Pictured: Serbia, March 2024—Hundreds of thousands continue to rally against government corruption that led to deaths of 17 people in a railway station collapse in November 2024
Myanmar Earthquake: Another Capitalist Disaster
March 31— A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck the city of Mandalay, Myanmar on March 28. It released energy equivalent to three hundred atomic bombs. A government building in faraway Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, collapsed.
The death toll is estimated to be at least three thousand people, probably many more. The military junta is paying lip service to the dead by organizing a minute of silence on Tuesday, coincidentally April Fool’s Day. Meanwhile it continues bombing rebel areas and has ignored calls for a ceasefire.
Earthquakes are natural, but this disaster is not. This region has a history of powerful earthquakes. Yet almost no buildings in Mandalay were built or retrofitted to withstand them. Residents were left on their own to fend for themselves and rescue survivors in the critical first days. Government troops blocked volunteers from coming to help.
Myanmar was already ravaged by civil war and ruled by a brutal military junta that seized power in a 2021 coup. It has brutally suppressed armed rebellions since then. It has killed over 50,000 people, thousands of them civilians, including hundreds of children. More than 25,000 have been arrested, including many doctors and nurses who were thus unable to help earthquake victims.
Despite international sanctions, the military junta continues to buy arms from Russia and China, and probably from other countries like Israel, India, Thailand and Singapore.
Meanwhile, the Myanmar economy is in shambles. Inflation is around 25%. Almost half of the population lives in poverty, with the majority hanging by a thread.
The mainly Muslim Rohingya minority had to flee Bangladesh in 2017 to escape a genocide, Their situation has worsened. They are threatened by both sides in the Myanmar civil war.
Some Rohingya now living in refugee camps have taken up arms. Others have filed a complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Meta (formerly Facebook) is one of the US corporations named in the complaint. Meta violated its own “community standards” and inflamed anti-Rohingya propaganda, which contributed to the genocide. Meta’s algorithms are invasive, and its priority is targeted advertising to keep users “engaged.” If that means spreading propaganda which could cost lives, then so be it.
This is a key feature of capitalism – nothing should come in the way of profits. Even if it takes a genocide to profit. From South America to Africa to Vietnam to Ukraine, atrocities are the way of doing business and the loss of human life is called “collateral damage”.
The working class is who suffers the most. They are the ones dying in substandard housing during earthquakes. The ones fighting and being killed in capitalist wars. Living in poverty while producing food, building houses, cars, planes, trains, and running the planet. Meanwhile the capitalists lie that wealth is just about to trickle down and this is the only possible system.
It’s not. Communism is possible. Workers had to save themselves from collapsed buildings and earthquake-ravaged cities. We can also save ourselves from capitalism itself and its constant wars. We can organize ourselves to build and rebuild, to produce for and care for each other without money or profit.
Let’s organize the International Communist Workers’ Party to seize power and create a good, sustainable life for all living beings.