Flooding from extremely heavy rain in New York City on September 29th shut down the city. It knocked out the subway system, flooded tens of thousands of homes and buildings and submerged cars trapped on highways. The rainfall, equivalent to more than a month worth of rain falling in three hours (CNN 9/30), exposed the failure of capitalism to manage even the most basic functions of society. Short term profits required by the needs of the real estate developers have left basic infrastructure in the center of U.S. capitalism woefully insufficient and there is no path for the situation to be fixed under capitalism. The massive changes needed to solve flooding in New York require an upheaval to the way society is organized that can only come through revolution and the building of a communist society.

Storms are getting worse as capitalism continues to wreak havoc on the environment. As society literally swerves between floods and fires the real estate developers at the top of the food chain in NYC are continuing to build, build, build. By owning the services of the politicians through donations to the Mayor on down, the permits are approved for taller and taller skyscrapers that are popping up all over the city.

Climate change runs into anarchy of capitalist development
Capitalism needs to seek profits. NYC was once a manufacturing center with million industrial workers at its peak in 1947 (NY Times 3/22/81). Today there are 58,000 manufacturing jobs in the city (Bureau of Labor Statistics). As U.S. capitalism lost its manufacturing power the capitalists needed to find new sources of profit. New York led the way with the development of retail and real estate. As small buildings and undeveloped lots are replaced by towers as high as 90 stories, the developers don't build sufficient infrastructure to accommodate all the new people moving in.

New construction should typically be built with accompanying infrastructure that can handle a 100-year rainstorm. This means a storm that would have a one percent chance of happening in any given year. New buildings in the city are being built with infrastructure that is designed for a five-year storm, meaning a storm that has a 20 percent chance of happening in any year (theverge.com 9/29).

A second cause of increased flooding is that new development is taking away areas where rainwater can seep directly into the ground. As empty lots and undeveloped land are built on there are fewer and fewer places that are unpaved. This forces increased amounts of rainwater into the sewers. NYC sewers were built to handle 1.75 inches of rain an hour. More than that and they back up into the streets and basements and even toilets in basement apartments. Last weekend had rainfall of about 2.5 inches an hour for a sustained period. In NYC a hundred-year storm is classified as 3.5 inches an hour, double what the sewers can currently handle (NY Times 9/29). Black, Latin and Asian workers bear the brunt of the flooding as thousands of basement apartments are the last refuge for low wage workers in a city with off the chart rents.

The capitalists won’t fix this
Decades upon decades of development would now have to be undone to properly deal with the flooding in NYC. This is not something the bosses even think about as the cost of fixing the problem under capitalism would devastate their profits. Instead, they are following a gradualist approach of installing tree pits on sidewalks that are designed to drain rainwater. These tiny, performative measures are being over-run by the continuation of development and climate change making heavy storms more frequent.

Capitalism is failing again and again. The education, health care and infrastructure are all broken. Workers power through communist revolution is the only solution.

As refugees from Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean swell in number at the U.S.-Mexico border, President Joe Biden agreed to grant 472,000 work permits exclusively for those coming from Venezuela.  Seen as a kind gesture by some, the U.S. bosses are creating a racist divide as they fumble to address a disaster they themselves created. Workers without permits will be deported, and those who stay will be super-exploited, just as the Black working class has been for centuries.

Denver and San Diego and other cities run by liberals have “welcomed more than they can handle” and are reducing the length of stay for asylum-seekers to 14 days (CBS News Colorado, 10/2).  These “progressives” have joined the open racists from Texas and Florida in busing migrants to Chicago and New York. Migrants trek to the United States for an opportunity to work and live stable lives, yet the reality is something harshly different. Most are met with racist insults from fellow workers and fascist crackdowns from the capitalist bosses. To discourage new arrivals, New York City Mayor Eric Adams began evicting migrants from shelters amid widespread flooding (Politico, 9/22). Fake leftist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has offered nothing but lip service for the refugees’ plight.

The imperialist rulers, set on preparing for world war, will not provide decent lives for the international working class.  Work permits and tent cities won’t fix this appalling situation. Only a communist revolution led by Progressive Labor Party can give workers the world they deserve. The global migrant crisis is a symptom of a deeply racist system that must perpetuate inequality, nationalism, and exploitation to exist. We must combat the rise of fascism and fight to destroy capitalist borders that serve only the bosses.

Venezuela: a crisis made by capitalism
For two decades or more, the working class of Venezuela has been stuck in the crosshairs of inter-imperialist competition. President Nicholos Maduro has stayed in power largely with the help of China and Russia, which are paying the bills to keep his regime from collapsing. In recent months they have also deepened military ties with Venezuela, much to the dismay of the U.S., the longtime bully of the Americas (Dialogo Americas, 1/21/22)

In response, to force Maduro’s fake-left leadership into submission, the U.S. and a number of European countries have battered Venezuela with economic sanctions on products entering the country.  Because of the resistance of the bosses behind Maduro (and behind Hugo Chavez before him) to diversify the economy, Venezuela relies heavily on oil exports. As oil prices dropped in recent years, the country’s economy collapsed.
Suffering from one of the highest rates of hyperinflation in the world, workers in Venezuela cannot afford basic necessities. There are shortages of food and medicine and even electricity and clean water. In 2019, as the country teetered on the brink of civil war, the economic crisis was heightened by civil unrest and violence.

Worldwide, as they flee war and extreme poverty, workers and their families are traveling through jungles, deserts, large bodies of water, and territories infested by ruthless militias and gangs. But there are no safe havens for workers in a capitalist world, least of all in a racist stronghold like the U.S.  The current U.S.-Mexico border crisis reflects the desperate conditions for the working class throughout the hemisphere and beyond.
For the imperialist bosses fighting over Latin America’s resources, workers' lives are cheap.

We cannot fall for the divide-and-conquer game of these exploiters, whether they are Trump MAGA racists or liberals who defend the racist Democratic Party. In the current period, with fascism on the rise, the work of communists is especially critical. Where the bosses energize the gutter racists, communists inspire multiracial unity and help organize internationalist workers to be bold and fight back.  

Workers on the move met with fascism
The last decade has seen a mass upheaval in the lives of workers across the globe. At present, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an estimated 117 million people are forcibly displaced by violent civil unrest, political repression, and economic instability (UNHCR.org, 2023). Climate change, another product of capitalism, has led to disastrous forest fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and rising sea levels. In the Global South, livelihoods for millions have grown unsustainable. Hundreds of thousands of workers fleeing Africa are  stranded on the Italian island of Lampedusa, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. They are being held there indefinitely in wretched conditions under the guns of Italian soldiers (NPR, 9/23).

The capitalist-controlled media propagates racist narratives about migrants, provoking fear and division within the working class. Workers get manipulated into perceiving undocumented and asylum-seeking migrant workers as threats to their livelihoods. This strategy serves the bosses’ interests by diverting attention from the true cause of this crisis–capitalism! Disgruntled workers in U.S. cities have organized small but heavily publicized anti-immigrant rallies to stoke fear and nationalism. In Chicago, migrating workers were physically attacked and  police officers were accused of raping and impregnating underage migrants in holding cells (Chicago Tribune, 7/23). Super-liberal Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed a multimillion-dollar tent city–essentially a city-run refugee camp–to house migrants (NBC Chicago, 9/23).

Communism will smash all borders
Borders are simply made-up lines created to signify where one boss's profits begin and another’s end. Never have they served the interests of the working class. Borders reinforce racist ideas that “other” workers are dangerous, untrustworthy, and out to steal jobs. Forcing workers to sleep in shelters, police stations, and tent cities is a racist travesty. We must fight back for migrating workers, and for the liberation of our entire class exploited and oppressed by the profit system.

Under communism, there would be no profits to fight over. The means of production would be controlled collectively. The factors that now drive workers to become refugees would cease to exist. Internationalism demands solidarity among workers worldwide. It calls for the dismantling of the structures that perpetuate inequality, beginning with borders.

The struggle for a better world must be a unified one, where workers from Chicago to Latin America to every corner of the globe stand together against the exploitative forces of capitalism. Only by breaking down the barriers that divide us can we hope to build a society where all workers are afforded dignity, freedom, and the opportunity to lead fulfilling lives. Join Progressive Labor Party as we organize to make this world a reality!

As the UAW strike against Ford, GM and Stellantis enters its third week, it has “expanded” to 20 percent of the membership on the picket lines and 80 percent still working, including at the most profitable truck plants that produce the Dodge Ram, Ford F-150, and Chevy Silverado. The 38 Parts Distribution Centers that got called out on strike only service the dealerships and have no effect on production. They also added only about 6,000 workers to the total on strike.

Trying to give cover to the UAW leadership and bolster his sagging presidential campaign, Joe Biden spent about two minutes on a GM picket line while his labor secretary is assigned to Michigan to make sure the strike doesn’t spread. But PLP has been out to the picket lines, too, talking with Ford truck and assembly workers in Michigan and Chicago and to Stellantis parts depot workers in New York, offering support, international solidarity, and talking about the need for communist revolution.

Biden calls himself “the most pro-union president ever,” yet he was one of the architects of the 2008 bailout that saw the auto bosses make $250 billion in profits over the past decade while auto workers saw their real wages drop by 20 percent. Biden recently forced a national contract on railroad workers that they had overwhelmingly rejected and is trying to ensure a loyal industrial workforce as the rulers escalate their proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and prepare for a possible conflict with China.

While the UAW leadership and corporate media have the workers focused on wages and restoring past concessions, all of which are important, the main underlying issue is the transition to Electric Vehicles (EVs), which is already underway, and where U.S. bosses find themselves trailing behind Tesla and China, the #1 producer of EVs in the world. A Hyundai EV factory will soon be operating in Georgia.

The UAW already represents less than half of the US auto industry. The transition from gasoline engines to EVs will cost thousands of jobs as current facilities that produce engines, mufflers, catalytic converters, fuel injectors and other components will be retooled or shut down. Many workers will not be around to see the benefits of whatever wage hike is ultimately settled on. One of the main goals of the UAW is to get the auto bosses to agree to have the new battery and EV factories, many of them joint ventures with smaller companies, covered by the national labor contract. If they don’t get it, they will ultimately represent a smaller and smaller share of the industry.  

Scientific and technological changes in production are nothing new, especially in the auto industry. Many Detroit workers and families remember in the 1990s, when GM built the Hamtramck Assembly plant and Chrysler built the new Jefferson Assembly and together they closed more than 13 factories as automation and robotics cost tens of thousands of jobs and reshaped the industry. Similar struggles are underway about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The problem isn’t science or technology, it’s who controls it and who runs society. These advances can serve the profits of the billionaires or the needs of all workers. Once we eliminate the bosses and their system with communist revolution, science and technology can serve the masses. We need a lot more than a wage hike. We need to abolish wage slavery!

Inglewood, CA, September 24—Cesar received a call from a friend telling him that his house was being raided by the cops. First he thought of his undocumented parents, but also in the back of his mind, he thought about his friend and neighbor, Ivan. Ivan struggled with schizophrenia and everyone on the block was aware. They loved him and looked out for him. No one was ever threatened by him, even during his episodes, rejecting capitalist lies about the mentally ill.

The terror and threats came from the bosses - fear of ICE raids and police terror.  That fear was soon realized when he got home and saw out of his upstairs window that Ivan was already dead on the driveway in front of his house.  Soon after, he received a call from Petra, Ivan’s mother, asking about what happened to Ivan, asking, "Is he dead?”

Bosses' system murdered Ivan
Ivan Solis Mora was 34 years old and lived in the back house of his mother’s home in Inglewood. On September 22nd, multiple kkkops showed up to Ivan’s apartment after his brother-in-law called for mental health support. Instead of support, he was gunned down in front of family, friends, and neighbors.  
We in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) first learned of this through the local bosses’ media, claiming that a man wielding a knife was shot and killed by Inglewood cops the day before. All we had was a street name that runs for about 1.5 miles cutting through Inglewood.

Members, including a friend from the local tenant’s union, made several passes that day and based on information from passersby had narrowed it down to the intersection of Century and Grevillea. It wasn’t until the following day that we saw a home with a few candles and flowers in front. We then saw an altar with his picture and flowers in the back of their driveway where he was murdered. With the several members of the Flores family, who lost their loved one, Alex, in an eerily similar fashion nearly four years ago, we knocked on their door meeting his stepfather, Jose, and his mother, Petra.  

They were clearly devastated by their loss and also angry and ready to fight.  We learned from them that after they killed Ivan, the killer cops left his body on display for nearly 12 hours without any coverage. The family reported that their neighbors were also rightfully enraged, throwing bottles and trash at the Klan in blue. The kkkops then further intimidated the family and neighbors by breaking into their homes trying to confiscate their cell phone footage of the assassination and threatening arrest if the cell phones weren’t turned over. With many neighbors being undocumented, this was obviously terrorizing.  

Workers need communism, not kkkops
We shared our condolences and also CHALLENGEs  We pointed to a couple of articles, connecting their tragedy to the fights PLP is involved in the Bronx for Eric Duprey and in the Chicago area for Morad Kurdi and Hadi Abuatelah.  We talked about the function of the kkkops under capitalism and particularly in their role in the racist gentrification of Inglewood with the construction of two new stadiums just blocks from their home. They welcomed us, took our literature, and invited us to the protest they were planning the following day at 10am in front of the Inglewood Police Station.

It was at this rally that we first met Cesar and his parents. This is where we learned his story about what happened to Ivan and their fears. Cesar and his older brother were both recent students at the high school where one of our comrades teaches.  

Several members of the local tenant’s union and  friends of the Party also joined this rally.  A veteran comrade and member of the tenant’s union spoke, further connecting the racist police terror to the skyrocketing rents, evictions, and homelessness in Inglewood and how every local politician from the former cop, Mayor Butts, to the City Council has been complicit.  

Amanda, the sister of Alex Flores, also spoke, connecting what happened to Alex and to Ivan and also drawing out the bigger picture of capitalism. She shared what PLP has meant for their family and struggle. Another family, the mother of Marco Vazquez Jr. who witnessed her son murdered by sheriff’s three years ago also joined us.   

A physician and friend of the Party was another rally participant.  He’s been active for several years in local reform fights with a comrade and will also be going to the American Public Health Association conference with that party member.  Our comrade also spoke at the rally, connecting what happened to Ivan with the murder of Nick Burgos three years ago.  He was murdered while hospitalized at a local county hospital while in a mental health crisis. He explained how the kkkops are the armed weapon of the state that serves the interest of the bosses and how ultimately, for these murders to end and for any real justice, we have to organize for communist revolution.  The day prior, when we first met Ivan’s stepfather, Jose, he said, “What do these people want, for us to rise up in a war?”  “Yes,” the comrade said.  A class war is ultimately what it will take.

Liberal reform a dead end
These messages of support and solidarity were well received by family, neighbors, and supporters.  Our work with the Flores family, police reform group, the local high school, and tenant’s union illustrates how our line of working within mass organizations and immersing ourselves in the class struggle is essential for the growth of our Party. It also demonstrates the impact that a small group of committed fighters can make.
There is a revisionist organization, Community Control of the Police, that has also built ties with the family.

Aside from their reformist nature they are also calling for body cameras for the Inglewood police, a policy that has already failed thousands of workers murdered by kkkop. Their leader touts this dead end reform as he runs again for LA City Council.  Nonetheless, the family is already planning two other actions and we will be right there with them pointing out the inherent failures of reformism and why communist revolution led by PLP is the only solution.
In struggle!