Vol. 78/No. 3      January 27, 2014

Every week new devastations are visited on working people and the air, soil, food and water we rely on, a result of the bosses’ unrelenting drive for profit that motivates production under capitalism. This week 300,000 people in West Virginia had to forgo drinking, bathing, washing dishes and other use of the public water supply or face being poisoned by the owners of Freedom Industries, who let dangerous industrial chemicals leak into the Elk River.

Water authorities in Cincinnati were preparing to shut the intake valves on their system as the spill’s chemical plume drifted by on the Ohio River Jan. 14.

The week before, derailed tank cars filled with highly volatile Bakken-shale crude oil exploded and burned for days outside Casselton, N.D. — by chance just a mile or two from town.

The bosses exploit labor without regard to the lives and limbs of working people, as they engage in cutthroat competition without concern for the social consequences of their “cost cutting” methods.

Capitalism, Karl Marx observed in 1867, works so the propertied classes accumulate profit “by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”

The bosses act as if dangers their system of production and distribution poses to both labor and nature are nobody’s business but their own. Eastman Chemical Company, which manufactures the toxic brew dumped into the Elk River, refuses to make their files on the chemical’s effects public, saying they’re “proprietary.”

For the working class, job safety, consumer protection and environmental protection are inextricably tied together. And what are often called environmental issues are not special “scientific” questions that can be abstracted from the class struggle.

“If we translate everything commonly thought of as an environmental issue into how to advance the protection of the working class, and how the working class can extend that protection to all, then we can hardly ever go wrong,” Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote in Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium.

The source of ecological destruction and its effect on human life is capital’s unquenchable search for profits through the exploitation of land and labor. It can be confronted only in struggle against the exploiting class in power, as working people organize and fight to wrest some control over working conditions and the processes of production.

It can only be stopped through the conquest of political power by the working class, whose objective interests lie not in the accumulation of personal wealth but in meeting the material and cultural needs of humanity today and for future generations.
 
 
Related articles:
Boss negligence poisons water in West Virginia
‘Can’t drink, wash clothes, brush your teeth’
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home