SWP discusses social crisis after Hurricane Harvey

Militant/Chuck Guerra

Cynthia Jaquith, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Miami, shows Militant to sanitation worker Leonard Reese on his doorstep in North Miami Sept. 4. “If we could just all unite, we could shut this country down,” he told Jaquith as they discussed the SWP’s perspective of building a movement for the working class to take political power.

Jaquith showed Reese and other workers she visited her campaign statement on the social disaster unfolding in Houston from Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath that was printed in the Militant.

The statement said that the hurricane’s impact “is a direct product of the natural workings of the capitalist system, the dictatorship of capital.” The capitalist rulers “made no plans to mobilize the forces needed to safely and quickly evacuate the tens of thousands who knew they would face life-threatening conditions in an area that’s a frequent target of hurricanes.”

It also pointed to the sharp difference the socialist revolution in Cuba makes for working people in organizing to deal with the frequent hurricanes workers and farmers face there. In Cuba, “thousands of volunteers, backed by the resources of their government and its communist leadership, are in place to carry out any needed evacuation and begin immediate reconstruction of destroyed homes and public facilities,” Jaquith says in the statement. “The capitalist property ‘insurance’ racket doesn’t exist there, because it is not needed”

Party members across the country used the Militant and Jaquith’s statement to discuss Cuba’s revolution and the example it sets for working people everywhere. And to discuss the potential shown here in the U.S. by the human solidarity of workers and ranchers in Texas risking everything to help others escape the ravages of Harvey in the face of the government’s lack of preparation.

— BRIAN WILLIAMS