HAWAII, August 15—Real estate developers, bankers, and tourist billionaires were exploiting the natural beauty of Maui and the labor of local workers. Seventy thousand visitors were on the island on any given day. Everything was cool, right?
In fact, there was plenty to worry about. An initial fire broke out on August 8 at 12.22 a.m. in Upcountry Maui. Another brush fire was reported near the Lahaina elementary school at 6:37 a.m. Subsequent fires started nearby. Horrific flames began tearing through the small town just after 5 p.m., lasting through the night. What seems like a disaster of nature is actually the result of the failure of capitalism to safeguard lives and the environment.
The only way to break out of traps like this is to end the capitalist system which sets the stage for the wars, disasters and tragedies we experience all over the globe. And for this, a revolutionary communist party is needed. Progressive Labor Party is a workers’ party, organizing to build a movement for communist revolution worldwide; everyone who wants to see this system end once and for all should join. Disasters like the Lahaina inferno should be a wake-up call.
State, media, and business neglect our class
Actually, the government was aware of the potential for disaster. Local scientists had published warnings well in advance of the inferno that took too many lives and disappeared 1,300 people. Hurricane Lane in 2018 was the immediate cause of multiple fires on Maui and Oahu. Scientists from the University of Hawaii (UH) analyzed all the causes, warning anyone who would listen of the dangers ahead. See their warnings in “Fire and Rain: The Legacy of Hurricane Lane in Hawaii” (June, 2020).
Vast tracts of grasses cover thousands of acres of unmanaged land in Hawaii. This makes the islands vulnerable to fires. This should, of course, raise serious questions. Why was the land around Lahaina unmanaged? Who actually owns that land? Why was it abandoned to the point where human life was placed at such grave risk?
Disaster prevention did not seem to be on the agenda for the state’s well-paid officials. An ecosystem fire specialist at UH had for years warned that a growing acreage of invasive, fire-prone grasses and brush had overtaken the abandoned agricultural lands once used for sugar and pineapple plantations.
The media and opportunistic lawyers seeking clients seem eager to only blame Hawaiian Electric Company for the disaster. Power lines blown over by strong winds might have sparked the fire, and the company hadn’t bothered to invest in preventive systems. However, there is plenty of blame to go around. It should be clear that the problem was more basic than a few dozen fallen power poles.
The cause is capitalism
The fundamental cause of the tragedy is the economic and social system we are trapped in—the system that leads to dangerously unmanaged land next to over-developed tourist facilities. Capitalism produces a government that cares not about protecting the lives of workers. In fact, it is an obstacle we must overthrow, fight for revolution, and build a new society based on communist principles.
It is clear that Maui has been overdeveloped only to benefit the owners of a multi-billion-dollar tourist industry. Hawaii’s Department of Business Development and Tourism reported that, during the first half of the year, Maui drew more than 1.48 million visitors, or 30 percent of all Hawaii tourists. Visitor spending was $3.5 billion in the same period. That is clearly enough capital for adequate fire-prevention and sufficient fire-fighting personnel and equipment.
No escape from a global system
Despite the priorities of profit, enough of historic Lahaina, with its breathtaking views of offshore islands, remained to attract visitors seeking to briefly escape the capitalist rat race. But, we are trapped in a global system from which there is no escape. Surviving Lahaina workers and visitors have learned a bitter lesson.
A 74-year-old survivor doesn’t blame firefighters for not warning him in advance. He said a long line of politicians allowed fire stations to be understaffed. Firefighting efforts were hampered by a small staff — 65 firefighters at most working at any given time in Maui. The Fire Chief pointed out that they're responsible for three whole islands — Maui, Molokai and Lanai. They had 13 fire engines and two ladder trucks, all designed for on-road use. The department doesn't have any off-road vehicles, which are needed to attack brush fires thoroughly before they reach populated areas.
Maui County’s 2020 Hazard Mitigation Plan identified 132,000 acres with burnable vegetation requiring long-term management with practices such as those used in agriculture. Seventy miles of fire breaks and 90 miles of fuel breaks were needed. However, under capitalism, politicians are induced to put profit first, public safety second. Even though the potential for destruction far outweighed the cost of prevention, political leaders were encouraged by big business to keep taxes down and budgets low.
It is important to learn why this failure occurred. Even more important is the need to learn how the capitalist system set the stage for catastrophe, and why and how this system must be brought to an end.
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Students, not suspects! Fight racist policing in schools
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- 17 August 2023 130 hits
Prince George’s County, MD. August 12—There’s a new Black “sheriff” in Prince George’s County—Superintendent of PGC Schools, Millard House, who quickly outed himself as serving ruling-class interests. His first racist policy is putting metal detectors in county high schools and some middle schools and requiring clear backpacks for students. As if having cops in the schools wasn’t enough, he wants to perfect the racist school-to-prison pipeline! We reject our working-class students being treated like suspects and criminals!
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls on all readers to join the fight to defeat the entire capitalist system which generates systemic racism like these policies, which are aimed at weakening our unity and terrorizing our class, the working class. Our class needs to take power through communist revolution, where we will determine educational policies that ensure the full development of each of us to better serve our class globally.
Quick to respond
A news article in the local Hyattsville Life and Times (HLT) newspaper alerted that House would appear at an open house at Hyattsville Middle School (HMS), so PLP members moved into action. We made protest signs and copies of the HLT article critical of the new policy. We reached out to the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) at HMS and talked to the parents at the open house, sharing the HLT article widely.
Several parents gave us their names and contact information, angry at this new racist policy. One woman who had been a student in Brooklyn when metal detectors were put in the schools was furious to learn that this is still happening. She knew firsthand how it felt to be a student treated like a criminal! PLP has been fighting this same fight in Brooklyn for years (CHALLENGE, 10/9/2020).
PLP members have helped lead anti-police terror groups in Prince George’s County for 50 years. Racist police brutality and the criminal (in)justice system are major weapons of the ruling class to kill, terrorize and intimidate our working class brothers and sisters. We have been part of the struggle to keep cops out of the schools. Today we continue the struggle for justice for William Green, murdered by police in January 2020, as the trial of this murdering cop comes up this fall.
We are spreading the word of these fights at the upcoming Greenbelt Labor Day festival on September 2 with a booth opposing the metal detector and backpack policies, while sharing copies of CHALLENGE to stress the need to build a long-term solution to racism: communist revolution!
BALTIMORE, August 3—The courts are institutionally racist, and serve the capitalist class; it’s their legal system, not ours, and it’s definitely not neutral. With this in mind, at last week’s West Wednesday rally, a member of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) explained his anger about the trial of a local squeegee worker, facing murder charges.
Last summer, a young Black man was working informally to earn tips at an intersection, asking drivers if they’d like their windshield washed. On July 7, 2022 a white motorist, Timothy Reynolds, pulled over haphazardly amidst heavy traffic, and walked across about 10 lanes of traffic with a metal bat to attack the squeegee workers. He forcefully swung at them, an immediate and deadly threat. One of the squeegee workers, in defense of himself and others, shot Reynolds, who was pronounced dead at a hospital.
A squeegee worker was jailed and charged. A PLP comrade attended his trial, along with many others, to support the squeegee worker. Two days later, our comrade—angered by what he heard and saw—spoke about it at the decade-strong West Wednesday rally, which is a weekly protest against the murder-by-kkkop of Tyrone West in 2023 & all victims of police terror.
Courts & laws defend racism
Bat-wielding Reynolds, as explained by a defense attorney, had no contact with any of the squeegee workers before getting out of his car. He was immediately in racist, attack mode, not due to any personal experience that day.
What’s more, he was 6’ 3” and weighed over 300 pounds, compared to the accused squeegee worker, who was 14 years old and probably weighed less than half as much.
One of the defense lawyers, Mr. Gordon, kept getting his legal arguments objected to—perhaps 20 times in rapid succession, and nearly always sustained by the judge—when he tried to speak about the motive for Reynold’s violence. Mr. Gordon and Judge Schiffer then had quite a battle. Gordon said instead of denying racism, we should be dismantling it.
The judge appeared to get red and said, loudly and defensively, that her blocking of his arguments was due—she claimed—to a lack of relevance, and because the remarks were inflammatory. They sure were inflammatory…to her!
It was disheartening to see—to avoid jailing the squeegee worker for many years—the jury would need to reject 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder, and manslaughter.
According to the capitalist’s laws, a finding of self-defense meant the jury had to agree the squeegee workers had retreated. What a messed up, capitalist legal system, expecting people to retreat when facing relentless, violent racism!
An article in The Sun (7/23/22), pointed out a major inequality in the outcome of such trials: “A 2013 Urban Institute analysis of FBI homicide data found that killings where the defendant was white and the victim was Black are 10 times more likely to be ruled justified than if the roles are reversed.”
On top of all that, the judge failed to instruct the jury about an important exception to the requirement for retreating. For a finding of self defense, retreat is not required if retreat would be too dangerous. If the squeegee workers had started walking away, retreat would mean their backs were vulnerable to Reynold’s deadly bat.
‘It’s all about the money’
So, yes, our comrade was deeply angered, and expressed that at West Wednesday!
The capitalist framework within which jurors must function, unfortunately, led to a conviction for manslaughter, not the worst, but still meaning up to ten years in jail. It's important to note that no prison sentence can address the racist ideas that led to this murder; capitalist "justice" is a lie!
At West Wednesday, our comrade said, “People often think the courts are neutral, that the police are neutral, that the government is neutral. But the fact of the matter is, the majority of the laws in the United States deal with property relations. And about half of one percent of the people own the vast majority of property: not just land, but businesses and machinery too: anything that can produce a profit. So the legal system is really their legal system. It’s 100 percent biased. And we saw that in this trial!”
Tyrone West’s sister, giving the major speech at that same rally, hit the nail on the head! “This is a dirty system… When you have the media portraying squeegee kids as goons, thugs, as bad people, as soon as a racist comes in town, they’re coming to attack… They have so many laws that are not right. You’ve got all these racist judges… They don’t want to address racism. It feeds this capitalist system… It’s all about the money, and that’s sad and disgusting… I just feel like we need to smash and trash this system!”
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The Soviet Union and the Comintern: Organizing the Dream of a Workers’ World
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- 17 August 2023 128 hits
Marxist communism was an international movement from the moment Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, “Working people of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Before that, the Haitian, French and American Revolutions had all included a strain of internationalism.
This dream of a workers’ world built on smashing the capitalist institutions of borders and nation-states found its first organizational form in the International Workingmen’s Association, the “First International,” founded in London in 1864 with delegates from several European nations, who drafted Marx to write its program.
A fundamental split between communists and anarchists (in shorthand, Marx and Bakunin, the red and the black) led to Marxists forming the “Second International” (1889-1916), which floundered during World War I because most socialists abandoned internationalism and backed their own capitalist governments in that war.
The Bolsheviks, who not only opposed all capitalist armies in World War I but created a social revolution in the very midst of that war, revived the dream of a workers’ world by backing the “Third International,” the Comintern or Communist International (1919-1943), almost immediately after taking power in Russia, and while still fighting the capitalist expeditionary forces invading Russia to end the revolution.
Defying patriotism, birthing internationalism
The Comintern defied bosses’ patriotism everywhere, condemned the betrayal of internationalism by the Social Democratic parties of the Second International, and called on workers to fight for their class, not their country. It was an organization of communist parties aligned with the Soviet revolution. They planned to take power as the Bolsheviks had in as many regions as possible, unified by the same political thinking and in a single disciplined alliance of all the world’s communist parties.
Unlike the First and Second Internationals, the Comintern had a center and a foundation in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Soviet Union for short), the first workers’ state. The Soviet Union was NOT a “nation” on the bourgeois model, but a union of many socialist republics, regardless of nationality, formed from the huge polyglot territory that had been Tsarist Russia. The very name of the USSR, refused any national name or identity, and implicitly was confined to no one region. It was an indefinitely expanding collection of states where communist workers took power, in principle extending to the whole world.
Because the USSR’s workers’ state existed and defied all efforts to overthrow it, the Comintern gave a newly powerful organizational form to Marx’s dream that “Workers have no country; their country is the entire world.” The USSR was never Russian merely, but “Soviet”—a collective form of government by the working class which could be a model for communist organization of society anywhere in the world.
The Comintern was a major achievement of the Bolshevik Revolution. When one of the Comintern parties, the Chinese Communist Party, established another workers’ state in a second huge area of the world, the dream of a workers’ world looked closer than ever. But the Comintern was never revived, and today both of those gigantic workers’ states have reverted to capitalism with a vengeance. That story of tragic loss includes the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. It was a concession to the capitalist allies during World War II. The communist parties agreed to suspend communist organizing for social revolution in the allied countries.
The failures and contradictions of the old movement
The Progressive Labor Party believes that a further organizational step needs to be taken—the abandoning of national or nation-state-based communist parties for a single international democratic-centralist party to which all revolutionary communists belong. If we want to smash all borders and the very idea of the nation-state, then our organizing weapon, our communist party, must from the get-go incorporate that principle and refuse to be confined by national borders in its organizing. The USSR and the Comintern contained this idea in principle, but nationalism as an ideology and a culture was too powerful within the communist movement for our comrades of that era, or of the era of the Chinese Revolution, to overcome.
Today the capitalists themselves have created a world more international in social production, distribution, and communication than it has ever been. A communist state or “Soviet” established throughout many regions of the world by revolutionary struggle is more than ever a possibility because of this “globalizing” development of the capitalist system. Capitalist classes still hang on to the nation-state, however, much more than international forms like the United Nations. The capitalists need the nation-state as the basis of their rule by armed force. It is their state monopoly of violence, which they use against workers and against competing capitalists.
It remains for us as communist workers of every country, of the whole world, to organize ourselves based on a single “Soviet,” idea and to struggle in a single international revolutionary party for that further realization of the old dream of a workers’ world.
When our comrades of the future succeed, it may well be again, as the Bolshevik and Chinese comrades found, in the ruins left by another barbaric global war. War between nations is itself one of the worst – and inevitable -- consequences of the capitalist system. Part of the dream of a workers’ world, made so visible to us by the Bolshevik Revolution, is the end of the wars the capitalists’ system of nation-states has always brought with it.
One world, one party fighting directly for communism
The Second International abandoned internationalism under the stress of World War I., and the Comintern eventually did the same thing, in part under the stress of World War II. They capitulated to nationalism. How many more such wars, and such betrayals, can we bear? Worker-soldiers of ALL armies must be organized by revolutionaries belonging to a single world party, even during a war as the Bolsheviks and the Chinese comrades did in their national armies.
It will be those workers with guns in their hands who build a new and lasting communist international. When they do, they will remember the great step forward towards internationalism taken by the Bolshevik Revolution. We communists of today in the PLP salute the Comintern, and will work in a single unified international party to realize its noble dream.
The fight for African resources sharpens
BBC, 8/6–Niger has become the latest country in West Africa where the army has seized control, following Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Chad - all former French colonies. Since 1990, a striking 78% of the 27 coups in sub-Saharan Africa have occurred in Francophone states leading some commentators to ask whether France - or the legacy of French colonialism - is to blame? Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, who was named prime minister by the military junta in Mali in September 2022, launched a scathing attack on France. Criticising "neocolonialist, condescending, paternalist and vengeful policies"...
Anti-French vitriol has also flourished in Burkina Faso, where the military government ended a long-standing accord that allowed French troops to operate in the country in February, giving France one month to remove its forces...François-Xavier Verschave, a prominent French economist, coined the term Françafrique to refer to a neocolonial relationship hidden by "the secret criminality in the upper echelons of French politics and economy". These ties, he alleged, resulted in large sums of money being "misappropriated".
Chinese and U.S. imperialists develop analyses to justify war
Foreign Affairs, July/August–In March, at the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood at the door of the Kremlin to bid his friend farewell. Xi told his Russian counterpart, “Right now, there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” The Chinese leadership, from Xi on down, believes that the global architecture that was erected in the aftermath of World War II is becoming irrelevant and that attempts to preserve it are futile…Chinese leaders see the United States as the principal threat to their survival and have developed a hypothesis to explain their adversary’s actions. Beijing believes that Washington is responding to domestic polarization and its loss of global power by ramping up its competition with China. U.S. leaders, according to this thinking, have decided that it is only a matter of time before China becomes more powerful than the United States, which is why Washington is trying to pit Beijing against the entire democratic world.
Workers in Libya continue to suffer after NATO attack
Al Jazeera, 8/14–Clashes have broken out in the Libyan capital Tripoli, residents said, after the reported seizure of a powerful armed faction commander by a rival force…Monday’s clashes are already the worst to hit Tripoli for months, though there has been sporadic violence between armed factions in some other parts of northwest Libya in recent weeks. “We have heard gunfire for almost two hours now and we do not know what will happen. We fear for our safety,” said one of the residents in Furnaj district late on Monday…Libya has had little peace or security since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising, and control has been divided between warring eastern and western factions since 2014. While there has been a ceasefire since 2020, there is no sign of a lasting political solution.
Another kkkop assault in Kenosha
AP News, 8/11–Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, have launched an internal investigation after a video posted to social media appears to show an officer punching a Black man the officer mistakenly believed was involved in a hit-and-run crash…Police said that witnesses told them they saw two Black men and a Black woman flee toward an Applebee’s restaurant. One witness said the woman was carrying a child, according to police…The officers tried to take the baby from the man and arrest him. The man yelled that he hadn’t done anything wrong and officers should let him go. The video shows that after the officers removed the baby from his arms, they threw him to the ground and an officer began punching him as he ordered the man to put his hands behind his back. Officers then discovered the people responsible for the crash in the restaurant’s bathroom…Police said the man who was punched wasn’t responsible for the crash but tried to leave in defiance of officers’ orders and resisted them.
