From Jackson to Karachi: workers of the world, unite!

Like many others, I’ve been following with disgust and anger the two deadly climate disasters occurring simultaneously in the southern US state of Mississippi and across much of Pakistan. Both disasters are drenched in the naked racism and anti-worker realities of capitalism. Both are the direct consequence of racist legacies of the capitalist state that go back decades, if not centuries.

In Jackson, Mississippi, the majority Black worker population has been left without clean water safe to drink or bathe with after heavy flooding knocked out the city’s main water treatment facility. Shipments of potable water into the state can’t keep up with demand, in a crisis that many are likening to the racist devastation inflicted on workers in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Across Pakistan, an especially heavy monsoon season has flooded an estimated one-third of the country, murdering over 1,000 workers to date and displacing millions more. Overflowing waters have destroyed bridges almost instantly. The slum housing where workers are forced to live hardly stands a chance when confronted with these ecological events exacerbated by industrial capitalism.

As workers, we need to connect these acts of state violence against our class to the need to build more internationalism. This is exactly what we mean in  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) when we say the workers in North America have everything more in common with workers in South Asia, Africa, or South America than we ever will with a boss in “our” own region. Bosses everywhere are ready at any moment to send us workers to our death.

The only way to reverse this reality is to continue to build the Party and fight for global communist revolution. From Jackson to Karachi – Workers of the world, unite!