“The Forgotten Space” is a poetic, visually stunning, and unabashedly anti-capitalist documentary about the global transport system. The film opens aboard a massive cargo container ship carrying products from low-wage manufacturing and farming centers to major ports in Europe and the United States. 

The seas are the pathways over which 100,000 ships, manned by 1.5 million seamen, deliver materials and goods worth trillions of dollars to a web of manufacturers (like Foxconn in China), importers (like Walmart and Apple), and banks and financiers on Wall Street and elsewhere. “The Forgotten Space” interviews the normally invisible people who make and transport the goods, rather than the billionaires who get both the credit and the profits.

The film depicts how the entire transport system of capitalism relies on cheap labor: factory workers in China; Korean and Indonesian workers who service the cargo ships; low-paid truck drivers at the huge port in Los Angeles. 

As economist Minqi Li explains, capitalism relentlessly seeks to lower production costs by cutting wages and benefits and also by demanding lower taxes and minimal environmental regulations, giving it freedom to pollute the oceans. 

The cargo container — a standardized metal box that can be moved from ship to train or truck — was developed by U.S. shippers who were eager to cut the number of dockworkers required to load cargo. Millions of containers now travel the globe’s oceans, a watery conveyor belt that moves 90 percent of the world’s cargo. Once they reach their destinations, trains and trucks bring their contents to stores. 

Meanwhile, farms in Holland are uprooted to make room for the tracks the railroads run on, while the entire village of Doel is demolished to expand the port of Antwerp, Belgium. Nothing appears to stand in the way of global capitalism as it moves factories abroad and shunts industrial workers to the unemployment lines or to stock shelves at retail stores.

Yet Minqi Li argues that something does stand in the way. The workers of China are now demanding higher wages and benefits, with a record number of strikes and job actions. Li asks, What happens to capitalism when it runs out of workers it can super-exploit? 

His comments have a certain deterministic ring, as though capitalism will somehow fall apart when wages rise globally. Yet the film — which the filmmakers declared to be “openly Marxist” — concludes by suggesting, “The lowly crew must seize the helm.” 

Indeed, only when the working class destroys capitalism with a communist revolution, and takes over the global economy, can it begin to plan a society that treats people humanely.

MUMBAI, INDIA, February 28 — Millions of workers in eleven major unions and 5,000 smaller ones went on a 24-hour general strike in one of the largest walkouts in the country’s history. They were demanding protection against soaring prices of vital commodities, more jobs, an end to privatization and to government anti-labor policies and a rise in the minimum wage.

The strike was virtually total in transportation in Kerala state, with buses, taxis and rickshaws off the roads. Striking banking workers halted all financial transactions in the states of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh. In Mumbai, the country’s financial center, the shutdown in banking was complete.

While the bosses and government were attacking even a one-day strike, it remains to be seen if workers will begin to realize that they need an extended walkout to get any real results. While the ruling classes always refer to India as the world’s “largest democracy,” the mass poverty and unemployment that exists here exposes the hypocrisy of that claim. Real solutions to workers’ problems here will only come when the working class takes power, led by a revolutionary communist party.

NEW YORK CITY, February 16 — “How do you spell racist? DOE!”

A young comrade led over 500 people in a series of such anti-racist chants as billionaire Bloomberg’s Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) used their state power and had their Department of Education (DOE) close 33 largely black and Latino schools for “underperformance.”

PLP members’ exposure of capitalism as the real underperformer was well-received among co-workers there, as well as among passers-by who took over 300 leaflets containing the above headline.

NYC teacher union mis-leader Mike Mulgrew led a rally outside, trying to “boycott” the sharp struggle inside where angry masses had gathered in the high school auditorium. His effort to lead folks away from the panel meeting flopped. He made a lackluster cameo appearance once the defeat of his boss-serving ploy became apparent to all.

Comrade Indicts Profit System

Only PL had students actively leading chants. At one point, the crowd demanded to “let the students speak.” Then our young comrade took center stage to give the only speech that named capitalism as the culprit. We met this young leader several years ago and she has been schooled in the fight against racist school closures. We need more youth like her.

The manipulation by Bloomberg and his henchmen emerged when black families appeared to speak up in favor of their charter schools which they see as a slight improvement over the abject failures passing for institutions of learning citywide. This set-up pitted them against other black and Latino families whose children overwhelmingly attend the public schools slated for closing. Rather than fighting each other, all working-class families must unite against the rulers who are destroying any opportunity for their children to make their way in this rotten society.

The purpose of the bosses’ school system is to reproduce the racist class structure of U.S. society. The main function the bosses have for all teachers — public and charter — is to assist in this massive and ongoing “sorting” of human beings to keep the social pyramid of capitalism intact. From K to 12 and beyond we are expected to inculcate each generation with patriotism and passivity.  

Charter schools, with the federal government behind them, are spreading like a cancer, functionally breaking the presence of unions in education, a way to make them weaker than ever. These Charter Schools are just another source of profit on the backs of the public sector. These attacks, with all their attendant dislocation and chaos, are focused on black and Latino working-class communities.

The assault on teachers, students and parents reflects the heightened state of siege in which the rulers have placed the workers since the demise of the old communist movement. Workers’ revolution is not on the agenda and the bosses are taking full advantage. For years, the bosses have been “measuring” and “analyzing” the performance and productivity of the working class.

For example, the bosses’ managers want to convince workers making $8.50 an hour at the local Kmart that they’re “accountable” for stocking the shelves as fast as they can so the company can prosper “for the benefit of the team.” Kmart bosses making six- and seven-figure salaries use the word “team” to motivate and drive workers making minimum wage. Many workers see through this.   

‘Toe the Line or Be Fired’

For factory workers, discipline is tied to getting the worker to speed up production or be terminated. For teachers, this means using standardized tests — which teach nothing — and the new Danielson Framework for Teaching to develop a fascist monitoring tool. If teachers don’t toe this line, they, too, are fired.

Ruling-class attacks on teachers directly attack students. The rulers’ ideas of success for our children are minimum-wage jobs, mass racist unemployment or the “choice” of a “job” in the military to fight in their imperialist oil wars killing other workers. Throughout the country the majority of schools being closed are in black and Latino communities. The rulers are trying to further segregate our children in order to continue to exploit and profit off all working-class people. 

Capitalism does not offer solutions to the racist education our children are experiencing. The young comrade who pointed to capitalism as the main culprit deserves much more than the non-existent “good old days” of public education the liberals are advocating. She, like young people worldwide, deserves a communist future, without bosses and profits. Today it felt like we brought that future little bit closer to fruition. Join PLP and fight for it.

NEW JERSEY, February 22 — Sixty people marched twelve miles today to protest against the racist expansion of detention centers in Northern New Jersey. We were young and old, black, white, and Latino, representing many countries.  We marched to three detention centers and three branches of the Wells Fargo bank, which invests in the federally funded companies that profit from the workers they imprison. 

The protest was organized by First Friends and the Interfaith Refugee Action Team at Elizabeth (IRATE), an umbrella group that sponsors legal aid, social services and volunteer visits to detainees. Some of us were critical of the march’s vague demands, such as “justice” and “freedom.”  We remarked that the sort of justice that has people paying up to $12,000 to release their loved ones into a system of unemployment is really an extension of imprisonment.  

And we argued that workers are free under capitalism only to have our children and resources used to wage war for the bosses’ profits. 

After beginning the march at Liberty Island, we visited a Catholic church, an Islamic school and a Jewish synagogue in Jersey City. We stopped for a while at the new, 420-bed Delaney Detention Center, one of several in this area. (The Essex County Jail is making room for up to 800 detainees. Hudson County in Kearny is up to 800 beds, Bergen County to 1,500, and Elizabeth to 320). The Delaney facility is in the middle of a toxic waste area where the pollution has a strong odor.

IRATE has a mailing list of 4,000, which they used to draw more than a hundred volunteers, social workers, attorneys and former detainees to a closing vigil in Elizabeth. The more progressive chants included, “No ganáncias, no cárceles” (No profits, no jails) and “Comunidades unidas, no serán vencidas” (Communities united will never be defeated).  A PLP member explained that the entire capitalist system is organized around profits for a small ruling class, and that our “communities united” consist only of workers, not the rich who exploit us. At the soup supper later, the comrade distributed CHALLENGE to everyone there while pointing out the necessity of an international party.

There was tremendous enthusiasm and energy among these interns, low-paid social workers, and over-worked attorneys. One group of twenty Mother Seton High School students had participated in this march for several years. A young woman had just been accepted to law school, where she plans to focus on immigration law. These people cheered each other on despite the sad news about one woman’s husband who’d been deported to Lebanon that morning after two months in solitary confinement with insufficient medicine for his chronic illness. His case is one of countless stories of how immigrants are terrorized in the U.S. It’s also a reminder that the capitalist system cannot be reformed and must be destroyed.