BROOKLYN, October 1—Progressive Labor Party and friends of a local community organization decried liberal fascist Mayor Erick Adams’s new ordinance to evict migrant families.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, after a rainstorm paralyzed the whole city of NYC (see page 4), we marched the streets of Bushwick near a shelter, chanting slogans both in English and Spanish in this integrated neighborhood.

We chanted slogans such as, “workers united will never be defeated” and “immigrants yes and evictions no.”
Our communist politics were well received by workers, and many took both the CHALLENGE and leaflets, and some young people briefly joined the march and chanted with us. This shows that no matter the condition, no matter the location, there are antiracists everywhere.

Once at the shelter, we gave speeches and chanted in front of the shelter, calling out the savage capitalist system as the cause, which needs to be destroyed and replaced by communism.
We got harassed by security. Some of the migrants were a little scared to show their faces on the window because of the harassment they go through by the cops.

We had also learned that a big portion of the migrants had already been evicted the night before and had been kicked out in the streets in the pouring rain that Governor Kathy Hohcul called “life-threatening.” Mayor Adams has been seeking to suspend the “right to shelter” law at a time when the City has the most needs to house people. These politicians’ decisions—Republicans and Democrats—are driven by profit needs, not workers’ needs.

This putrid racism displayed today is what capitalism has to offer to families already terrorized by the profit system (see page 2). A system that literally puts families into the streets in the middle of storms and floods deserve to be drowned. Smash all borders! See more next issue!

In Part One of this five-part series, we looked at impacts of climate change over the past year.  CHALLENGE considered the September 17 climate march and analyzed its weaknesses. Part Two considers how the continued use of fossil fuels under capitalism puts the survival of humanity at risk.
The amount of carbon dioxide (the main gas generated by the burning of fossil fuels or wood) has been rising since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s. Over the past 70 years, the Earth’s temperature has risen steadily each decade (see graph). Small changes in the average global temperature can have major impacts.

Despite pledges by the world’s capitalists to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the summer of  2023  was the hottest on record. In 2015, capitalist bosses from nearly two hundred countries signed the Paris Agreement, which targeted a limit for global warming by 2100 of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, and the latest climate models project that we’ll pass 1.5 degrees by the mid-2030s (new.stanford.edu, 1/30). Even if all the big-emitting nations (led by China and the U.S.) fulfilled their short-term emissions cut commitments, temperatures will rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius (climateactiontracker.org). The consequences? A “new normal” of devastating weather events, from mega-hurricanes and killer floods to raging wildfires and drought.  As United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutterres said, “We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing” (theguardian.com, 11/7/22). More recently he added, “Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with, with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet”(theguardian.com, 9/7).

Workers protest, bosses burn more oil
A wave of mass demonstrations is demanding an end to the expansion of fossil fuel and a phase-out of existing gas, oil, and coal installations.  At present, however, financing of fossil fuel exploration, development, and use continues to rise. In the United States, consumption of energy derived from fossil fuels increased by more than 2 percent in 2022. Britain has reopened coal mines in the name of “energy security” after the war in Ukraine disrupted energy markets. On September 27, it approved an enormous oil and gas project in the North Sea, “ignoring warnings from scientists and the United Nations that countries must stop developing new fossil fuel resources if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change” (Associated Press, 9/27).  After U.S. President Joe Biden promised to block further oil exploration in Alaska during his 2020 campaign, his administration approved the massive Willow oil project.

Left to the capitalists, the odds of shutting down the carbon economy in time–and sustaining a liveable planet–are slim and none. In the U.S., Biden and the liberal Democrats–representing the Big Fascists of finance capital–are controlled by the “supermajor” energy companies and the multinational banks that finance them and reap huge profits in return. Meanwhile, the Small Fascists fronting the Republican Party are bought and paid for by domestic energy companies, notably Koch Industries and coal-mining giant Peabody Energy. In schools, children are taught the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide but are assured that we can stop it by recycling or buying electric vehicles or installing solar panels and heat pumps for our homes. The underlying message is to blame individual workers for climate change and to hide the truth: that global warming is the product of the anarchy of capitalism and its drive for maximum short-term profit. Only a communist society run by and for the international working class can balance workers’ need for energy with the need to preserve a healthy and habitable world.

Workers want change, bosses want profits
One recent example of the capitalist bosses’ bad faith is their decision to hold the next United Nations climate summit this December in Dubai, in the oil-soaked United Arab Emirates. The conference president will be Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, which is committed to exploit fossil fuels through the year 2100 and most likely beyond.

The October 4 CHALLENGE noted that the Climate Week demonstration drew more than 75,000 marchers, including significant numbers of Black and Latin workers and youth  and members of labor unions. Some welcomed the demand of  “System Change, Not Climate Change.” The march was bracketed by sit-ins at banks and museums that take money from fossil fuel companies, as courageous workers put their bodies in entryways to draw attention to the catastrophe now unfolding before our eyes. This year alone,  devastating wildfires have consumed forests from Canada and the U.S. to Spain and Brazil. The fires poison the air hundreds, even thousands of miles away. As forests dry out and rain patterns shift, climate change has increased the likelihood of these fires by 50 percent.

Millions of workers and students are fighting back against climate change and Big Oil. Fridays for Future is a youth-led international organization in 7,500 cities across the globe, from Sweden and Belgium to  Peru, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Sierra Leone. Extinction Rebellion, based in Britain, calls for civil disobedience to push governments to act. While many participants in these liberal-led reform groups sincerely want to see ”system change,” most do not yet approach the crisis from a class perspective.

The only climate solution is communist revolution
We must win workers to the understanding that the only climate solution is communist revolution, and that only a revolutionary communist party–Progressive Labor Party–can smash capitalism and its rotten, climate-poisoning ideas. It’s not enough to appeal to governments for stricter environmental regulations or to pressure banks to stop financing fossil fuel companies. Communists challenge the basic premises of capitalism: the need for money, the exploitation of labor, the extraction of commodities in the interests of inter-imperialist rivalry.

Many of the participants at the September 17 march would be receptive to this message if given a chance. It’s up to us to share it with them, to develop personal ties and build a base within these mass organizations.

PLP aims to lead the international working class to smash capitalism and replace it with a worker-run society. In future articles in this series, we will challenge the notion that solar and wind power alone can replace fossil fuels and consider the possibilities to advance the clean energy transition with nuclear energy while also limiting growth.

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.

U.S. agents struggle to keep Colombia in the fold of their decaying empire
Foreign Affairs, 9/13–For many observers of Colombia, it is hard to imagine that a former member of M-19, the guerrilla group that waged war against the state for nearly two decades, could attain the presidency. Yet in 2022...Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 organizer…ascended to the country’s highest office. Despite Petro’s populist and at times anti-U.S. rhetoric, the Biden administration has since made overtures to the new president…the United States may be hoping to prevent Colombia from falling into China’s orbit. But as Petro begins his second year in office, Washington’s charm offensive is yielding diminishing returns. For one thing, Plan Colombia, a security and antidrug cooperation package that has been the linchpin of the U.S.-Colombian relationship for nearly a quarter century, looks increasingly obsolete. Signed in 2000, the joint initiative helped quell Colombia’s guerrilla war and arguably prevented the country from becoming a failed state, and it has been backed by more than $12 billion in funding…But Petro has opposed Plan Colombia since its inception…

Haiti-D.R. diplomacy rises to level of guns and tanks
Al Jazeera, 9/14–The Dominican Republic will close its entire border with neighbouring Haiti later this week, President Luis Abinader has announced, as a conflict over the construction of a canal from a shared river worsens. “Unfortunately, they left us no alternative but to take drastic measures,” Abinader told reporters…He added that even if the Haitian government…could not control the construction of the canal, his country could. “We have been prepared for weeks, not only for this situation but also for a possible peace force in Haiti,” Abinader said.

Officials in the Dominican Republic say the project will divert water from the Massacre River, which runs in both countries, and violate the 1929 Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Arbitration…Haiti’s government had said on Wednesday that it met with Dominican officials in the Dominican Republic that day to try to resolve the canal dispute…On Thursday, the Dominican Republic said the looming border closure was set to include all land, sea and air routes. It also said it deployed a further 20 armoured vehicles to a military camp on the border.

U.S. and Chinese bosses continue fight over who gets Pakistan
The Intercept, 8/9–The U.S. State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document obtained by The Intercept. The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster…The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

French bosses back down slightly on mission “Occupy Niger”
France24, 9/14–"France welcomes the liberation of Stephane Jullien," said a spokeswoman for the [French foreign] ministry. Jullien, a businessman long based in Niger, had a role representing the interests of French expatriates at the French embassy. He was arrested on September 8 amid deteriorating ties that followed a coup in the former French colony in West Africa. France had announced his detention on Tuesday and called for his "immediate release". Relations between Niger and France went swiftly downhill after the July 26 putsch, which ousted French ally president Mohamed Bazoum. Paris, which has about 1,500 troops deployed in Niger…has stood by Bazoum and declared the post-coup authorities illegitimate. There has been speculation that France will be forced into a full military pullout from Niger, with a French defence ministry source saying last week that the French army was holding talks with Niger's military over withdrawing "elements" of its presence.