Detroit Water Shutoffs: ‘Every Day We’re Shown that Black Lives Don’t Matter!’

DETROIT, MI June 25 — “There are people who can’t cook, can’t clean, people coming off surgery who can’t wash. This is an affront to human dignity…Every day, we’re shown that black lives, black quality of life, black communities, don’t matter.” That’s how an organizer of the Detroit People’s Water Board described the latest case of mass racist terror as the Detroit Water Department shuts off water to those who owe $150 or are two months behind on their bill. More than 150,000 customers (as many as 300,000 mostly poor and black residents), are late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last ten years. They are targeting as many as 3,000 homes every week!
Denying water to almost half the population of Detroit in a blistering summer comes after almost 170,000 homes with children and the elderly went without heat during the brutal winter of 2013-14.  To add to the racist terror, state welfare authorities can take children from any home without running water.
Meanwhile, more than half of the city’s factories and office buildings, including the Detroit Lions’ Ford Field, the Redwings hockey arena at Joe Louis Arena, and the Palmer Park Golf Course owe a total of $30 million. No one is shutting their water off.
This is not about unpaid bills. The shutoffs are intended to drive people from their homes so developers can buy up the land dirt cheap, while making the Water Department more attractive to a private investor. Privatizing the Water Department has been on the agenda for the past two decades.  
These attacks are the result of the decline of the U.S. auto bosses, the UAW’s (United Automobile Workers) total submission to their billionaire masters, and a financial crisis that left millions jobless and homeless. The racist character of these attacks is stark and indisputable.
People are parking their cars over water valves to prevent shut-offs and teaching each other how to turn the water back on. Community groups even filed a human rights complaint at the United Nations, demanding an end to the shutoffs. The Detroit Water Brigade, an Occupy-type group, is collecting supplies and trying to serve those in need.
Just weeks ago, the UAW held its national convention here with more than 2,000 delegates. The water shutoffs was even mentioned. Instead of a brief photo op at a nearby hotel organizing drive, the UAW could have led thousands out on strike and seized the Water Department, ending any shutoffs and demanding that the auto billionaires pay the bill. But it didn’t. And it won’t.
As home to millions of industrial workers, Detroit was once a center of communist-led, anti-racist struggle. In 1932, after six workers and youth were killed by company thugs at the Ford Hunger March, 100,000 workers marched behind the red-flag-draped coffins singing the Internationale. Five years later, workers seized the GM factories in Flint, Michigan and established the UAW. And in 1967, the armed uprising against racist police terror shook the bosses and was probably the greatest single act of solidarity with the Vietnamese in defeating U.S. imperialism.
Today, as Detroit workers face winters without heat and summers without water, they are organizing mass militant actions against the water department. What w we win is temporary as long as the bosses hold power. The main lesson of the Detroit water shutoff is that we need to build a mass PLP to destroy wage slavery, with communist revolution. Then, “dark night will have its end!”