an upcoming World War III.
—Comrade in Los Angeles (US)
Read our Pamphlet:
“Mobilize the Masses for Communism”