Texas power outage: Death by capitalism

The ongoing fallout from the Texas power collapse, in the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and the grim milestone of 500,000 lives lost to the coronavirus pandemic, shows the world that the rot of U.S. capitalism extends to infrastructure, liberal democracy, and health care. Devastated parents found a perfectly healthy 11-year-old boy frozen to death overnight in his bed (Houston Chronicle, 2/18). He died because the depraved power bosses value maximum profit over the most basic human needs of the working class.
For workers in and around the Gulf Coast, the bosses’ callous negligence led to massive misery and untold dozens of deaths. As many as 17 million workers lived under “boil water” orders in Texas alone. Half a million remain without water as we go to press, three weeks after a winter storm broke the state’s fragile electrical power grid (CNN, 3/1). Facing the rising global power of China, the U.S. rulers have a big problem. U.S. workers will be less than eager to fight and die for a ruling class that cannot provide drinking water or heat in brutal winters. Capitalism can’t be “regulated” into serving workers’ needs. As U.S. capitalism lurches from one unprecedented crisis to the next, we must see the bosses’ reform efforts for what they are: fascist preparations for wider war.
The Texas power disaster is above all a lesson in the anarchy and cruelty that lie at the core of capitalism. Because the bosses are driven to gain profit every step of the way, from energy resource extraction to power generation to its delivery to people’s homes, the grid is drained of the capacity to deliver electricity when and where it is most needed.  
Domestic energy: backbone of small fascism
The power collapse reflects a widening split within the U.S. ruling class. The Texas energy model is essentially unregulated, a capitalist "free market" in all its glory. Independent Texas power arrangements date back over a century. They were a move by domestic energy producers to escape federal regulations and taxes that benefit multinational finance capital, the Big Fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class now fronted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The openly racist Small Fascists, like the Republicans who run Texas, are desperate for maximum short-term profits. They have no interest in contributing more of their spoils in taxes to maintain the far-flung and floundering U.S. empire. The Big Fascists need a more reliable infrastructure and more "sacrifice"—most of all from their fellow capitalists—to prepare for war with China. That translates to more regulation and higher rates of corporate taxation. Beyond funding for war, the finance capitalist liberals know they need to provide at least a minimum standard of living to give workers a society that seems worth fighting and dying for.
Big fascism: still the main danger
After Donald Trump’s unlikely rise to the White House, a taste of presidential power has motivated the Small Fascists to stay on the offensive. Their defiance of the liberal bosses exposes the weakness of the main wing’s ability to discipline its own class. The Small Fascists kicked off 2021 with a failed coup that was cheered on by Trump, who still refuses to accept his loss to Biden at the polls. To date, they’ve had zero price to pay. At the February 28 convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump flaunted his gutter racist movement’s tenacity: “We’re not starting new parties.  We have the Republican Party” (CPAC Convention, 2/28).
The liberal Big Fascists are faced with mounting challenges to stay in control in their own backyard while fending off rivals like China and Russia. At stake are the long-term needs of U.S. imperialism. Meanwhile, the underfunded U.S. infrastructure is falling down around their ears. The latest power grid failure, along with raging wildfires in California and roving blackouts across the country, is in line with a 2017 warning from the  American Society of Civil Engineers. It gave the nation’s infrastructure a “D+,” meaning that conditions were “mostly below standard,” exhibiting “significant deterioration,” with a “strong risk of failure”(Council on Foreign Relations, September, 2020).
The Big Fascists’ big plans are currently stuck in neutral. Though the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, they’re struggling to enact relatively modest efforts to shore up working-class loyalty to U.S. capitalism. A $15 minimum wage, student loan forgiveness, and stimulus checks are all currently on hold. Sooner or later, the only option left for the liberal imperialists will be to move toward open fascism, both to smash their Small Fascist rivals and attempt to control an angry working class. Growing calls from House Democrats to “deplatform” Fox News for its sins of building the Trump phenomenon (politico.com, 2/22,) must be understood in this light.
In imposing their final solution—fascism—the liberal rulers are playing catch-up with more unified ruling classes, like China’s, who wield tighter control over state power and infrastructure.  
Illusions about the U.S. decline lead some workers to ask “how in this country” could we have older people and children dying in bed from the cold. But this kind of atrocity is what U.S.-led capitalism has imposed internationally since it became the top superpower after World War II. It’s just a hint of the ruthlessness to come. The global war U.S. imperialism is now planning will wipe out populations. It will devastate the natural environment. It will make today’s atrocities pale by comparison.  
Capitalism = profit over workers
Communism = abolition of profit
Communist revolution is the one and only force in history ever to stop the imperialists in their tracks.  The towering achievements of Soviet and Chinese workers in turning imperialist war into communist revolution are still the wind in our sails.  True, those achievements have been reversed by a resurgence of the profit system. The brave victory of Vietnamese workers over the U.S. imperialist war machine in the 1970s did not produce a communist Vietnam. But it once again proved the power of communist-led workers to defeat imperialism.  
As to picking up the pieces to build a world where workers don’t die in their beds, we communists are supremely confident. Once we smash the dictatorship of the liberal capitalist bosses, a working-class dictatorship can fix problems that today are unsolvable. We’ll succeed where the bosses have failed because we’ll abolish profit as the driving force behind every economic and political decision.  
The racist, sexist profit system gives workers terrible choices, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge. Workers can freeze to death in Texas ice storms, burn to death in California wildfires, die in secret in a New York nursing home, or be slaughtered by a rain of U.S. missiles in Syria.  Only communism can abolish the murderous chaos that’s engineered by capitalism. Our liberation lies in discarding fascists both large and small, to create a world run by and for workers. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!