Wildfires are regularly occurring natural disasters whose effects on workers are worsened by the neglect of capitalism. Throughout the state of California, over one thousand workers are still missing and at least 80 have been found dead in the Camp Fire in Northern California and the Woolsey and Hill fires in Southern California. Over 11,000 homes, including the majority of the town of Paradise, have been destroyed and the fires have not been fully contained.
Under communism, we would organize the working class to plan in advance for and respond collectively to the damage and destruction that ensue from natural disasters. Instead of “everyone for themselves,” our motto would be “mobilize the masses to act together.” Most of all, we would preserve and protect our environment from exploitation for profit, and design scientific policies based on the interconnection between a viable natural environment and human progress.
A Paradise lost
While California boasts to be the richest state in the country, home to tech giants like Google and Facebook and the multimillionaires of Malibu, these blazes lay bare the inherent inequality of capitalism, especially in this state, as many poor workers have been reduced to refugee status in tent cities in Walmart parking lots much like our sisters and brothers of less developed countries. (New York Times 11/18).
Moreover, while the Woolsey fire turned around 100,000 acres into a smoldering hellscape with its fast-moving fire, one neighborhood in its path was saved. It’s a gated community with multimillion-dollar homes of celebrities like musician Kanye West who called on private firefighters to save their $60 million mansion and many of the other houses in their neighborhood (Huffington Post 11/15).
Mainly retired workers on fixed incomes lives in Paradise. Most of them never received evacuation orders; those who did found gridlock as they tried to flee (Los Angeles Times, 11/14). This is the essence of capitalism—leaving workers stranded to die. We see this time and time again around the world—the earthquake in Haiti (2010), the tsunami in the Indian Ocean (2004), hurricanes Katrina (2005), Harvey (2017) and Maria (2017) in the southern U.S. states and Puerto Rico.
For decades, workers had demanded safety
The Woolsey fire started near the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) and burned part of this nuclear waste contaminated site that has yet to be cleaned up (NBC News, 11/12). Workers who live near SSFL have been campaigning for decades for the government to clean up the site, not just because of the ongoing exposure to residents, but also because of the danger that a wildfire could pose by spreading hazardous chemicals in its smoke.
In the area surrounding the Camp Fire, workers have been wearing masks when outside to protect themselves. Despite the dangerous air quality, farm workers in Ventura County are forced to continue to work in the fields picking crops. Some farms even forced their workers to speed up the picking to avoid crops being damaged by the fires (LA Magazine, 11/15).
Workers douse fires for $2/day
For the other thousands of workers’ and their communities, these blazes were covered by over 9,000 firefighters including 1,500 incarcerated, mostly Black and Latin workers. These incarcerated firefighters risk their lives to make slave wages of two dollars a day, which only increases to $1 an hour when they are actively fighting fires (New York Times, 11/15). Even with the work experience, they cannot work as firefighters when they are released because of their criminal records.
Bosses don’t prioritize health of workers and earth
According to Cal Fire the causes of these fires have yet to be determined. Many people suspect that they were caused by power company equipment failures, which happened minutes before the start of each blaze. Southern California Edison is already facing a lawsuit stating that their negligence caused the Woolsey fire (Ventura County Star, 11/19). Pacific Gas and Electric also reported issues with two high voltage power lines in the area where the Camp Fire started. (Sacramento Bee, 11/18).
Nevertheless, while it is true that forest fires are a natural phenomenon, and while the California energy corporations might have started these fires, the magnitude and intensities of these fires represent a much larger problem that has been ongoing for generations. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) was created in the late 1800’s with the sole aim of managing timber production and was the first government agency that hired university-educated agronomists and forestry experts as opposed to other government bodies that hired based on patronage. However, after the Great Idaho Fire of 1910, which burned three million acres and killed at least 85 workers, fighting forest fires was added to its mission. Nevertheless, in spite of its best intentions, the proponents of scientific forestry didn’t understand the role of fires as serving an important function in maintaining the health of forests.
For instance, shade-intolerant trees such as ponderosa pines, lodge pole pines, and giant sequoias, require periodic fires to clear areas in which they can regenerate. Once fires were suppressed, these trees were overrun by trees like the highly flammable Douglas firs which turned forests into potential giant tinderboxes. Coupled with the Great Migration west, which resulted in larger communities in forest areas, these government policies led to more people living in areas vulnerable to wildfires. With this movement, insurance companies added pressure on the USFS to continue a bad practice in order to preserve their property.
Over time, the USFS began to take on multiple missions that were often in direct contradiction representing the competing interests of real estate developers, wealthy homeowners, insurance companies, timber interests, environmentalists and aspiring firefighters. As a result, the decline in the USFS’ effectiveness now mirrors the decay in bourgeois political institutions like the U.S. Congress (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014).
Burn capitalism, build communism
Under capitalism, the ruling class doesn’t care about whether housing is built safely in areas that are prone to fires, floods, hurricanes, or other natural disasters. During times of crisis, the working class unites to help each other evacuate and to help each other rebuild. Under communism, natural disasters would be exactly that—natural. Under the leadership of the working class, we will build infrastructure and maintain natural areas to lessen the damage to neighborhoods and destruction of workers’ lives.

As a migrant “caravan” makes its dangerous trek through Mexico, capitalist bosses worldwide continue to scapegoat immigrants for the failures of the profit system. With the dwindling group still hundreds of miles away from the nearest U.S. border, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to send 15,000 or more troops with permission to shoot (Military Times, 11/1). Two weeks earlier, when the migrants approached Mexico from Guatemala, Mexican cops in riot gear greeted them with pepper spray. As they suffer from hunger, illness, and drenching downpours, these Central American refugees must also fend off the bosses’ racism and rising fascism.   
In his vicious effort to divide workers, Trump followed up with a threat to end birthright citizenship in the U.S. Though it’s unlikely that the Racist-in-Chief will be able to deliver on this promise in the near future, the constant barrage of racist propaganda plays into the hands of all bosses. Whatever their internal disagreements, all capitalist rulers need to weaken working-class fightback. They all need super-profits from immigrant workers’ labor. They all promote rotten nationalist ideas.
Workers unite
Who is in the caravan? In the runup to the November 6 midterm elections, Trump played to his racist base. He warned of an “invasion” by gang members and “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners”—a conflation of racist lies about Latin and Muslim workers. The reality is very different, as the Washington Post (10/23) observed:
Women push babies in strollers next to clusters of teenage boys. At night, small families sleep on the ground next to middle-aged men smoking cigarettes. One man walks with his 3-month-old puppy named Muñeca on a red leash…. A little girl carries a stuffed koala on her head. A pregnant woman stops to take a break in the shade. A young couple kisses after a rainstorm. A 6-month-old girl wears a yellow dress that reads, “Little baby dancer.” A man wears a shirt he bought in Arizona, before being deported for the sixth time.
In contrast to the bosses’ relentless assault, the working class has rallied to the migrants’ cause. Poor Mexican workers have donated food, water, clothing, blankets. Churches and recreation centers have offered shelter for sleep. Volunteer nurses are treating their blistered feet and respiratory infections. “The responsibility of feeding, clothing and sheltering several thousand migrants has been embraced by the small Mexican towns along the route, with residents jumping into charity mode as if they are responding to a natural disaster” (Washington Post, 10/26).
Workers around the world are supporting our immigrant sisters and brothers. In February, a 63-year-old restaurant owner in Bosnia and Herzegovina shut down his small business to provide 80,000 free meals to Syrian refugees. “They’re people who are seeking refuge,” he says. “They want to work; they want to provide for their families just like us” (Al Jazeera, 10/23).
Many workers understand that national borders benefit only the bosses and the profit system’s exploitation. The working class has no borders!
Imperialism:  root cause of mass migrations
The caravan originated in Honduras on October 13, and soon attracted other migrants—seeking safety in numbers—from El Salvador and Guatemala. It takes a lot to move people to leave their homes. In this case, as noted by Pueblos sin Fronteras, the group that organized the caravan, the push came from “decades of political, economic and military intervention by the United States and of negligence, coups d’état, insecurity, corruption and impunity by Central America’s governments” (Politifact, 10/22).
In advanced finance capitalist nations, bosses are driven to expand beyond their borders to dominate markets, resources, and labor in other countries by force. This is what is known as imperialism, and it lies at the heart of the current crisis in Central America. The workers in this region have felt the imperialist boot on their neck for well over a century. In the absence of a mass working-class movement to challenge the blood-sucking imperialist bosses and the local rulers who sell out to them, the situation now is especially unbearable.
In 2009, a military coup in Honduras paved the way for the current fascist government of President Juan Orlando Hernández and skyrocketing murder and poverty rates. While U.S. President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, refused to formally recognize the coup, they maintained the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid. To this day, several hundred U.S. troops remain stationed at Soto Cano Air Base, under the pretense of “fighting the drug war” and providing “humanitarian aid” (The Conversation, 10/25).
Meanwhile, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), engineered by the U.S. bosses, has devastated economies and job prospects for workers in El Salvador and Guatemala. Since the passing of CAFTA in 2005, U.S. imports to Central America have increased by more than 80 percent, or nearly $15 billion dollars (Telesur, 3/1/16). This massive influx of U.S. agricultural goods has destroyed any chance of smaller domestic farmers to compete in the market. Millions of rural workers have been uprooted. They must migrate simply to survive.
Worldwide crisis of workers on the move
The migrant crisis isn’t limited to the Americas. All over the world, workers are escaping imperialist-driven civil wars, racist persecution, indiscriminate violence, and economic exploitation. The number of refugee workers worldwide exceeds 68 million, roughly the population of France (UNHCR, 5/15).
Among those recently caught up in the bosses’ lethal chaos are workers from Syria and West and Central Africa. The capitalist crisis has brought them to the doorstep of the European Union (EU). After initially “accepting” some of these workers, the European rulers quickly showed their racist colors. They essentially closed their borders while pressuring Middle Eastern and African countries to stop migrants en route (The Guardian, 7/7/17).
As the imperialist super-powers move toward a broader global conflict, and the global economic crisis intensifies, we can expect even more violent anti-immigrant racism. It will be up to the international working class—to fight back.
The fight of the workers has no racist borders!
The bosses’ assaults against migrant workers is an attack on our entire class. The profit system survives through exploitation and racist, anti-worker violence and terror. It cannot be reformed; it must be destroyed! PLP calls on the international working class to build a communist movement to seize state power from the capitalists. We call on workers everywhere to organize to support our migrant sisters and brothers with food, shelter, and safety. And to soldiers in the U.S. military: Refuse all orders to shoot our sisters and brothers!
All workers have fundamental common interests that unite them. Only a communist revolution led by a mass, international Progressive Labor Party can end this capitalist nightmare. We call on all workers, from Central America to Syria, from South Sudan to China, to help us build this fight. Join Progressive Labor Party!  We have a world to win.

Brooklyn, November 5—Over 50 mostly Black and Latin high school students walked out of their classes and staged an energetic protest in front of the John Jay Campus. They were protesting the racist conditions at the Secondary School for Journalism, one of five schools in the building. that were destroying their education and making it difficult for seniors to fulfill their graduation requirements. The students were fed up and they reached out to students at the other schools in the building and organized a walkout.
The New York City Department of Education (DOE)  has mismanaged this struggling school for years. Principals have been rotated almost every year over the last 5 years. One year they even started the school year with no principal. The DOE tried to have the Secondary School for Law principal at the time keep Journalism afloat.
 The students at this school have endured disaster after disaster and have had enough. They organized this walkout specifically protesting the current principal, Livingston Hilaire.
The latest complaint is an online learning curriculum called Summit Learning. Hilaire hastily forced this online learning website on his students without much thought or staff training. Now many students sit multiple periods per day staring at a computer screen. Many seniors are worried about graduation, as they are not enrolled in classes they need to meet the New York State Graduation Requirements. When students and parents complained to Hilaire, he basically responded with the standard top down response of “too bad this is what we are doing.”
H.S. Students shutting it down!
During the walkout students demanded Hilaire come outside to answer their demands he was nowhere to be found. Principal Hilaire is just a cog in the wheel of the racist system of education that capitalism has to offer the working class. Our youth deserve more than a dumbed down online learning curriculum that stymies their love of learning.Here is what some of the student protesters had to say:
— The walk out was an act of civil disobedience a walk for our right to receive a proper education. The principal of the Secondary School for Journalism failed to advocate for the students who were treated wrong. A majority of the seniors felt they were mistreated, and the principal did not help them stay on track to graduate, refusing to give students classes they need in order to graduate.
—  It was raining but that didn’t stop the students fighting for what they believe. It wasn’t organized but it was strong and loud and it was their fight for justice no matter the consequences they were fighting for something they believe in.
— The walkout was great! It takes so much courage to go against your school and fight for your rights and I’m extremely happy that the kids from journalism did so. When close to no teachers are defending you it can easily get discouraging but as a school we stuck together and showed that although there are five different schools in one building, an injustice to one is an injustice to all. We rallied outside of the school for around 45 minutes calling for change. Some kids were threatened with suspension and other disciplinary actions but made the decision that fighting for the right to an education was much more important. After the kids raised their complaints with principal Hilaire, they were told if they were to do the walkout no other school would advocate for you because they don’t care about you. With this, the students were infuriated and told everyone else in the building. As a collective, we all supported journalism in their fight for justice!
As these students rallied in the rain they chanted “Summit will plummet” and “How do you spell racist? DOE” and “Hilaire come out” and “We are not cowards”
Youth leaders in the fight against racism
When one of the students returned to class, the teacher asked why they had walked out. After hearing what was happening at Journalism and why many students were supporting the students there, the teacher said “And that’s why I’m not even mad.” Then the other students also asked a lot of questions. This was at Park Slope Collegiate where there has been a lot of struggle against racism and segregation. And the teachers at Park Slope Collegiate fight hard and work hard for their students. We need more of that. Students, teachers and parents uniting to fight for an anti-racist education and also an anti-racist world. That would be communism.

NEWARK, NJ, November 7—Anger is beginning to rising inside the working class in Newark. For the second time in three years, Newark’s students and working class residents are plagued by lead poisoning in their water. As in Flint, Michigan, Cleveland,and other cities with large Black populations, the contamination of drinking water exposes the racist nature of capitalism. And, since high levels of lead in drinking water are a threat to all students and workers, this disgraceful neglect reminds us that racism is poisonous for the entire working class.
The Progressive Labor Party demands that the bosses pay to guarantee clean drinking water. We also know that this is just one symptom of a racist capitalist system that will continue to damage the working class. Ultimately, we must smash capitalism with communist revolution if we want to ensure that future generations of workers have a society that looks after their needs, including  having healthy drinking water and clean air.
Urban areas tend to have homes and water delivery systems built between the late 19th and the mid 20th centuries. Back then, lead was commonly used in piping, paint and gasoline. Major U.S. companies like DuPont and Standard Oil reaped billions in profits from lead-based products. Although lead has been known to be toxic for over 100 years, its use was not banned until the 1970s.
Newark city officials knew of the presence of lead in city water when 30 Newark schools were found to have elevated levels in 2016. In 2017, when homes were tested as well, it was revealed that 10 percent of those tested had lead at twice the level allowed under the Safe Water Drinking Act. Twenty percent of the homes were found to have levels of lead that max the federal limit.Children and pregnant women who drink water with these levels of lead are in danger of developing brain and nerve damage. Lead intake causes a host of other health problems (including high blood pressure) in both adults and children.
We have a basic right to drink clean water. But it’s going to take a fight to get quick action and to guarantee that the Newark clean up is paid for by the wealthy corporations and not struggling workers.
Can’t trust the politicians
After months of denying the existence of a problem, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and his administration are now forced to admit that there is a lead crisis. But who’s going to pay for the infrastructure repair? Not the companies that profited from selling toxic products like lead,   and not the corporations currently getting billions in tax reductions. No, the politicians want working class residents, of Newark to pay the bill. We say hell no!
As the mid-term elections approached, the Democrats told us that they were our friends. However, this crisis shows that both [Democrats and Republicans] parties are part of the problem. The Baraka administration withheld information regarding the water contamination. It was only the current lawsuit brought by the Natural Resource Defense Council that forced them to admit there is a crisis.  Current U.S Senators Bob Menendez and Cory Booker (the former Mayor, who is also responsible for the water crisis) voted to spend $700 billion on the military budget, but have not said a word on the current lead crisis in Newark. With friends like these, who needs enemies!     
Transforming anger into action
Since the walkouts of 2015, many of the high school students in Newark have been relatively quiet.  Yet this crisis has awakened some students to organize,  talk to community members and create videos to expose the lead crisis.  While it is still in the beginning stages, this gives us hope that the students can once again give leadership to a struggle that greatly affects their lives.
As a result of the lawsuit, Baraka is now being forced to hold town halls across the city about the water crisis.  At one town hall a worker got up and asked Baraka why he continued to tell the city that the water was safe when they knew lead levels were rising.  Another questioned why residents in the East Ward neighborhood were not given water filters when it was known that some homes had high lead levels.  His only response was that the “data” is wrong. While Baraka is still able to get away with these responses, many are beginning to see through the illusion of Baraka as a “radically progressive” politician.
Only a worker-run society can meet our needs
The only way that working people can ensure that vital resources like water are safe is to run the world. Politicians spend billions on elections to convince us that only they can run things. And look at the results: low-wage jobs, racism and sexism, murderous wars, and unhealthy environment! Taking power from the capitalists and building communism will be a long struggle, but it will save hundreds of millions of lives. Join us in the fight!