Under capitalism, terror is a constant for the international working class. Workers in the U.S. have recently suffered a series of murderous attacks, in line with the global terror launched by U.S. imperialists and their allies on workers worldwide. On April 15, the day that terrorist bombs killed three people and maimed at least 170 more at the Boston Marathon, thirty people were killed in Iraq and uncounted others from Obama’s drone reign of terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see box).
Two days later, profit-driven disregard for workers’ safety caused an explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas. This crime of capitalism slaughtered 15 people, injured more than 100 others, destroyed three public schools and wrecked hundreds of homes (see page 5).
The official U.S. reactions to these atrocities battered workers even further. Obama’s Boston manhunt and lockdown became a not-so-dry run for the bosses’ imposition of martial law. House by house, elite squads kicked down doors seeking the bombers. Meanwhile, thousands of cops and troops imprisoned the city and its suburbs for an entire day, robbing many workers of their wages.
But the response in Texas proved no less menacing. The imperialist bosses put out no dragnet for mass-murdering factory owner Donald Adair — just stern warnings to heed their war agenda. Meanwhile, Adair, safe in his mansion, announced an inquisition of the very workers his greed had killed, wounded or rendered homeless (see below).
Taken together, these two disasters exposed the U.S. capitalist rulers’ intent. As they plan ever wider wars abroad, they are acclimating the domestic working class to destruction and fascist terror.
U.S. and Russian intelligence agencies first learned of Boston’s brother bombers in 2011 when the FBI, at Moscow’s insistence, investigated the elder Tsarnaev. It seems possible that the roots of the Boston blasts lie somewhere in the tug-of-war between increasingly hostile imperialist rivals.
Then again, the brothers Tsarnaev may have acted alone. We don’t yet know. But whatever motivated the Marathon attack, both Russian and U.S. bosses are seeking an advantage in its aftermath. Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes to use Boston to bolster support for his brutal crackdown on Islamic separatists in Chechnya, where the Tsarnaevs were born before being raised in the U.S. (The younger one became a U.S. citizen.)
The opportunistic Barack Obama & Co. pounced as well, quickly deploying the sports-media complex in a nationwide campaign for militaristic patriotism. After April 15, virtually every professional baseball, basketball and hockey game in the U.S. began and ended with a televised, highly orchestrated, flag-waving tribute to Boston that laid the foundation for subsequent storm trooper operations there.
On the night of April 19, when the younger bomber got caught, people actually gathered in the streets to cheer cops passing in armored vehicles. That was a bad sign for the working class. But try as they might, the media could not produce images of black or Latino workers applauding the cops.
Since 1995, these same Boston police have shot to death 20 innocent victims, all black, Latino or Cape Verdean. There are eight times more black and six times more Latino inmates than whites in Massachusetts prisons, where 76% of the population is “non-Hispanic” white (see “Sentencing Project, 2007”). Black inmates outnumber white inmates in the state’s prisons by eight to one; Latino inmates outumber whites by six to one. . A critical segment of the working class can harbor no illusions about the cops’ true role.
In Texas, it wasn’t terrorism — just routine capitalism with a distinctly fascist twist, in accord with U.S. capitalists’ coming war needs. To boost production and revenue, plant boss Adair had been storing “1,350 times the amount of [highly explosive] ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security [DHS]” (Reuters, 4/20/13). This dangerous practice could have originated only with West Fertilizer’s owner, not its workers. Workers don’t buy carloads of chemicals.
Caught disobeying Washington, Adair handed over his workers as the supposed culprits to the police apparatus he loathes, the FBI and DHS.  “We are presenting all employees for interviews....with investigating agencies,” he said.
The imperialist, war-driven wing of U.S. finance capitalists is using West Fertilizer to press for tighter, centralized government control of industry, including the dangerous substances needed for war. On April 20, the New York Times ran an op-ed column by Bill Minutaglio, a liberal professor at the University of Texas in Austin. He declared:
[I]t is finally time for this pathological avoidance of oversight to end in Texas. To understand how deep the state’s regulatory resistance runs, one need only to listen to the state’s attorney general, Greg Abbott, who often spearheads the Lone Star state’s rebuffs to federal imperatives. Earlier this year he was asked what his job entailed. “I go into the office in the morning,” he replied. “I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”
U.S. imperialists use food as a weapon, in “peacetime” and war. They reward their friends and deny food to their enemies. Predominance in a critical industry like agriculture, in which fertilizers play a big part, was essential to U.S. imperialists’ successes in the first two world wars. They foresee a similar equation in the next one. Big finance capitalists mistrust anti-government small fry like Adair, who once sued U.S. imperialist flagship Monsanto. Until April 17, Adair was stockpiling, against DHS orders, the volatile chemical essential to farming, which also powered the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh.
From Boston to Texas, we can see common threads of sharpening domestic fascism and global war preparation. Our class enemies, the capitalists, may seem too powerful to stop. But history shows that class struggle will persist and accelerate in reaction to assaults by the ruling class. It shows that the misery created by the rulers’ wars can become the crucible for communist revolution — if workers are organized and led by a fighting party of and for the working class. That party is PLP!
May Day symbolizes this struggle. The actions of the Progressive Labor Party against racism in the cops’ killing of Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, and Ramarley Graham in New York, and in PL’ers fighting evictions of workers in Palestine by Israeli rulers; against sellout union leaders of Metro transit workers in Washington, DC; against Mexican rulers flooding workers’ homes near Mexico City; against U.S.-UN forces responsible for the spread of cholera in Haiti; against the neglect of workers in Pakistan ravaged by earthquakes. All of these struggles are building the force that can counter capitalism’s terror and will ultimately destroy the profit system to build a workers’ society: communism.
May Day represents the need to join this movement. Join PLP!