Puerto Rico trip affirms working-class solidarity

PUERTO RICO, April 15 —Two years after Hurricane Maria, the capitalist disaster that ravaged Puerto Rico’s working class, six young Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members from New York and New Jersey returned to the island earlier this month (see letter on page 6).
The trip was organized as a follow up to last year’s summer project, the Puerto Rico Brigade, with the purpose of reinforcing our bonds of solidarity, and delivering PLP’s internationalist message to our working-class brothers and sisters surviving there.
Although Maria ran its natural course, an increasingly fascist storm still rages on for the island workers. To date, 4,600 workers have died of causes attributable to ruling class negligence before and after the hurricane. U.S. bosses continue clamping fangs down into the working class with austerity measures (The Atlantic, 5/29/18).
The trip exposed that there is no disaster more destructive and lethal for workers than this system. From Puerto Rico to New Orleans to Haiti, workers cannot escape capitalism’s lethal grip. Thus this trip was a step towards building the kind of international working-class solidarity we need to smash capitalism, and replace it with the only system that guarantees us a future–communism. More importantly our trip sharpened the young PL’ers ideologically, as they learned from workers in the trenches, shared stories, distributed CHALLENGE to workers and students, and struggled with newer comrades about how nationalism is toxic for workers in Puerto Rico.
Capitalism deadlier than any natural disaster
While the damage caused by Hurricane Maria was extensive, the disaster of capitalism and U.S. imperialism has been pummeling the island since 1898, with raging super-exploitation and violent repression, stemming from the racist Jones Act, which turned the island into a cash mill for banks and corporations.
 Before the hurricane, 45 percent of workers were suffering from poverty and 10 percent unemployment (CHALLENGE, 10/25/17). More recently, the Puerto Rico Oversight Management Stability Act (PROMESA), the austerity measures that cut funding to important social services—passed by liberal terrorist ex-president Barack Obama in 2016—exacerbated the attacks.
Since then, inflation has worsened and workers’ wages remain stagnant; students are being piled together in trailers used as makeshift classrooms, as funds are hoarded by the bosses.
When the ruling class neglected Puerto Rico after the storm, we teamed up with the PR October Brigade, university students, workers, and a veteran comrade to take matters into our own hands and rebuild, both literally and consciously. Young Party members helped clean up after the storm, delivered supplies to workers, led communist study groups, and attended rallies fighting these vicious cuts.
The Department of Education closed more than 400 schools under Secretary Julia Keleher’s regime. Yet many teachers and parents are not taking it lying down. The Federation of Puerto Rican Teachers (FMPR in Spanish) has occupied at least ten schools with community assistance and  help from El Movimento al Rescate de Mi Escuela y Comunidade (the Movement to Rescue our Schools and Communities).
Trip to Toa Baja
On the third day of the visit, PLP organized a trip to Toa Baja to visit the Lorencita Ramirez de Arellano school, one of the schools the workers occupied. There, we spoke to parents and teachers who converted the shuttered school into a community center, complete with free tutoring, capoeira and fencing lessons provided free to local elementary school-aged children. The parents and teachers hope to collectively keep the school running, through grassroots funding, and count on educators organizing in the movement to volunteer their talents to serve the working class.
The movement is another example that workers are the only class fit to create the society we want for our children and youth. At a FMPR march, we learned about the school shutdowns, budget cuts, and their privatization. These learning conditions reflect teachers’ working conditions, as they often must buy school supplies, and provide air conditioning for students, while on average living on a  $27,000 a year salary ($7,000 below the poverty line).
More the same than different
One teacher particularly interested in our ideas and CHALLENGE pointed out how the abuse teachers face on the island is a product of capitalism, which does not care about truly educating workers. Through this discussion we were able to connect how these conditions are replicated in the U.S. We shared the notable example of how U.S. bosses used Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to expand corporate-backed charter schools, and the way in which capitalism uses disasters like Maria and Katrina to profit from working class misery.
Even though Puerto Rican nationalism was on full display at the march, we won some friends to internationalist ideas by showing that while workers everywhere face attacks at varying levels, we all have one common enemy, capitalism. Our hope is to continue to forge ahead, and fight with workers to rebuild Puerto Rico, with the ultimate goal winning workers to fight for the most important batle ahead, and that is for  Communism, a world in which workers run society for the benefit of all.